I. 2025

I feel I have failed at being a woman.

Something I’ve noticed in women my age—that being anyone between twenty-five and thirty—is an air of slouchiness. Their clothes are sized two sizes up from standard fit, falling off their shoulders and hips without looking like they’re wearing an ill-fitted costume. It all seems effortless. Sometimes they’re creative types with a knack for styling themselves for their field of choice. Or they’re hybrids of model/bartender or photographer/administrator, who prove that even in their normie jobs, late-stage capitalism’s financial suffocation is no match for a stellar Pinterest board. And occasionally, they’re not creative at all, but they just get it. Doctors wearing Damson Madder, teachers donning Jacob Eldordi’s Bottega bag (scored during a Vinted bid), and bankers wearing purposefully beat-up Mexico ’66s. It’s as if they’re all speaking the same language.

I must’ve misplaced my dictionary.

You’d assume that all these women are skinny, but more often than not, I find myself envying women with body types similar to mine. Despite our physical likenesses, there’s something about slouchiness that eludes me. Not just in the sense that when I wear slouchy clothing I tap into a strange sense of discomfort at being seen as bigger than I am, but that I’m wearing my shame on my sleeve. Hiding rather than making a deliberate fashion choice. It doesn’t help that my boobs prevent me from reaching that end goal of slouchiness. No matter how hard I try, they turn my attempt at slouchiness into clinginess. The uncaring chic into a desperate attempt for attention, which might say a lot more about how I was socialised to view not just my body but women’s bodies in general. Clothing is tight and sexualised, no matter how much I lean into de-gendering myself. I peruse thrift shops looking for men’s jumpers, hoping that this one might allow me to walk around without the immediate glare of voyeurs. That men twice or three times my age will stop leering at me in the same way they leered at me aged fourteen. If an abaya couldn’t stop the leering, how would a 4x sweater sourced from the back of a Cancer Research store fare any better? I’m also considerably bigger than I was as a teenager, a byproduct of grief, PCOS and a fluctuating grip on my sense of self. With that, I’ve had to shift not only my physicality of dressing but mentally alter how I perceive how I’m being perceived. I’m the voyeur in my own head, ala that Tumblr famous Margaret Atwood quote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman”.

My shame travelled 3,585 miles with me to Canada this summer. Stored in my overhead compartment, it braved the sudden jerks and sways of a not-so-subtle, terrible landing, determined to claw away at my sense of self even if there was no self to tear down. I landed an hour before my Swedish cousins, who were making a similar trek from Europe to North America, giving me ample time to sit down in the tepid humidity of Toronto Pearson airport. As I watched my fellow travellers meet their families and embrace their lovers, I wondered how I’d adjust to Canada and its distinctly limited public transport. I wondered if I packed enough clothes. Had my aunt gotten the lactose-free milk I asked for? And then, entirely at random, I thought about my recent weight gain. Would it be an issue? Would my aunts and uncles, whom I hadn’t seen since my mother’s funeral two years ago, be upset that I hadn’t lost weight?

I’d just come off one of the worst flights of my life, I was in a new country, and this was the thought that concerned me.

How sad.

I’ve become slightly narcissistic. Not clinically, and certainly not in the way the term is thrown around in our cultural lexicon, deeming any questionable behaviour beyond redemption. But there is a narcissistic quality in my self-loathing. What does my family think of me? What do my friends think of me? What does this stranger on the bus think of me? It’s a futile form of self-obsession. It’s funny that then, on my trip, I made the choice to give up makeup. I told myself this was feminist and self-liberating, thinking about the beauty industry’s ills and my despair at my lone brush with walking around on a 30-degree day in downtown Toronto. After the sickly texture of sweat mixed with foundation flooded down my face, I binned most of my routine, keeping the key essentials: blush, mascara, eyebrow gel, and lipliner. It wasn’t a capital Q quit, more like a silent one. I was doing no-makeup-makeup—Alicia Keys —but broke.

I did feel better about myself. Not because I wasn’t wearing makeup, but because I felt beautiful. For the first time in a long time, I genuinely believed people when they told me I looked good and wondered why I’d been lying to myself for years about how much makeup I needed. When I spoke to my friend Charlie about this, they recounted their own experience of giving up makeup. “Not good politics, but good aesthetics”, they said. Not only did Charlie’s skin clear up, but their bare lashes grew considerably, a natural version of what they’d chosen to give up in the first place. If a feminist or political choice inadvertently brings you the rewards of Beauty or desirability, does that then sabotage your efforts? What if the sabotage can only be felt internally? When I returned from Canada, I continued my pared-down routine, wanting to feel as good as I felt up North. But slowly and surely, that shame crept back in. In conversations, my attention drifted to whether my cream blush had faded or if my beauty store lipliner looked wonky, veering away from the topic at hand and falling headfirst into a pond of ice-cold vanity.

I’m twenty-seven, three years from thirty, and eight years past being a teenager: far too old to be this self-obsessed and far too young to hate myself so much.

At what age do you stop being obsessed with looks, or more importantly, at what age do you stop caring about how your looks influence the way you’re treated?

II. 2012

I have a vivid memory of being fourteen.

I’m sitting on the stairs in the old house I grew up in. The faint outline of my mother yells at me to hurry up and wash my face before my grandmother comes to pick me up for secondary school. She, or the blurry figure in her place, insists that the makeup thrown on my face at the crack of dawn makes me look like a clown. Harsh to hear, but she’s right. I do look like a clown, made up with dark, streaky bronzer stolen from her bedside drawers, fuchsia-pink blush, and shimmery Dior eyeshadow gifted by my aunt after her time as a House of Fraser makeup artist. It sits on my face like costume paint, rather than carefully applied to fit my features. I argue back, like any teenager brimming with hormones and insecurity would. Why is she ruining my life? This is how all the girls do their makeup! Why can’t I be like them?

My mother doesn’t give in to my pleading; she didn’t wear makeup at my age, so why should I? More importantly, I am already naturally beautiful. I roll my eyes at her. Naturally beautiful is something you say to make ugly girls feel better about themselves, and I already know I’m deemed ugly; I just want a way to fix that. After some umming and ahhing, I acquiesce. I wash my face and slide into the backseat of my grandmother’s small Toyota, mentally preparing myself for the day ahead. I wish I could physically link our brains so she would know the pain I’m in. I can’t explain why I so desperately need makeup, but in my bravest daydreams, I confess to her, “Mum, I feel ugly” or “the boys in school make fun of me for being fat”. At times, I feel it at the tip of my tongue, and yet I hold back with the knowledge that this level of honesty had been hammered out of me after one too many times complaining about my insecurities.

I was also fourteen the first time I was sexually harassed. After weeks of comments about my boobs and my bum, both of which developed early, a boy groped me after our English class. It was on our way to our DT department. I felt a hand grab and squeeze me from behind, and a chorus of laughter followed shortly after. The other boys wondered why I was covering up when they could see the outline of my figure, suggested I might as well take my hijab off, and that because I was chubby, there was only one use for me. All, of course, ramblings of insecure, childish teenagers, but the feeling that I must compensate for a perceived lack took root on that day—poisoning me from the inside out. Later, one of those same boys snatched my hijab off my head in an RE class. I was angry, but I also wondered if they might have treated me differently if they had considered me attractive. This was the lesson I could learn: becoming more attractive might prevent other boys or men from treating me like that.

As an adult, I can look back and realise that my child self was making sense of inexcusable actions. The idea that looking presentable can protect you from harassment is a myth. As writer and educator Mia Mingus argues in her keynote speech Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability, there’s an illusory solace in beauty. That the idea it can protect you is a farce, because “if age and disability teach us anything, it is that investing in beauty will never set us free. It has always taken the form of an exclusive club, and supposed protection against violence, isolation and pain, but this is a myth. It is not true, even for those accepted into the club.” But try explaining that to a fourteen-year-old. The constant belittling from boys whose approval I so desperately wanted to win meant there was no logic-ing my way out of it. If I accepted that there was nothing that could be done to prevent harassment and violence, then it would mean I’d be prey for the rest of my life, and wouldn’t that be tragic?

III. 2015

I also remember being sixteen. The only things that kept me afloat during my tedious IGCSE exam prep were: my dying K-POP phase, my DC Comics obsession, several TV shows (BoJack Horseman, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and The Mindy Project), and makeup. The makeup routine I had at sixteen was in no way unique to me; I was one of many caught up in the onslaught of Instagram makeup tutorials and the peak of MUA Influencer culture. This routine became my weekly treat, similar to that of the weekly cheat day I had after a gruelling five days of working out and strict dieting. Looking back, it was clear that my way of avoiding the mistakes of 2012 was to exert extreme control over myself and my appearance.

Attending a religious girls’ school in Saudi Arabia meant makeup was forbidden during the week. My high school’s military-like standards of ‘cleanliness’ were so strict that on one of the few occasions I wore mascara, I was called out by my biology teacher, who asked if I was trying to impress a boy during school pick-ups, the only time our gender segregated school allowed us to mix with teenage boys. I turned a deep red, laden with embarrassment at being singled out because I wanted to look as pretty as I thought my classmates did, most of whom were non-Black, lighter than I and much slimmer. It was only at the end of the school week that I could sit at my altar, my bedroom desk transformed into an MUA table, holding the weight of all my pots and potions. I spent hours learning how to cover every spot, smooth out my skin texture, and practice the sharp edges of liquid eyeliner until my eyes began to sting from the makeup wipes. I wanted to be pretty because pretty girls were treated better. I savoured my time walking around the local park and in malls dotted close to my compound, my face adorned with the latest beauty technique from a tutorial logged in my YouTube Watch Later. Except in my case, Anastasia Beverley Hills was substituted for drugstore makeup products, which my father bought at my behest instead of the books I used to ask for at thirteen, the last year I recall being makeup-free.

When I visited my father in Saudi Arabia this past March, I got coffee with a childhood friend. We caught up on the last couple of years and the changes in our lives since we last saw each other in 2022. At a certain point, I brought up just how terrible our experiences of sexual harassment in public spaces were. When she reacted with confusion, I reminded her of a lane next to our houses known as ‘rape alley’ where girls our age were frightened of ending up after dark. Her confusion and subsequent dismissal of this—an attitude of ‘oh well, you know kids’—brought me a feeling of unease, not about her judgement, but at my own. Was I making too much of this shared experience? Did I allow these men to cloud my fond memories of growing up, or had I just experienced something different from them—a harassment tinged with fetishism for my Blackness and larger body?

On several occasions, I was followed home by college-aged boys who resided in on-campus dormitories inside the compound. Sometimes men made comments about my makeup, suggesting my red lipstick was sexy and wondering how old I was. Once, a group of men in a SUV stalked me as I walked my usual routine after dinner, only leaving me alone after I went up to a stranger with her baby and asked her to pretend we knew each other until they left. I was catcalled from car windows, profanities such as sharmouta (whore) thrown my way for wearing a coloured abaya or playing around with my style of hijab. Eyes leered at me everywhere I went, perpetual staring that always went down to my hope half or bottom, despite the fact that I was covered head to toe. I complained to my parents about how unsafe I felt. Possibly, I was just more sensitive about it, as I tend to be with everything in my life, but living on the edge became unsustainable. I was a shell of myself, unsure of where I, Haaniyah the girl, began and where the apparent desire of my body from unwanted glances ended.

When I experience sexual harassment today, I simply blankly stare at the perpetrator and walk off. If I’m feeling brave, I tell the man to leave me alone. But there are days it gets to me: recently, a man cornered me near my flat, confessing he’d never slept with a fat woman before (he used a much lewder term). Our both being Somali meant that we already had a shared connection, he said. He told me to get into his broken-down car, and after saying no several times over and over again, I rushed home and cried in my bedroom, partly scared that he might’ve followed me and knew where I lived, and partly confused about why I couldn’t prevent this. I was wearing my Tony Sporano fit (baggy shirt with a tee underneath), I had no makeup on, and my hair was a few days past wash day. I hadn’t allowed him to find me attractive, so why was he still determined to do so?

I wish I had a switch to make me invisible, to dull down any part of me that a man might pester me about.

Back at home, I cursed myself for having a body in the first place. It was my fault for not covering enough, for daring to exist in public at all. I reverted to my fourteen-year-old self, wondering if I could prevent this by losing weight, because that would mean my boobs would shrink. If there were less of me, then I’d be less visible to men. I knew this strategy didn’t help me avoid lingering gazes at fourteen or sixteen, when my eating disorder was at its peak, or now at twenty-seven, but for those few moments, it gave me comfort.

IV. 2025

I travelled to Canada in late June. My aunt, whom I’ll refer to as mamo, lives in Milton, ON, a small town outside of Toronto. There were seven of us in the house: my mamo, her two sons, her husband, my cousins from Sweden and me. This marked the first time I saw my mum’s family since her funeral in 2023, and the first time in three years I left the country for a holiday. Saudi Arabia didn’t count. Canada felt familiar to me, given the dominance of North American culture I remembered from my childhood in the Gulf. The only difference was the fresh air, gorgeous green landscapes, and cul-de-sac houses, which reminded me of Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow. For those two weeks, I was in a different country; cars drove on the opposite side of the road, and the food was both unduly sweet and extraordinarily salty. But I was also different during that trip; something in my life paused and reset in a way I haven’t yet named. Maybe it was spending time around my loved ones, microdosing the familial structure I so desperately needed. Nobody tells you when your mum dies that your family unit is most certainly going with her.

I spent most of my time traversing Plazas. My mamo reminded me of the distinct difference between what Americans call strip malls and the fancier architecture of these buildings. I went to her favourite restaurants and spent days sightseeing in nearby small cities, including a visit to Niagara Falls. I was a tourist, and admittedly, tourism is fun. That aforementioned shame petered out over the first few days of my visit, around the time I decided to cut down on my makeup. On the third or fourth day of my trip, I abandoned my foundation. It was sweltering, and sick of wiping the sweat off my face, I decided to stick to the basics. I made one change, slightly overlining my lips to give me a fuller look. I went out and immediately noticed a difference. There weren’t hordes of people coming up to me or calling me pretty (though my mamo did every day), but I felt like an adult. That condensed routine made me feel attractive in a way I hadn’t felt in years, if ever. In the mirror, I no longer saw that fourteen-year-old, trying on her mother and aunties’ makeup to cover something up—I saw myself as I am right now. It seemed like such a minuscule thing to have such an impact, but through the holiday, I kept to this new routine, and I felt unbelievable. Charlie was right: it was about good aesthetics, certainly not good politics.

The makeup routine I’d developed as a teenager in 2014 & perfected in 2015 coincided with my flirtation with feminism. I, like many of my friends in their mid to late twenties, was very online, and my learning of basic political knowledge came from the internet. I watched video essays on the wage gap, read Tumblr posts that waxed lyrical about body hair and the shame around it, and I became aware of the pink tax and the sheer amount of money spent on the beauty industry. Pop feminism was also taking root around this time. Beyonce stood on stage with the word ‘feminist’ written behind her in bold font, and, in a similar vein, actors like Emma Watson and musicians such as Taylor Swift and Lorde were proud and loud about their feminist journeys. Here I was, a teenage girl utterly depowered by the amount of harassment I was experiencing, not to mention casual racism by classmates and friends alike, but online, this world and outlook made sense to me. Of course, since then, my understanding of feminism as a political framework has developed, especially after discovering the likes of Audre Lorde and Angela Davis in my late teens, but the pop feminism that initially educated me has since degraded into a rehash of the worst of 2000s postfeminism (at least back then it gave us Sex and the City).

To the masses (comment sections): Beauty is a human right. What’s the point of making yourself feel or look ugly when the world is already so complicated for women? They deserve to feel attractive, loved, hot, and sexy because it makes them feel good about themselves. Isn’t feeling good about yourself feminist? Isn’t that precisely what we’ve all been lambasting each other (and the world) over? Feeling good about oneself, putting pleasure over hardship, and happiness over discomfort? Unfortunately, despite its absurdity, I do suspect that this plague has struck me. I realise that I, too, have been treating Beauty as an inalienable right that I validate through self-help rhetoric. I must be exhibiting self-love because I look good, right? I know I tell everyone I don’t care about looks and that we must dismantle Beauty, but when it comes to myself, that same belief system doesn’t apply. I was a great faker, but inside, I felt myself die a little more each day.

For a few months after I left Canada, “good aesthetics, not good politics” became the troubling motto for my relationship with makeup and beauty. I feel more attractive now, so I should be more attractive. I noticed an ease in the way I’d talk to people; instead of being wracked with nerves, I made direct eye contact, smiling wider and laughing with more fervour than ever before. But if using makeup to alter how I was perceived once made me feel alien, then giving it up brought on a slow unease about how naturally attractive I should be. Was my skin good enough? What about my teeth? Do my eyes look weird? Maybe they’ve finally clocked onto the lack of symmetry in my face! Or perhaps I’m just thinking about myself too much, as Jemima Kirke once said when asked “what advice she had for unconfident young women”.

Halima Jibril expressed a similar sentiment in her essay My year of divesting from beauty culture. For Halima, detaching herself from the importance of beauty was difficult. Describing it as Beauty noise (à la food noise, something I know all too well), she argues that discourse about optimising our appearance is inescapable. Halima told me that a photo of her from a friend’s party inspired her to write the piece, one she disliked but didn’t push her to spiral in the way she would’ve before her divestment. It’s not that Halima doesn’t care, but she now understands that this care isn’t about what’s good for her; it’s more about what she feels she’s meant to be doing as a woman rather than what she wants to do. I understand where Halima is coming from. In September, the second anniversary of my mum’s passing coincided with one of the most significant career opportunities of my life so far: a live Q&A with the BFI1. A horror story if you’ve ever heard it. How was I meant to pay attention to the people in front of me when all I could think about was the fact that my mum died two years ago today? But I wasn’t really thinking about my mum, as bad as that may sound. Messages from friends, flowers, and a visit from my nan were all support that underscored the tragedy of what the day was. Yet, I didn’t cry; bolts of nerves sparked up and down my body as I imagined falling over in front of 400 people. I thought about my questions over and over, considering how confident my voice would sound across the microphones and whether I would correctly pronounce the names of the cast and crew.

What I wasn’t thinking about that day was my body or my face. Amidst all the drama, joy, heartache, and pride, the one feeling that didn’t rear its head at all was insecurity. I’m not sure why, on that day of all days, it suddenly clicked that I was allowed not to care about how I looked. Perhaps it was the remembrance of death. That I was here on this stage was a testament to the hard work I had put in. More important things exist in the limited time we have than looking into a mirror to confirm that your body looks as bad as you feel it does. On my way back home with my grandmother, I pored over the photos sent by various friends and peers, reposting their stories that featured shots of me on stage at angles I’d usually deem unflattering. For the first time in my life, I felt nothing while reposting every single one. Not embarrassment, not annoyance, not regret. I knew this indifference was a temporary feeling, one quickly replaced by a familiar discomfort a few days after, but embracing it, even if only for a day, felt like being allowed to take in a deep breath after holding my head underwater for aeons.

Have I failed?

At being a woman? Perhaps. At being a fully fleshed out adult? Probably. Moving forward past that feeling of letting my younger self down? Most definitely.

On my twenty-seventh birthday, I found myself walking home from a late screening of Die My Love (2025), vowing to do three things: be kinder to myself, make healthier choices, and be more honest with myself. I usually make these vows or promises after an ADHD-related meltdown, but this latest addendum to my plan for adulthood was brought on by my uncertainty about the future. I desperately wanted to rid myself of the feeling of failure, to prove I’m not a bad friend, writer, employee, random IG mutual you never talk to but always watch the story of. Yet, those vows ring hollow in my head because, in truth, all I want is to feel beautiful and loved, not just because I know the world is unjust towards those considered ugly, but because the teenage versions of myself are still somewhere deep down, and their need for validation far surpasses mine.

I know that my being fat and subsequent experience of fatphobia is a systemic and long-term issue which impacts the way I’m treated at the doctor’s office, or when looking for work or how people see me as someone worth caring about. I should be okay with being overlooked, judged or harassed, because the attention of men should be something I savour. I should be mature enough to accept that the world might not get to a place of neutrality, but I don’t think I ever will be. I want to make choices about myself that are rational and driven by good politics, but in all actuality, they aren’t. I could continue to abandon makeup and hope the discomfort grows into strength, or I could admit defeat, acknowledging that I won’t better the world.

As you can tell, I am currently wearing makeup, and I guess if it makes the younger versions of Haaniyah feel less shitty, so that the grown-up me can also stop feeling shitty, it’s worth it, at least for now.

It’s selfish, but I am an imperfect person still learning how to feel safe again. And until then, or at least until I find an Imam ready to exorcise those teenage ghosts, all I can do is quiet their insecurity. So all aboard, I’ll be getting a one-way ticket to Vanity Junction.

Thank you once again to my editor, Emma Tranter. You make all my words make sense!

Also, a massive thank you to Ned Knight for illustrating this essay!

I’m famously bad at keeping promises.

Promises include and are not limited to:

• Appointments (including medical ones)

• Reading a book or listening to an album, but often reading a book recommended by one of my friends

• Praying more often

• Oiling my nails after I get a new gel set

• Taking my medication on time

• And finally, writing reviews, ideas, blogs, comments, feedback, and other such things that I said I would time and time again.

I’m not bad at promises because I lack the moral, or perhaps ironically, a somewhat Catholic seeming guilt complex, despite my being raised Muslim in a country where everyone else was indeed also Muslim. It’s because, my dear reader, I have ADHD, an overly subscribed speciality that I can only describe as my brain’s slow deliquesce into an eventual bloodied mush once I hit 50 (inshallah). I’m impulsive—as seen by my purchasing of a typewriter at 22 that I never use and now sits in my living room as hispterish decor—and very forgetful. Perhaps the worst combination of traits, considering I make rash decisions and promises, and immediately forget them 10 minutes later because I’m thinking of the subsequent rash decision alongside a looping thought pattern that’ll consume me for the next three days. But why am I telling you something you may have already guessed by my infrequent posting on this blog despite my pleas that I will 100% definitely have something about something written by some day at some point in time posted by an eventual release date? Because I’ve taken the brave (wayyy too late) and smart (debatable by my career metrics) choice to delete my Twitter account on the eve of my 27th birthday (which is next Saturday).

My deleting of Twitter—much like an essay I’ve been working on about good political choices versus making the same choice for selfish reasons—comes not from the pleading of everyone to abandon an app filled to the brim with terrible people. It’s because Twitter has been making me mentally ill for years, which might seem unfair. After all, nothing makes you mentally ill; I have to thank my genetic makeup for that one. But what Twitter has done since the day I downloaded it in late 2012, during a mind-boggling bout of boredom on a school holiday, is exacerbate any underlying issues already contained within me. The app merely served as a pretence to allow me access to my full potential, which was validating my bottomless need to make people like me, something I’m admitting with shame and a slight tenderness towards my teenage self.

On Twitter, I found that my “astute” observations about cultural moments or politics weren't ignored because of my wallflower-like tendencies. I was cool, and the one thing I have always wanted to be since childhood was cool. Mind you, my side of Twitter was frankly uncool—I was a stan of various pop acts, Kpop groups, superhero comics, movies, and shows, and I even had several matching Star Wars-themed PFPs (profile pictures) and headers sourced from Tumblr. But in the veneer of uncoolness, I found myself. Even if I was overlooked in real life, here was this place that didn’t judge me in the way I felt so many of my peers did.

You may be wondering: if it helped with your sense of self, what’s with all the ‘Twitter made me sad’ rhetoric? For the sake of time and my new found boundaries with personal essays to avoid what my friend Laura refers to as ‘vulnerability hangovers’, I’ll skip over the gorier details of adolensence and cement us into my late teens and early 20s where I stopped using Twitter for fun, and started using it for work (writing infrequently, my infamous Where Hands Touch Thread, hot takes on film and TV). In many ways, the app was the same, veering between argumentative and collective like a broken happy family, but I had changed. Sometime around my 20th birthday, I awoke with a boulder-sized weight on my chest. Coinciding with my start of university, my anxiety became an unbearable force to reckon with, both in person and online. And what was once an escape from the reality of my life began crushing me with the knowledge that xx, xxx amount of people were watching me at any given time. Again, a reality laden with irony, considering I kept at it, remaking my account if I were ever suspended, pleading with its customer help desk to get it back when I couldn’t access my log-in, and promoting it as the reason my voice should be listened to. “She’s got xx, xxx followers on Twitter” quickly became my justification for keeping ties with something that made me feel queasy, to say the least, and downright insane at worst. It seems silly to be so annoyed and frustrated about something that benefits my work. Kicking a gift horse in the mouth or ruining your brand, pick your poison.

In an age where the line between influencing and writing has become blurred—influencers who become writers through their platforms and writers who are almost always forced to become influencers to keep writing—there seems to be no exit sign in sight. You either stay on the hamster wheel or you get off and risk being forgotten about—something I have always feared and dared not tempt. But like I mentioned earlier, I’m turning 27 next Saturday, not a remarkable age by any stretch of the imagination. It’s not 25 and it’s not 30. It’s a middling passage way between the two, adult adolescence on the precipice of full-on adulthood. With said adulthood looming over me like a night terror, but not the enjoyable kind that gives you ideas for a successful Blumhouse script, I thought long and hard about why I had held on to having a Twitter account for almost thirteen years. It really wasn’t for my career, as I’ve successfully shifted to other, equally detestable but much more tolerable, apps alongside working with cultural institutions such as the BFI and my monthly film column for A Rabbit’s Foot. It wasn’t for my friends; I’ve made plenty from the app, and I know them IRL or have remained good internet friends with them. And it certainly wasn’t for gossip, considering that I’ve got Reddit and a full personal life for that. I kept my Twitter because, as it turns out, I was afraid to let go of my past. To say goodbye to that scared fourteen-year-old, and to let her know that she doesn’t have to bury her head in the digital sand because she’s too weird for other people. I can’t keep living for her. I have to live for me—almost 27-year-old Haaniyah—because I think she deserves a fair shot as well.

Anywho, with that brief explanation as to why you will see less of my thoughts thrown at you in an untoward manner, I’ll explain how I plan to turn those thoughts into a monthly newsletter. It’ll be a round-up of things I’ve been watching (TV and Film), listening to (Music and Podcasts), reading (books, articles, academia) and what I’ve been writing (as I realise I rarely update you guys with my work).

This newsletter isn’t paywalled because I don’t believe I’m writing anything special enough to force your readership under duress. If you donate to my Substack, I want it to be of your own volition. We’re in a recession here, people! What good is it to commodify myself when it’s meant to be fun?

With the housekeeping out of the way, we can get started on my picks from October; anything from earlier in the year will be in my end-of-year round-up.

What I’ve Been Watching (TV):

Gilmore Girls (2000-2006)

This might be the wrong show to start this list off on because I don’t want any of you to think of me differently. I’m not sure I was meant to dislike this show as much as I did. It feels like blasphemy when we’re in the middle of Autumn, but I have to be honest and to ease the pain, I’ll start with my pros!

Pros:

• The snappy, screwball-comedy-like dialogue, when people speak as fast as I do, makes me feel less ashamed about listening to my podcasts at 1.5x.

• The gorgeous set design. I love when TV shows feel lived in. The attention to detail in Stars Hollow is probably why I’ve seen hundreds of Tumblr gifs dedicated to the show’s aesthetics in my time as a teenager on Tumblr. Not to mention, the yearly ‘I’m an Autumn’ soundbite that goes viral on TikTok every year.

• The costuming is divine, especially with Sookie. It’s rare to find fat women in early 00s TV as well costumed as she was. Melissa McCarthy, if you ever do an estate sale, please let me know. I have a couple of pieces in mind.

• The soundtrack, I’ve been listening to Gilmore Girls playlists for weeks, which has put me in a very alternative rock ‘90s mood this October.

Now the cons….

• I found everyone a bit unbearable. Lorelai is emotionally stunted, for understandable reasons, but never really grows out of it, so by the time we get to season seven, the show has left her where she started in season one. Part of that stuntedness leads to my second issue.

• Lorelai both coddles and parentifies Rory, which creates an interesting dynamic if the writers ever thought to explore it. The season in which Rory leaves Yale was an incredible chance to do just that, where Rory is allowed to finally take a step back and think about what she wants without being pigeonholed as her mother’s perfect daughter (despite her claims not to be anything like Emily). Still, it stops short of blaming Emily and Richard, and refuses to delve into how Lorelai relies on her daughter’s smarts to coast through easy parenting. My issue isn’t that the characters are flawed, but that the writers who create those flaws want nothing to do with playing around with them or seeing how they can lead to fulfilling arcs.

• I hate nearly all of the men on the show, I’m sorry. Dean is possessive and weird, Jess is possessive and weird, Logan is possessive and weird and rich. Jackson starts incredibly sweet and veers into an odd mansopheric shell of himself that would do quite well on today’s internet landscape if he decided to become one of those homesteading channels. Luke skirts by on a minor technicality because of his care towards April and Rory, but he’s on thin ice.

But hey! It sure is pretty to look at.

Gen V (2023-Present)

Not better than the last season, but also not bad? I’m a bit ‘The Boys’d out, the gross-out humour has hit a wall, the satire is indistinguishable from the reality of today, making me wonder why I’m forcing myself to watch two versions of these same migraine-inducing fascist regimes (I guess one doesn’t have lasers yet), and it’s just become a bit boring which might be its biggest crime in all honesty.

Slow Horses (2022-Present)

Also, not better than the last season, but in this case, I thoroughly enjoyed myself with weekly filler episodes whilst getting ready for the day. Slow Horses is my version of watching a middling ITV crime drama, except with an Apple TV budget that lets them shoot 2 seasons in one go. I’m not lying to myself and pretending it’s the best TV in the world, but for that hour and a bit when it’s on my screen, I am locked all the way in. I missed Luicia this season, but River trying to kiss her mid-emotional breakthrough, leading to a low-contact situation, is so understandable and a great way to explain away the departure of Rosalind Eleazar, who is set to come back at some point in a future season. If you enjoy bumbling fools attempting to prove their worth in a system set to turn every single one of its recruits into machine cogs, then this might be the show for you.

What I’ve Been Watching (Film):

Mastermind (2025)

I saw a few films at LFF, for which you can read my individual reviews below. Hamnet was the only one I didn’t write about, and that’s because I cried so much I got a migraine right after, so I’m due for a rewatch since I remember almost none of it. Instead, here’s a film I wanted to see at LFF but missed: Kelly Reichardt’s Mastermind (2025).

In Mastermind, James Blaine “J.B.” (Josh O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, finds himself on the run after stealing artwork from his local museum. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s America, Reichardt is commenting on the extremes of the mundane of home versus the inhumane elsewhere, and the lengths one goes to ignore what is happening around them.

Despite his pleas that his hiest was for the good of his family, J.B.’s actions are more selfish than he admits. He attempts to recoup the loss of an artistic career gone by the wayside, and whilst he fights his own deluded revolution, people protest a very real war right outside. Towards the end of the film, J.B., left with no money, no family, and no friends, sits in a cafe thinking over his next move to get a bus ticket out of America and towards his Canadian freedom—robbing an old lady should be easy enough. Except that after robbing said old lady and conveniently ignoring the protest outside the cafe, J.B. uses it for a cover of his crime, only to end up in the same police van as the protesters. I’m not sure how on par these allegories are, or whether the political implications are as one-to-one as I’m reading them, or as Reichardt hopes they are. I was reminded that during her acceptance speech at the 2024 Indie Spirit Awards, she commented (albeit after being drowned out on stage) on the absurdity of the celebrity class celebrating indoors while protesters were outside for Gaza. I wonder if this has anything to do with the themes in Mastermind alongside the current political unrest in the United States. If anything, the film, much like its politics, is a slight tepid for my own tastes, and the clash of tone from start to finish makes it an uneven watch.

In my Letterboxd review, I said something to the extent that I had nothing to say because it wasn’t for me, which is still somewhat true. I can’t say the film is for me, I don’t think I’ll revisit Mastermind, and quite honestly, I did doze off for a millisecond due to my local Odeon’s blistering heating system. However, Josh O’Connor should continue giving Elliot Gould, even if it means more middling films in his filmography.

What I’ve Been Listening To (Music & Podcasts):

For weekly updates on my music listening habits, I post them every Friday on IG, but for now, and to save time, because this is getting really long, here’s my favourite album of the month:

Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman

I’ve also been—and have for years—enjoying this month’s Eating For Free pod, especially their episode on the Saudi Comedy Festival.

What I’ve Been Reading:

The Goon Squad

Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation

by Daniel Kolitz

Honestly, go without any knowledge of the topic or preamble from me, but I will say I found this quote quite eye-opening:

Is there a timeline, a regulatory environment, in which the internet does not turn into a highly efficient manufacturer of niche suicide cults?

On a slightly similar note to the recommendation above.

Men Who Hate Women

The Extremism Nobody is Talking About

by Laura Bates

I kid you not, this book took me two months to read. That may sound like an indictment of its writing quality, but I promise it’s anything but. I kept putting down Men Who Hate Women because of how bleak it was. As referenced in my above breakup letter with Twitter, you’d think someone as online as I am would be aware of the depths of online misogyny, which is true, but for the sake of my sanity, I try to avoid it where I can. And if, like me, you realised, given the general state of things, that perhaps it’s time to lift the blinders, Bates puts it all on wax (or page) for us to lap in despite its unsavoury aftertaste. Meticulously researched and remarkably blunt, Men Who Hate Women is a book I implore you all to read.

But I would also love to hear from anyone who has read it and didn’t enjoy it as much as I did!

What I’ve Been Writing:

This has been a great month if I do say so myself. I’ve had the opportunity to be at LFF (before I was taken out by chronic fatigue) and watch all the films I wrote about.

“We need more Black love stories on screen – and Love, Brooklyn is a perfect example of why” - Stylist Magazine

Stylist contributor Haaniyah Awale Angus explains why we need more Black representation in romantic comedies, taking lead from Rachael Abigail Holder’s feature debut, Love, Brooklyn.

After the Hunt, The Social Network and the thorny politics of the campus drama - A Rabbit’s Foot

In her latest column for A Rabbit’s Foot, Haaniyah Awale Angus considers the legacy of Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook drama, and why, despite moments of redemption, After the Hunt fails to live up to its premise.

Susan Wokoma on Her Short Film ‘Dark Skin Bruises Differently’

Haaniyah Awale Angus spoke with Susan Wokoma about her short Dark Skin Bruises Differently and why she took up the mantle of director.

If you’ve made it this far, wow, thank you for reading. I promise next month’s will be half this long. I’m still playing with formatting, so I may include some comics I’ve read, galleries I’ve been to or even an anecdote or two if it’s funny enough to repeat on here.

I didn’t comment on this when it happened earlier in the year, but I’m so thankful for 5,000 subs. That’s a crazy number of people here just for my writing, and not searing hot takes. I don’t really use the social aspect of Substack because it is too Twitter-y, but I’ll always have my chat open if anyone has any review requests or ideas for topics they’d like me to cover.

I hope you all have a wonderful Halloween Weekend!

Irene doesn’t reply to my 8 AM text. I’m freaking out about a date, or work, or maybe even celebrity gossip we both laugh at. She’s probably fast asleep – it’s 3 AM in New Jersey – but far from that responsible and logical conclusion, what ping pongs around my head is fear. She must be angry with me. Or worse, annoyed.

My anxiety relishes this. It toys with my body and brain, propagandising: I must be the most annoying person in existence. I know that everyone experiences this to some extent, whether it’s a passing thought or, like in my case, a lifelong belief. I worry I’m annoying when I talk, when I text, when I call, when I say hi and bye and most unfortunately, when I seek any reasonable human connection. No matter the conversation, I always wonder if the audience of my non-stop prattling glazes over in boredom. My mind trails away mid-speech, as if the thoughts in my brain are entirely separate from the words that continue to crawl out of my mouth at a rate unknown to mankind. Are people counting down the seconds until they can politely smile and say, “god, look at the time, I’ve gotta go”? How often has someone sat across from me wishing they could scream, “for the love of god, shut the fuck up!”? Calculating that might be pointless. I’m twenty-seven in November; I began gnawing my parents' ears off as a toddler in both English and my long-lost Somali. That’s twenty-five years of talking, at least.

A few weeks ago, I stayed up all night, a habit I’ve tried to avoid since my teenage era of sleep-deprived psychosis. This time, my insomnia was down to an ill-fated experiment with ADHD meds during Katy B’s performance in Phonox rather than poor sleep hygiene. For some, ADHD medication replicates the feeling of Speed, for others, it empties your mind, or even is an experience combining a little of both. I felt the effects of the second. Amongst a sea of intoxicated, sweaty bodies falling in and out of sync to a hazy mix of Jungle, DnB, UKG, Bassline and Speed Garage, my mind emptied. For the first time in my life, there was no running script pouring around my mind. Talking about this experience with several friends, I was surprised to find the consensus was that most people just focus on the music and nothing else. I secretly wondered if there was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I stay in the moment? 

That Friday night, I was hyper-focused on the music—feeling the bass pumping into my chest, thrilled by the mixes from DJs I’d never seen live before. I didn’t think about whether the guy circling me thought I was attractive. I didn’t wonder if I looked silly, lost to the melody of Lights On or Katy B on a Mission, reloaded by the woman herself for a third time. I’ve never experienced freedom like it. Just as this realisation hit, I was cornered in the smoking area by a posh twat, his drunken eyes shifting in and out of reality, as he waxed poetic about my hair—“your Afro is so cool”—demanding to know when I’d last cut it. C'est la vie.

Spurred on by growing understanding of mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, and the optimisation of self-care, Therapy Speak has become common parlance. We live in an age where the language of anxiety is everywhere; it might as well be marketing jargon rather than an actual disorder with debilitating consequences. I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder as a teenager. Not just run of the mill, my stomach feels a bit off because of the extra shot of espresso this morning, anxiety, but the I fear I might die at any moment variety. In my second year of university, I had a complete breakdown, becoming a shut-in, avoiding my lectures and any semblance of a social life. It got to a point where I couldn’t walk past the pub next to my house because I was convinced that fellow students would exit said pub just to mock me. When walking alone, I took the shortcut through a nearby cemetery, even in the dead of winter. I saw a therapist for weeks of CBT, who suggested that I needed to shift my feelings away from my anxiety by realising the things I was afraid of were not going to happen. People weren’t going to make fun of me: these scenarios were imaginary, and that was the sole cause of the fear boiling up in my body. I tried explaining as best as I could that it wasn’t all in my mind—I brought up the bullying I experienced as a child and the overwhelming sexual harassment of my teenage years. She disagreed, and I felt embarrassed—clearly, I was too broken for even a therapist. The CBT homework must have been too advanced for me, and I was doomed to be an anxious wreck forever.

I am not the same woman—I frequent clubs, parties and DJ sets, I speak on panels for the BFI, and I showcase my work at book clubs and literary readings. It’s taken me years to gain any control over my anxiety, and what looks like control to me would look like hell to most. I check my door three or four times before I leave my house to make sure I’ve locked it. I arrive everywhere ten to fifteen minutes early, so I never keep anyone waiting. I pre-check any and all routes I take so I know every possible way I can get home, lest my phone breaks or my charger gets lost. To me, progress is the fact that I’m able to leave my house at all. Credit is not due to any therapists, but rather to the noise-cancelling headphones I purchased in 2022. If you ever run into me, brace for a shocked scream as you tap my shoulder, because I’m blasting dance music. Jersey, Baile Funk, Bassline, Ghettotech—I can’t hear anything else. It’s a distraction, not a fix, but it helps, even for the cost of extra ear damage. 

My mother also had anxiety. For the longest time, I thought she was just a bit kooky in the best way an older woman can be. She was a health nut, an avid believer in the evil eye, fiercely protective of me and my brothers, all of which I attributed to the difficulties of her youth: losing her own mother to cancer, becoming a carer to her younger siblings and escaping a civil war, all before the age of thirty. Her fear of the world made sense to me. She worried about other people, not letting me and my brothers walk alone from school for years. She worried about me, in particular, being taken advantage of and feared the way I would be treated as a young veiled Muslim girl in a country that was growing more Islamophobic as the years passed, eventually suggesting a move to Saudi Arabia. I sensed this anxiety from a young age. My own anxiety manifested in quietness, in complete contrast to my two younger brothers, who took up so much of my parents' attention due to their hyperactivity. I was a good child, often sitting in the corner with my nose in a book. My anxiety centred within myself. With no words to express how I felt, I turned to Jacqueline Wilson, Rick Riordan, those weird anthropomorphic Warrior cat books, and Darren Shan. The stories of Wilson were especially poignant, as her protagonists were around my age. I hadn’t been left home alone (Illustrated Mum), or experienced abusive parents (Lola Rose), adoption (Tracy Beaker), or breakups (Girls series), but I recognised myself in their sense of profound loneliness in a way I hadn’t before.

What would my life have been like as a Wilson protagonist? Maybe it would be the story of an isolated young girl, finding it hard to make friends in a country that was hellbent on racism despite all religious rulings against it. Maybe it would be about my malleability, camouflaging myself to my surroundings, ensuring I had friends even at the expense of my personal identity. I realised being as available as possible to people worked in my favour. Within five minutes of knowing me, a total stranger would be aware of the intricacies of my life and my deepest, darkest secrets. Betrayal wasn’t something that even crossed my mind, because surely being honest would prove my value as a friend. Unfortunately, as she always was, my mother’s warnings about jumping the gun invariably came true. I imagined her weariness of strangers, in particular, as some unresolved trauma she was passing onto me. Unlike her, I wasn’t going to be fearful of friendship or love. I was friendly, open, accepting and all too naive with no fear of how that naivety could harm me.

She always warned me about getting too close to friends in particular. But my mother had seven sisters, and I have none. My brothers and I, as much as I love them, couldn’t be more different if we tried. I had always imagined that maybe if I had a sister, in the same way my twin brothers have each other, that I’d have a friend built in. Someone I didn’t need to work hard to impress. She’d laugh at my jokes, include me in conversations and take my inherited kookiness as a positive instead of a negative. My wonderful therapist, who perhaps appears too often in my writing, told me that I was too hard on myself. We discussed my anxiety surrounding social media and the idea of how I’m perceived. In all honesty, I struggle to see myself as someone worth supporting. I don’t understand why my writing gets compliments or how people find me enjoyable to listen to. Surely, I sound like an idiot. I’m well aware that the way I view myself is slightly sad, if not pathetic. I should be more forgiving, as it’s clear that the unrelenting standards I set for myself are tearing me apart. I’ve felt the grip of my harshness far more than anybody else in my life—the self-imposed guidelines on how to conduct myself and who to allow into my world.

Sometimes it feels like my running commentary wants me dead but doesn’t have the balls to see it through. 

I talk a lot, but only because I think a lot. I think a lot because I worry a lot and so on and so forth. Very chicken or the egg: is it the worry or the thought? Does the worry come from an ache deep within my bones, or does that ache of feeling unwanted come from the thoughts that plague me as I walk across the busy intersection towards my local station? These thoughts carry themselves above the sound of the screeching underground, which in turn dampens the ear-bleeding volume of my playlists. It is never-ending, but as an adult with actual responsibilities, the thoughts need to go somewhere else. I have rent and bills; I need to figure out how to afford a fridge that doesn’t leak. So how do I do it? I wonder how my mum managed, dealing with anxiety whilst raising three children between two countries she knew would prefer her to be elsewhere. How did she cope without her mother, an ocean away from most of her sisters and her friends? I’m child-free and single, only directly responsible for myself. It should be easier the older I get, but it feels like more weight is being piled on top of me, pushing me down into an inescapable sinkhole. I still can’t tell if I’m really that annoying, but I’m sure there are people out there who would jump at the chance to confirm, “Yes, Haaniyah is annoying, and mean and a bitch and and and and and.” Maybe I am annoying, maybe I am mean, and maybe I’m a bitch.

Is that a crime?

Massive thank you to my editor, , for turning my flowery language into something that makes sense.

Heart Notes

notes on fragrance/fashion/film, assorted daydreams towards communal luxury, occasional book-bitching

By Emma Tranter

A layer of desperation encases my skin. It began sometime around last summer, after someone I was talking to told me, “Hinge took a backseat” in his life when I apologised for a delay in texting while moving house. We hadn’t been talking on Hinge that long, promptly moving to iMessage, and had met IRL for coffee. For most people, it wouldn't be an issue; we did indeed meet on Hinge. But it was his blasé response, dismissing me as a Hinge match and not as someone he’d been getting to know for almost two months, that set something off in me. Instead of bringing it up, I just replied with a “haha, yeah it’s been a while” and tried to repair the talking stage as it fizzled out.

