Vivat Libertas

So this all started with an absolutely terrible event. I've lost my mind like I haven't done in a long time, so this post isn't going to be at all coherent. Have fun deciphering my mental scrabblings, guys. Long story short, everyone's alive. Everyone now wants to move on - except me. But why? you might ask. Moving on is desirable, the end goal after trauma. Not moving on is for weaklings, attention seekers and other such - to put it impolitely - absolute fuckheads that no sane human being wants to associate with. The trouble with me is that I think too much. It's certainly better than doing the opposite, but I don't think in straight and clear lines or elegant curves: I think in circles, tangles, swerving in sharply as I spin towards the centre of the proverbial downwards spiral. It's not good for me. Sometimes I think a lobotomy would help. It's especially odd, as in depression most activity of just about anything in the body is reduced - that...

Shit like this is why I won't go back to being a feminist any time soon. Some feminists are complaining about how we can't criticise any concepts or institutions, like marriage or wearing make-up, because some women enjoy these things. Quelle horreur! Whatever can  we do, if we can't criticise other women's choices? Explode righteously? Their justification for criticising the choices of other women? Because they're not made in a vacuum: they're made in a repressive, kyriarchal society that has a vested interest in making women complacent and content in their own oppression. I'm going to concede something right now: choices are definitely, definitely, definitely not  made in a vacuum. They are made chained to kyriarchal standards, drowning in them even. But every single person, no matter their privilege, is bound by these chains - so no-one can claim to be uniquely liberated. And this is one main reason I don't believe you should  be criticising the...

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Content note: suicide, self-harm, purging. I can't really be bothered to think up a good title for this; I'm too angry. As a mentally ill person, I absolutely beg anyone who's reading this right now not to romanticise mental illness. I beg anyone who's reading this right now to spread the word, to tell their friends and family and loved ones and children, to go and shout it from their roofs that mental illness is a terrible thing to live through. Please don't wonder why I care so much: I live through this. Rather, wonder why I don't welcome it. I've seen people defend the romanticisation of mental illness with the justification that it's better than demonisation - the trouble is that it's not. They're two sides of the same thing: a refusal to deal with mental illness honestly. And here's why. I'll start with demonisation first, because it's simpler to understand and to explain. This demonisation is dehumanising, as it st...

Content note: sexual harassment, rape threats, suicide attempts Before I start, here's the standard disclaimer: I'm a white cis het-passing but actually bisexual middle-class able-bodied but mentally ill woman. So this is written from a perspective that's really rather privileged and might just be whitesplaining drivel. If it is, burn it. Anyway... Sex-positive feminism seems to have gotten a pretty bad rap over the years as being overly simplistic, centring on the experiences of privileged women, and erasing and oppressing asexual people, among many other things. So by all rights, I should be sneering at it and turning away from just another vehicle that only works for certain privileged groups of women. And besides, I'm not even a feminist anymore, even though I miss being a feminist and a lot of the time I wish I could go back, particularly for the feel of community. Why do I even give a shit? I'll concede this right now: a lot of criticism of sex-posit...

Well, I never thought I'd be putting photos of my face on the interwebs for everyone to see - so any photos are what I actually look like. I'm ugly, I know. Usually, selfies are considered by patriarchal society as being "slutty" (how I hate that world) or vain. However, not-so-recently there's been this idea going round that selfies, far from being attention-seeking or cries for help, are empowering and actually pretty good things to do. I actually have a pretty tangled opinion on selfies, so I need to write this to untangle it and actually make some sense in daily life. I'll say one thing first: I completely disagree with calling selfies slutty. They range from perfectly innocent to sexy and seductive, but no actual promiscuity is ever involved because it's a static image. Even if it's a highly sexualised static image, no sex is going on. The kinds of people who say this are also usually more than happy to look at entire pages full of hot women...

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It occurs to me that I really, really don’t mind staying up till midnight doing maths; in fact, I actually quite enjoy it. Yes, you heard me correctly – I am that strange, unnatural and perhaps slightly broken person who genuinely enjoys mathematics. I’ve talked about it before, I think, how I consider maths an elegant and beautiful language to work with. But more than that, it’s just…well…it’s fun. I find it a very natural language to work in, and I enjoy learning more and more of its grammar and vocabulary every day. It calms me down when I need to relax and fires me up when I see something new. More than anything, it just makes sense: from the relatively simple equation F=m dv/dt to the beauty that is Euler’s relation, it’s elegant and precise and, to my mind, deeply intuitive.

So. Three years. I'm sitting here writing this feeling absolutely knackered and not in the mood to write, to be honest. I haven't had the time or inclination to do so. Not for a very long time. My depression's picked up and I now function much better. My life's picked up a lot too: I'm a lot more outgoing and social despite an anxiety condition that means spending too long in loud places makes me agitated. I have more friends now, through poking my head out of the shelter and self-contained society that is my school. I'm going steady with my boyfriend and just saw him off at the station after a weekend enjoying Christmassy shit in London, seeing Jeeves and Wooster (it's hilarious), and going on bus adventures. And, of course, it's my final year at school, which means work and anxiety over going to university - though I've got an offer from Manchester. So between working hard and having an actual social life, I don't know how much time I...