Kathyayini

“i have this productivity anxiety
that everyone else is working harder than me
and i’m going to be left behind
cause i’m not working fast enough
long enough
and i’m wasting my time

i don’t sit down to have breakfast
i take it to go
i call my mother when i’m free—otherwise
it takes too long to have a conversation

i put off everything that
won’t bring me closer to my dreams
as if the things i’m putting off
are not the dream themselves

isn’t the dream
that i have a mother to call
and a table to eat breakfast at

instead i’m lost in the sick need
to optimize every hour of my day
so i’m improving in some way
making money in some way
advancing my career in some way
because that’s what it takes
to be successful
right

i excavate my life
package it up
sell it to the world
[...]

capitalism got inside my head
and made me think my only value
is how much i produce
for people to consume
capitalism got inside my head
and made me think
i am of worth
as long as i am working

i learned impatience from it
i learned self-doubt from it
learned to plant seeds in the ground
and expect flowers the next day

but magic
doesn’t work like that
magic doesn’t happen
cause i’ve figured out how to
pack more work in a day
magic moves
by the laws of nature
and nature has its own clock
magic happens
when we play
when we escape
daydream and imagine
that’s where everything
with the power to fulfill us
is waiting on its knees for us

- productivity anxiety”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

“She did not want to see hope in his eyes. She wanted him to be a monster. But monsters were for children.”
― Katherine Arden, The Winter of the Witch

“In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was—how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.”
― Emily Ratajkowski, My Body

“i miss the days my friends
knew every mundane detail about my life
and i knew every ordinary detail about theirs
adulthood has starved me of that consistency
that us
the walks around the block
the long conversations when we were
too lost in the moment to care what time it was
when we won and celebrated
when we failed and celebrated harder
when we were just kids
now we have our very important jobs
that fill up our very busy schedules
we compare calendars just to plan coffee dates
that one of us eventually cancels
cause adulthood is being too exhausted
to leave our apartment most days
i miss knowing i once belonged
to a group of people bigger than myself
that belonging made life easier to live

- friendship nostalgia”
― Rupi Kaur, Home Body