I’m not telling you about this blip in my dating life as a way to shame said guy or rid my body of any lingering rage it’s holding onto, but it’s an example of me ignoring my needs for the mere chance of love. We were clearly incompatible, not interested in keeping dates with each other, constantly back-and-forth rescheduling. Most importantly, I was actively grieving my mother’s passing, which took place less than 9 months before. Yet, I pushed all that aside to make it work. Nothing forced me to do this, no parental yelling about marriage or friends shaming me for being single. It was an urge that came from within as if someone had planted it there from birth. When it eventually blew up in my face, as dating so often does, I sat with myself and pondered what had gone wrong. I tried hard, and I was always pleasant. I was usually on time and often even too eager to talk. I arrived early for our date, and we seemed to hit it off. So what was it? Obviously, these things happen, and people just don’t work out for whatever reason. Still, I resented myself deeply. Most of all, I felt guilty that my grief had been the reason I had ended things, despite all the obvious signs it wasn’t going to work anyway.

When I tell friends, acquaintances, and even strangers the sheer number of times this exact scenario (give or take a few details) has reoccurred in my dating life over the last year, they often think I’m exaggerating. Perhaps, to some extent, I play it up for comedic effect to ease the growing anxiety I’ve been harbouring that I might be an unsuitable candidate for love. How many times have I made myself available for someone who wasn’t worth the sacrifice? How many times have I felt a twinge in my gut that I perhaps should take silence not as an admission of dislike or disgust but of simple indifference? And, in all honesty, how many times have I turned an interaction into something it wasn’t just because I’m hellbent on romanticising it as a way of making life more tolerable?

The older I get, the harder I find it to determine if the romantic choices I’ve been making are a reflection of my actual wants and desires. Acknowledging that I’ve attempted to settle feels like admitting defeat. It's like I’m holding up a giant neon sign that reads ‘THIS WOMAN IS BROKEN’. However, I think the crux of it is that I desperately want something or someone to make me whole again. Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t believe I’ve intentionally used dating as a band-aid for my grief, but the timing sure doesn’t help my case. At times, I felt ashamed to even think about dating whilst grieving, but at what point do you get up and say, ‘I’m fixed enough now, please love me’? Is it a year after grief? Two, three? Do I remain single for the next ten years in hopes I therapise myself enough to the point of being a woman without a single dent? How soon do I confess that I’m grieving? Am I being too forward if I wait until I eventually make the blunder of explaining that my mum is dead, even though I spoke about her as if I saw her yesterday? Is it leading them on, misleading them into thinking I’m an easy person to manage, or am I just so burnt out by endless bad dates that I’ve forgotten normal, or even good ones, still exist? Still, I can see the light go out in their eyes when the words leave my mouth; the Haaniyah of five minutes ago no longer exists. It’s replaced by an atmosphere of suffocating pity, a hand squeeze that makes me feel like I’m a placated five-year-old or a dying dog—I can’t tell which option is worse.

I suppose the hurt, confusion and all the mess in between is less about them and more about me. I shouldn’t internalise, but I continue to do so—to the point that I started crying whilst building dining chairs and listening to Fall Out Boy (a real Wednesday night activity from last week). I know someone being cruel isn’t a reflection on me. I know someone ghosting me isn’t a reflection of me. And most importantly, I know it’s not their fault if they’re not ready to take on grief. I know, I know, I know, but god, can't I just experience dating without the added hurt? Why can’t I come home giddy with excitement that I’ve met someone special or with butterflies in my stomach (that don’t mimic anxiety)? There are only so many times I can tell jokes about my love life until it stops being funny and starts to read like Jo March in Little Women pleading about her loneliness to her mother.

I am so lonely.

I know that I’m not literally alone—I have plenty of friends who love me, friends who I have dinner with, go to museums with, spend hours in the dancery with, complain about films with and even friends who have sat beside me during the worst moments of my life. I know I’m not a bad judge of character because my friends are some of the kindest, funniest and most genuine people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

I know that because my friends love me, I am a lovable person who has the capacity for care and compassion as well as love. But as much as I hate to admit this, fearing ungenerous accusations of ‘centring romance’, it’s not the same. Despite all the words I’m writing right now, I can’t precisely explain why. Perhaps that’s the issue. I find it hard to describe to people who have not experienced grief. I don’t want to suggest I’ve gained access to a higher level of emotional mastery, but after my mum died, something that can only be described as a black hole started whirling around inside of me. I became an endless pit desperately in need of validation, affirmation and, most importantly, love. But what is it about romantic love that I perceive as the sickly sweet medicine to my specific ailment?

It wasn’t romantic love that sat beside me at my mother’s funeral and consoled me afterwards. It hasn’t been romantic love that’s celebrated my achievements time and time again. Romantic love doesn’t listen on the phone, as I question my career goals and whether or not my writing is a worthwhile pursuit. But my friends have. That pity I spoke about feels nonexistent with them; no light goes out because their eyes remain fixed on me, seeing me for who I am and not what I could be if a date went well. I do not want to be a cynic about romance, but I wonder if it’s time to start being more realistic about where I’ve been ranking romance over friendships, even if unintentionally. This is not so much about decentering men as it is decentering romance and decentering my wish that romance will fix me, because the reality is that nothing can fix me. Not even time and the best therapist around could eliminate the level of devastation I feel, so how could a relationship? I keep forgetting that relationships aren’t meant to fix me—they’re meant to be a complement to the other elements of my life. I seem to have missed the memo.

I’m unsure what this grand realisation means for me going forward. Is there some sort of prize for reclaiming your agency, or is peace of mind good enough? Maybe all my effort and desire for a great date could be put towards something worthwhile, perhaps a rom-com script or a romantic novel, because, god, don’t we need more of those from self-described ‘hopeless romantics’? A more realistic outcome than a 90,000-word manuscript would be the sanity and peace I’d gain, not using dating as a way to make fun of myself. I’d feel better talking about myself beyond another story of how I was fucked over, beyond the feeling that being constantly fucked over has made me into a worse person. As one of my best friends said to me during our brunch today, “Haan, you need to tap out, it’s driving you crazy”. Much like my other friends, Ren has spent more than their fair share of time listening to me complain down the phone. And I fear, like always, they’re right. Dating is driving me crazy, and I’m finally over it. Godspeed to you all.

This essay is a little out of nowhere for me. Thank you, Ren, for your inspiring brunch talk and thank you to all my wonderful friends.

And a special thanks to the wonderful Emma Tranter for making my words make sense. She’s also a fantastic writer on this website:

Heart Notes

notes on fragrance/fashion/film, assorted daydreams towards communal luxury, occasional book-bitching

By Emma Tranter

I’ve always described myself as a bitch. Not in any derogatory sense or as a way to put myself down, but as a loving expression of my firmness and adoration of boundaries. I’m a bitch because: I stand up for myself, I leave dates early, I quit my job if I feel disrespected. I’m a bitch because I make my opinions known no matter who they upset even if it means I end up alone (as I so often have). I’m sure that’s not the reclamation of the word other women, especially those older than me, would enjoy being made aware of, but it’s always felt like an apt description of myself. Except that, at some point along the way of my early to mid and now late twenties, I’ve stopped being a bitch, instead I’ve transmuated my personality into that of a ‘nice person’. You may be thinking, “Okay well you were a bitch and now you’re nice, that doesn’t sound too bad? You just learnt some manners, that's all!” However, being nice and engaging in niceness is a trap—sickly sweet and intended to undermine my humanity at every turn.

My niceness, which I view as distinctly separate from my kindness (freely given without expecting anything in return), has left me unable to speak up for myself, which might seem ironic considering I am currently writing this essay for my Substack. I have a voice, a platform, hell, I even have an agent ready to disseminate my work whenever I see fit to get out of my writer's block, yet I feel stunted. I started being nice as a way to avoid conflict. Being away from civilisation (London) for two years meant that I became accustomed to a life of distant socialisation where I could be a bitch to no consquence. Nobody’s asking my opinions on nights out or making sly comments towards me because there was quite literally nobody around me at any given time in Aylesbury. I also think it was a course correction, a way of amending my previous self that did the typical London exodus when things became unmanageable. A previous self that was unruly and deemed too sharp to fit into my friend groups of the past. If I wanted friends, I would be amenable, smiley, and most importantly, nice.

Niceness is hollow; it seeks only to reaffirm my placement as an acceptable woman. Niceness is a performative act with the sole purpose of placating and aiding in measures of pretence without one ounce of sincerity. Niceness is a mask I’ve worn since I was a child, precisely because of my gender. It has allowed me to evade the judgmental eyes that wandered over my midriff and automatically measured the fat around my stomach before getting to know me. “She’s fat, yes, but she’s also nice.”

In Niceness, Flattery, and Deceit (2017), Calvin L. Troup & Christina L. McDowell Marinchak argue that the appeal of niceness is not just powerful, but easy. It indicates approval without “ethical commitment, moral support, or personal responsibility”. Niceness fits comfortably with our need to affirm one another rather than be honest about our feelings. Troup and McDowell Marinchak continue, “The affirmation registers with others as approval, but niceness does not and cannot carry any moral valence; it sets affirmation against evaluation.” I’m not just nice, I’m agreeable. I’m malleable, a shape-shifter that avoids scrutiny because I can turn on the charm and make you laugh at the drop of a hat. In one of our recent sessions, my therapist made a comment that shook me to the core as she so often does. She said, "Haaniyah, it feels like you're performing for me out of a fear you'll be judged. You come in here with stories and your charm as a way to avoid the hard stuff." I immediately felt shame crawl over my face, heating my cheeks to such a degree than she could've easily seen it over the shaky Zoom camera. She was right—I was so committed to putting on a performance that it even crossed over to therapy, the one place on Earth where I'm meant to be the most honest version of myself.

If this is how I act with my therapist, then my god, how do I act with my friends, my colleagues, my family, and, unfortunately, men? I wonder if being nice makes the pill of getting to know me go down easier. You no longer need to wonder if I’m pretty enough, if my body looks right or if I’m intelligent because I’m a “nice girl”. Nice girls eventually become nice women, and nice women don’t protest when you upset them, because, god forbid, I stand up for myself. Nice women don’t make faces of distress because what if someone else feels uncomfortable as a result of my discomfort? Nice women are meek, annoying, push-overs, prudes, cowards, treated like idiots and vapid creatures with nothing but rocks in between our ears. I know this because I’ve spent the past year being a nice woman.

I’ve found that men, in particular, hate nice women. They enjoy being around us because they feel validated by being around someone who feels much too uncomfortable to do anything other than smile when confronted with a gut feeling of emotional dysregulation. Yet, there’s a level of dehumanisation ready and waiting at the door because you’ve shown yourself to be nice. “Haaniyah’s nice, she can take a joke”, “Haaniyah’s well adjusted,” “Haaniyah’s just a great laugh”. And honestly, it is my fault. I smile and laugh at jabs pointed towards me because if I don’t then I’m a shrew that can’t take a joke. I push down my gnawing feeling that something is wrong because surely I’m just reading into how I feel and putting words into their poison-laced mouths. Instead, I bite my tongue, choose to enjoy my time out with friends and go home having had my self-esteem ripped apart seven ways to Sunday. If I don’t, I’m the spoilsport. Didn’t you know, men are just like that! They’re just mean, rude, vicious, pointed, unkind, cruel and most importantly, they’re just men! I wonder if I were a man, if I’d spend so much of my time thinking about how nice I am. Maybe, I’d be a gigantic asshole as so many of them often are. Perhaps I’d single women out based on how attractive I found them and lock them into cages of expectations that they can never escape from. Women doomed to be typecast as fuckable, mean, nice, pretty, and other. You're the Madonna or you're the whore and maybe a secret third thing Freud was too high on cocaine to figure out. I’m nice so that I can escape the other, but I’m finding that my attempts seem futile. I continue to be bothered.

In her 1977 essay “Nice Girl”: Social Control of Women Through a Value Construct, academic Greer Letton Fox suggests that the application of niceness is attached to behaviour and not the individual. Niceness in women is continuously in flux because it’s a never-ending endeavour to ensure that our identities aren’t in jeopardy. Fox explains, “One is under pressure to demonstrate one's niceness anew by one's behavior in each instance of social interaction. In sum, the lady is always in a state of becoming: one acts like a lady, one attempts to be a lady, but one never is a lady. In effect, then, throughout her lifetime, a woman's behavior will reflect continued efforts to attain what is an essentially unattainable status.”

Unattainable status rings around in my head like the auditory remnants of a gunshot. It puts into words a feeling that’s been consuming my thoughts and body since I was able to realise that I was not just a girl, but a fat Black girl. It also reminds me of a tweet that’s been stuck in my head for the past six months (which rarely happens on Elon Musk’s far-right hellhole). The tweet reads:

“I feel no attachment to my perceived femininity. It is a costume and a system of actions that I perform. It is not my personhood. It is a performance. Just enjoy the show.”

When the Barbie movie emerged in 2023, the word girl took over social media. It was girl math, then girl dinner and eventually TikTok videos simplifying politics to explain to the girls. There was a demand to ditch adulthood and fall back into the naivety of not just childhood but girlhood. I found the trend to be unrelatable but also deeply unnerving. I wasn’t sure at the time if that unnerving feeling came from a place of annoyance or actual unease at being reminded of my girlhood without the £15 fee I pay my therapist. I wondered if something was wrong with me—it seemed like everyone else could sit around, share stories of what it was like being a young girl without feeling an immediate sense of doom. Had my bitchiness gone too far into fully formed cynicism preventing me from enaging with human connection? I think about my girlhood (or childhood as I prefer), and I think of a young girl ostracised from the moment she could speak. I think of a girl robbed of the chance to be anything other than chubby, with her future weight at the forefront of her parents' minds rather than her future career. Please don’t take this as a dismantling of my relationship with my mum, who long before she passed reckoned with the damage I was left to deal with or my relationship with my father, whom I love dearly but currently exists as a quasi-bargaining process between us to put aside our eerily similar egos. I think, for as much as my parents failed me, they, in turn, were failed by society, which doesn’t alter history or erase the pain I experienced, but allows me to process it in a healthier way than screaming into my pillow as I often did at 15. My parents instilled in me kindness, care for others, loyalty, and determination to be a good person. Yet, they also did little to prevent growing knowledge from creeping into my brain as a pre-teen that I would never be seen as a girl or a woman, or even a human being. So, how was I to cope? I learnt to be nice.

In the same way, I became nice again as an adult because I wanted friends—I initially became nice as a child as a form of self-protection. I was isolated and quiet, and I made very little noise or waves in an attempt to veer suspicious eyes away from my being. The only thing people could say about me was “She’s a bit weird/quiet/quirky, but she’s nice!”, just as I wanted them to do. I spent my days buried in books, which became fanfiction, cultural criticism in the form of tweets, and eventually writing my articles as a journalist. As I grew, my niceness adapted to my surroundings in the same way Venom protects (and mutates) Tom Hardy from Riz Ahmed or whatever weird villain thing exists, in what I’m going to say seems like a money laundering scheme from Sony. It became a defensive shield I could fall back into if life became too hard. I found myself unable to be honest—fearful of what that honesty would mean. Further explained in their paper, Troup and McDowell Marinchak state: “The fact that we have internalised niceness as a society means that most people take for granted an entire virtue structure that makes “being nice” the primary guide for our public conduct, particularly conversation. Niceness functions as an unquestionable, unscrutinised norm.”

In laymans terms they mean, we all need to stop pretending to be so fucking nice all the time. Or at least that’s what I took from it. Niceness has been my way of normalising and sanitising the harm that has happened to me. It allowed me to make sense and accept that there were ways that I could conduct myself so as not to be targeted for my weight, race, gender and the messy combination of all three. I believed there was some way I could be accepted enough that my personhood would shine through instead of everything else. There's just one problem: it doesn't work that way! Bigotry doesn’t respond to niceness—it doesn’t care how sweet you are or how much you try to woo people to like you. It’s even worse when the bigotry is covert and based on socialised bias rather than outwardly malicious. Men, even, allegedly well-spoken, educated, socially aware men won’t call you a fat bitch, instead they make you feel like a creep for engaging in basic facets of human connection. They placate you, mock you, belittle you, and wrap it all up in a bow, saying, “You’re just so nice!” along with an aloof yet condescending smile. He does it under the cover of one-on-one conversations, not to be caught out by other women who fit into the favoured typecast he has placed them in. It's happened to me as a teenager, a university student, at my first job, and now as a woman three years away from turning 30. My life has been a never-ending cycle of finding myself in the crosshairs of men who see me as an easy target and believe nobody will come to my defence. It’s violence without the receipts to prove said violence, and you feel like a crazy woman for thinking you’ve just been taken for the biggest mug in the world. Nobody else sees this? Nobody else admits there’s an issue here? Am I the problem? So you go home with a sickness that has been transferred onto you by someone unwilling to take the time to heal and mend themselves. Their disease becomes your reality, and there is no cure to be found.

In her essay, Fox ponders: “Who gains from the "nice girl" construct?”

I've thought about that question years before I even came across Fox's work, but as I sit here unpacking my particular trauma through an essay some may call vindictive, I'm trying to determine the why rather than the who. Why have I been tying myself into such an unbreakable knot for so many years? In many ways, I am a failure. I have failed by aiding and abetting the nice girl construct. I have felt it tightening around my ankles for a long time, hardening into place as it has done to many other women and doing nothing to chip it away. There must be some way I can break free, some way I can feel the air in my lungs after drowning in both traditional and progressive misogyny. Perhaps the first step is acknowledgement that I am not a nice woman, and indeed no man’s fantasy. I hope that’s enough.

Citations:

Fox, G. L. (1977). “Nice Girl”: Social Control of Women through a Value Construct. Signs, 2(4), 805–817. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173211

Troup, C. L., & McDowell Marinchak, C. L. (2017). Niceness, Flattery, and Deceit. Western Journal of Communication, 82(1), 59–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2017.1306097

When my mum died almost two years ago, I found myself suddenly adrift with no sense of direction. For the past few years, she had been the compass guiding me after I made an abrupt decision to upend my life by quitting my job at the BBC as a media support worker and giving up my tenancy in my Lewisham houseshare. I was 23, living what I thought was the perfect introduction to my working career. When I was younger, I often envisioned myself in my twenties with a hazy mirage of contentment. I would be like the rom-com heroines I had so idealised for so long—think of Andi Anderson, but brunette, without as much charm and much more blunt.

There I was, hoping that, in some way, my coffee and tea skills would transfer into a foot-in-the-door writing job on a BBC show. Or that maybe I’d weasel my way into becoming a researcher on a radio show. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise when taking my job that there was little to no career progression when the basis of my job was servitude. And more importantly, nobody takes you seriously when you don’t want to live and die by your 9-5. For almost a year, I clocked off at 5 PM on the dot, didn’t answer messages out of work, and wouldn’t push myself beyond my contract and capabilities like many of my generation's post-pandemic employees. Work was just work; I had a life beyond that, and in no way should I have sacrificed my personhood for something so temporary. This attitude, whilst normalised today in 2025, was less acceptable in 2022, merely a year after lockdown regulations began lifting. To some extent, perhaps I was already burnt out due to COVID-19 and my final year of university, but on the other hand, was I not allowed to view my work in a more casual manner than life or death, especially since I had been so close to death with my mother’s cancer diagnosis in 2020. I’m not sure what exactly came first, the chicken (quitting my job) or the egg (leaving my houseshare), but out of the blue, I began texting my friends to let them know that I had chosen to move back to Aylesbury without a plan to guide me and no paycheck in sight beyond £200 freelancing fees that were few and far between.

In Severance (2022-), work is the lifeblood of Lumon, especially for the innies (inner versions of our characters). They have no lives of their own, holding on to mere morsels of information handed down to them by wellness practitioners that tell them with idyllic rainforest sounds how good a person their outie (outer versions of our characters) is. Work is presented as more than something to sustain your bank account, bills, life plan or any other signifier of what makes a life worth living (according to the capital C Capitalists). The offices are decked in what my Pinterest board would call retro-modern-futuristic furniture, blending aesthetic imagery of the 1970s with the sleek futuristic build of the Lumon offices. There is no break from work at Lumon, which is the point of the show and the procedure itself. Severance (in my own words) is splitting oneself into a work version and a personal version, aka your innie and outie. Your outie goes to work and leaves work with no recollection of the tasks performed that day. Your innie, however, is the labourer. They take on the burden of severance because they know no other life than working once they've been created. They hold no memories of the outside, no interests of their own, no loves, no family, no unique ticks or annoying quirks they can link to childhood. To many, the innie would be seen as a non-person, only so far attached to the outie and rendered disposable whenever someone quits or is fired. When Helly R (Britt Lower) threatens to cut her fingers off to force the resignation of her outie in season 1, she receives a videotape where her outie, in so few words, tells her she isn’t a person. The outie is. But everything we see in Severance goes against that argument. Sure, they may not remember when you were bullied in grade school, but they hold the trauma in their bodies. They may not remember when they fell through a glass window as a kid, but they have stitches across their thigh (that one happened to me). Some parts of you shine through even without the innie having the exact words or recollection for it. In Severance they aren’t a non-person—they’re you. By denying them personhood, are you not denying your very existence?

My mum died when I was 24. She was admitted to our local hospital after being sick for a few weeks and then died within a month. I’m sorry if that language sounds detached. There’s no other way for me to make it easier to swallow. For the first few weeks of no longer having a mother, I was given time off at the insistence of my boss. It had only been a few months since I was hired part-time, and to have someone give me so much leeway with my bereavement felt strange. I was under the knowledge that most workplaces weren’t so lenient regarding loss. I eventually came back because if there’s something you can take from this essay, let it be that being bereaved is suffocating in ways you wouldn’t expect. Everyone is helping, cooking, mending, cleaning, fixing, and there’s nothing to do. It’s boring, quite honestly. I felt my brain rotting away as all I could do was watch Grey's Anatomy to contend with the lifelong amount of hospital trauma I was left with. Going back to work helped me in ways I hadn’t expected and certainly kept me distracted from the crying. Now you’re thinking, okay, your mum died. That’s sad, and I'm sorry for your loss, but if you enjoyed your work, what does this do with Severance? Well, see, the thing is that my day job, whilst fulfilling and distracting, became an easy way to ignore the actual work I wanted to do—my writing. I’ve written about writer's block before. I penned an essay a couple of months before my mum died about my issue with writing and how it relates to my chronic illness. At the time, I thought that I’d got past it. I could get back to work by mining my personal life for writing material, and I’d be on the fast track to be signed by an agent with a book deal by 25.

