On domestic violence

TW: domestic violence, obvi

A version of this has been sitting in my drafts for close to a year, but really it's been over two decades in the making.

*

Three years ago, I had to abruptly end a friendship when I heard that my dear friend of many moons, someone who'd held my hand through some of the roughest episodes of my life, lifted my spirits when I was too hard on myself, stocked his place with my favorite snacks, helped me start a business, the list goes on… when I heard that my friend had harmed the woman he shared his life with. I tried to hold space for her as she cried over the phone, and frantically recounted what happened over and over again, as she kept pleading with me to tell her that no, this wasn't who he was, I knew him better and this wasn't him, this was a temporary lapse in judgment and perhaps she deserved it, that this wouldn’t fundamentally change her because in reality, it was nothing. I pleaded with her to leave, please leave, but it wasn't what she wanted to hear from me. She wanted me to help her rationalize his actions, visualize a reality in which this wasn’t a big deal. My heart tore for her, but also for myself, as I immediately started to mourn the affection I knew I’d have to let go of. I've held onto this grief, not sure what to do with it, not sure how to hold my anger against the man and tenderness for my friend in the same palm. Everything slipped through the cracks. It's a special kind of heartbreak and had me wishing, gosh if only you'd gotten help, if only you’d spoken to someone and told them what haunts you, maybe this could have been avoided. He hasn't reached out to me in the three years since. In an effort to protect her I didn’t confront him either much as I'd have wanted to, knowing she would suffer the consequences, knowing a narcissist can do unspeakable things when his reputation is at stake. My friendship with her waned as well; I suppose I remind her of him and what she's told me. In the best possible turn of events, I recently found out she left, that she's happy, that she can now see him for who he is. It took the time it took, but she did it.

*

My therapist told me a few years ago that very few people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) will ever actually seek help and those who do will still have to navigate very difficult conversations to make things work in their lives, to make relationships, especially romantic ones, function somewhat healthily. She told me about one of her clients who, even after years in therapy, couldn't stop wanting to harm his partner and had to keep talking himself out of it when such an urge would arise. This was a best case scenario in her opinion. She told me this at a time when I had hope for a narcissistic family member, someone I thought I could steer in the right direction, someone who's hurt me so much I will probably never heal, someone who's reconstructed reality in a way to make everyone but him, guilty of abuse, someone who's attempted to show he’d changed only to randomly burst into violent episodes. She said the only way to deal with him was to go no contact.

*

A few months ago, another friend of mine started reaching out to me very frequently, sort of out of the blue, telling me about how his relationship was falling apart all of a sudden, that he'd fucked up but that ultimately his wife was the one responsible for the relationship failing. His complaints about her were vague and nothing I could find a real problem with. I told him it sounded like good ol’ married life, it's not all rainbows and butterflies you know, go to couples counseling. But he wasn't having it, no, instead he insisted there was something profoundly broken, he sent me recent pictures of them attempting to show me how miserable they looked. They looked fine. He insisted trust was broken although *he* had broken it and it wasn't at all obvious why he wouldn't want to repair. There was something strange underlying these long calls. I told myself, I will be there for my friend, he might not be seeing things clearly, he's in distress, he's unhappy, they should go to therapy. As it usually does, the truth, or something closer to it, eventually came out when his now ex-wife reached out to tell me what was going on. The reality of what he'd done was far uglier and yet, she didn't seem hellbent on making him the bad guy - she didn't have to. The things that didn't add up suddenly did, and it was clear he’d been attempting to paint himself in a positive light to me, his friend who loved him, so I would side with him when it came down to he said she said, so he'd have me as a sounding board for his fabricated side of the story. I was incredibly upset about what I found out and further upset that he attempted to manipulate me into believing a distorted version of what happened, trying to fashion himself into a victim when he is the one who fucked up. In the time since we last spoke, he's changed his usernames on all platforms to untraceable combinations of words, and after ghosting me when I called him out on his shit, deleted me from all his social media. He knows I know and can't face the reputation he now has. He's trying to reinvent himself, in a new city far away from the people he's hurt who know what he's capable of, far from any accountability. On a public meme profile he runs, he recently posted about delivering donuts to a girl he just met and talked about how he's supposedly known as the hot neighbor in the apartment block he just moved into - sure thing! It's a new cycle for him and there will be new collateral damage.

