What a week this has been. This has to be the absolute dumbest timeline in history. The world has seen its share of horrors, but we might be living in the most profoundly stupid timeline since Adam and Eve. Not the most violent, not the most tragic. The dumbest.

Every Sunday that I wake up still semi-sane, not yet driven to bang my head against a wall, I count it as a victory. Another week endured under a ruling class that is both comically clueless and disturbingly violent.

This week’s collection hit me for exactly that reason: the combination of an absurd, comical display — paired with a total disregard for human life beyond one’s own circle.

Why do I do this to myself? A stranger on Instagram asked me today: ”How’s your mental health with all this? You seem to process so much news, and then you write about it, to contextualize it all. Serious question: what do you do to keep sane and normal?” I was startled, as no one usually asks me how my mental health is — honestly, I’m just on a loop, churning out information without thinking about the cost to my body or psyche.

Writing is not passive.

I remembered a bit I wrote this year for a magazine that featured a piece on me:

Today, writing is not passive; it’s a labor of witnessing in real time, documenting fractures as they form, refusing erasure, and standing inside history while it unfolds, rather than explaining it safely after the fact.

It’s nauseating. Every day. Not just for writers, but for every single person posting bits and pieces on social media, trying to awaken the masses, sharing the atrocities, and hoping accountability finally reaches the perpetrators.

To everyone choosing to live on the inside of this grotesque timeline, witnessing it so it can be documented, choosing clarity over comfort — I know the price of your clarity. We’re not on the front lines; our loved ones aren’t dying. Yes, we’re privileged, and we got the better end of the stick, but we still need to acknowledge we’re part of it. Because the seed for revolting must come from us. People in America. People in the West.

Holding the truth without letting it hold you hostage.

I read something great today. This is how I help myself, and try to help others: I find sources, other writers and creators who have uncovered something, and bring it back to the community. It’s about clarity, knowledge, passing the information. I look for it, I share it. My articles heal me as much as they might heal my readers. This is how I cope — by documenting everything.

I will give you a source for this at the end of this article. Read it:

Everyone talks about waking up. Nobody talks about what comes after, when you see how deep it goes, and you still have to show up to your life, pay bills, talk to people who think the news is real. The worst part isn’t knowing, it’s knowing and having nowhere to put it.

And here’s what happens to most people who start seeing clearly: the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and an existential one. When you understand the scale of what’s happening, the manipulation, the layers, your cortisol spikes every single day, that’s not enlightenment, that’s a trauma response. Can seeing the truth actually break you?

About this past week.

What is it about this past week that had me specifically irked about this timeline forced on us? It’s the accumulation, the totality of it all.

It’s the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that offered us a visual into the most grotesque nature of the U.S. administration. The ducking under the tables with the phones in their hands, everyone with an agenda of their own, with a supposed active shooter in the building. What in The Garden of Earthly Delights was that?

It’s Erica Kirk doing her bit in front of the perfectly positioned camera, followed by an appearance on a podcast, complaining about rumors of killing her husband while dressed as a sniper.

It’s Pete Hegseth testifying before a US House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, grifting lawmakers for another $1.5 trillion in military spending, not answering one single question he is elected to answer, while parroting but what about Ukraine, but what about October 7, but what about the Islamic regime for hours on end.

It’s someone in the White House pressing send on Trump’s messianic, self-mythologizing memes, every hour of every day.

It’s Trump giving a statement about the Iranians “who executed three young people for protesting” the same year ICE executed Renee Good, Alex Preti, and Keith Porter.

It’s about IDF militarily attacking the twenty-two Global Sumud Flotilla ships off the coast of Italy and Greece, kidnapping and beating activists to the pulp, without a word of condemnation from one single government in the European Community.

It’s the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Warren Goldstein, publicly stating that “Pope Leo has blood on his hands” for criticising the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon, and not respecting the “noble and brave soldiers of the State of Israel,” the actual people, with actual blood, on their actual hands.

It’s Bibi Netanyahu going on air to tell the world Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian community is thriving, while we’re watching an Israeli settler punch a French nun, kicking her with his feet, after he knocked her down.

It’s about Michael Jackson being exploited and repurposed by the same people who took him out, now, in death, when he’s not a damger to their system anymore.

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I reached the end of the news. I do not know where to go anymore with all this. I do not know where to store it anymore.

As I reached a proverbial wall this week, watching this grotesque display of human rot suffocate everything sane and civilized, I came across a media platform called The End of News, and their bio validated every bone in my body:

Reporting from the frontlines of civilization’s descent into stupidity. Perspectives on the news from the dumbest timeline imaginable.

If you need to watch one thing this Sunday night, let it be this video, and this reporter’s perspective on the news from the dumbest timeline imaginable.

“Oh no, someone tried to shoot the president again, just as his poll numbers are tanking, oh no, what a coincidence. Everything he touches, everyone he surrounds himself with are fake. Fake lips, fake tits, fake gold, fake pools, fake Bible verses, for crying out loud. False promises to voters. False prophets in his cabinets. False flags for the cameras. No one cares anymore. And maybe that’s the point, I don’t know, not to convince you of anything, not to win; just to make reality so exhausting. So exhausting to hold onto, that we just give in and play along.”

The truth doesnt set you free, it tests you.

What happens when the illusion cracks, but life keeps going like nothing changed? When patterns appear everywhere, trust dissolves, and the people around you still believe the script? Do you go back to sleep — or risk losing yourself trying to hold a truth no one else sees?

This question is asked by a profile on Instagram called Daily Conspiracy Peter X. Don’t let the name fool you; this profile offers some of the best investigative research on crucial events I’ve come across. The excerpt I quote in this article comes from their think tank, and you need to absorb it.

Check this out:

“I see patterns everywere now, in the news, in history and people I used to trust and I genuinely don’t know what to do with that. That’s what nobody warned you about. Everyone talks about waking up. Nobody talks about what comes after when you see how deep it goes and you still have to show up to your life pay bills talk to people who think the news is real. The worst part isn’t knowing it’s knowing and having nowhere to put it.

And here’s what happens to most people who start seeing clearly, the nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a physical threat and an existential one. When you understand the scale of what’s happening, the manipulation, the layers, your cortisol spikes every single day, that’s not enlightenment, that’s a trauma response.

So seeing the truth can actually break you?

It breaks most people one of two ways. They go back to sleep - comfort over clarity. Or they spiral, consumed, angry, isolated, losing relationships, losing themselves. Both are traps, and a person who sees everything but can’t function is just as controllable as someone who sees nothing. Actually more useful to the system. Exhausted and alone is a great look for someone you want neutralized.

Knowing the cage exists doesn’t free you. Losing your mind inside it definitely doesn’t either.”

Are we there yet? Has the seed of a real, physical revolution taken root? What exactly are we waiting for?

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For the past two years, like anyone with a talent for words and a functioning conscience, I wrote about power. I wrote about wars, genocides, cruelty, violence, and the cost of bearing witness. That cost was high for me. I lost myself in the process. I became a shell of a human being — waking up every day to frantically research the latest atrocity that had happened while I slept, taking notes, consuming, sourcing, reliving it in my bones so I could put it on paper and pass the information on. I haven’t slept properly in two years; I was napping, researching, writing — rinse, repeat.

I stopped writing about myself, and in doing so, I stopped examining myself. I stopped caring for myself. I stopped examining the world; the art, music, and craft I had loved and written about for most of my life.

Live genocide, streamed daily on our phones, paralyzed me.

How do you write about your life, culture, movies, film, books, relationships, love, and tell all these beautiful stories while children are being shredded to pieces?

Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I was blocked, and I was angry at my government for telling me this is normal. I have been researching, taking notes, saving, listening, reading, taking more notes, writing, and reporting on what I have learned to others, to the level of mental and physical exhaustion that became my constant. My permanent state.