Except that when your mum dies, writing becomes the last thing on your mind until it's the only thing on your mind. Admitting this feels gross, but in the name of analysis, I’m going to be honest in a way I haven’t been before. I was jealous. Not the usual “Oh, she’s so gorgeous, why aren’t I?” or “Ugh, I wish I was that financially stable”. No, I was jealous of my peers and their ability to write through trauma. They figured it out somehow, turning their losses into stories that won the hearts of their subscribers over. Not just jealous but disappointed in myself for my lack. Why couldn’t I write an essay about my mum that garnered thousands of likes on Substack? I was good at my job. I wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but I certainly wasn’t too stupid to find it difficult. What the fuck was wrong with me? That was the growing voice of jealousy intermingled with grief in my brain. Every time I came across a book, a poem, an essay fuck even a good Twitter post about how well someone was dealing with or able to talk about their grief, I became irate. What the fuck was wrong with me? Did I not love my mum enough? Was this not traumatic enough? Maybe I was a hack, and I’d been lied to for years about my writing ability. If I couldn’t turn this into something worthwhile what was the point? And yes, this sounds insane because grief makes you insane. Looking back almost two years later, it’s evident that I was in grief-stricken hysteria because, guess what—grief makes you balls-to-the-wall bonkers crazy.

You begin feeling like you’re no longer in control of your body; the days blend into one, and you forget that you were once capable of experiencing joy. I understand why Mark Scout (Adam Scott) chose severance. If his body, like my body, was no longer under our control, or if our brain was under attack by the slightest recollection of perfumes, the types of cakes my mum enjoyed, or photos of Gemma, then why not lob it off? It couldn’t be any less insane than how I’m feeling. He chose severance for the same reason Cobel (Patricia Arquette) created severance after her mother died. Because the loss is uncomfortable at times and frankly unbearable at others. It’s nauseating having so much love for someone you will never be able to see again. You’ll never be able to hear them laugh, get angry with you, or even shout at you. Do you know what I’d do to have my mum yell at me for something silly like leaving my keys in the door or forgetting to take the bins out? At least then, I could apologise and hug her one last time without the blaring beeps of an ICU machine monitoring her oxygen levels.

For the first 10 months after my mum’s passing, I found myself living in a state of psychic limbo. I recall some moments and can't remember others for the life of me. I was severed in my own way, living life as if I no longer was a whole person. And for a while, it worked. I dissociated. I ignored my writing because the writer's block made me feel inadequate and reminded me so much of her support for my career. Instead, I worked from home, went to the cinema, and became a disjointed voice that my friends only heard via Facetime calls because I refused to leave my hometown more than once a month or so. I became my own innie, stuck in a routine of refusal and avoidance that denied me the courage to face the music. Let me tell you, it’s probably the most gruelling and dehumanising experience I’ve gone through in my life. And in my case, there was no magic procedure to put me back together again, no big bad outie holding me hostage or company to riot against. I was experiencing what grief does to us all—unleashing its wrath until we are nothing but shells of our former selves.

When Mark S and Mark Scout have their argument in the season 2 finale about saving Gemma (Dichen Lachman) from her doomed fate, there’s a sense that both parts of him are aware of how much pain the other is inflicting. To save Gemma, Mark S would have to give up the only love of his life he’s experienced by leaving Lumon. If Mark S stays behind with Helly R, Mark Scout loses the love of his life for the second time. Neither is a choice worth stomaching, yet forgetting that someone is gone is more devastating than losing them in the first place. At the end of the episode, Mark S stops in the exit hallway after pushing Gemma out. He looks at her—the woman he’s supposedly meant to love and for whom he was imprisoned—and feels nothing. He looks back and sees Helly R—the sustenance of his time at Lumon over the past two seasons—and, at that moment, feels the full weight of his grief. Not the grief of losing Gemma but the grief of potentially losing Helly. On both sides, there is a tremendous loss at play, but only one is pleasant to the touch. In that moment, staying within that grief, not moving through or past it, brings Mark S to his personhood—something he had long been searching for.

On the 11th month, I moved back to London. It was a choice not made easily as it meant abandoning the last place my mother lived with me and my brothers, but a necessary one nonetheless. I’m unsure if it was London, my friends, or my family, but it was as if a light had switched on. I woke up with a chest that weighed less heavy than it had the week before. I was still crying, bursting at the seams anytime I remembered that I was experiencing such a vital change without her, but the cries became less about my pain and more about her absence. I wandered the streets of North London, envisioning what she’d think of our new home, her closeness to her brother and the flourishing of her children's careers. I avoided thinking about my mum, talking about her, and writing about her because to live within the grief meant feeling it all, but what I hadn’t realised is that within that grief is also love. The love I hold for her that makes me a person. It makes me a great friend, a loving family member, and a daughter who wishes the world knew how incredible her mother once was. Like Mark S, I chose not to go through the grief or past it. I’m living in it every day, and it hurts, and maybe there’s a version of me that is so much happier because I’ve abandoned my hurt, but I quite like how I am right now.

Just some info: It’s almost 1 AM where I am, so I'm sorry for any mistakes. This was hastily written after seeing the episode this morning. I will be editing it over the next day or so. xx

I wonder when I’ll unlock the secret key code of desire. It’s a question that’s plagued me over the last two years. I’ve sat on the sidelines, wondering when that feeling of want will lay its warm touch on me. Tepidity appears to be all I have felt, and yet, I long for something more. 

It’s Friday night. Going out has become a masochistic pastime for me. I’m more than aware I’ll end the night feeling like shit, but I always say yes because of the slight chance it could be different this time around. I walk into it, hoping I’ll get into bed at 5 am the next day and feel the bubbling excitement of infatuation. Instead, I end up standing around the smoking area after an hour to give myself a breather and time to plan my early exit. I don’t smoke, and the second-hand fumes will probably lead to lung cancer, but for some reason, it draws me in. It’s as close to an anthropological study of dating as you can get outside of a classroom or the summer edition of Love Island. There’s something intoxicating in watching the women around me, friends, strangers and acquaintances alike, play their part in the antiquated mating game.

What I’m focused on the most isn’t their chat or how they’re laughing at a clearly unfunny joke told by a drunk guy—it’s what they’re wearing. Standing beside them, I mentally note what I’d need to change to fit into their thrifted jeans and DIY crochet tops. Their hair always seems tossed with the right amount of volume, slicked back with a firmness I could never achieve or coloured with no trace of their roots because, of course, they can afford a hairstylist. The necklaces worn atop their slender necks are always on my Pinterest boards. One of them is going for maximalist chic with layered chains mixed with pendants of their names, favourite flowers and a gold-plated cross. The other opts for the basic mid-90s Olivia Rodrigo crystal heart pendant on what looks like wax string. I’ve always wanted mine to look like theirs, but my collarbones don’t protrude enough to be deemed worthy of accessories.

Do they think I’m staring at them because I’m jealous? 

Well, I am. 

It feels so childish, and yet, I can’t help but envy the fact that it all comes across as easy for them. They smile, tap their over-lit cigarette and draw in their smoke along with all the attention in the room. Their eyes never break contact with the men who would only ever see me as someone to befriend. I’m the funny friend, the smart one, the driven one. I’m tolerable so long as I stand beside a woman who is worth their time and effort. Otherwise, I’m a walking, talking shadow—dead to all and destined to haunt. 

I don’t stop for a moment to think that maybe those women don’t want the attention I so desperately crave. They could very well resent that they can’t go out without drawing prying eyes, but for the invisible few, the unwantedness seems like an attractive bonus. 

My brain is short-circuiting, and I can’t figure out why I’ve regressed into feeling sixteen again. I want to be desired so badly that I’ve lost all sense of reason. Every other thought in my brain is spent on whether or not men find me attractive. It’s gotten to the point that when I go to restaurants with friends, I spend the entire time wondering if the cute guy sitting at the table next to me is judging my posture. Maybe he’s breaking down the parts of my body I could do without and if I’d be worth the effort to talk to. 

Frankly, it’s embarrassing, but all the remedies I’ve tried don’t seem to work. I try meditating, but my thoughts dance around the calmness I try to evoke. I go on walks, and all I think about is whether the cars that pass by me are taking their time to judge my body. My therapist thinks it’s anxiety manifesting from my grief and recent PCOS diagnosis. She might be correct, but why couldn’t it have manifested in a less mortifying way? I’ve been thrust into the worst parts of what we’ve societally deemed as “girlhood” at the ripe age of twenty-five without a maternal figure to grab onto for dear life. These thoughts are plastered across my brain from morning to night. Does the postman think I’m ugly? Maybe the shopkeeper thinks I shouldn’t have cut my hair. Why didn’t the barista smile back at me? 

My prettiness is often treated like wasted potential, that if I was just born with the right body—or parents who didn’t encourage my eating disorder—I’d be worth something. Instead, they tell me that I just have to wait it out to meet the right person, that my physicality will be overlooked, and my personality will shine through. When I was twenty-two and dating seriously enough to tell my parents, my father admitted that he always feared I’d never find love looking like I do. His words confirmed my long-held belief that nothing I did was good enough for him. It’s not just my beauty that’s wasted potential, it’s me. I’m not meek or demure as I should be. I argue and push people if I feel slighted. I stand up for myself. I’m honest about my hardships, rejecting cultural taboos of shame and silence. What he meant when he said that he feared his only daughter wouldn’t be loved is that I’m someone men would have to settle for. Because who on earth would choose that challenge wholeheartedly? 

I’m unsure if I’ve done this intentionally or if my gnawing insecurities have taken me hostage, but somehow, I’m now the passenger in my life story. Things are happening to me and not with me. I don’t feel destined for a love story because that would mean I’d have to be an active participant in my life instead of the girl men settle for. It’s not like I can even see myself in a serious relationship at the moment, but I still feel that I’ve been hoodwinked. The option of being able to say no is a powerful thing. It means you can make choices for yourself. But I no longer make choices. I live in memories of the ones I’ve made in the past. I spend my days remembering the potential partners I turned down and resenting the freedom I’ve granted myself by not clinging to men who would only see me as their subordinate. Maybe being someone’s second choice or choosing my own wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I could grow to love him. Women in my family have gone through much worse—who am I to deny my own fate? 

I think about the men who have treated me like I was an embarrassment to be associated with. Filling my rotten brain with promises of love and adoration when nobody could see, only to starkly remind me that actually being with me meant having to tell their friends and family. As SZA states in Normal Girl, “wanna be the type of girl you’d wanna take home to your mama, the type of girl I know your fellas would be proud of”. I walk the fine line between knowing I shouldn’t care what families or friends think and simultaneously desperately craving their approval. The idea of being an embarrassment to someone feels so regressive and asinine. I know I’m being silly. I know I’m being childish.

Nonetheless, none of that matters because I also know that this is the reality of how the world treats women who can’t fit in the mould of desire. If my father believes it, then why wouldn’t strangers?  If the person meant to love me more than anybody or anything in the world can look at me with pity and suggest I should be settled for it, then clearly, that’s where my destiny lies. I feel suffocated by the weight of my history and all the baggage it brings. I want to be an easy-going, casual, and fun girl, but all you get in return for your time is an agitated and despondent woman. That’s why I sit in the corner on Friday nights. Why come out into the light knowing all I can provide is my misery? 

I wonder if the women would identify with my feelings if I asked. Have their fathers made them feel unworthy of basic care and decency? Do they have microscopic lenses to nitpick their bodies and appearance? Maybe, just maybe, they also wish to wear another woman's flesh as armour. Alternatively, they might look at me with sadness in their eyes, thinking something traumatic must have happened to make me feel this way. 

I guess that’s why it’s hard explaining this to my friends; telling people who love you just how little you think of yourself is heartbreaking. They’re wonderfully supportive people, but I wish their love were enough to sustain the hollowness in my heart. I want to tell them I feel all the crazy without dismissing it just because they support me. They tell me that because I’m blessed enough to be admired by strangers who follow me, I should feel good about myself. Can someone not feel the cold breeze of loneliness amongst a sea of admiration? If anything, the fact I feel worse must signal that something is broken inside of me. I’m an imposter hiding amongst the townspeople, waiting for them to discover the giant secret of how utterly awful I am. No amount of placating will change how I feel. I need my pain to bleed out to give me a chance of survival in my thirties, or I risk hoarding up all of this energy and letting it all go with an overdue breakdown. Career progression be damned. I must hole myself into a bunker and emerge in four years fixed and ready for my era of thirty, flirty and thriving. 

I want to skip over the hard parts—the grief, the incessant doctor appointments, the discomfort in no longer recognising myself in the mirror. Why do I have to unpack the damage done by lending my heart to unworthy contenders who have left it bruised beyond the point of no return? What gives them the right to go about their lives without considering the damage they've caused me? They tell me they see no serious future with me but continue to pop back into my life or bump into me with their new partners who appear preen and ready to meet the family I was too much for. 

I know I come off as insecure, which is allegedly the worst thing a woman can be in this life. I can't and won’t convince you otherwise—insecurity has become my only mode of existence. I speak in self-doubt, hatred and passivity. Yet, part of me fears that putting this out into the world signals that I am not open to love even if it dares knock on my marred door. What if someone reads this somewhere, at some time or another, and thinks I’m not worth the effort? Being forthright about my insecurities feels like the only way to learn to breathe again, but am I ready to face the consequences of complete honesty? 

The answer to that is unknown when writing this, but I hope I’m proven wrong.

God, let me be wrong. 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on Substack. Usually, I’d do a song and dance about apologising for my absence, but I’m not going to this time. The last three months have been excruciatingly painful. I’m astonished that I’m still standing, but I guess grief gets easier day by day, even if you are still knee-deep in it.

As monetisable as my current trauma might be, this isn’t a letter to update you on my going-ons or my mental state; I’ll save that for my new therapist (yay, she finally got one!). Instead, you’ll get a run-down of Haaniyah-approved music, TV, films and products of 2023 because if there’s one thing I did this year, it was bury my head in the sands of escapism.

I hope you all enjoy my recommendations and give me your own 2023 favourites in the comments. I finished my Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice watches, so I need more mindless TV for 2024.

FILMS OF 2023

My 2023 watchlist hasn’t been completed, so here are three movies from my current favourites of the year.

1. Priscilla (2023) dir. Sofia Coppola

I saw Priscilla last week at an Odeon Limitless preview, and it's consumed me ever since. This film has a wonderfully crafted dollhouse effect, where Priscilla is shot within door frames and peering out of windows to signify her inability to escape Graceland. I've seen people criticise the film, stating that it doesn't bring you into the world of Elvis Presley as Elvis (2022) did, but I would argue that Coppola did that on purpose. It's not Elvis's world— it's Priscilla's. Between the fairytale gifts and dressing up is a man lashing out at his teenage bride for being a teenager. She's stuck standing in his shadow and finds herself without a life of her own. 

I also adored how Coppola incorporated a chapter-like feeling into the story's progression. Undoubtedly, it's gorgeously shot, and it's such a shame she couldn't have used film as she originally intended. Cailee Spaeny is superb, and I hope she isn't snubbed for the Best Actress nom for the Oscars because, weirdly enough, there's little talk about her (and the film) during this award season.

2. May December (2023) dir. Todd Haynes

There’s much to say about this film, from its commentary on modern true crime, method acting, and the dynamics of white womanhood—May December is a film I will never rewatch, but I’m glad I saw it. The film revolves around an actress (Natalie Portman) who wants to study a Mary-Kay Letourneau type (Julianne Moore) for a movie about the origins of her inappropriate and infamous relationship with her husband (Charles Melton). Both Moore and Portman are firing on all cylinders. Portman’s transformation into a copy of Moore’s character and the lengths she goes to craft her perfect performance is absolutely terrifying.

BTW I did interview Charles Melton for Dazed, so if you want to read that, you can click here.

3. Past Lives (2023) dir. Celine Song

Past Lives centres on Nora and Hae Sung, childhood friends torn apart when Nora’s family leaves South Korea for Canada. Twelve years later, they reunite via Facebook, but the distance proves fatal for any chance at a real relationship. Another twelve years pass, and Nora is married. Hae Sung, unhappy in his relationship, visits her in New York for a week.

I’ve heard people say that they think the film’s writing is twee and too on the nose, but maybe that means I’m a fan of twee things because it worked well for me. I’m what people would call a third-culture kid; as cringe-worthy as that moniker can be, it's what fits. My parents are from two different cultures/backgrounds, and I grew up in a country I wasn’t born in. Past Lives resonated with me in a way I don’t think I’ve experienced before. The daydreams of what your life might’ve been like if you stayed in one place, one school, and one house really do stick with you for life.

Honourable mentions of other 2023 films I’ve adored this year

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) dir. Martin Scorsese

Bottoms (2023) dir. Emma Seligman

Joy Ride (2023) dir. Adele Lim

Talk to Me (2023) dir. Michael Philippou, Danny Philippou

Oppenheimer (2023) dir. Christopher Nolan

Anatomy of a Fall (2023) dir. Justine Triet

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (2023) dir. Kelly Fremon Craig

FIRST-TIME WATCHES OF 2023

This list won’t include any 2023 releases, as those will be on my 2023 list.

1. Brooklyn (2015) dir. John Crowley

“You’ll feel so homesick that you’ll want to die and there’s nothing you can do about it apart from endure it. But you will, and it won’t kill you. And one day the sun will come out. You might not even notice straightaway, it’ll be that faint. And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past, someone who’s only yours, and you’ll realize... that this is where your life is.” 

I said I wouldn’t talk about trauma, and I won’t, but this quote from Brooklyn had me sobbing at 1 AM. It’s what Saoirse Ronan’s character advises to a fellow Irish girl travelling to New York via sea, but there was something so touching about how all you can do is just endure the pain, and it won’t kill you. The sun will come out one day, and I’ll be okay.

2. The Age of Innocence (1993) dir. Martin Scorsese

Apparently, I’ve been sleeping on how hot and talented Daniel Day-Lewis is.

God, what a film, a beautiful one at that. Just the costuming, the set decor, the attention to detail. My friend Irene wrote a rather spectacular piece on The Age of Innocence and its use of floriography (the symbolism of flowers), so I’ll let her speak on my behalf:

Scorsese and his creative team’s use of floriography in this film is, without exaggeration, perfection. This era was full of repression, and most people went their whole lives unable to express their heart’s desires for fear of disrupting the status quo. As we see in the film, even the most rebellious individuals bow into submission because of the pressures of societal expectations. A great love, a chance at true happiness, goes unmaterialized, the only trace of it being a flower a man long ago once wore at his chest.

3. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) dir. Anthony Minghella

Watching this back to back with Saltburn (2023) was the definition of whiplash. I’ve never been a massive fan of Matt Damon as an actor, but his performance here? Phenomenal. The thin line between obsession and admiration is something he keeps toying with until it gets too late, and the object of his affection (Jude Law) ruthlessly rejects him from not only his life but from accessing the status of wealth he’d been cosplaying over the summer. Jude Law, Ms Goop and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (RIP) are sooo good in this.

It is the blueprint. It is the moment. 

Honourable mentions of other first-time watches I’ve adored this year

Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) dir. by Éric Rohmer

His Girl Friday (1940) dir. Howard Hawks

Rear Window (1954) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

While You Were Sleeping (1995) dir. Jon Turteltaub

The First Wives Club (1996) dir. Hugh Wilson

Thelma & Louise (1991) dir. Ridley Scott

TV I WATCHED IN 2023

This was the year I got back into watching TV, so I’ll give you a list of my favourites from both 2023 releases and first-time watches.

1. First Time Watch: Sex & The City (1998-2004)

What can I say about SATC that hasn’t already been said? Twenty-five years on SATC has remained steadfast within the cultural zeitgeist. The fashion worn by Carrie Bradshaw, resident sex columnist and the show's protagonist, remains influential with years of attempted recreations of Pat Field’s costuming. The rules and regulations of dating that the women in the show live by have also continued to influence the modern-day dating culture, with a growing amount of young women looking for a Carrie Bradshaw type to lead them to their one true love or at least a relationship.

It’s a marvellous time capsule of a particular type of white womanhood from the late 90s to the mid-noughties that people have tried to recreate or emulate but never got quite right. From hundreds of online quizzes on which SATC character you are—based on stereotypes that actually feel really two-dimensional once you watch the show— to a movie series and a sequel show, SATC has outlived most, if not all, of its “chick-flick” peers.

P.S. I’m definitely a Miranda w/ a little bit of Charlotte.

2. Starstruck (2021-2023)

   

We do not have enough screwball comedies! I was beyond distraught when I heard that Starstruck was ending this year after gracing our screens for three hilarious years.

Starstruck centres on a woman in her mid to late 20s and her one-night stand with a celebrity on New Year’s Eve (think Chris Evans of the MCU level of fame). After the awkward goodbyes, the pair continue to run into each other and end up in the longest, most confusing situationship of all time. There’s so much will they and won’t they that this show will keep you on your toes and constantly break your heart for being silly enough to believe in true love.

The way it ended is perfect, but I will miss seeing Rose Matafeo on my screen.

3. First Time Watch: Veep (2012 - 2019)

When I was a teenager, all I knew about Veep was that Julia Louis Dreyfus kept winning Emmy awards for it, and now it all makes sense.

It’s the perfect show; hilarious and witty, it will live on in our cultural memory for a long time.

10/10

Honourable mentions of other TV shows I’ve adored this year

Sharp Objects (2018)

Succession (Season 4)

True Detective (Season 1)

The Bear (Season 2)

This Is Going To Hurt (2022)

How I Met Your Father (Season 2)

After Party (Season 1)

iCarly (Season 3)

Private Practice (2007 -2013)

The Other Two (Season 3)

A Different World (1987-1993)

High Fidelity (2020)

ALBUMS OF 2023

Once again, my Spotify Wrapped got my favourite artists, songs and albums 100% wrong. So here I am to correct it and regain my esoteric cool girl points.

1. Calico (2023) - Ryan Beatty

If, like me, you were embarrassingly into Justin Bieber as a kid, you've more than likely heard the name Ryan Beatty. But if that's too difficult to admit, think back to your love of Brockhampton as a teenager (which is also quite embarrassing) — you more than likely have listened to Ryan Beatty’s music.

Like Bieber, Beatty came up on YouTube through covers and was positioned as the new Justin, as many others before him had been (Cody Simpson and Grayson Chance). However, it became clear that their artistic paths would diverge when Beatty fired his team due to creative differences. It would take Beatty three years before he could release new music. In years since, he’s collaborated with Brockhampton and released three incredible albums. Boy In Jeans (2018)— a pivotal record for my coming of age— Dreaming of David (2019) and Calico (2023).

Calico sees Beatty as his most intimate and stripped back with his songwriting and vocals front and centre. It is my favourite album of his and my favourite album of the year. I still remember pressing play on the first song, Ribbons and experiencing that immediate feeling of being swept away into something bigger than yourself. If this is where Beatty’s artistic journey is taking him, then I cannot wait to be taken along for the ride.

Some of my favourite lyrics from the album include:

And suddenly you're older
Spinning the turnstile over and ovеr
Who's gonna hold you while you sleep? Well
It's brave to bе nothing to no one at all

- Ribbons

What stops me from sending the call?
In a midnight paranoia, hey
That's love after all, isn't it?
What stops me from spending it all?
Spinning out, Andromeda
Watching Jupiter come back around again

- Andromeda

There's a million ways that this could end
And no horizon's ever promised
So, while I hold my baby in my arms
I'll count on God to wake us up by sunrise

- Bright Red

Going through your jewelry
I smile, but I know you see through me
You knew who I was 'fore I knew me
On the very first day
Now I know what you're onto
You were just looking for someone to talk to
A beautiful life to belong to

- Little Faith

2. Princess Going Digital (2023) - Amaarae

This would’ve certainly been my #1 album pick if not for Calico. There aren’t enough words to describe how magnificent this project is. Amaarae is a master of her sound—there is nobody like her. I was already in love with the album, but after attending a party this past summer and witnessing how captivating her sound is in the presence of others, it became my most listened-to album of the year. Amaarae (along with Pink Pantheress) shows us what’s possible when borrowing from aesthetics of the noughties and 2010s and using them to inform her unique soundscape rather than producing pale imitations of music from these eras ( I also wrote about this for Dazed).

My favourite songs from the album include Co-Star, Princess Going Digital, Counterfeit, Reckless and Sweet.

3. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love (2023) - Kara Jackson

I was foolish for waiting for so long to listen to this because Kara's voice has been playing in my head for the past week. Why Does the Earth is the debut album from former U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson. The album is soft and overwhelming, with her lyrics and sound clashing in the best way possible. Jackson examines the intricacies of heartbreak, love, loss, friendship, and much more through a diaristic approach to her songs, and as you all know, I love a diary.

Some of my favourite lyrics include:

I'm not a liquidated asset

I'm a sharper than a jewel

What kind of miner does that make you?

When I'm the gold and you're just a fool

- pawnshop

When you're good and free

Don't you bother me

When I've cleaned my sheets

Don't come calling to see

I'm not so motherly

I won't kiss your cheek

I'm sure you're someone's baby

But it ain't me

No, it ain't me

- free

Why does the earth give us people to love?

Then give them a sickness that kills?

And why does the earth make us pay for the dirt?

Are you saying the dead pay the bills?

I've buried old and young

I've watched them lower a saint

We're only waiting our turn

Call that living?

- why does the earth give us people to love?

Honourable mentions of albums and artists I’ve adored this year

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You - Caroline Polachek

The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - Mitski

JAGUAR II - Victoria Monét

Something to Give Each Other - Troye Sivan

GUTS - Olivia Rodrigo

This Is Why - Paramore

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess - Chappell Roan 

Get Up - NewJeans

Heaven knows - PinkPantheress

EMPTIES OF 2023

I rarely talk about purchases on here but given the fact my mum died three months ago I think was due a little retail therapy.

1. Pureology Hydrate (hair mask and conditioner)

   

If you have dyed hair, you know the nightmare of getting it back to its soft state once it has been bleached or dyed. That’s where Pureology’s hydrating hair mask and conditioner have come in to help. I promise I’m not trying to write an ad. I’ve bought two bottles of the conditioner since Sept and three bottles of the hair mask because I use it as a leave-in. My bank account cries for help, but I cannot return to regular hair care.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t been waxing lyrical about the Pureology shampoo, that’s because I don’t need a hydrating shampoo; I prefer a detoxing/purifying shampoo to get rid of the gunk in my hair at the end of the week.

Which brings me to my next entry on the empties list.

2. K18 PEPTIDE PREP Detox Shampoo / OAUI DETOX SHAMPOO

Detox is a word I, unfortunately, associate with fitness influencers trying to peddle celery juice for self-cleansing organs, but I’ve used both of these within the past three months (not at the same time), and they’ve both done wonders to my hair care.

I prefer the Ouai shampoo because I think it’s better smelling, but that’s it— they're both worth the price and very good for cleaning curly hair.

3. Innisfree - Hyaluronic Acid Watery Sun Gel

I’m due to restock this in January, as I’ve been using this nonstop. All other sunscreens seem to have a unique formulation that hates my skin and eyes - they sting, peel off, or don't sink in. I finally gave in and bought the Innisfree sunscreen after being bombarded with ads from TikTok (see, it does work on everyone).

In short, it's one of the best things I've bought for my skin in years. No white cast, funny smell, or stinging—bonus, it’s SPF 50 +.

So, if you take anything from this list, remember that you NEED TO USE SUNSCREEN EVEN IN THE WINTER!!

I will be back sometime in January with an updated version of an essay I posted here earlier in the year. Until then, have a safe and happy New Year.

Lots of love,

Haaniyah xoxo

My mother died last month. Died doesn’t even sound like the right word. It sounds too permanent, too sudden but that’s exactly what her passing felt like. 

She was born in Somalia in the 1960s and immigrated to the UK in her late twenties after seeking refuge from the Somali civil war in Egypt and various other European countries. My mother rarely spoke about her experience during the war, but she spoke of Somalia often. She’d smile and tell me how beautiful it was. She’d tell me stories of my grandmother who died when she was around my age. Most of all she’d tell me that she couldn’t wait to go back when she had the chance. 

When I was a toddler, and my brothers were babies, my mother fell severely ill. It was to the point that she wrote notes behind her old photographs to introduce us to family members we’d have to know and what her life was like before us. In her scrawly handwriting, she told us how much we meant to her, that she loved us and we should remember her like this—still, beautiful and in the country she longed for. 

I think of these photographs often and how sure and accepting she was of death. She had an unshakeable faith in Allah and kept that with her throughout the next twenty-odd years of her life.

My mother died last month, and I’m still holding my breath in anticipation that she’ll knock on my bedroom door and ask me what my plans are for the day. I wake up forgetting she isn’t here. I go to bed thinking about what she would’ve said about my new hair colour and my sweatshirt dyed in Adore’s French Cognac. 

I see her imprint everywhere I go. 

In our kitchen, she’d house her crumpets, peanut butter and love of lemon cake. There’s no mess to indicate she once cooked there. I don’t smell the pizza she insisted she had to make weekly because any other pizza wouldn’t compare. There’s no Somali and Arabic music playing alongside her slightly off-key singing. 

In our living room, the noisiness of soap operas and football used to reign supreme. We now live with the eerie silence of footsteps, avoiding the inevitable truth. 

Exhaling feels like an acceptance of this new reality—one where my brothers and I don’t have a mother. One where my mother will never see us get married or achieve the success I know she prayed for us to have.

In a few weeks, I’ll be 25. It marks the fact I’ve been alive for a quarter of a century. I’m my mother’s eldest child, I’m her only daughter, and she will never see me turn 25. 

I should feel comforted by the idea that she’s in a better place and safe without pain, but it doesn’t lessen my grief or guilt. The feeling of guilt that comes with grief is unprecedented. Guilt for being alive. Guilt for going to work or school. Guilt for being able to hold onto your loved ones for longer. She wouldn’t want me to feel guilty, but there’s no way to rid myself of it. Guilt has cemented itself onto my body and mind, leaving me despondent and lost.

I catch myself crying in parks, on trains, during walks I’ve taken to better my health and now, as I’m writing this. I never used to cry. It was always something I found embarrassing, but now it seems to be the only expression of my love I have left. I can’t tell her I love her, so I cry until my head hurts and my eyes are bloodshot. I mourn for the years I will never have, and the time I thought I still had.

Half of my heart, half of my being and my stabilising force have been taken from me. I want to think I’ll feel better eventually and grow around the loss, but right now, it feels impossible.

Hooyo, mamo, mum, mother— I love you more than you will ever know. I’ll keep your memory alive for as long as I shall breathe. Your love will go on through me, the boys, and everyone who was lucky enough to meet you and experience what it was like to be loved by you.   

 إِنَّا لِلَّٰهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un

Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him we return.

To anyone who knows me well, Greta Gerwig is (if not THE) filmmaker who inspired me to go to film school and pushed me toward the writing career I have today. There was something so magical about Lady Bird (2017) and its approach to mundanity and familial relationships that made me feel like I could do something similar. In my essay on Lady Bird and birthdays from last year, I delved into my feelings on the film and its legacy five years on. Whilst I do touch on its politics at the end, I stopped myself from picking it apart due to exhaustion over discourse that has been going in circles for years.

With the release of Gerwig's fourth film, I anticipated it would touch on the type of feminism that had brought years of critique her way. And after having seen the movie twice, it is difficult for me to remain neutral about the choices made for what appears to be the year's biggest blockbuster. 

In 2019, I was stunned when news broke that Gerwig would be directing and writing the Barbie movie with her writing/real-life partner and fellow indie darling Noah Baumbach. If you had asked me about the career trajectory of Gerwig, I'd say she'd still be doing small films like Lady Bird (2017) whilst dipping her toe into the pool for movies like Little Women (2019) now and then, but Barbie wasn't something I hadn't predicted. 

My worry and the worry of others did not come from her lack of talent but from the growing trend of studio interference with talented creatives. Over the years, there has been an increasing trend of indie filmmakers and creatives being plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight for made-to-fail blockbusters. Chloe Zhao's Eternals (2021), Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's Captain Marvel (2019) and Josh Trank's Fantastic Four (2015) come to mind as films that struggled due to studio intervention and/or a lack of support from studios which left the filmmakers at the mercy of bloodthirsty fans. Due to this, we wince when we hear of Barry Jenkins making a live-action Lion King 2 or Sarah Polley making a live-action Bambi. Nobody wants people to be out of a job or lack money to survive in an industry that is hellbent on making creatives suffer (as seen in the WGA/SAG Strikes), but there's a fear that they'll be limited in their creativity in favour of the bottom line.

What I can say about Barbie, however, is that this is not the case. If anything, Barbie seems as Gerwig as a film about a life-sized doll could've been. From technicolour sets, 2001: A Space Odyssey intro, and clear inspiration from Greta's love of musicals and Old Hollywood (and Jacques Demy), Barbie is brimming with Greta's creative flair. Her adoration for themes of mothers & daughters, girlhood, and wanting to be more than what the world has chosen for you is laid out from the start of Barbie until you reach the end credits featuring Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj's cover of Barbie Girl.

As hard as a studio may try with online bots, review bombings and other tricks, there's no natural way for them to control the discourse around it. This happened to Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000), an intended satire on wealth, masculinity and yuppie culture, only to become an idealised version of manhood for teens on Tiktok. Similarly, Gerwig's Barbie is a satire on consumerism, feminism, ageing, and so much more. Still, in some circles, there's been chatter about how Barbie feels hollow when you realise that all of that satire falls short because the entire movie, no matter how great, is an ad.

In her article on Barbie, beauty culture critic Jessica Defino notes:

“You cannot subversively, satirically, or ironically produce and consume things. The idea that you can is solipsistic and conservative. Production and consumption have collective consequences, whether you adopt Barbie-inspired beauty behaviors with a knowing wink or not!”

Barbie is not the first nor the last film based on existing IP. The idea for Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) came from a Walt Disney ride. Clue (1985) sought inspiration from the board game of the same name and, lest we forget, the dreaded attempt at bringing Barbie’s direct rivals to the real world with Bratz (2007). The difference between the Bratz and Barbie movies beyond quality control is that the Bratz dolls were never an attempt at making a Statement™—they were created by an ex-Mattel employee who found himself creatively stifled by the brand and sold his idea to MGA Entertainment, a Mattel rival company. On the other hand, Barbie has always had to exist in some way to remind little girls that the doll represents something.

In their analysis of Barbie, Malibu Stacy, and the Simpsons, Charlie Squire writes:

“The original success of Barbie was in her fundamental adult-ness; the cornerstone of her design, her humanity being what separated her from both the baby dolls and fashion dolls she competes with. Barbie has always been a woman first and foremost—or rather, a representation of womanhood.”

Because of this, I don’t believe there would ever be an attempt at Barbie without the contradiction of liberation vs consumerism. Especially not a Barbie movie that Mattel directly influenced to the point where Gerwig allegedly fought for a scene where Barbie tells an elderly woman that she’s beautiful. The scene eventually appeared, and Gerwig got her feminist masterpiece, so is this a case of discourse taking her film out of context? No, I don’t think it’s being taken out of context when people say they’re rushing to buy dolls, merch, or makeup. It seems that’s what the film intended to do; Gerwig’s empowerment is added seasoning that hides the less empowering aspects.

A fundamental flaw in the film comes from the characters of Sasha and Gloria, the mother-daughter duo. Sasha meets Barbie at her junior high school and relentlessly mocks Barbie to the point of calling her a fascist (which makes Barbie cry). Intended to be a joke of usual teenage hostility and their early love of leftist ideals (like Kyle in Lady Bird), Sasha seems pessimistic at first, although that's not the case. It can be argued that Sasha's feminism at the beginning of the movie (whilst, yes, harsh) is far more radical and subversive than Gloria's big monologue towards the end of the movie. Teenage girls being hostile to beauty standards and thinness is a positive development, and somehow the film makes it out to be anything but.

This is unlike Gloria’s monologue, which, whilst giving us a tremendous acting moment from America Ferrera, felt tepid. The speech includes lines that could be directly stolen from a 2014 Tumblr post on intro feminism and ignores any sense of intersectionality that could arise. There could be several reasons for this, such as the film dumbing its politics down for the youngest in the audience, but I don’t buy that, considering the rest of the film is very on the head and straightforward. Another could be that the politics of Gerwig are less advanced than people had assumed, which is possible considering her attempt at dealing w/ race in Lady Bird and Little Women being less than stellar. Gloria’s speech becomes an antidote to Sasha’s inherent political savvy, which makes sense considering the film’s central point: the contradiction of liberation vs consumerism. But I fear that Barbie chooses consumerism more than anything else.

Since Friday, some have said that critiques of the film prove its point—that women have to tie themselves into knots to justify liking something, but that feels like such a cop-out. To state that media for men (comic book movies) aren't talked about like this and don't need standards is a blatant lie. Many people (including myself) have written about the sexism within movies of that genre, especially considering they are military and cop propaganda. But even so, are we racing to the bottom for the lowest common denominator? Yes, Barbie is a masterfully crafted film, but it can also fall short because it is a mouthpiece for Mattel. Admitting that doesn’t change your enjoyment of it, nor is anyone forcing you to burn everything pink in your wardrobe. It is simply realising that studios and corporations will use anything to get us to buy their products, even if it is our own liberation.

Also, the Kenough merch is hideous.

Barbie (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig

3.5/5 ⭐

Guilt seems to be something we cannot agree on as a culture. Some argue it’s a useless emotion with no purpose beyond making you feel shitty about things you might not even have control over. Others suggest guilt can serve a purpose when mistakes occur, and if you force yourself to sit with negative emotions, you end up better in the long run. At the very least, you might become more self-aware. Both perspectives might very well be true, but the cynic in me thinks the former and some elements of the latter are just the latest espousement of therapy-speak sifting its way into our already lumpy daily dialogue about mental health and emotional resilience. It’s clear that neither side views guilt as an all-absorbing force—something that can embed itself into your psyche and daily routine.

My guilt creeps in over small things like forgetting to wish someone a happy birthday or not congratulating them on their success. I know I should, or at the very least, I want to be someone who always would, but sometimes I can't muster the energy for feelings of joy and celebration. It emerges when I realise that I haven't been as close to my family as I think I should be; I'm failing them as a daughter, sister, cousin and grandchild. Sometimes I feel guilty for spending time in the lives of those who have loved me, because to love me is to receive love from someone holding you at a distance.

But mostly, the guilt comes from the fact I'm not writing enough.

Unlike the external guilt of forgotten well wishes, unanswered family group chat messages and avoided relationships, the writing block festers itself as internal guilt. It's a hodgepodge of falling short of your own expectations and deep-rooted insecurity from the all-powerful imposters' syndrome.

My writing career began online ten years ago, and since then, I've experienced writer's block several times. Yet with each new block, I become more and more abrasive with myself. Whenever I felt blocked in my late teens, I used to go on a walk to clear my mind and return to my laptop, having figured out all the parts needed for an article. Writing back then was unpaid, stress-free and anonymous—all the things writing isn't anymore. Now, I remove myself from the act of writing entirely: I'll call myself a talentless hack who needs the help of editors to strike gold. There's an independence I have developed over the years, one that feels shame for wanting help or asking for it, even though writing has always been a collaborative process for something so intimate.

After months of not writing anything my block considered pride worthy, I took a page out of my old playbook and did what nineteen-year-old Haaniyah would’ve done—I watched a movie and saw a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Instead of going to London as always, I went to Oxford, my old university town. It was here that my block began to take on a more unsightly mangled appearance. My life for the first year of university was plagued by stress-induced episodes of anxiety from keeping up a 2:11 average while running an independent publication I started at seventeen. By the spring of 2019, I had left the publication and abandoned creative writing outside of academia. Before I started university, I hoped teachers would be gushing about my talent and intelligence as a first-year—a rather foolish fantasy that I imagine a lot of formerly homeschooled students have. Instead, I failed my publishing module and found that my screenwriting professor thought my ideas were idiotic. Definitely a blow to my ego.

After my friend Nadia and I walked out of our screening of Beau is Afraid (not good, I’m afraid), we started talking about writing and our lack of publishing on Substack. I complained about my writing anxiety and that I couldn’t figure out why I felt so blocked. She told me that maybe I should wait for inspiration to strike and then quoted Toni Morrison, stating I shouldn’t write through a block. I knew Nadia was right, but I’m stubborn, and honestly, I haven’t got many hobbies that don’t involve writing in some respect. I started writing for fun as a child because I needed an outlet, and soon that outlet transformed into blogging and then a career, but with that shift, I found myself unable to write without thinking about how my work will either benefit me in some way or cast me aside as a has-been.

Can you be a has-been at twenty-four?

I feel like I've fallen behind. It's just that I can't figure out why or how. Did I take a step back when I moved home to pursue freelancing instead of sticking it out in the big city like the rest of my peers? On the surface, it looks as if a lot of people in their twenties who live at home are working at their dream jobs. Let's face it, nobody admits to failing on LinkedIn. Instead, you scroll through success story after success story, hoping that, at the very least, someone else is struggling as much as you are. I knew it wouldn't be easy for me—my parents aren't wealthy, well-connected and frankly, for a long time, they preferred their dream of me teaching English in the Middle East. There's no nepotism in this story, just a gut feeling I had at fifteen that I'm meant to be a writer. Maybe that was just a teenage delusion from someone who couldn't decide what she wanted to be when she grew up.

In any case, the journey isn't coming together the way I thought it would. Is there something uniquely off about me? Or do I want it too much? Does my staunch independence set off a pungent smell of intractability to anyone who might be able to turn around my plateaued career? More importantly, is it spilling over into other areas of my life?

For the past four years, I've woken up to a stabbing pain in my lower abdomen. At times, it's the first thing I feel when my eyes open to the blurriness of the morning. It's there before hunger pangs or the annoyance of not getting enough sleep—a sharp reminder that my body's aches are releasable in slumber. Other times, I wake up with no memory of the past four years spent in muted agony, but as soon as I sit upright, the pain grabs hold of me, huddling me in its embrace. Throughout the day, the pain reshapes itself from sharp and rapid to dull and slow, making me the most uncomfortable when I go on walks or go to the cinema—some of the only activities I seem to have these days in my supposed year of rest and relaxation.

When I was twelve, my mother sat me down and warned me of The Pain. She said even though I would only experience it infrequently, I should be prepared for a gnawing and merciless affliction. However, it never showed up. At the time, I childishly felt like I had been the luckiest person ever—unlike my friends and classmates who complained about how intense their periods felt, physically and emotionally. The truth is, my preexisting emotional rollercoaster of pre-pubescent depression, anxiety, and neurodivergence heavily influenced my emotional state, making the extra hormones almost insignificant in making me feel more out of control.

By the end of 2019, that luck had run out, kicking off my long-term relationship with doctors' offices and emergency rooms. Hospitals were a reoccurring location throughout my childhood because of my mother's chronic illness. While I should have gotten used to it, the smell of antiseptics and intense overhead lighting made the already challenging experience of visiting my mother during dialysis considerably worse. In the years I sat next to her, I prayed for her recovery and good health. But every so often, I also begged Allah that I'd never have to go through the dismissal and hardship she had experienced as a Black woman reliant on the British healthcare system. 

The first time I went to A&E2, doctors told me the pain was probably my appendix bursting. After days of poking and prodding me with every scan, blood test and checkup they had, they were disappointed that this was not the case—appendicitis is an easy fix compared to examining the true reason for my discomfort. I went for GP3 visit after GP visit, interspersing emergency rooms in between for my unending pain until a doctor at A&E (the fifth one I'd seen) pointed out that maybe it was a reproductive issue. He was also the first doctor to give me a painkiller prescription when the other four said paracetamol would be enough—they all but told me I was exaggerating the severity of the pain. 

You'd think after being told what area of your body was breaking down, it would be easier to go to a doctor and say, "Hey, please fix me!" but as I quickly learned, existing in a fat and Black body gave doctors a million and one excuses for what to focus on instead of my persisting crisis. As a result, I had to research how to advocate for myself, which is intimidating for anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old. Maybe I should claim a medical degree from Google Medical School since I know all the symptoms and cures for every reproductive issue known to humanity. It could be endometriosis, fibroids, ovarian cysts, polycystic ovary syndrome or the dreaded ovarian cancer—it's a lucky dip, and the prize is a hysterectomy in twenty years.

If you're intrigued by how I've survived for four years without being diagnosed, here's the secret formula: 

• An excellent cocktail of over-the-counter painkillers.

• Raspberry leaf tea.

• A heavy codeine prescription.