Gosh, there are too many such stories to even write about and I'm sure whoever’s reading this has stories of their own. In recent times I've borne witness to multifaceted accounts of abuse: a bipolar man refusing to take his meds making life unliveable for his family, a relative with severe abandonment issues turning to sex workers after his wife gave birth to their child, someone I know of going to jail for statutory rape, a charismatic great-uncle turning out to be pedophile, men casually berating and demeaning their wives, endless stories about narcissistic, disgusting men slowly shattering our sense of self to abuse us better. I forgive none of you.

There's no moral of the story here, except perhaps two observations: a) we often attract the trauma we experienced as children in some form or another. In boyfriends, friendships, family ties, I can see now, looking back on my track record that I've unknowingly done this too. We tolerate, often seek out even, behaviors we endured maybe because we subconsciously view them as acceptable, maybe because we were raised to see them as love. b) We tend to downplay domestic abuse, and in doing so inadvertently condone it. Even when presented with unambiguous circumstances, we might elect to warp things into something far less serious. The bar has been so low for so long we close our eyes to what feels inevitable, what feels like part and parcel of loving men. I mourn the friendships I've lost, the women who aren’t in my life anymore because I didn’t take a strong enough stand, and try to forgive my younger self for looking at red flags with soft eyes.

*

There's no spiritual reward for putting up with abuse. We need to learn to call it what it is. We need to believe the women who come to us and stop being wishy-washy. We may sometimes find it hard to use the terms “abuse” and “domestic violence” to talk about our lives because these words feel loaded and we don't want to be reduced to victimhood, we don't want it to be too big a part of our identities, we don't want to believe the people we think love us capable of violence against us. But it is not our fault that we were abused, there is no shame in leaving, there is certainly no prize for staying, and there is nothing wrong in wanting a better life for ourselves.

I will always admire the women who leave, even if it takes years, even when it makes a logistical mess of their lives, even when they dread log kya kahenge, even when their own families try to reason them into staying. Hell, a woman leaving is what saved my life, allowed me to have a life that is larger than what I could ever have fathomed. There really is no point being hush-hush about it, all that does it protect the abusers, and man, I'm so fucking done doing that.

The case for being a regular

Being an adult in this day and age is having everyone you love live in different parts of the world and spending a significant amount of time and resources trying to see as many of them as possible each year. In fact, one of the main reasons I ended up leaving Mauritius again when I did was because the number of people I wanted to and could surround myself with suddenly shrunk. I found myself without community after my cousins moved away, a neighbor cum best friend lost his job and could no longer legally stay, a long-term hot and cold friendship fizzled out for good, and a father-figure roommate revealed his narcissistic tendencies. Not to mention all of us in our early thirties getting married, having kids, navigating increasingly large crises who are no longer able to prioritize friendships lacking a practical or professional angle.

For most of my adult life I believed that the antidote to the deep seated loneliness I experienced throughout my twenties would be my one true pairing, (whom I met and was lucky enough to marry) but as it turns out, as much as romantic companionship can be an absolute balm for the most bizarre and unexpected ailments, no matter how many storms we weather, I often end up feeling alone regardless, alone together. This has been especially true during these pandemic years of necessary seclusion and remote work when our second place (the workplace) and our third place (where we spend time between home and work) largely disappeared.

In recent times, I've found myself wanting to be known again for the first time. To light up as I draw parallels with someone else's life, for someone to see me and be mildly intrigued by any given facet of my personality. When I think back on my life as a teenager, I'm envious of her robust social life. I had a roster of friends at school and a codependent best friend with whom I’d share my most intrusive thoughts, at home, I had my younger cousin with whom I’d watch cartoons and to whom I’d give my best desserts after playing hardball (my only foray into elder siblingship) and within my religious community, folks my age, with whom I shared a number of cultural touchstones and inside jokes as well as repeated, low-stakes interactions with people of all ages. Add to that a constant flow of incoming texts from friends of friends, evenings spent on MSN and afternoons playing cards with my neighbors and I had all my bases covered. My social muscle has gone largely unused in recent times, and shared spaces for quasi de facto relationship building aren't as accessible to me as they once were.

*

In her most recent essay collection On Community, Casey Plett touches on a lot of these points, having been brought up Mennonite and later on being part of a number of queer and literary communities. She offers a handful of thoughtful meditations on what it means to be in community with each other, how we tend to adopt an all or nothing approach, how trauma can make us cut ourselves off from the rest of the world (guilty), how we often cast too wide or too narrow a net and look at our communities either too harshly or forgivingly. Throughout these essays, she repeatedly comes to what seems to be the same conclusion though, which echoes my own recent musings: no matter how hard it is, how it can really bring out the worst in people and create fertile environments for harm, living in community with one another is still preferable and far less deadly than isolation.

Community is a vital but oft-neglected sibling of those rarefied entities that keep one away from isolation and despair; it rests right up there with cherished friends, a partner who loves you, a family of some stripe who love you back, a passion or commitment that gives you juice through the days.

Casey Plett, On Community

As I sit in a cute café boulangerie in Ho-Ma that reminds me a good amount of Bombay’s Subko, I’m privy to the barista’s furtive glances to friends in the seating area waiting for her shift to end, the grandpa who comes back from a walk with his grandson to two busy parents working at the communal table, the patrons with the relaxed body language of regulars. The presumed owner cleans window panes down with satisfying Lysol swishes and flashes gigantic, sincere smiles at every customer, and I want one such look myself, maybe because she looks like a movie star, maybe because to be seen in a room of people slightly more familiar than total strangers, is to be acknowledged as a person participating in the world, and if we make enough eye contact, or if I gush over the pain Suisse I just had, there's a chance she’ll remember me, there's a chance she might smile at me knowingly next time, like hey, you're the girl I laughed with when two eight year old boys cosplaying adults walked into the shop asking if they could try something and sat down at a table commenting on the superior texture of their carrot muffins. Maybe the time after we're on first name basis, and then maybe she knows my order and I know what shift she works and I linger around the counter long after my drink’s ready.

Maybe my third place is an elusive shapeshifter; being a regular at a specialty coffee shop for months at a time, Pokemon Go congregations at raid hour on a Wednesday afternoon, superficial but frequent interactions with Canadian Bookstagrammers whose recommendations I start to live by, long distance text-only friends with whom I have a 70%+ Spotify compatibility and who send me the most accurate Gemini memes, metalheads I meet once a year whose life I know close to nothing about but who've seen me at my drunkest and know a version of me that doesn't exist outside the concert venue. In the midst of my continued loneliness, I’ll keep on fostering these small moments of mutual knowing, to tide me over until the next big trip, a friend’s wedding, or a cousin reunion. Maybe that'll be my goal for 2024, to seek out community where I might not instinctively think to find it, to keep myself slightly ajar when I’ve evolved not to, to lower my guard even when it might not feel safe to, to, hopefully, experience something at once banal and entirely necessary.

Summer dump

Life and book thoughts of late

So I haven’t posted in a while. There have been drafts and attempts to share thoughtful book reviews but everything gets boring the exact minute I decide on doing it. Something called pathological demand avoidance, apparently (thanks TikTok for more pop psych than I know what to do with). Since I last wrote on here, I’ve been chasing dopamine hits, which all things considered, are pretty tame given the current state of the world, and have left the GVA, possibly for good. I wanted to be a West Coast girlie so so bad but alas, cost of living, drug crisis, yaddi yadda. I talked about the sad state of the Canadian dream as well as navigating multiple identities with the ever so thoughtful Sherry-Lynn who runs the excellent nuances podcast. Give it a listen for all manner of stereotype-defying AAPI conversations!

In leaving the West Coast, I found myself back to square one, so to speak. Literally my very first square. I was skeptical. When I left Montreal in 2017, I was so done. A job that made me physically ill, mindless consumerism, friendships that felt shallow, and the winters, gosh the winters. Sometime between then and now, I rebranded. No more insane “I love the cold” pick me shit. I’m an island, heat-seeking girl through and through, I want year-round savat dodo and bol 5 by the beach kinda weather. This absurd September heat wave has felt like the coziest dream, you know, minus the impending doom.

I got to be in my birth city during my birth month for the first time in six years. I expected to feel a sort of tranquil reverence, a deep gratitude, an unparalleled sense of homecoming after being away for so long. But the first week was a fever dream. I found myself navigating an entirely new wave of grief, holding young versions of me and all their sadness and telling them it’s all going to be fine while barely believing it myself. So there's been a lot of crying, happy tears, when I notice something tragically beautiful, and when I’m overcome with an ache ten years in the making, something eviscerating. Three months later, I can see beauty and softness where I used to not be able to see it, I notice the shades of green in the trees, the happy children at the splash pad, the couples scratching each other’s backs on park benches, which tells me I’ve healed at least in part. For the first time, it’s all coming together, it all makes sense and there’s no splitting happening, at least for now.

Some book thoughts

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo (May 2023)

Although I’ve barely flipped through a physical book this month, I’ve been sa-vo-ring Stephanie Foo's acclaimed memoir What My Bones Know in audiobook format while going on Pokemon Go walks. I just reinstalled the app for the first time in 6 ish years and that's been giving me the extra incentive to go out in my neighborhood (which is a great low impact activity for my chronically hurting body). Discovering hordes of new Pokemon has been filling me with childlike wonder I can rarely sustain but having something to do with my hands while I listen works magic for my easily understimulated brain. Except that I’ve been having to take breaks to take notes. So many notes!

Stephanie Foo really takes us on one of the most intimate, personal journeys through trauma and its very persistent consequences. She explicitly charts her trajectory through diagnosis, theory and experimental methods of healing, as she tries to figure out how to rewire a traumatized brain. There were so many juicy tidbits - gosh I have documents full of notes - so many atrocious recollections and scientific revelations that were often a familiar punch to the gut.

I loved this important piece of work and it begs repeating that there is so much we don't know still, so many mental illnesses that have no real workaround, so much red tape to work through before even getting close to getting help. It's rough, it's tough, and the only certainty I have in this life so far is that it takes good people around you to get by, it takes affordable healthcare, non exploitative work, it takes a village of care work and we are oh so lacking.

"Healing is never final. It is never perfection but along with the losses are the triumphs." (Chapter 43)

Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

A comic by Asian-Canadian authors set in NYC? Say less! After seeing about a gazillion promo posts on Drawn and Quarterly’s IG, I had an immovable awareness of it (Aisha Franz’s Work Life Balance is next). I sat down at an Indigo for what I thought would be one of several reading sessions (the book is 400 pages +) but read it in one tranced sitting! High school besties Zoe and Dani, and Dani’s opinionated college friend Fiona, take on the city and try to take everything in but tension brews as their ideas of exploration and adventure begin to clash. I entered their world so fully and was completely taken by the subtle rendition of competitiveness, jealousy and pettiness of twenty-somethings exhibiting varying degrees of conventional cool. The artwork is stunning, and incredibly pleasing to my eye and was a sweet little throwback to Skim (from the same authors) which I read during my undergrad in this very city, many moons ago. The comic is also set exactly when I started college and Fiona reminded me so much of Girls‘ Jessa which made me perfectly nostalgic for my early twenties. I longed for pizzas by the slice and late nights in a new city with people I half know.

Personal Attention Roleplay by H. Felix Chau Bradley

You know the kind of book that really makes you wanna write? This was one of those for me. It had a bit of everything. H. Felix Chau Bradley's short stories are full of quirks and walking contradictions. They take us on a journey through the lives of a number of queer characters who experience longing and limerence in complicated, surprising ways. Many of the stories are set in and to an extent about Montreal which I’ll always be a sucker for. I loved being able to read about nights at Club 737 (which is a café now apparently?!) and references to specific bumpy bus routes. I especially loved Finisterre, a short story following two cousins who, for different reasons and with different motives, take a trip to Europe together. A sex scene with an older Spanish man is described in such precise, haunting language I felt like a fly on the wall of that sweaty European room. I adored the imagery the author employed and saw my younger self in many of the anti-heroic, borderline pathetic protagonists. An excellent meditation on unrequited queer love and wanting to belong yet be different from everyone else. I want to read more of this exact kind of stuff! Fittingly, here's their review of Roaming.

That's all for now, happy September folks! 🍁

Your mileage may vary

Reflecting on new-ish beginnings and the end of an era

It's the last day of January and flurries melt on my skin for the first time in five years. He ordered an iced capp of all things, said the medium looked like a large. I tell him that's North America for you. I drink a Brown Sugar Shaken Espresso. I used to have the app but today I'm paying with my Mauritian card. The barista is excruciatingly nice for no reason. She turns the payment terminal to me. 18, 20, 25%. Since when do we tip at Starbucks? I fumble with my card, tap it on the wrong end of the machine. This will happen a handful of times before I get the hang of it and embarrassment will tug at me every time. I'm from some version of here, I should know better. At arrivals, land acknowledgements, a relatively recent phenomenon, one I've only witnessed on Zoom or satirized on Reservation Dogs. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about them. It all feels performative. You won't get your land back but we'll acknowledge that we stole it from you. Near Timmies, a faded "Welcome to Canada" written on a Ukrainian flag. In the middle of all this, a rude immigration officer talking down to us. If you're immigrating you owe the state unexamined deference. It feels a certain way to be on the other end of this, witnessing what my parents did in the 80s. My passport is a privilege I've only recently understood.

The construction of a nation. Canada hides itself behind all this fabricated niceness. It's interesting how a state built largely on pillage, deceit and stolen resources has such a rigorous immigration process. A well oiled machine. Will pander to foreign migrants just to treat them as second class citizens. The Canadian dream is alive and under zero scrutiny. Everyone's moving and whoever isn't wants to. There's no crime here. Canadians are so nice and not racist. Healthcare is way better than in the US so it definitely works well. Ignore the used needles lining the streets. Ignore the mentally unstable white guy screaming incoherently at patrons. Ignore Twitter threads about police brutality. Ignore the encampments in DTES. Yes homelessness is an issue but just avoid those areas and you'll be fine. Focus on the barista who said thank you so much for no reason and all the things you can buy once you've gone up the corporate ladder. Just play nice will ya?

*

I can't tell if everything is way more expensive or if I'm just adjusting to living in dollars still. I feel uncool. My tattoos aren't visible and I don't have anything Arc'teryx. All of my winter gear is from six, seven years ago. Michelin is here now and a restaurant I visited in 2016 made the cut. I console myself with this smidgen of intheknowism. I've always cared a little too much about this. We go to Phnom Penh and the bò lúc lắc is good but I’m not sure I will ever crave it. Massy Books is what some of my dreams look like. Whole sections on Disability Justice, Indigenous Poetry, Black History, Feminism and Gender Studies. We try Oatly and Earth's Own. I see places on TikTok and can just go. How refreshing. Coffee at Timbertrain and Novella are highlights. My list keeps getting longer. I have the best XLB since Din Tai Fung at a food court in Richmond. It barely snows and I don’t need a tuque most days. When the snow melts it’s all green underneath still, and from certain angles, February feels a lot like fall. T&T is my new comfort place. All my favorite greens and world class boba should I want some.

Now that I'm in my thirties cycles are repeating themselves. Some things are the same they were 14 years ago, 31 years ago. Shopping at Garage. Sitting at Indigo for hours. Dairy Queen's chocolate dipped cone. I get to have another emo era. Swapping Paramore for Sweet Pill, side swept bangs for curtain, black nail polish chipped all the same. I'm an assemblage of entirely new cells but some of me is foundational. How long do things bear repeating?

*

It's not so much that I miss it. I spent the last two years trying to flee. One year of planning and procrastinating and a year of waiting. I knew the parts I loved and would miss. But even the sand got dreary. I'd exhausted all the dopamine. There's no excitement in a bol 5 from Ti Kouloir anymore. Sunset boulevard looks like any street. I know the exact spots where it cracks and dirty rainwater pools. I know the corner where the stray dogs laze in unthreatening packs. I know which road to take to minimize catcalls and sleazy eyes. I got too close to love it the way I once did. Too close to look past all the ways it hurt me.