I’m proud of what I have built on Antagolist and how many of you use it as a guideline, and a source of information, a take, an opinion, a breakdown, through these violent times. I have built a community of great people whom I discovered throughout this injustice — and if you are one of them reading this now, I’m grateful for you and our dialogues about dignity, community, and liberation. You keep me sane.

I won’t stop dismantling these systems with my words.

What I realized, though, is that I gave myself so fully to the work of breaking down the house of cards that funds and sustains such violence that I lost myself in the process. For the past two years, I felt as though I were outside my body, looking in — waiting for the nightmare to end so I could return to myself. And to my life.

I think it’s clear to all of us that this won’t be ending anytime soon. The atrocities keep piling up, growing bolder and more blatant, and by now we’ve learned how to live with a permanent fight-or-flight mode switched on.

Joy is resistance.

Around Thanksgiving, my Canadian friend told me to watch this new Canadian show, Heated Rivalry. I instantly said no. I removed the TV from my room so I could focus on writing and didn’t have time or focus to binge-watch anything. I had too many unfinished articles to work on and barely made time as it is.

But she insisted. Life-changing, she said.

For the past two years, I haven’t been able to write about anything beyond the constant stream of injustice, death, and manufactured narratives. There was no room left for anything else while mass suffering played out in real time, normalized and justified before our eyes.

I kept waiting for something, anything, that could pull me out of that paralysis, disrupt the despair, and remind me why storytelling still matters. But for a long time, nothing did.

I never imagined that the antidote to two years of genocide, permanent war, propaganda, and political decay would be two men fucking their way toward love.

I didn’t seek out this show for comfort. I wasn’t in the mood to be softened. I was exhausted, like everyone else, bracing for the next headline confirming how bad things were getting (are).

But it touched me. It sobered me up. It woke me up.

Love as counter-programming.

What caught me off guard wasn’t the mind-blowingly realistic depiction of sex turned into romance. It was the relief of realizing my nervous system hadn’t been lying to me all along — that I still knew the difference between something real and something manufactured.

We’re told, day after day, to accept stories that don’t match what we can see. That violence is unfortunate but necessary. That dissent is dangerous. That empathy is naive. That obedience is patriotism.

It’s all bullshit. They drained the joy out of us, and joy is resistance. Tenderness is resistance. They bombarded us with so much violence and cruelty that we began to accept it as a permanent state. The depravity they hurl at us daily is what numbs us, turning us into shells of human beings.

This little Canadian low-budget show snapped us all out of this despair.

Storytelling as recalibration.

Much of today’s culture is built for speed and profit. Stories are made to be easy to consume, not to stay with us. When everything is built on narrative, honest narrative becomes insurgent.

That is why a love story between two hockey players can matter more than a thousand prestige dramas engineered to launder power. That is why we all responded so intensely to something that simply feels honest. And that is why this show landed so precisely, and landed now — not as escape, but as recalibration.

It reminds us all how truth feels in the body.

Staying sane in this time of absolute, unchecked power, cruelty, injustice, and lawlessness means learning how to see clearly without being consumed by what we see. This moment isn’t asking for panic, but for coherence. And staying sane means filling your body with joy — music, craft, art, all the beauty life can still offer, despite the depravity we’re subjected to.

Returning to myself.

I have been exceptionally joyful these past two months, even as I continue to feel the cruelty we’re subjected to every day. I continue to witness the unabashed violence our government commits at home and abroad, analyze it, and write about it — but I counter it with JOY. I make sure to take in enough beautiful things to remain human, capable of feeling happiness, desire, love, lust, wonder, curiosity, kindness, and tenderness.

And it healed me.

I have more clarity and more strength to fight the unchecked power more precisely than ever before.

And I want to continue on this new (normal) path. I opened a Patreon account to start writing about myself again — unrestricted, unstructured trains of thought that help me examine my own consciousness and reclaim my truth.

I want to return to writing about the beautiful things that keep us human — the films I love to watch, the music I listen to, the books I read. I want to talk about love, real or on screen, about connection and self-examination. I want to laugh, to be joyful and silly. And I wholeheartedly reject letting the psychopaths in power turn me into a shell of the person I was for two years straight.

Staying true to yourself and your humanity, despite the horrors being committed in the world, is the greatest act of resistance and a middle finger to those trying to make you unfeeling.

Join me in this space.

William Faulkner once said that the only thing worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Whether we’re examining the real or the fictional, the truth is the same. Fiction is written from someone’s lived experience. And in a world that makes less and less sense, where violence is committed unchecked, where power toys with us through its depravity, the only thing that truly makes sense is connection with another human being.

The only thing that fully and absolutely makes sense, and is worth living for, is love.

And I, for one, want to exist in that space.

Hope you share it with me.

Head out to my Patreon, and subscribe — it’s going to be my personal space, a platform where I’ll be writing about us, me and you, and all the beautiful, joyous things still happening in this world.

I’ll also be sharing excerpts from my book (still in progress), as well as essays that will be published as part of an essay collection — all centered on love, acceptance, desire, and self-examination.

Antagolist will, as always, continue to interrogate power — examining the structures that shape our politics and our culture, and remaining a space for analysis, refusal, and the reclaiming of reality.

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Hi, folks. Three weeks into 2026, and wow. Checking in on you, and myself in the process. The first few days of the new year, along with the 2025 holiday season, felt promising.

What a beautiful thing it was to wake up on New Year’s Day and celebrate the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani — the joy, the hope, the inclusivity, the clarity of both the man and the message, all sprinkled with confetti as the final words were spoken, coming right after the high of a Heated Rivalry Christmas.

The year started strong, and we’ll hold on to that hope no matter what. Anything else would be capitulating to power — and we’re not the bending kind. Unless we choose to bend for things far more pleasurable than letting the government fuck us in the ass.

Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high on my Mayor / Cottage crossover, and I foolishly believed we might have a chance of catching a breath.

And after two years of struggling to find my own sense of meaning, living in a country in perpetual decline, I was determined not to let 2026 be taken from me in the same way.

No can do, said the crime syndicate, pretending to be your government.

Only three days into the new year, and it’s already Grand Theft Venezuela — snatching presidents of foreign, sovereign countries to steal their resources, all in service of attacking another, bigger, badder enemy that threatens the ethnostate we’ve been propping up since 1948.

Only two weeks into the new year, and it’s the Israelization of the U.S. in full swing — IDF, sorry, my bad — ICE shooting citizens on the street, taking out nurses documenting violence and cruelty.

Bearing witness.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being a writer today — one that has nothing to do with motivation or creative block. It is the exhaustion of bearing witness. The cost of it.

When you just consume information, you read it, possibly share it — and it leaves you. I take that back: if you have a strong moral compass, it never fully leaves you. But you don’t have to sit inside it the way someone does who has to live in it — who has to stay with it long enough to research it, source it, and write about it.

And bearing witness, in this moment, is not a passive act. It is an active, grinding labor carried out in a world that produces suffering faster than it can be processed.

Frends, I’m exhausted.

This is not the fatigue of consuming news. It is the fatigue of carrying it. Witnessing without pause, of being unable to look away because looking away feels like moral failure, yet looking directly feels like erosion.

By the time you finish researching one atrocity, another one has already replaced it. By the time you shape a sentence to honor the dead, the algorithm has already moved on.

Seven million pieces of information a day. This is the reality of writing now. Not writing as commentary. But writing as moral documentation.

Your anger is needed.

The other day, I received a message from someone I know. She told me she appreciates everything I’ve been doing for the past two years — posting, writing, informing people about the genocide in Palestine, U.S. aggression around the world, and ICE violence at home.

Then she added that I don’t seem as angry as I used to. That it looks like I’m able to enjoy other things too, not just write about constant violence.

I think it’s your turn to be angry — I responded. For the past two years, she never said a word about a livestreamed genocide and shared my story about it twice.

For the past two years, many of us have been saying this clearly — If you stay silent about Palestine, the violence will come home. The same government that funds genocide abroad will use the same tools here.

You didn’t listen.

You thought what was happening to the Palestinian people was far away. Someone else’s problem. Not connected to your life. But now you’re seeing those same tactics used here, at home, in the U.S.

And now you’re angry. Now you want me to be angrier, too.

I already saw the worst things human beings can do to each other. I saw children’s limbs blown apart. I saw suffering that most people chose to scroll past.

You feel angrier than I do right now because you turned away when brown bodies were being destroyed. Now, when violence reaches people who look like you, it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever seen.

For me, it isn’t.

Bearing witness for two years — really bearing witness — cost me my health, my sanity, my sense of self. That’s the price of not looking away.

So yes. It’s your turn to be angry now. Feel it. Sit with it. Carry the weight yourself.

Connection has always been there. Palestine trained us to watch horror, scroll past it, and keep going — so that when violence shows up here, it doesn’t shock us anymore.

Your anger is needed now.

My anger is spent.

Writing in the violent world.

There will always be more suffering than you can document. More injustice than you can expose. More violence than you can contextualize. The work is not to capture everything — it is to refuse the lie that nothing can be captured truthfully.

This is why writing today feels less like creation and more like triage.

And maybe that is what it means to be a writer now: not a commentator on history, but a recorder of its fractures while they are still forming. Not someone who explains the world after the fact, but someone who stands inside it while it burns and refuses to pretend the fire is normal.

Writing in this moment is an act of defiance against erasure.

If this work feels unbearable, it is because it is being done correctly.

Despite all, the work continues. Not because it is rewarded — it often isn’t. Not because it is sustainable — it often isn’t. But because bearing witness is not optional for those who understand what silence protects.

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I was never one of those people who enjoyed this day. New Year’s Eve, what is it for? I don’t even recall what I did last year, did I go somewhere, did I do anything, or stayed home — this is not a new thing for me. I’ve never been one for joiner activities or organized cheer. I like to be joyful when I want to be, not when someone tells me I should be; Palm Leaves by Bukowski always felt like my New Year’s Eve manifesto.

I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers –
their gaiety, their happiness
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…

New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me

New Year’s Eve doesn’t terrify me like Charles, but people who see today as anything else but the 452nd day of genocide terrify me. I tried to wake up today and give you some hopeful words, but they just escape me. There’s a reason no one sane posted any plans, wishes, goals, or aspirations for 2025; what can we expect from an incoming year when the one we’re leaving behind gave us a million heartbreaks?

I have nothing for you today, but this, I don’t know how to be in this world anymore. I don’t know how to handle the world when even babies frozen to death cannot draw any sympathy from the people who are trying to make space for their own children; over small, white, frozen wraps of someone else’s children. That is if they even find the wrap to tie them in, or if there’s anyone left to wrap them. What does it matter, they already froze?

How do you live in the world where the notoriously Zionist Twitter account writes —“Also, it’s in the 50/60 degrees in Gaza, not exactly freezing weather” below pictures of a frozen baby?

I read someone saying today - “Most days it feels like as though Earth began spinning on a different axis and I’m the only one who noticed and when I turn to the person next to me and ask if they too felt the weight of the planet shift, they reply what planet?” — I don’t know how to be in this world anymore, I don’t know how to look at people, I don’t know how to get out of my house and face them, hear them, I’m afraid of what they might tell me and I’m not ready for a thousand new heartbreaks.

I read someone saying today “Everything I thought I knew about the world and everyone in it was a mirage”—how do we do it, how do we step into 2025?

Every time I step outside my house that isn’t mine, I look at people’s faces and wonder—do they know what’s happening? Do they care? Do they wake up like I do, scrolling into the abyss—numb, angry, briefly hopeful, but mostly defeated—waiting for someone, anyone, to stop this? Why do I still feel like a child, waiting for an adult to make it right?

There are no adults, we are the adults, and that makes this world even scarier, it’s us, we are in charge; what are we doing? No one to blame. I go through the motions every day, trying to find the smallest instances of happiness, joy; any meaning, just any, give me any meaning—and there isn’t any; waking up is hard, what is the point of all—then I see a one decent person saying something, seeing what I see and I feel a glimpse of hope that only cheats me into surviving each day.

My friend asks me “Why are you so involved in this, why do you care about the Middle East, are you planning to get an Arab husband” and I say no, I haven’t gotten any such plans, I just don’t want them to die, and the sigh of relief when he heard me say it sends me into a tailspin.

Who are these people, and how did they come to be my friends? I blame myself. I’m repulsed for ever thinking these people are more than what they are; I read someone saying today “The greatest contempt of all I reserve for myself for ever thinking we were anything more than we are, for ever believing in even an ounce of the mythology we drench ourselves in. What a dumb bitch.”

What a dumb bitch.

I call my family and all I can talk about is the politics of a geocode, I make them tired, worn out from my constant rhetoric that just cannot let this go, so I pretend to care about things I don’t care about, and pretend I do things I haven’t done in 15 months; I tell them about a piece of clothing I bought, trying to mask as a normal, superficial human who’s not intense, so I tell them about a new sweatshirt I bought, it’s 100 % Cotton Terry, extremely hard to find, while thinking to myself if that sweatshirt is “the appropriate item of clothing to wear when the world is crumbling”?

I go through the motions of life, all that’s required, pretending for people who need me to be a functional human being. It comes easy for me, my neurodiversity trained me to mask every single day; I do it so well, it’s like a choreography I got down to the tee.

I can’t remember many details about my life, or the last names, sometimes even the first names of the people I know. But Hind Rajab, Sidra Hassouna, Shaban al-Dalou, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, Refaat Alareer, Khalad Nabhan, and Reem, a soul of his soul—why are these names engraved in my mind? Will I ever in my life again sit down for food and not think about these names, will I be able to stretch in the morning and not see the images of their shredded limbs while I stretch mine?

I read someone saying today they feel “Contempt for all of the institutions for whom ethnic cleansing is the second-worst thing that could happen; the worst thing is controversy”. Controversy, what a peculiar word. People who slaughter children in Gaza, then travel to New York to stroll around 5th Avenue are less controversial than me who can’t ever walk down the same avenue without looking at all the faces passing me by, thinking which one blew people up with his or her iPad, while passing me by.

I’m contemplating going to a movie theater today, I haven’t been in a long while, they say Babygirl is good, a story about someone played by Nicole Kidman who falls for a much younger guy; hardcore they say, very steamy, soft porn like even, and I feel like I should go and see it, rather than endure small talk about a prosperous 2025 from people who, when you say the planet feels off its axis, ask what planet?

Love is the only thing that makes sense to me in this screwed-up world, people have always said this—it’s the only thing that truly makes sense and I didn’t believe them; I have a strange rapport with love. Lust is what keeps me going, what is love exactly? No one I had asked ever knew how to define it properly; I love my sister, that’s love, I love a few people, that’s also love—but how is it the same feeling as entering a room with a hundred people and seeing that one person in the sea of others, just that one person among all those on earth who alters you?

Lust is a pathway, it’s how I measure love. We've all experienced lust and passion beyond reason, where you know you can't, but you absolutely have to. It demands from you. It militates you.

This world didn’t become screwed up now, overnight, we just see it now. Nothing is new about the establishment exploiting people who go to wars for the ruling class, billionaires, and oligarchs; we always did, only before they were called Monarchs, Dukes, and the aristocracy. Regular people always bleed for someone else’s causes and money—we just didn’t see it on our phones, and we believed all the myths.

What a dumb bitch, we all were.

“The greatest contempt of all I reserve for myself for ever thinking we were anything more than we are, for ever believing in even an ounce of the mythology we drench ourselves in. What a dumb bitch.”