• Two tried and failed forms of birth control that worked for a while and then became ineffective. These include: 

  • The Progesterone-only Pill (POP)—because a doctor's primary concern is your weight gain and nothing else. The pills work for two months, but then you spend four to five months with a heavy period. 

  • An IUD (Mirena coil)—fitted with what should be considered a modern-day torture device. It works for around nine months, but you start spotting, and the abdomen pain promptly returns with a vengeance. 

Combined, they work like a charm when nobody wants to investigate why you've been bleeding for over a month— the latest instalment of my uterine warfare.

Four things nobody tells you when your body stops working:

1. You decided you didn't want kids at fifteen, and you were content with that choice, but now there's a thought nibbling around in your brain, filling you with regret that you can't even try. 

2. In no time, you'll discover that people you thought were your friends have little to no patience when you don't want to extend yourself past your discomfort level. Soon, all the events and nights out you used to attend are no longer brought to your attention, and now you're at home looking at IG stories with envy.

3. Speaking on discomfort, you'll also realise that the preexisting judgement you got for being fat before your chronic illness is exacerbated when you make things easier on yourself by getting Ubers or sitting around. 

4. Your writer's block worsens because you can't focus on talking or writing about anything else, which totally kills the chill girl persona you've so clearly curated on your blog.

Surely, now is the perfect time for me to have a flare-up. I'm not at uni or work, and any freelancing I do is WFH4. All I have to do is sit in my bedroom or living room and do the work I've been paid for. Weirdly, it feels like there should be something freeing about being chronically ill (ignoring the debilitating pain and a decreased social life). My writing is the one thing I can nurture and take care of whilst my physical being is withering away. Yet, I sit at my laptop staring at the caret that blinks back at me like it's waiting for me to fulfil some prophecy or long-awaited best seller. Everything I type out sounds too cringe, childish or eerily similar to writing I've read the day before. Not to mention, the advice given by Toni Morrison via Nadia didn't seem to work. As much as I'd love to write once a year and wait until my anxiety cures itself, I can't do that in an industry built on always making your presence feel known until you hit your big break.

Looking for other inspirations for overcoming a block, I found that Ray Bradbury once stated that the block is merely a manifestation of your subconscious, knowing that you're focusing on the wrong work. That would have been helpful if the block meant that I was uninspired, but that wasn't the case. Most of the folders on my laptop desktop contain countless ideas I could work on—unfinished TV, short film and feature-length scripts that need editing, half-written novels and a list of pitches I could send out. The issue wasn't a lack of ideas. My problem was that I've never experienced a block bad enough to make me doubt my writing ability.

Am I good enough to have the following I’ve built? Maybe all those acclaimed essays and articles I’ve written are just an amalgamation of things I’ve seen online, except now they’ve been regurgitated with my spin of neuroticism. I worry that my language is too flowery—that I can’t just get to the fucking point, and midway through my sentences, readers will drop dead from boredom. What if it’s the opposite? Am I so unrefined that my readers secretly wonder if I know what a thesaurus looks like? 

It should be clear by now that self-criticism is a fundamental part of my process, but at one point, it served a healthy function, forcing me to push myself beyond what I expected of my writing. The problem is that even though I've outgrown the function—knowing that the criticism should be replaced by care—the voices I helped nurture will not die. The habitual self–flagellation has evolved into unrelenting loathing that mantras of self-help and introspection can't shut out.

In an attempt to quiet them, I distract myself, but all that does is remind me how standard I am. Watching TV or movies makes me think about scripts that have never seen the light of day. Whenever I read a good book, I lament that I'm so much further away from getting a book deal than I was at twenty-two. And when I scroll on my timeline and witness peers jumping ten steps ahead of me for an ugly moment, I can't help but question why they deserve to be so lucky instead of me. It's getting to the point where my internal pressure, guilt, or whatever the fuck I call it, is about to rupture. My need to Be The Best and inability to reach that height before twenty-five has become my Achilles heel.

The loathing happens the most at night when there are no distractions to keep my thoughts busy. In their absence, I'm left with the one person I can't tolerate—myself. Is that not deeply mortifying? I devote so much of my time parading myself off as an enlightened individual with all the answers, but I'm more like an anxious child that can't spend so much as an hour alone in silence because I insist on feeling guilty. I never used to be this bad. I struggled with my mental health but never felt so permanently stuck. It could be the hormones, which seems like a stone age sexist excuse, but wouldn't it be equally as sexist to deny that they have impacted my mental health?

On the other hand, it could be the fact I find myself freelancing during a recession and the cost of living crisis. Even though your twenties are supposed to be somewhat unstable, I guarantee it wasn't supposed to be this rough. My old therapist would probably tell me that I'm catastrophising my worries inwardly, and a part of me knows she'd be correct, but it feels so much easier doing that than facing reality.

Getting hundreds of rejections for jobs you're overqualified for is defeating, especially when you've incurred £50,000 of student debt to get your foot in the door. It would be nice to do something meaningful for a living, but the job market has dried up, and nobody wants to hire a writer who can't double her workload as an influencer. In the modern artistic marketplace, you're required to be a multi-hyphenate. A writer, editor, filmmaker, host, and beloved personality all in one. Your work no longer speaks for itself—it must prove why it deserves the dwindling resources the arts have left. In the same way, tech-finance-bros have wormed their way into movies, creating an impossible expectation of making a billion dollars for every release; creatives are expected to succeed instantly; if it doesn't happen, one strike and you're out.  

How can I reach instant success if I’m scheduling time off because I’m constantly in pain? What purpose do I serve in the hellscape of paid writing in 2023 as a chronically ill person? Am I as useless as guilt? I know I need to stop basing so much of my self-worth on whether I’m hireable, but how am I supposed to do that when I have to spend the rest of my life answering that inescapable question of, “So what is it you do?” 

Sometimes it sounds more like they’re asking, “What are you worth to me?” And in all honesty, I feel like saying, “Nothing, nothing at all.”

Thank you, Juliette, Charlie and Brooke, for being such amazing friends and editors. I am at my best when I am around you.

A special thanks to Nadia. Your eternal optimism gives me hope for one day being happier with myself.

If asked to name my circles of internet hell, True Crime and its fanatics would be among the top 5. There are only so many times I needed to stumble across a makeup tutorial x True Crime story when I was 17 to know that the way we talk about the real-life harm caused to people feels incredibly voyeuristic and detached from any semblance of remorse.

Our cultural obsession with bloodlust and solving crimes has long been a staple of our media. Think of all the late-night (now daytime) channels on TV dedicated to reenacting True Crime through docuseries and documentaries. Today, True Crime tends to be most popular on streaming services thanks to the boom of the Netflix docuseries (Hulu, HBO and more also contribute). In 2015, Making a Murderer was a pivitoal moment for Netflix seeing as it hit 19.3 million viewers 35 days after its debut.1 According to Parrot Analytics, True Crime is one of the most in demand documentary subgenres.2 However, this obsession continues beyond documentaries. When you log in online, suddenly you’re bombarded with podcasts3, TV recreation of serial killers, Tumblr blogs, fancams and edits. You name it, it exists, and it comes with a barrage of fans ready to die to defend their right to consume it.

A clear example of the obsession over the True Crime genre can be found in the inescapable presence of Dahmer. Produced under Ryan Murphy’s $300 million deal with the streaming service, he gave Netflix their second most-watched series. When I say Dahmer was everywhere, I mean it was EVERYWHERE. Beyond the memes that took moments of Dahmer brutalising and terrorising people into humorous gags, there were videos of people sexualising Dahmer, people feeling bad for him, costumes over Halloween weekend, and most recently, both Evan Peters and Niecy Nash have won for their portrayals of Jeffery Dahmer and Glenda Cleveland this awards season.

@shawncostin#jeffdahmeredit #jeffdahmer

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@blackbeltbabe80% of people under this sound have lost it

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Suppose somehow you managed to ignore Dahmer and its relentless discourse. In that case, you may wonder why this show would become so popular, as it seems we’ve entered a period where celebrating this re-enactment feels incredibly crass. However, this has always been part of Murphy’s charm beyond Glee. Think of Tate from American Horror Story (also played by Evan Peters) as well as the constant borrowing from True Crime for the show. Not to mention Murphy’s most clear move into the genre with American Crime Story.

However, both shows are about as respectful to the victims and their lives as you'd expect from watching a True Crime Youtuber discussing old casefiles whilst doing a mukbang. As expected, Dahmer has received mass backlash for the show refusing to contact the victim’s families for their permission and romanticising the killer.

And funnily enough, one of the voices criticising Netflix (and by proxy Murphy) is star of You, Penn Badgley. If you’re unaware of who Badgley is, he’s of Gossip Girl fame (also, in Easy A and John Tucker Must Die), but most importantly he stars as Joe Goldberg in one of Netflix’s most popular shows.

During an interview with Entertainment Tonight, he was asked about the serial killer phenomenon and stated,

“You need to look at that, inside. Now to be fair, with our show, you’re meant to fall in love with him. That’s on us. Ted Bundy, that’s on you. Jeffrey Dahmer, that is on, that is on Netflix. That is squarely on the shoulders of Netflix.”

@entertainmenttonightPenn Badgley has a message for those of you who are a little TOO obsessed with Joe Goldberg and serial kworders 💀 #younetflix #pennbadgley #joegoldberg

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Badgely has always maintained that he doesn’t understand the obsession with serial killers, especially Joe. To him, it’s evident that the character is cruel and unfair to those around him, not to mention his need to stalk, kidnap and murder people (especially his romantic partners). Badgely argues that You is about privilege and how far we’ll take it to understand the plight of a white man.

When speaking to the New York Times, he had this to say,

“To me, Joe is this work in progress in dismantling and dissecting the myriad of privileges that a young, attractive, white man carries with him.”

The show’s intent is clear when you listen to Badgley and the show’s creator Sera Gambles explain what was originally intended. When asked about the show’s messaging Gambles stated that we as a society are hard-wired to root for a love story and forgive men whilst judging women. That’s something I agree with but when you actually watch You, that intent seems to vanish. It's a show that's 80-90% narrated by a man who explains what he did out of a need for love, having been abused and orphaned. There is rarely a moment where the show truly challenges him, and instead, confirms that the women in his life are indeed the problem he views them to be.

As Siyyan Inaas writes in her essay on the female characters in You,4

“However, we do spend some time outside of his head. If this show’s intention also is to comment on Joe’s unhealthy view of women, and his toxic masculinity — why is it that when we leave his point of view nothing changes? If he’s putting these women in boxes that he created to satisfy his narrative, in Season 1 Episode 4 when we spend time in Beck’s point of view, why don’t we see differences in the way she acts or Peach? “

A prime example is when Joe kills Love, his main romantic interest in seasons 2 and 3. When Love was revealed to have murderous tendencies similar to Joe, some of the audience responded that she was irritating, even though she reflected Joe's crimes. As Joe kills Love, it is depicted as him saving the world from her wrath. It glorifies Joe’s POV to satisfy the audience's bloodlust of “yes, he was right to kill her because she was a total bitch.” The only woman (girl) safe from Joe is Ellie, and that’s because Joe has projected onto her in the same way he did with Paco. The difference here is his care for Ellie is most likely conditional. The second Ellie becomes an adult and presents in a way that he deems unfit, she would be taken down as Beck, Peach, or Love would.  

So how does this relate to Dahmer? I think it’s fascinating that we can have such cognitive dissonance to wonder why Netflix would make a show like Dahmer whilst already profiting off shows that engage in similar narratives of romanticisation for serial killers. And this is where must state that I understand that Dahmer was a real person, and Joe is not. There’s no argument that he has caused actual harm to real-life victims like Dahmer or Bundy, but the reactions to his character are eerily similar. When we speak about understanding how media impacts how we interact with one another and the world, surely we can see that the romanticisation of one often flows into the other?

Pretending like You is some grand thesis on masculinity feels like a way to peddle the show without garnering criticism. Not only that but, it seems that Badgley’s own interpretation of the character has shifted. When speaking in conversation with actress Ayo Edebiri, he tells her,

“He [Joe] certainly wouldn’t describe himself as a serial killer. I don’t play him like a serial killer, and I don’t think of him as one.”

But what does one call someone who murders people consistently? An accidental killer? A sleepwalking killer? Joe is temperamental and idiotic at times, but he is methodical. He stalks, keeps a lair to kidnap his victims, and buries bodies where nobody will find them. If the show's goal was to make us question why we afford them such leeway and adopt them into our pop culture lexicon, then why hasn’t the conversation around the show changed in the past 4 years?

Each time a new season of You emerges, we have a wave of memes subtly agreeing with his actions, recreating his internal dialogue or downplaying the harm he inflicts on the people in his show. The quintessential internet culture aspect of this are the fancams people make of Joe. These include clips of him from the show in a slowed-down manner with sexy music in the background, removing all context of the character's actions. Of course, this phenomenon isn't new—think of Kylo Ren or even Loki, both villainous and deemed somewhat sexy (to the general public). Still, neither actor is giving us grand speeches about how Dahmer is bad whilst aiding in a kidnap fantasy with Drew Barrymore. 

Yep, you read that correctly. Drew Barrymore's team built a replica of the kidnapping box Joe uses to hold his victims. After Barrymore is led blindfolded into the box, Penn emerges seductively and walks up to Barrymore, exclaiming, “You’re not supposed to want this.”

I can’t help but grimace at this video. Is this not the exact opposite of what both Netflix and Badgley have been exclaiming for years? A show that aims to examine why male serial killers are allowed to get away with so much should not be engaging in fanfare to this degree. I think of the image attached to this piece where Netflix attempts to separate Penn and Joe, and of course, they are two separate people, one being real and the other fictional. But when you’ve capitalised on the memes, made quirky Tiktoks about Joe’s commute in London or cutesy Valentine’s day posts, what other outcome do you expect?

Like Dahmer, You fulfils a fantasy for the viewer. Here is a man that the viewer finds attractive committing a heinous act. They aren't thinking about why they find this fascinating but instead revel in the excitement of watching something out of the norm. Neither show utilises a narrative that attempts to question our obsessive nature. In fact, one of the few movies and shows I can think of that do this well are Fincher's Zodiac and Mindhunter. As stated in the Tweets below, I can’t say that either is perfect, but there seems to be an examination of our cultural need to watch people suffer perpetually that is missing from both Dahmer and You.

There is no doubt that You and other shows, books, and movies like it will continue to be popular, but at the very least, would you please spare us the lecture while you continue to promote the media circus that follows? 

2023 is a new year, which means new complaints and the same horrendous infrastructures ruining our lives. For me, it’s been a few weeks of incessant beauty discourse on my FYP and Twitter TL—you know, the ones where people argue over if your body is worth existing in.

My understanding of beauty has always been elusive. As I've mentioned in my articles about shrinking myself and body neutrality, I've grown up in a world where I've always been seen as lesser than others due to my fluctuating weight—which never entered the realm of skinny. As a result, my interactions with other people shifted from comments of puppy fat to outward mockery and pity, as if I didn't have a mirror to know what I looked like.

Whenever one talks about the experience of not being desirable, it is often whittled down to the typical woes of once being a teen and not being liked. My treatment wasn't that—instead, I was treated as subhuman. The fear of being mocked at lunch prevented me from eating to the point of a debilitating eating disorder. My daily goal was never to appear out of place, sweat, breathe loudly, walk slowly or sit in a natural posture without sucking in. All for fear of receiving taunts that confirmed my appearance. Unfortunately, this shared experience of being plus-sized sticks with you into adulthood no matter how much therapy you put yourself through because, as we know it, the world has not radically become less obsessed with beauty as a concept.

Some have said feminism is currently in its flop era (myself included). Right now, we're peddling anti-ageing straws to teenagers via social media apps and telling young women that they must have botox at 21 to avoid looking their age at 30. They must try pilates if their hips don't look right, plaster their mouths shut at night if they don't want to breathe funny or shave down their teeth to get a million-dollar smile.

Clean girl, girl boss, doe-eyed, siren, coquette, red scare — you are meant to be everything and yet nothing. Even within non-conforming sub-identities, you still fall into the trap of desirability.

The older I get, the more exhausted I become with the world. This seems like a natural progression, I suppose, but I often wonder how much of this exhaustion comes from the fact I’m repeatedly being told how much I’m meant to hate myself. Strangely enough, it feels worse now than it did at 14. When I was 14, I wasn't fully aware of the depths of beauty's roots. The only reason I thought people were mean to me was their cruelty.

By the time I am 30, I don't want to hate myself simply because the algorithm says I have wide eyes or droopy ears. My crooked teeth do not need to be fixed but should be taken care of lovingly as a part of my body. I want my experience of physical movement to be joyful and not a punishment for refusing to tear at my flesh with scissors.

I can’t wait to age because it means I get to look like my mother. I look forward to the day I have the same crinkles beneath her eyes. Her body and mine exist to keep us alive, so we can love people and experience life for as little as we have it.

In 2023 I want to hate myself less and love my body much more.

I hope you all do the same.

Firstly, let me thank you all for subscribing to my newsletter. When I started this account earlier this year, I had no idea I would share such personal and heartfelt content with strangers. With every post, I feel more at home with myself, and I hope my writing does that for you as well.

Despite my struggles in 2022, I'm looking forward to a year filled with joy and success.

Best wishes for the New Year to you and your loved ones.

Sincerely,

Haaniyah (in a panoramic)

FILMS OF 2022

My 2022 ranking hasn’t been completed, as I still have films to get through, so I’m going to recommend three movies from my current favourites.

1. Bones & All (2022) dir. Luca Guadagnino

Don’t you love when a film refuses to leave your brain?

I came into my screening of Bones & All not knowing much about the film other than it was adapted from a book with the same name and that I should be wary of the gore. The only film by Guadagnino I’d seen was his remake of Suspiria (2018), which I frankly did not enjoy compared to the original (one of my favourite films). However, all my doubts about Guadagnino and this film melted away when we opened with shots of paintings of vast American landscapes. I felt sucked in. Every frame of this film is a painting, the story is heartbreaking, and the performances leave you feeling like your own heart has just been eaten.

Bones & All takes place in a universe where there is a small subsection of people who are cannibals (or eaters as they’re known in the film). One of these cannibals is our main character Maren (played by the incredible Taylor Russell), who finds herself abandoned by her father after sneaking out and giving in to her urges. Maren goes on a road trip to find her birth mother, who also left her at a young age and on the way, she meets two more people who, to her surprise, are just like her. One of them is Sully, an older Eater who becomes obsessed with Maren and eventually begins to stalk her. The other is Lee (played by Timmy T Chalamet), a younger Eater who meets Maren and agrees to drive her to her mother, eventually falling in love with her during their trip.

I don’t want to go into too much detail because I think the impact may be lost if I spoil the whole thing, but I want to say that this film is one of the most romantic movies I have ever watched. Both leads are lost people who find themselves in a world that hates and fears them through no fault of their own, but they find each other, and with that, they find love.

I read the film's screenplay, and I want to leave you with a quote that’s stayed with me for the last few days.

All we have is what we see, and what we see is youth, freedom, beauty, and, most of all, love. The country belongs to them here, not the reverse. There is no abandonment, no shame, and no harm. Not anymore.

2. The Fabelmans (2022) dir. Steven Spielberg

   

I have to be honest. I rolled my eyes when I saw a trailer for The Fabelmans a few months back.

I thought, here we go, another biopic / autobiographical film about somebody's life and how lucky we are that they were born. We're about to witness career highs and lows that should've been in a documentary, but spectacle works better for audiences.

However, I have to admit I was fucking wrong.

I mean, Spielberg does subtly brag about his talent in this film, which is understandable because he’s STEVEN SPIELBERG. The film is less about 'you should be grateful for me, and my art is your blood'. Instead, it's 'filmmaking is my life's work, and I wouldn't be able to exist without it'.

The latter was something I found myself drawn to as someone who isn't interested in doing anything except writing. It was nice to have a film advocate the importance of the arts at a time when it feels like filmmaking is giving up on itself due to corporate interests. The Fabelmans leaves with a reminder that art and creativity are part of our DNA. Without them, we wouldn't function as individuals or as a society.

3. Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells

I also have a father like Calum, and this film made me cry.

Please watch it.

Honourable mentions of other 2022 films I’ve adored this year

Decision To Leave (2022) dir. Park Chan-wook

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) dir. Daniel Scheinert & Daniel Kwan

Nope (2022) dir. Jordan Peele

Funny Pages (2022) dir. Owen Kline

Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) dir. Halina Reijn

FIRST-TIME WATCHES OF 2022

This list won’t include any 2022 releases, as those will be on my 2022 list.

1. The Worst Person in the World (2021) dir. Joachim Trier

The third and final instalment of Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy came to us last year with The Worst Person in the World, a coming-of-age film that explores the feeling of never feeling situated in life. Julie (played by Renate Reinsve) is a young woman who finds herself changing career paths. First, she’s a med student, then a psychology student and finally, a photographer. This pattern of indecisiveness follows her into her mid-twenties to her early thirties, where she’s now all but a stay-at-home girlfriend to a comic artist and fears the idea of domestic life. Finally, Julie meets a young man at a party (who is also in a relationship), and she rediscovers what’s missing from her current relationship, sending her into a headspin. The film is an emotional rollercoaster that takes us through her highs and lows and leaves us questioning if our choices leave us the ‘worst person in the world’ to someone in our lives. 

2. The Apartment (1960) dir. Billy Wilder

This is a recent watch, and I am unfortunately not someone who has seen many if any, Billy Wilder films (something I’m going to change in the new year), but my god, does it pack a punch. The film follows Bud (played by Jack Lemmon), an accountant at an insurance firm. He lives a relatively simple life, except that he regularly allows his superiors to use his apartment as a den for extramarital affairs. Aside from being funny, well-performed, and beautifully shot, my attention was drawn to how seamless the story was. Characters come and go from the screen without any clumsiness or overdue presence, and there is a rhythm to the way the story flows, which is incredible to watch. There’s a reason this is heralded as a classic and a screenwriting masterclass. 

3. Mistress America (2015) dir. Noah Baumbach

Mistress America is a comedy directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written with his frequent collaborator Greta Gerwig. As a longtime fan of Gerwig's work as an actor, director and writer, I knew this would also be right up my alley.