It's not that I miss it yet because hell, how stupid would that be. How cliché to miss the ocean when it looked unimpressive at my doorstep? Now I dream in cerulean waves. It’s not that I miss it but I don't want to forget. I don't want to forget waiting so long for the detour bus on Sundays. I don't want to forget Andrew's old house, impromptu trips to Super U and ham paninis at Kristen's. I want to remember the first jianbing at OG Nina's, the first time we had drinks at Marmite and the trash can full of puke. My pink cup, my clear cup, my blue plate, my chipped plate. I want to remember Chez Popo éclairs, my chatty eyebrow lady and Kabann Rouz minn bwi. I want to think back on three pandemic years and having Mont Choisy practically to myself one August afternoon. I want to remember the goddess at the end of the lane, the sharp turns of the last Triolet bus, the GBLC flanbwayan. My crop tops and Mango pants era. I want to remember the first year I didn't hate my body as much, the beginning of disability, the beginning of a marriage. The family time at dusk, Anjy's Cakes, getting tattooed by Emmy, obsessing over fish fragrant eggplant, my growing book corner, the tiles in our bathroom. The Desambers, the new friends that made everything good, the BLM season that changed so many of us. Dozens of Coffee Nut hangs, banter with baristas and regulars turned community. Jars of Mayver's dark roasted peanut butter, boxes of digestion tea. The Bridge, frozen berries, sourdough, banana chips in lieu of Shapes, my first salmon phase. Becoming a metalhead, scream-singing in the car, the gigs, the community. There's so much to love still, so much to remember. The bad, I lay to rest.

Everything everywhere all at once

Rounding up a year of reading, food, Tiktok and more

Last year, from Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran I learned that “if you say yes with enough force, your chi will say yes too." This was the year I found out it works. Or maybe it’s that in this third pandemic year we conned ourselves into believing the virus no longer kills and moved on. This is what I imagine the roaring twenties must have been like. After two years of fearing death, languishing, boredom, grief and separation, some of us went all out. On social media, I saw girl gangs flock to Lisbon over the summer. On a trip to Porto, a friend said he could hear Americans on every street corner. Yikes. Masks no longer dominated the scenery. Instagram reels of crowded concert venues proliferated. I dreamt of raving in Berlin. In Mauritius, the cost of living skyrocketed. Strawberries I used to pay 90 rupees for now average 200 rupees a box. Bus fares went up drastically. Social media activism went down as we went back into the world. We traded infographics for travel logs. I even heard the phrase “during BLM” to refer to the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder two years ago. As if the movement started then, as if it’s over.

On travel, ethnolinguistics and food

I too traveled for the first time in years, spending two intensely hot months in India. I microdosed living in Bombay as autos, Swiggy and mango everything became part of daily life. In between oat lattes at Subko and rumali rotis from Miya, I got to explore Bandra’s lively streets. We got away to cool Bangalore for a week. I met friends and family I had only ever seen through a phone. I met parts of myself I didn’t know. Those of us who live and read in Mauritius know the struggle of getting the books we want when we want them so in that regard, this year felt luxe. From Bandra’s quaint Trilogy to Bangalore’s exquisite Champaca and Blossom, I grew my stacks and postcard collection. I wrote erratically about the emotional tundra that carried me through those places as a couple of Hindi words entered my everyday lingo.

Prior to this trip, I read Patrick Eisenlohr’s Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius and couldn’t stop taking notes. One of the most salient arguments from this book was how there seems to be two competing ideologies, largely in conflict with one another, of what the Mauritian identity is. There is the Kreol identity, marked by the language most of the population speaks and the Indo-Mauritian identity marked by an imagined and sustained diasporic link to India. The first incorporates elements of creolite and quasi-indegeneity as the language it’s founded upon was locally made but is often implicitly rejected by Indo-Mauritians since “Creole nationalism implies a temporal disjuncture between Mauritian Hindus and their Indian ancestors” (Eisenlohr, 2006). This book has profoundly changed my outlook on Mauritian society and was one of this year’s most impactful reads.

“Defining Mauritian nationhood as above all constituted by diasporic traditions, in a situation in which nearly 70 percent of the population is of Indian background, reflects a particular organization of ethnic and linguistic diversity that is shaped by imbalances of power and informed by a logic of exclusion.”

Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius - Patrick Eisenlohr

This year I got to spend time with friends in different parts of the world and took many of them to Bloom: a bobo café owned by white South African immigrants, a place where many of the patrons are white and all of the staff are POC. It’s no small act of defiance that I show up here time and again, in spaces I know are not meant for me, in spaces that want me to shrink myself, in spaces where my ability and willingness to be leisurely is not a given. I spent many an afternoon there, writing, reading, observing and noshing on smokey aubergine toasties and sweet potato fries.

On disability, neurodivergence and TikTok

This is also a year I started not being able to walk. This pushed me to various breaking points as I navigated chronic pain with a baseline of depression. To make sense of who I was becoming, I leaned on Disability Justice writing. Leah Lakshmi’s Care Work gave my life new meaning (I talk more about it here) and Jason Purcell’s poetry collection Swollening tapped into the febrility of slowed crip time. This slowness saw me finally join TikTok and I quickly became part of a strange temporality. Trends are cycled through hastily, as Lizzo, Doja Cat and Harry Styles samples feel aged mere months later. The abundance of queer and neurodiverse content on the app helped me reach new levels of bodymind awareness. I derived from it so much fashion, cooking, skincare (hi La Roche Posay girlies) and travel inspo and as far as I can tell, it’s the first time social media has pushed me towards positive, pleasurable change. I wore the shit out of the parachute pants I got after months of pining and made the parmesan crusted potatoes that dominated my FYP in November. I visited Amsterdam’s Saint Jean and went to the same photo booth Emma Chamberlain posted about. Interesting times we live in. Many of the songs that dominated my soundscape were also thanks to TikTok: Beyonce’s Break My Soul, Steve Lacy’s Bad Habit and Pierce The Veil’s King For A Day. Thanks to a slew of metal covers, I entered my metalcore era by the end of the year. Norma Jean’s Spearmint Revolt would have topped my Wrapped had it been available in Mauritius (fuck you for that Spotify).

In October, a surge of neurodivergent content across platforms helped me put many things together. Flaky ginger scallion salmon cemented itself as what I now know is a same food. I learned that ADHD and Autism often go undiagnosed in girls because diagnosis criteria are based on how they manifest in boys leading to a gender bias. I learned about things like rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), sensory processing disorder (SPD), executive dysfunction and masking and realized how many people who’ve been labeled ‘weird’, ‘gifted’ or ‘different’ probably fall somewhere on the AuDHD spectrum. Parts of me wish I was coming of age now, how different things would have been.

On millennial cringe

Around the same time, I started Sarah Thankam Mathews’ All This Could Be Different. This book had been hyped up within South Asian literary circles to the point of skepticism. It turned out to be an incredibly immersive experience. Mathews’ main character Sneha goes through the motions of young adulthood as a Brown, queer immigrant and toys with notions of romance, belonging and friendship in cold, cold North America. The prose was alive and her vivid descriptions of place pulled me so deep into her world that it was at times undistinguishable from my own.

I’ve since read a number of reviews pointing to the novel’s blind spots, especially in its use of harmful tropes towards its Black characters (some of which I initially attributed to a flawed protagonist). I suppose that highlights my own biases as a South Asian reader. I suspect this is what Normal People and Conversations With Friends are to my white contemporaries, a mirror held up to our insides.

At a time when Gen Z vs. Millennial discourse seemed to be at an all-time high (or maybe that’s just me being on TikTok too much) I read Ayesha Siddiqi’s razor-sharp Memento Millennial in which she examines our cultural habits through a Sally Rooney lens. She posits that much of our identity construction has been predicated on uniqueness and knowing something before it’s cool (aka the hipster) but that there is much to gain from letting go of the need to be special and quirky (aka a pick me). I learned that the Sally Rooney girl is a very real trope, one I cringe at myself for having wanted to identify with but one I thoroughly enjoyed in my favorite film this year, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World. Vox also published Rebecca Jennings’ interesting take on millennial cringe this week, charting the evolution of internet culture as we know it, explaining why we don’t have to look back on Dogespeak and wince.

"But realizing that you’re not special can actually be a cool thing. Not because it confirms that life is meaningless, but because it means you have stuff in common with someone else. With many other people, in fact."

Ayesha Siddiqi - Memento Millennial

So here’s to meeting more people with whom I have stuff in common in the new year. To more same fits, same foods and same songs. To more special interests, fascinating reads, friend hangs and beautiful bookstores!