People talk about feeling a pull from the ocean: its call, their response, and a splendid union. I can’t say I’ve felt the same. My pull comes from within, it is manic and obsessive. Every other thought is suffocated by my desperation for submersion. Returning to the water is a compulsion.
Browsing: Perspective
The lowest point of the run comes as the 5km point looms: we are once again crossing Cumberland St and ascending the stairs towards the Harbour Bridge. I curse the Unofficial run club and all its future generations.
Whilst people may reach for an Arnott’s Kingston, or a Scotch Finger, I’ll always be reaching for a Ginger Nut.
I love being Indonesian, but when I ask myself the question if it was worth hiding my queer identity to be accepted, I still grapple over the many intricacies of what it means to be Indonesian.
There was so much work to even sign up for the app that downloading it felt like a feverish farce. I was curious if I made it onto the app, would I even see any “celebrities”, and could I even hold my own as a “non-celebrity.”
I also know my mother married young. She became a mother long before she was able to become herself. I worry that everything my mother loves, she loves as a mother.
“You get up and comb your oppression and exploitation every morning.”
From an insider’s perspective, the rampant misogyny is something that I’ve been exposed to since a child. As a person born female, from an early age you are told what your place is as a woman.
My brown identity is either on exhibit, a tool to exoticize my conceptual framework, or something pushed to the back of storage for when it isn’t required to be gazed upon.
Being a JD student can be a particularly sobering experience — being in a tight-knit cohort again feels eerily reminiscent of high school. The other day, a friend of mine mouthed to himself at a quiet moment in the Law Annex corridor “I had a job… Why am I back here?”