Mistress America feels like the connecting glue between Frances Ha and Lady Bird. Tracy (played by Lola Kirke) reminds me heavily of Christine, and Brooke (played by Greta Gerwig) is a more, albeit barely, put-together version of Frances. The film explores Tracy’s first year and her new relationship with her stepsister, Brooke, ahead of her mom's new marriage. Brooke is a woman of many talents and is Tracy's inspiration for her creative writing piece, which she plans to submit to a prestigious college writing group. The women spend the film getting to know one another and building their relationship, but Brooke has no idea that Tracy is documenting their time together. This film struck me as very timely as we currently have the discourse of ‘should writers blast their family or friends via essay’ on the bird app (Twitter). Tracy’s decision ultimately harms her newfound sister and forces her to confront aspects of herself she’d rather ignore. If Lady Bird is the film for your teen years, Frances Ha is for your late twenties—Mistress America is definitely for the 24-year-olds. 

Honourable mentions of other first-time watches I’ve adored this year

Last Holiday (2006)

The French Dispatch (2021)

Jackie Brown (1997)

Girlfriends (1978)

The Holiday (2006) 

MUSIC OF 2022

Similar to finding out your Myers Briggs Type, Spotify Wrapped tells you so much and yet nothing at the same time. My Wrapped list includes some great artists and songs, but I wouldn't call them my favourite picks of 2022. In most cases, I use the entries as background music when writing or doing other tasks, not as active listening. So, my list of music from this year will differ from my Wrapped, sorry, Spotify AI.

1. RENAISSANCE - Beyoncé (2022)

I mean, it’s obvious, according to Lastfm, I’ve played this album almost 300 times and for a good reason. Dance music always returns when society falls into a financial black hole— this year is no exception. The post-2020 years have been challenging, but at least we now have Beyoncé to listen to whilst we dance through the pain. 

As far back as I can remember, Beyoncé has always been a staple in my life, and I know she will continue to be as I grow into my 20s and 30s. She serves up some career-best vocals and incredibly experimental production on RENAISSANCE, which reminds us why she's one of the most acclaimed performers of all time. In addition, RENAISSANCE is a homage to the originators of dance music— the Black LGBT community. Beyoncé asks us to come together in joy to remember what they’ve done for music and how none of this would be possible without them. RENAISSANCE is a celebration of culture, music and creativity.  

My favourite songs from the album include AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM, PURE/HONEY, ALL UP IN YOUR MIND, VIRGO’S GROOVE and ENERGY.

2. Norman Fucking Rockwell - Lana Del Rey (2019)

2023 marks the 10th anniversary of Pure Heroine by Lorde, Self Titled by the 1975, AM by the Arctic Monkeys and Night Time, My Time by Sky Ferreira. Additionally, it marks the 10th anniversary of the Tumblr 2013-2014 era. Of course, everyone has a different artist they idolised from that time, but for me, it was always the infamous Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey has always been a complex figure in my life. Even though she has some frankly insane takes (like the typewritten culture letter), her influence on my taste in music cannot be denied. My first encounter with Lana was when she released Born To Die (2012), and just like any embarrassed teenager trying out new music, I thought I was the only one who understood her. However, it wasn’t until I joined Tumblr in 2014 that I realised that other people also loved her music and had created an identity around it.

The last time I listened to Lana a few years ago, I was convinced I had outgrown her 'my daddy loves me, but I have to leave' crooning. However, as usual, Tiktok showed me that I was missing out. While scrolling through my FYP earlier this year, I heard a snippet of Norman Fucking Rockwell (the title track of NFR), and I felt this sudden overwhelming sadness. Maybe Lana and I were still on the same page after all.

In the song, she proclaims, 'Cause you're just a man. It's just what you do. Your head in your hand as you color me blue.'

Relatable stuff, huh? Maybe all I needed was some age and bad experiences with love to finally get her.

My favourite songs from the album include, `Norman Fucking Rockwell, Cinnamon Girl, How to disappear, and Mariners Apartment Complex.

3. All I Have - Amerie (2002) 

As with Beyoncé, Amerie has always been a part of my life. As a child, I remember listening to 1 Thing and becoming enamoured with its melody and her angelic voice. Despite this, I hadn't delved into her albums until this year, when I heard a snippet of I Just Died on TikTok (I guess that app is helpful for something). 

I Just Died is one of those songs that makes you feel like you've just fallen in love. The song recounts when Amerie realises she has a crush on her friend. She's terrified to admit it, but he reciprocates the feelings, and all feels right in his arms. It's a classic love song and is now one of my all-time favourite R&B songs. All I Have is equally romantic and captivating throughout. Amerie's voice creates a sense of warmth and excitement in the mundane, like a hug buried in an album. 

My favourite songs from the album include Why Don’t We Fall in Love, Talkin’ To Me, Need You Tonight, and I Just Died.

Honourable mentions of albums and artists I’ve adored this year

Overgrown - Joyce Wrice (2021)

First Band On The Moon (1996) - The Cardigans

Being Funny in A Foreign Language (2022) - The 1975

Blue Summer (2021) - Woesum

Around The Fur (1997) - Deftones

Touch (2005) - Amerie

Gemini Rights (2022) - Steve Lacy

Beatopia (2022) - Beabadoobee

DECIDE (2022) - Djo

Atlanta Millionaires Club (2019) - Faye Webster

Hypnos (2022) - Ravyn Lenae

Laurel Hell (2022) - Mitski

RINA (2017) - Rina Sawayama

Luv 4 Rent (2022) - Smino

Gently Down Your Stream (1973) - Four Mints

TV OF 2022

I can’t lie; I’ve written so much so far that I’m just giving you a short list— trust that these are incredible.

1. Love Life (2022)

You'll undoubtedly enjoy Love Life if you love romantic comedies. It's an anthology series about the love lives of different people. Anna Kendrick stars in season 1, and William Jackson Harper stars in season 2. We delve into their ups and downs, childhoods, and what makes them tick. In an age of terminally online dating TV, it was nice to watch something with so much heart and so human. While I enjoyed season 2 more than season 1, it is still an incredibly well-written show overall.

2. Interview with the Vampire (2022)

Vampires are back, baby! I haven’t seen the Tom Cruise version of this, and frankly, I don’t think I will, so any comparison is null and void here.

IWTV is a phenomenal piece of television that tackles faith, sexuality, the supernatural, and abuse. Most, if not all, of the performances are superb, but my god, Jacob Anderson is a fantastic actor. I hope he continues to prove how underused he was in Game of Thrones and that this show is not another victim of the relentless cancellation brigade.

3. The Bear (2022)

The Safdie Bros meet Ratatouille.

Honourable mentions of TV I’ve adored this year

Midnight Mass (2021)

Single Drunk Female (2022)

I May Destroy You (2020)

Derry Girls (2018)

Abbott Elementary (2021)

Superstore (2015)

The Boys (2019)

iCarly (2021)

Girls (2012) —I’m also shocked.

Never Have I Ever (2020)

Starstruck (2021)

Andor (2022)

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000)

Veep (2012)

In her song ‘First Love/Late Spring,’ Mitski laments, “And I was so young when I behaved twenty-five. Yet now, I find I've grown into a tall child.”

With the onset of my mid-twenties, I faced what all 24-year-olds eventually confront: mortality and youth.

“Will I get those feared hereditary illnesses after all?” 

“Maybe I should take up yoga again?”

“What the fuck am I doing with my life?” 

Despite embracing adulthood by moving out and being plagued by sky-high bills and terrible landlords, I still felt more like a child than I ever had under my parents' roof. There's no fun in perpetually feeling 17— when was maturity going to kick in?

Maybe part of my immaturity resulted from going through a transitional period of my life both publicly (because I tweeted through the pain) and privately. While social puberty in your twenties isn’t as physically altering as growing armpit hair for the first time, it is equally as embarrassing as getting caught out wearing a training bra during P.E. Part of that social puberty includes coming to terms with love and all its side effects. 

In late 2022, I wrote an article for DAZED on young people in the workplace. I discussed how 2022 was my year from hell, which led me to resign from a terrible media job at the BBC and move back to my hometown of Aylesbury. What I left out of the essay included dealing with long COVID, having an insane housemate situation (I got Single White Female'd) and working through a breakup. I told myself that, eventually, I would write about the breakup so I could let my heartbreak out on paper instead of letting it fester inside me. In the same way that so many literary greats (or writers featured in Modern Love) have done before me, I would use my failure in love to my advantage.

Ultimately, I decided against that since the level of vulnerability required to allow strangers to judge my romantic woes felt impossible. Why should I put myself or anyone else on a metaphorical chopping block where we would both be sentenced to social media exile?

The last thing I wanted was for my experiences to become an AITA (Am I The Asshole) or r/relationships post circulated on a Twitter thread where people debate how much each party contributed to the breakdown of the relationship without considering the humanity of those involved. It wouldn't matter if I wrote about it with grace or tried to be fair— divulging would be seen as a revenge attempt rather than a cathartic release. Even if I blamed myself, examined dynamics, or self-reflected, my pain would turn into meme fodder. The mere idea of bringing my grief to a place that rewards behaviour, like the West Elm Caleb witchhunt, made me sick to my stomach. 

I broke up with my ex in May of 2022. Part of me was secretly delighted since it was just in time for a summer of enjoyment. However, due to karma or whatever cosmic justice white tarot girls believe in—the start of my summer was miserable, and I spent a month and a half desperately seeking an outlet to bloodlet my heartbreak. I tried everything I could think of. I did self-care, hung out with friends, wrote terrible poetry and dyed my hair repeatedly—nothing worked. I felt plagued by misery and guilt. Two emotions do not bode well for someone who spent a good chunk of their early 20s in therapy trying to fix their pre-disposed commitment issues.

I eventually gave up, resigning myself to staying indoors for the rest of the season. Instead, I’d catch up on my movies and maybe learn to crochet. That was until one night, with a miniature fan in hand to stave off the scorching London heatwave, I sat down to watch something I hadn't seen for a long time: Nora Ephron’s classic 1989 film When Harry Met Sally. 

At last, I was in tears, and the relief set in. That night, I rediscovered something I had forgotten about myself: I love rom-coms. I mean, it's easier, isn't it? You feel the highs and lows without any of the emotional baggage dating tends to bring. Splitting the bill is no longer necessary— your heartfelt tears and popcorn are more than enough. For a period in my early 20s, I tried to convince myself that I was a serious person and that I liked serious movies. Despite my dislike of Amy Dunne's decontextualised 'Cool Girl' monologue, I admit it holds true. I aspired to be a 'cool girl'. I wanted men to like me, so I didn't tell them I enjoyed watching silly romance films. If I did, it wouldn't be without making excuses for guilty pleasure watching. I wanted them to think I was as interesting as their top 100 IMDb films of all time list. Stupid, I know. 

Yet, as I sat in my heat-laden room and watched Harry run after Sally on New Year's Eve to say he loved her—I felt electrified. That’s the thing about great films and, ultimately, great screenwriting. They help uncover parts of yourself that have long been hidden. I forgot that I was a hopeless romantic and that, in all honesty, part of me had settled in most of my experiences with love so far. 

When it comes to romance, I feel stuck. It’s the type of stuck where, when I attempt to alter my position, it all caves in—crushing my body into the ground and rendering me dead upon arrival. I’m at the ‘right’ age and now have the freedom to figure out what I want in a potential partner, but part of me feels as if I don’t know what to look out for because I didn't spend my teenage years developing a perfectly crafted radar for bullshit. Not to mention that any romantic advice wasn’t going to be taken from those in my vicinity. To put it lightly, romance has not been a part of my genetic makeup.

Despite this, I have always enjoyed romance as a genre. In TV, movies, and books, I found what I imagined the perfect partnership would be like. Reading about crushes in Jacqueline Wilson's Girls series as a child made my heart flutter. Towards the end of my childhood, I started taking the soap operas my mother watched more seriously. My mother would translate between Arabic, English and Somali to make sure I followed along with her Turkish masalsalats. Yearning connects people across continents and cultures— it's a universal language.

Tumblr was, unfortunately, a massive influence on my taste in films and music. Like most women my age, this meant I went through a spell of only watching 80s teen movies, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, etc. I pretended to enjoy the stilted dialogue and questionable antics to share an interest with people with more sophisticated taste than my love of Star Wars and Percy Jackson. But when I watched When Harry Met Sally for the first time, I felt as if this random film from 1989 had seen me somehow. That Nora Ephron herself had watched me fall under its spell and unlocked something inside me. I wanted more than passive consumption. I was in love with love itself.

My teen years weren't full of puppy love. In fact, I didn’t engage in romantic pursuits until my late teens and early 20s. There was always more ease in reading or watching a romantic story than living it. However, at 18, I took a chance and told my long-term crush I had feelings for him. Sadly, it ended terribly and led to my first experience of heartbreak, but I realised then that I had opened a door in my heart that could no longer be bolted shut. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that remaining alone would be easier, the taste of love awoke my senses like someone rising from the dead. I spoke in riddles of yearning and desire as if it were a mother tongue. 

But when yearning occurs in a Muslim household, there is only one outcome: marriage.

Years ago, I read Love in a Headscarf, a memoir by author Shelina Janmohamed. In the book, she examines the trope within her own life as a Muslim woman who wants to get married. She writes about having an expectation of flurrying romance sweeping off her of her feet and examining how that co-exists with the Islamic idea of the one where we have been “created in pairs” (Adh-Dhariyat 51:49). A common trope in romance media is the idea of the one—the person you’re fated to be with. The main character goes through trials and tribulations to find them, and by the end of the film/book/show, both people realise they’re in love with each other. Of course, this is different to real life, depending on your cultural background and the religiosity of your family. As Janmohamed states in the book and many of my Muslim friends and I have discussed, there’s an expectation that you meet the one at 21, get married and live a happy life. Sounds easy enough, right? 

The weird thing is that many of our parents didn't necessarily meet, marry, and have children by that age, but there’s still this looming invisible pressure on you. For me, it’s an unintended consequence of growing up in Saudi Arabia, where my classmates and friends spoke about getting married at the ages of 20 and 21. I remember telling people what ages my parents were when they got married and them being visibly surprised. My father married when he was 25—the same age I am now. In contrast, my mother was 30 years old—a not-so-typical age pairing between two Muslims from incredibly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. 

My parents have never prioritised marriage in my life. Unlike girls I knew, I never had marriage dangling over my head as an expectation to fulfil early on—instead, they focused on my education and career goals. My mother wanted me to have my own life before settling down. And yet, I still feel like Charlotte from Pride and Prejudice (2005) when she says, "I'm 27 years old. I've no money and no prospects. I'm already a burden to my parents.”

As much as I know that bringing religion into an essay will most likely garner the attention of those who see nuance as a garnish rather than an essential component, I would do myself no favours by hiding my feelings about marriage. I mean, I own a Pinterest board with the title 'I'm not getting married, but IF I DID.’  

In When Harry Met Sally, the lead characters meet in their early 20s and do not get married until their mid-30s. Watching the film on that night in June did re-confirm my want for love, but it also made me realise that I had been rushing into things for the sake of not dying alone. I gripped my hooks into those who showed me care without pondering if I needed to be anywhere near a relationship at this point in my life. I’ve seen women in my life sucked into relationships and spat back out as shells of their former selves. I would not survive the process. Who could put up with me for years on end? I need to be cared for and held like a fragile being. I want someone who will hold me upright like the neck of a newborn babe and keep my flimsy bones from falling apart.

I fear making a wrong choice and living to regret it for the rest of my days. My attempts at finding the one have failed disastrously, and I would rather die than ask to be set up, so instead, I spend my days writing. It soothes me and quiets the anxiety swirling around the toilet bowl I call a brain. I’ve even written my own Muslim rom-com. And even though I know it will probably never see the light, there’s a sense of power that comes from writing stories like that. A writer's ability to materialise love out of thin air is magical. It also feels a lot safer than a personal essay about a breakup. You take the elements of the real story and place them into a fictional one instead, r/relationships be damned. 

What I’ve also realised since June is that love can exist in multiple forms, from my friends, my family and my work. The love and devotion I pour into my words allow them to thrive in the cold and hostile environment of my Google Drive. I watch romantic comedies far more often now and feel less internal shame about it. Watching romance on screen may not be a liberating experience for us all, but it certainly is for me.  

If I was ever asked what traditions I hold sacred in my life, my response would be: none.

I don’t go to a particular place every year, and I don’t have a gift, custom, or belief handed down by my family. Traditions seem very purposeful, and I can’t say my routines hold much purpose, especially around my birthdays. 

I think the first time I experienced birthday anxiety must've been around my 18th. It was as if all of a sudden, I came face to face with mortality. Of course, this is a common reaction to ageing, but I sometimes forget about the dramaticism of anxiety. It’s life or death, and neither feels safe. 

Two months before my 19th birthday, I stumbled upon a film on Film Twitter™, which created discourse about whether or not the praise thrown towards the film was valid.

That film was 2017’s Lady Bird. Before Twitter, I hadn’t heard of or seen any of Greta Gerwig’s films— in my defense, I grew up quite far from any notable indie scenes, but in 2017, I had found myself amid a personal change in my taste in music, movies, and tv. 

Gerwig has written and directed several films, including Frances Ha (2012) and Mistress America (2015)—co-written with her partner and fellow writer/director Noah Baumbach. Both films focus on the feeling of being lost and finding yourself in your early to late twenties, and they take place in New York. Frances Ha is a film that centres around a struggling dancer who finds the love of her life (her best friend) slowly pulling away as she enters a new phase of her relationship. Mistress America is about two almost stepsisters who become intertwined as the younger of the two begins writing about her sister's failing life as a woman of many skill sets. 

I adore those films equally— they are charming, incredibly heartfelt, and poignantly written. However, Lady Bird is the only one I watch every year on the day before my birthday.  

Produced by IAC and distributed by A24, Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film that depicts Gerwig’s teenage years in Sacramento, California, during the early 2000s. The film explores typical themes of coming-of-age movies, such as failed relationships, college applications, and rejection. At the epicenter of Lady Bird lies the fragile relationship between Christine' Lady Bird’ McPherson (the stand-in for Gerwig) and her mother, Marion McPherson.

Lady Bird as a character is both miles away from me and yet so familiar. We both went to private religious schools and struggled with maintaining friendships and a deep-seated need to be liked, but she was a white girl who lived in California, and I was someone who wasn’t that and lived in England.

Still, when I watched the film on a less-than-reliable pirated link months before the UK premiere, I finally knew what it was like to fall in love with a movie for the first time. 

As previously mentioned, Lady Bird is about many things, but the age-old tale of mothers and daughters lies at its core. There is so much love in the way Gerwig writes Marion and Lady Bird. Their arguments are sometimes futile, but also we witness them become infused with bitterness. Lady Bird and Marion do not understand each other, and the effort to try often hurts them both. Upon my first watch, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t for a long time— this was during a year where my relationship with my mother was in many ways hurtful to me, and to see this depicted on screen with someone so different to me almost made it easier. It’s not just a cultural or religious issue that pries us apart but, instead, a lack of understanding and patience. 

One of my favorite elements of the film is ‘This Eve of Parting’ by John Hartford, which Gerwig uses to cement the theme of change. It appears when Marion is driving home from her late work shift and peers around at Sacramento—a city she loves and her daughter desperately wants to escape. When Marion arrives home, there’s a cut in the music, and we move to the next scene, where we witness the clash between Marion’s work life and her home life, filled with tension between her and Lady Bird.

Further in the film, Lady Bird chooses to move to New York without telling her mother, leading to Marion completely ignoring her. During a montage, ‘This Eve of Parting’ plays again as Lady Bird becomes more mature than she has during the film's first two acts—she gets multiple jobs, acquires her license, and applies for student loans.

On the other hand, Marion is almost ghostlike, not wanting to be seen or heard. She tries to write letters, which are later revealed to be her attempt at an apology to Lady Bird but throws them away. The song plays until Lady Bird catches her flight, and it is at this moment Lady Bird finally speaks to Marion and is once again ignored—a breaking point between them. Through this song, Gerwig seamlessly connects the themes of how the women feel about Sacramento and how they feel about each other.

Being a few months away from university applications at the time of my first watch, I deeply related to this aspect. I wanted to move away from home but felt scared to do so and felt resentful of my town. While I couldn’t do this at the time, Lady Bird did and inspired me to switch from a Communications and Sociology major to a Communications and Film Studies major. 

I rewatched the film several times towards the end of 2017, and when my birthday rolled around, I found myself in the same anxious haze of 2016. To cheer myself up I put it on but this time, I felt different. The anxiety hadn’t disappeared— I would be giving too much credit, but the feeling of displacement was no longer around. I can’t say if the routine started accidentally or on purpose, but I did the same for my 20th birthday and my 21st, 22nd, and 23rd after that. 

Five years later, it’s not only the 5th anniversary of Lady Bird, but it’s also my 24th birthday tomorrow (November 8th). I am five years older than I was when I watched Lady Bird, and my relationship with my mother is far better, but I wondered what the rewatch of Lady Bird would do for me this year as there was no catharsis I needed to get through. But is catharsis the only reason I should be watching a film, or can my love for it exist beyond that? 

I’ve also become much more aware of the issues within the film, such as how Lady Bird depicts a racially diverse city as a primarily white environment. In addition, Lady Bird makes an unruly racist comment towards her adopted brother when she doesn’t get into college, and there have been comparisons of how the film has similarities to Real Women Have Curves (2002), a coming-of-age movie starring America Ferrera. 

Being able to reconcile one’s love for art while acknowledging its issues is always tricky because the question becomes, “is my love for it enough to look past the harm?” In my eyes, I see that I have to hold both my care and my criticism to certain aspects in a similar light—they can co-exist.

That being said, I am so grateful to this film because even if my routine ceases to be, I will always hold it dear for the path it set me on. As much as someone may scoff at this, I believe that my filmmaking and writing wouldn’t exist if not for Gerwig. 

There’s not much I recall about being seven. 

Seven is not an age deemed an essential milestone during an adolescent's early life. You remember nine or ten because the cliques of friendship groups begin to form, media imprints itself on you at that age like never before, and for a lucky few, you begin to feel the first signs of childlike crushes and fancies. 

What I most recall about seven is my breath. How my lungs quickened when I sucked in all the air I could to hold my stomach in, and how I let it all out when my brain began floating away into the unconscious void. I was trying to make myself smaller, and when I look back at photos of myself at that age, I am aghast because there was not much more I could shrink towards. But still, I continued, mainly hoping that if I could suck in my stomach enough, I would be treated differently. I wasn’t outwardly bullied; social tolerance was granted to me on the condition that absolute rejection was sure to be talked about by the mums of such a small neighbourhood.

