hm sometimes i wish i was one of those people who moves thousands of miles away and never looks back and has a ton of adventures unmoored from their past and where they’re from but i can’t help looking back and i’m deeply, fervently defined by every person, thing, or place i’ve ever loved

She’s a 10 but she lives off of academic validation while simultaneously procrastinating like she’s been promised immortality

james baldwin was right. one day i’ll weep for this. one of these days i’ll start to cry. 

maybe there is no best version of myself. just me, right now, vulnerable and tired and hopeful, willing to show up regardless of what it looks like.

“I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time — indulging in a sort of chronic disgust at everything & everybody —”

— Virginia Woolf, from The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf; Selected Diaries (via violentwavesofemotion)

“you’re so pretty,” okay write poetry about me then.

defend my thesis? like with a sword?

I know this is just people complaining on the internet but god the increasing trend of treating all media and art as only sth to be consumed as escapism that makes you feel good and never as a means of conveying a message or expressing a feeling or sharing a idea is such a destructive and consumerist way to view art. anything challenging and unfamiliar is Scary and Bad, better to just watch another formulaic franchised spinoff bc that's Safe And Comforting

“Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.”

— Sharon Olds, from “September 2001: New York City,” in Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

“But then it passed, as all things do.”

— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed

from why poetry can be hard for most people by dorothea lasky, published in rome

[Text ID: why poetry can be hard for most people. because speaking to the dead is not something you want to do. /End ID]

dark academia is when you have to read the crustiest pdf known to man

why don’t you read a poem about the sunrise written 5 centuries ago and contemplate the fact that we have been writing about the same sun for centuries upon centuries and then maybe you’ll calm down

I find it funny that it is widely believed that the dark academia phenomenon was born on tiktok. Maybe I'm too old now (even though I'm not) and I'm starting to think like bitter old people who observe the changes around them and stubbornly can’t accept them? I remember when dark academia reigned supreme on tumblr, when we used to read, watch, listen, take photos and share it all while getting deeper and deeper into the dark corridors. Years later, I get the strong impression that we were doing it tired of the world around us growing so fast - a reality that was slipping more and more out of our hands, that was harder and harder to keep up with. We were just kids on the internet sharing sad quotes and "aesthetic" photos on our blogs. Dark academia was some sort of universe to escape to after a hard day. Something along the lines of video games. Today, dark academia is a negation of everything it originally carried with it. Once again, tiktok has appropriated it as an online aesthetic and subculture to spend more money, to pressure others to spend more money; to make certain demands and set the bars. The moment dark academia went beyond tumblr, it automatically ceased to be this imaginary universe, created for fun, and became a capitalist game. 

I hate that I'm taking this tone, but it's hard for me to stop myself. After all, tumblr has always been a place where you can be mad, sad, happy all you want, without the specter of being cancelled. Ok, we're anonymous here, but most of us are also total individuals who don’t care too much about this platform besides our own blog. So yeah, I'm disappointed that dark academia reigns supreme on tiktok, and stores are starting to have special "dark academia fashion" tabs. I guess the only positive aspect of this is that it only raises the discussion of eurocentrism and elitism in literature and filmography that is identified with dark academia. Now that it has gone out into the real world some of the items in the "dark academia syllabus" can have negative effects if approached uncritically. And we all know how critically one approaches things on tiktok....

I've always wanted to complain about it a little bit. Am I alone in this? Do I sound pathetic and oh god - like a boomer? I just hate tiktok SO MUCH. And I used to love dark academia, SO MUCH. 

sorry i’m late, professor. im disenchanted with the human experience and waking up every morning thrusts me into an instant existential crisis

Psyche Weeping, Kinuko Y. Craft I Ophelia, Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser