// Recently Found This Bengali Song - "ami Shunechhi Shedin" Which Would Literally Translate To I Heard

// recently found this bengali song - "ami shunechhi shedin" which would literally translate to I heard that day (one day)

I wish I could do justice to the beauty of the lyrics if I translated them to english but so much of it would be lost in translation.

The part that really struck me was ' I heard that you still dream ... the saga of human existence still makes you think... Only emptiness in the depth of my eyes , there're no dreams in my eyes".

There's such a haunting melancholy in the song, especially if I consider the protagonist to be a middle aged person who's struggling with being disillusioned with life and it's meaning, in contrast to the vibrancy and hopefulness of youth as she questions how's she's reached the stage she's currently in as the song refrains out with " To dream I opened my eyes/arms towards you".

// collection of memories project

I don't say this enough but I really write for the young queer and trans desi kids here who reblog my poetry and stories and moodboards and share their own stories. You are very brave and very loved and extremely resilient for existing in a country like ours, in a time like ours, when literally every day I open the newspaper or go online and see some horrific tragedy about some queer Indian kid who deserved the world and instead ended up without the help they deserved. Like even a few years ago, when I was in Catholic school in Kolkata, we– may be five or six queer girls–stuck together and had it BAD, and now seeing baby trans and queer desis in my inbox all being happy and camping out and calling me an older sibling is. Well. It's a lot. It makes me emotional. I mean, I was in first year of college when section 377 got repealed. So.

I know social media doesn't make it any easier to exist in the world as a non white, non western gay in the global South, with the constant guilt tripping rhetoric in online queer spaces that goes like "why don't you visit your local queer bar and maybe you'll know what REAL lesbians/gays looks like" but like I promise you!!! you'll be happy someday and you don't have to chase after a distant metropolitan/Euramerican dream and feel helpless without it!!! I promise you you'll find love and community, and I promise you you'll get the life you deserve!!! your worth isn't measured in how queer a lifestyle you lead by western visibility standards!!! Please keep being hopeful, and proudly yourselves, you're all brilliant young people.

It is a cruel and fundamentally inhuman tragedy that the culture has convinced so many of us that we must be healed in isolation, because being surrounded by people — people who love us, or care for us, or are willing to sit in the same room with us while we clean up our messes — is about the only way that I, for one, have ever been able to get better. I am lucky enough to have been changed again and again and again by the people who have loved me or challenged me; I look back at the person I was at eighteen and I hardly recognize her, which feels like a miracle and a tragedy all at once. Standing between me and my younger self are a thousand different individual experiences of failure and growth and redemption, each a moment of excruciating vulnerability being witnessed by the very people I wish could only see me at my best. It’s driven me to isolate myself, convinced that ritualistic self-punishment and pathetic martyrdom were the only ways I could ever make myself worthy of other people. I realized, though, that I was being a coward. Being alone is hard, to be sure, but it’s also deceptively easy — it requires nothing of us.

People, on the other hand, challenge us. They infuse our life with stakes. You can hurt a friend or partner or lose them forever if you refuse vulnerability or reject growth — the same cannot be said of a therapist, for instance, which makes them far safer companions. Therapy, while genuinely beneficial in many forms, has started to become homogenized in the personal-wellness zeitgeist as a kind of resume-builder for the self; a box to check off on the way towards becoming a hyper-functional young professional in life and love. “I only date people who go to therapy” has become a nearly unavoidable refrain in dating app bios and viral tweets. Many of us conspicuously signal our enrollment in therapy in order to make ourselves more viable candidates for love and friendship — to show, again, that we are doing the work that will make us worthy of salvation. If you go once a week, pay $200 a session, scribble in the worksheets, have the tough conversations, and Do The Work, perhaps you can come out the other side clean and clear, unblemished by uncontrollable emotion or idiosyncrasy or errant needs. It’s a satisfying transaction, to be sure — one that gives people the quantifiable markers for success that form the fundamental currency of capitalist society.

I’m not trying to discount the genuine benefits that therapy can provide. A good therapist really can help you notice your blind spots, recognize and process your emotions, and build healthier relationships, and I know many people who have reaped great benefits from therapy. My problem is the positioning of a one-size-fits-all solution as the only way to become a good, functional, whole person — and the idea that one must be “whole” in order to love or be loved.

no good alone, rayne fisher-quann

Amrita Sher-Gil - Sumair (1936)

// a case for cats in mumbai