The tolerance came in waves. I’d be invited to birthday parties but sit at the back where nobody would interact with me. My neighbours exchanged whispers in small groups about how much they despised how I looked, not in the formulated way adult women do with painted-on kindness, but in the precise and blunt way children do. When I was told of said whispers, I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if it were possible for me to cut off the skin on my body and sew my flesh back together in a smaller size. That’s what tolerance did to me. 

I didn’t want to be tolerated; I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be loved. I craved the feeling of belonging. 

Is that not what everyone wants? For complete and utter adoration from others? Or am I merely falling into my worst traits by admitting this in the public forum of online newsletters? 

I held my stomach in at seven, eleven, fifteen and eighteen. I shrunk myself mentally and physically for people to enjoy my company. I was vague enough that my friends could project whatever version they wanted onto my blank canvas. My personality was an accessory I could take on and off like an unflattering accessory. 

I wonder what the point is in having a pleasant personality? In particular, how does it help when you’ve grown up around rich kids. I found that fitting into their aesthetics could never work. It was almost impossible to ply and squeeze myself into their mould. I believe that growing up around them has given me a complex of some sort. I could argue that I have tamed it through extensive years of therapy, but still, I cannot walk around without the idea of not fitting in looming in my mind. 

And frankly, it’s ridiculous that I still feel this way at the age of twenty-three. I should be profoundly embarrassed, but if anything, I feel angry. I feel angry that my psyche has been so thoroughly beat down and broken because I couldn’t hold my stomach in at seven years old. 

I believe the only time I didn’t think about my physical existence was during the lockdown. 

I hated lockdown, not just because the air was unbreathable or the worries about getting sick. Not just because everyone decided to go masks off and become eugenicists, I hated lockdown because I had a breakdown. I have written about that breakdown before, so I won’t go into intricate details but know that it occurred at the same time my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. 

I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself then and there, but I suppose that because everything happened within my house, I found a small amount of peace with the idea of not having to go outside again. I could stay in for as long as I wanted, and nobody would have to perceive me ever again. Nobody could stare at my body and dissect it as if I were a slab of meat on a countertop. I almost forgot I had a body at a certain point; I was simply a translucent woman making her journey in and around her house like a lone ghost. No men or gawking eyes to make me cower away in fear. 

When I moved to London in 2021, I had to become aware of my body again. This isn’t to say my hometown is any better, but fewer people meant fewer eyes. Sat on train seats and bus rides, I could feel myself taking up space again. I apologised and smiled behind my mask for the embarrassment of daring to be seen on public transport; I felt like I had done wrong to those in my presence. 

Taking up space was a theme during my 22nd year. I shrank myself down in all aspects of my life. My work self felt like a hollowed-out version of who I am, not wanting to speak for fear of my true self being volatile. In friendships, I have felt like an outsider looking on in, that even in groups of people (who I know to love me), I still have an inkling that the garden chair I’m sitting in was once meant to seat someone else. In dating, I can’t figure out where I stand with anybody, and I stop shy of being 100% honest because to get to know me honestly, one must see the ugliness inside. 

The common idea is that we never truly grow out of high school, that the adolescent hormonal versions of ourselves are at our core, no matter how much fancy perfume or trendy thrifted clothing we throw over it. But I believe it is not high school that remains, but elementary. We are simply idiotic children at the root of it all, looking for answers to our ever-changing lives and having tantrums along the way. 

The last time I felt seven was a month ago. My friend invited me to be their plus one to an album launch. I’m not one for events due to the ever-present criticism towards myself that swirls around in the toilet bowl I call a brain, but I went along because I adored the musician playing. When I arrived, I wished for once that I would stop being wrong about my instincts about how I’m going to be perceived because, once again, self-awareness has never helped me fix the issues at hand.

It’s such a dehumanising experience to be looked at from head to toe as if you’re not worth anything at all. From the very initial look, your entire life has been road mapped by people who do not know you, and you are assessed and dismissed within a second. It’s why I don’t network. 

But still, I persisted; I wanted to see the musician perform after a year of already missing out on so much. When she got on stage, the room instantly became filled, hordes of people packed into what was already a tiny room, and as each new person came in and out of the room, they transfixed their gaze on me. Because to them, I was taking up space and making it uncomfortable, not the apparent issue of poor crowd planning. The stares came in from all directions, and I felt them wash over me like molten lava. My cheeks turned crimson red, and panic sat in. I left two songs into the set. 

If I were to predict the reaction to this essay from a total stranger, I’d guess that it would be among the lines of “there are bigger fish to fry in this world, so suck it up.” This is true. Of course, there will always be a more significant, pressing, groundbreaking social matter to focus on. But I bring this anecdote up to say that the feeling of being seven never escapes you. Even when you’ve become popular, successful or “prettier” than you would deem your nineteen yourself to have been. It would seem easy to dismiss the insecurities, but when they reside in your mind day in and day out, you become haunted by them.

To end, I’ll leave you with this extract from Zoe Moss' renowned essay 'It Hurts To Be Alive And Obsolete', where she relays a similar feeling of shrinking that I have found to be one of the most insightful quotes of my twenties thus so far. 

She states, 

“To be, in other words, still a living woman, and to be told every day that you are not a woman but a tired object that should disappear. That you are not a person but a joke. Well, I am a bitter joke. I am bitter and frustrated and wasted, but don't you pretend for a minute as you look at me, forty-three, fat, and looking exactly my age, that I am not as alive as you are and that I do not suffer from the category into which you are forcing me.”

Editing thanks; Brooke Ross and Juliette Marie

Google Meet therapy is awkward. The Wifi connection lagging behind your therapist leaving less time to talk about the gnawing stress that’s built up over the week, the repeating sounds of “sorry, could you say that again”, and the inward pride that prevents you from crying on camera like so many cancelled Youtubers before you. It’s inhuman. 

That’s not to say my therapist doesn’t try to help; in fact, I could say that the longest relationship I’ve had with someone would be with her. It is because of this that amongst the depressing stories of eating disorders and childhood bullying I admitted something I had never said aloud before: I was in a writer's block. Everything I wrote or tried writing followed the same monotone ‘we are all doomed and I’m the saddest person of them all’ thematics that made my teenage self want to be a novelist. I was fuelled by writing about pain, spite and my familial arguments. What’s the point of going through things if not using them as a grounding force to do better? The guilty obligation to turn your trauma into a monetisable book, tv show or podcast; otherwise, you feel as if you’ve wasted your prime creative years.

In the episode titled ‘Good Damage’, Diane Nguyen who for the most part is the perpetual sad girl of ‘Bojack Horseman’, finds herself unable to write her book of essays cemented in the pain she felt growing up. Instead, she wanders off and begins writing a story about a teenage girl detective, and Diane’s inability to stick to her essays gives us one of the most insightful speeches in TV;

“All the damage I got isn’t ‘good damage’. It’s just damage. I have gotten nothing out of it and all those years I was miserable was for nothing. I could have been happy this whole time and written books about girl detectives and been cheerful and popular had good parents, is that what you’re saying?”

For the longest time, I believed that the damage I had was good, that it made me a more interesting and insightful person. After years of watching women and girls in media as tortured beautiful souls that only received care and attention once they had gone through pain, my brain had turned into rot. My self-awareness of how hurt I was made me better than others because I could pinpoint where I was hurting and I could wax lyrical about the thousands of reasons why. 

I am what Leslie Jamison describes as a ‘post wounded woman’.

In her essay ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’, she states that the post-wounded woman feels wounded but is “aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead.”

Being self-aware is gauche. It is tacky and uncomfortable. It feels similar to being trapped under sweat ridden sheets in the middle of a summer night, the fabric clinging to your body in the most grotesque manner. I no longer want to be self-aware. I don’t want to be post-wounded. Instead, I want to be blissfully ignorant. I want to be delusional and live in a world where my mind is not racing at every minute, not screaming at the highest level, only to be silenced by the inflow of media I use to distract myself. Self-awareness has disintegrated the fabric of humanity. It has made us into bumbling fools who parade around our deepest insecurities within public forums for nothing more than a minuscule amount of attention. We’re a generation of people who claim to be more understanding and patient than our parents but posting about pain in online spaces is the easiest way to be told that online spaces are not to be used as journals. I wish someone had told me that when I first used social media. 

I've been on social media since the age of twelve, operating a Twitter account dedicated to my adoration of Justin Bieber. I think that's an embarrassing fact to relay. 

In my eyes, my father was a technological wiz; he knew how to fix our desktop when my brothers and I accidentally downloaded viruses after playing flash games that ranged from cute to irresponsibly violent. He taught me how to torrent and that movies, music, and video games aught not be hidden away from those who couldn't afford them. My father in many ways tried to teach us how not to let the internet ruin our lives. But even with his knowledge and care, my persistent need to express myself online undid the efforts of a doting parent who, like many others, found themselves in new territory with children who could see the world beyond its physical manifestation. 

In Year 8 (or Grade 7 if you're American), I had a YouTube channel that no longer exists. The benefit to being born in 1998 was that once you hit 12 access to a basic shitty laptop is all you need to create online content. The downside to that though is that without the demand of a post-production process that combs through your videos or short films for irregularities, you’re essentially posting content just because you can. It’s easy, and it’s fun. The hidden opinions I had, the worries I faced, and the cultural zeitgeist that found itself trapped in the body of a severely anxious 13-year-old wanted so desperately to be set free. 

During this time, I made a video ranting about how much I hated the Kardashians. My classmates thought I was a bitch for judging the women so harshly, and in hindsight, I was. Although I remain convinced that my disdain of the triple K Klan was justified, the language and ideas I was internalising came less from good-faith critique and more from the hordes of misogyny I was consuming through pop culture. I was rash and judgemental and angry. I had so much anger in my body that, at moments, I wondered if I could harness that heat into my fingertips and melt everything around me. I assume years prior that would’ve been a diary entry had I been 13 when my mother was 13 (the 1970s) but now, I didn’t have to sit and write for hours on end. I could just record, confess and share how I felt. It was cathartic, speaking to power my annoyance had been something I had never been allowed to indulge in before. But I also did not predict that the public visibility would open me up to judgements I didn’t quite comprehend. 

Being a teenage girl is confusing. Nothing makes sense and nobody wants to listen to you. But Twitter does. 

Twitter listens, so does Instagram, and so does Tiktok. They listen to your anger, and they listen to your love for celebrities and boybands. They take in every molecule and element of what makes you the person you are. And so you feed into it. This is why every other post on your For You Page is begging you to engage in a vast display of trauma dumping. What use do the platforms have for you if you’re not stripping down and selling your parts like a used car? Every private and personal aspect of yourself is no longer yours, it becomes the public domain. 

I believe I've had at least 10 Twitter accounts, all either deleted or suspended. I've taken on identities of the celebrities I 'stanned', putting a pause to my current reality of a disillusioned girl living in a patriarchal country. One year I was into One Direction, the next it was Fall Out Boy, and the year after that, I found KPOP. And year after year, the ending to my love affair with each personality I donned went out in fiery flames of Twitter spats and fallen out online friendships. 

I had no self-awareness; I could not tell what was wrong with me or why I found myself continuously repeating the cycle I had set into motion. I would go months on end gorging myself on online binges and then promise I’d go cold turkey and develop a life outside of Twitter, but the reality of having to make friends in person and being honest about who I was always became too real and too frightening. And that would continue until my eventual breakdown in 2016. 

2016 is a year of Drake, Brexit, Carrie Fisher's death and the year I became self-aware.

My self-awareness was gradual. First, it was the acceptance that I was an intrinsically sad individual. I am sad when I wake up, I am sad when I sleep. The sadness follows me around like a stalker that somehow figured out how to cement itself inside its victim. Accepting that I had that sadness inside of me felt revolutionary. I no longer needed to engage in conversations of deep-rooted change with my parents because I knew I couldn't change, and the most I could do was manage the sadness. I knew that I had to keep the rot from spilling outwards. 

I did just that, and in 2017, I put myself on anti-depressants. In 2019, I put myself into therapy. In 2020, I sought out a BPD diagnosis. I did it all so I could be self-aware and figure my shit out because perhaps if I did that, then maybe I would stop hurting. 

And for a while it worked, I told people that the meds didn't bother me and feeling numb at times was more straightforward than feeling anything. I stomached the costs of therapy because asking for an apology from my parents was a thankless task and they argued that I should just accept they were trying to do what was best for me at the time. It worked, and it worked, and it worked until it didn't. I became so aware of my actions, I knew what made me tick inside and out. With every choice I made I found my head being my own therapist and spelling out how my deeply damaged brain made sense of the actions at hand. The self-awareness haunted my every day, prying open cracks in relationships and holding my hands back from writing. 

Further along in her essay, Jamison states the following:

“I find myself in a bind. I’m tired of [female] pain and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the “hurting woman” is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don’t like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it.” 

I am tired of it as well. 

I’m tired of tweeting about being sad and then having a barrage of strangers liking it, which emphasises that they relate. Because that's what I want to be; relatable and reachable. I hate the joy I find in being relatable, I wish I felt embarrassed. I wish my writing didn’t feel like the amalgamation of every sad girl trope on TikTok. 

Because who really wants to read about another sad woman? Sad women rule our pop culture, sad women thrive in Fleabag, Sally Rooney novels, Taylor Swift songs and Mitski Tiktok posts. Sad women are shamed for being sad, and they are told they are annoying for being sad. It is not lost on me that the aforementioned sad girls are not Black and that my sadness is unique to my racialised experiences. I am not given the space to feel my emotions even more than a white woman who finds herself posting ‘The Worst Person in The World’ quotes on her IG story or lip-syncing to Faye Webster. The white sad girl is deemed beautiful in an ‘I Can Fix Her, Slyvia Plath, Virgin Suicides’ sense. For her, the wasting away or waif aesthetic is fetishised. She’s admired for playing into her neurotic tendencies, whereas for women like myself, even acknowledging sadness would be an ugly stain on what some would consider a beautiful face. 

In her article titled, ‘The unbearable whiteness of the 'disaffected young woman' genre’, Heven Hailie writes, “Black women are not afforded the luxury of dissociation due to the continuous cycle of racial violence we are forced to confront.”

My politics seem to conflict with dissociation. I believe myself to be a socialist or at least some sort of Marxist. I’m a feminist, and I believe that the world needs to become a better place. I believe that we should use love, care, and empathy to progress forward. That the world should not have suffering and we should all actively do better to prevent that. Does my need to shut off my brain co-exist with that? Or am I becoming the selfish individualist that I often find myself critiquing? 

Were the people before me not also self-aware? Was bell hooks not self-aware when she wrote about her life, black feminism and how we treat one another. Was Audre Lorde not self-aware, or Frantz Fanon? I am by no means comparing myself intellectually or creatively to them but I wonder if they figured out something that I’m missing. Or perhaps it is the institutions of online spaces that have made it so hard to reconcile with the awareness of your own misery and the need to do better? 

My therapist would argue that I am doing better, that in the 50 minutes we have together every week, I make progress towards finding a version of myself that isn’t fixed but at peace. Within that empty space, I am shut off from the noise of the internet. I ignore the current trends and the discourses, and I tell her about my day. And it feels refreshing, she lifts the burden of being self-aware, or post-wounded, instead, I am merely a spectator. Watching myself from afar as I’m allowing someone else to do the thinking for once. In that space, my brain is shut off, and I am enshrouded in silence. 

Editing thanks; Brooke Ross, Charlie, and Juliette Marie

For all intents and purposes, I am a hater. 

It’s post-ironic at this point to state such a thing, between the ‘let people enjoy things’ demands of media shills and the deep-rooted cynicism of film twitter spaces it feels almost cringe to admit that I love to hate things. I guess the more clear statement would be that I love to critique things, I adore breaking down the parts of a whole sum and figuring out what works for me and what doesn’t. The greatest pleasure I can gain from a piece of art is that it allows me to critically examine it without feeling as if I must dislike its entire existence. But Euphoria is not one of those pieces of art. It is the antithesis to criticism, it is the self inflated ego of a man who’s flying too close to the sun and just about misses out on burning his entire being.

I must state that I am not the only one with such a polarised take on the show, it is on everyone’s lips. To some, it’s the perfect representation of a burnt-out and hyper online teenage audience. To others, it’s simply another example of adults in Hollywood not knowing how to talk about adolescence without veering into hypersexuality. Euphoria is the American child of Skins and it is Riverdale with shots of dicks in every scene. It’s a Tumblr wet dream.

When Euphoria first appeared on my radar in 2018 I must admit that my aversion to the series stemmed from a rather shallow discomfort of sexuality as well as the supposed glamourisation of drugs. I do still believe the show engages in sexualisation, but it is not the inherent depiction of sex I now take issue with, it is the objectification of the characters. As for the depictions of drugs, I believe that whilst the show uses incredibly glamorised imagery it juxtaposes the downward spirals of addiction to show the literal highs and lows of Rue’s journey. That is as close as I will get to complimenting the show because every other aspect falls flat when you examine it more closely. 

Euphoria is Sam Levinson’s first TV show and second egregious attempt at talking about being a teenager in the modern-day. The first attempt is his directorial debut, ‘Assassination Nation’ which attempts to examine the idea of ‘what if the Salem Witch Trials occurred today’. It’s not good and frankly, I’m shocked Euphoria seems to be as level headed as it can be with that film as a predecessor. Within that film, Levinson made it clear that he has a very specific view of women, that they can either be the sexual harlot who becomes devoid of sympathy and is punished for said sexual liberation; If not then they must be sexually avoidant so they can be written as nuanced characters.

But when Levison isn’t writing films to get back at critics who disliked his meandering attempt at #feminism (Malcolm and Marie), he’s writing, directing, creating and at this point putting to sleep the baby that is Euphoria. Because god forbid anyone else touch it, nobody could dare add in any semblance of depth or coherent storytelling, otherwise, it wouldn’t be authentic enough to his worldview. You know the one where themes such as teenage Sex Work, Domestic Violence, Homophobia, Sexual Assault and so on are brought in and used purely as a topcoat for incredibly dull and at times mind-boggling character arcs. (I am aware that Hunter Schafer babysat for an episode but that’s a one-off that was not aired in either season nor did her writing seem to impact the wider themes of the second season).

Levinson falls in a long line of male directors who believe themselves to be the auteurs of their time, even down to the alleged overworking of his cast and crew.  Creatives like him assume that it is solely down to them to present the issues of a generation and that without their incredibly tiring voices topics of importance will somehow cease to be spoken about. He is this meme personified but without any of the artistic merit of a Peele or even more similarly of a Tarantino, a creative with a similar track record of misogyny and dangerous shooting practices.

However, I do believe Euphoria is the perfect show for where we exist as a culture at this current time, but please don’t assume that’s a supportive statement in any fashion. The fact I see it that way feels more like a terrifying omen if anything. Euphoria is a PBS after school special expanded into 8 episodes of terrible dialogue and unfortunately decent cinematography. But most notably the airing of Euphoria and the rise of Tiktok seem to be an almost fated occurrence. The show first came on our screens in 2019, a year after the app then known as Musical.ly was transformed into the horror show we know today as Tiktok. Euphoria is a show that seems to deflect every attempt at genuine criticism, it does not for a second pause to correct course or self reflect. Tiktok also engages in discourse in a similar format, it speaks first and thinks second.

There is something to be said about how an app such as TikTok has cornered the marketplace of critical thought. Not that this wasn’t an issue on Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube or a myriad of other online spaces, for years we have seen how the concept of criticism has been battled until its dying breath leaving us with a hollow and decrepit state of discourse. But it is specifically on this app where there seems to be no such thing as a nuanced take. This is seen most notably when you look at Euphoria and the discourse it has garnered throughout its Season 2 run. 

If you critique a show on Tiktok such as Euphoria you give yourself the kiss of death, your mentions are flooded with people demanding you retract a simple analysis on how perhaps they seem to be unfairly mad at Jules (Hunter Schafer) because they hold less grace for trans women. And you can’t mute these comments, the app doesn’t allow you to do so, in fact, it seems to gleefully allow a train of hate to come your way until you choose to abandon the app entirely until the comments move onto the next take they dislike. If I were Levinson I’d even be thankful for the platform and its mind-numbing attempts to convey his terrible writing as secretly deep and meaningful.

The cult following of the show resembles the very essence of Levinson’s creative practice. They too believe that the gravitas of nudity is some deep underlying commentary on misogyny. If you state that there is a lack of nuance involved in the depiction of Cassie’s (Sydney Sweeney) choice to engage in an affair with her best friend’s ex-boyfriend, you are told that you’re in defence of choosing a white woman over a woman of colour (Alexa Demie), even though Levinson has never overtly commented on the racial dynamics of the characters in the show. If you say that Kat (Barbie Ferreira) has been sidelined and that perhaps attempting to engage in a body positivity storyline whilst diminishing a fat actress’s involvement is somewhat harmful, you are told that “well actually he meant to do this and it’ll all make sense next season”.

For every criticism, there is a deflection, and I’d be lying if I pretend as if this hasn’t always been the case when it comes to rabid fandoms and their lack of critical analysis for the media they engage with. However, for some reason, this show has reached levels that I have never seen before and that does worry me. How is the show enjoyable if you spend every waking moment defending its poor choices and god awful shooting practices? Is it worth watching something if you have to make thread long tweets trying to convey what Sam was going for because he simply was unable to do so himself? 

Perhaps I ask that not only to you but also to myself as someone who still watches the show, it’s a trainwreck I can’t seem to avert my eyes from and week to week I find myself engrossed with the delirious spectacle of it all. Am I simply part of the problem if I continue to watch, write and talk about the show? Or am I serving some greater purpose that I envision myself to have as a critic and someone who loves television? 

When I think of the landscape of media at the moment and its relationship to criticism I think of a piece written by my dear friend Charlie, called In Defence of Critique: Let People Enjoy Not Enjoying Things. In the piece she states;

“When our media landscape is inextricable from capital, we move through the messaging and ideology of monopolized capitalism even as passive witness. To look is to love, it is the quality of being thoughtful that allows us to perceive the pain and pleasure in the sights and sounds around us. And so we need critique, we need criticism, and we need to want to be observant, careful, and patient. These things elevate culture and more importantly elevate discourse, perhaps with time moving us away from a pithy liberal presentation of marketable representation and into a fluid, poetic, multifaceted cultural consciousness.”

Perhaps this is what we should take from the trainwreck that is Euphoria.

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