I don’t know how to be in this world, seeing what we have seen. I have no answers. I only find hope in history; this is what the world has always been, and being in the dark about or knowing about it doesn’t change what the world has always been. Just our awareness of it.

I don’t know how to be in this world right now.

But what I do know is that 2025 is the year when the phrase “new year, new you” finally holds meaning. You've said it countless times before, but you weren’t the new you. You did the same shit as the year prior. Nothing about you was new.

This year, after everything you’ve witnessed over the past 15 months, and that feeling you experienced during this holiday season, is quite literally you shedding your skin. The horror you feel when you see the images on your phone, the realization of a world that tolerates it, and the sensation that you’re going insane—have altered you. You can’t ever go back to who you were.

That feeling you have today, the one we all share, the gut-wrenching nausea—it’s the new you being born. A new you who isn’t naive anymore, no longer consumed by myths about the people around you, your friends, or the world in general. You get it now. Embrace the terrors and horrors you feel.

Let them change you. Be that new you in 2025.

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I wasn’t planning to travel this year. My summers are usually spent in Europe with my family, but lately, any sense of joy has taken a backseat to the horrors unfolding in this world. Not just the livestreamed genocide currently happening in Gaza, but the entire West funding, supporting, and justifying it—while preaching morality and the importance of a rules-based order to the world. To me, that is as horrific as the mangled bodies themselves.

The world feels so apocalyptic right now, and planning trips felt like an exhausting task I couldn't handle. All I could muster this past year was waking up, checking my phone, staring in disbelief, researching, posting, eating if necessary, and hunching over the screen—waiting for some miracle to stop this. Then, rinse and repeat the next day.

I've never been on vacation during an active genocide. Can it even be called a vacation, going home? Or is it more like wandering around, questioning why I get to enjoy the land I was born into while others must bleed for it?

Unwell.

I wasn’t doing well, watching children get slaughtered on my screen for over a year now. But why do we keep saying women and children as if male adulthood somehow makes death more acceptable? Do we need to push children into the narrative to spark sympathy for an entire nation being erased before our eyes?

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My family and a few intuitive friends, who see beyond the surface of someone’s life, have noticed that I’m scrambling. Being a writer means spending days and weeks on research, which involves confronting the atrocities being committed against the entire population every minute of my day. I’m constantly entrenched in what’s happening in Palestine. I can’t escape it.

Being neurodivergent doesn’t help—I live other people’s pain as if it were my own.

Gaza also made me despise legacy media. Legacy—what a grandiose moniker for something so ugly and deceptive. I’m devastated by how complicit they are in this genocide. The magazines I once adored, admired, and dreamt of writing for have all broken my heart. The country I worked so hard to call my second home has let me down by funding this atrocity. I’ve lost my sense of self, my direction. There were days when I would wake up and no longer know who I was or where I was going.

Core.

When lost, go and get familiar with who you are.

Go back to your core.

A neurodivergent brain means being bothered by constant noise, like someone else’s phone conversations, hearing other people’s music or videos playing on their phones without wearing AirPods, TV noise in the background, beeping sounds, repetitive sounds, sudden sounds, and so on. Most of my day consists of fighting off other people’s noise and trying to regulate my nervous system.

It’s not pretty.

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On one particularly loud day, nothing could help. The New York subway is a neurodivergent hell. Out of 10 people, 6 are scrolling their phones without the headset. On the outside, there’s the noise of construction, ambulances, and sirens. My noise-canceling Beats were empty, I forgot to charge them. I was starting to casually—rage.

At that moment, while I was trying to find a quiet spot to lower my cortisol levels (in Manhattan, that’s a non-existent concept), a friend called me. I was agitated, but I particularly like this friend; I didn’t want to reschedule her. We started chatting, and, not sure how—we ended up reminiscing about a TV show we watched as kids. She’s from an island a boat ride away from my home town, a spot I’ve been going to since childhood. We talked about the music we grew up with and the sounds of the beaches where we grew up. She mentioned her favorite stone beach I have to visit, and we talked about our favorite foods, wines, and people. Slowly, my mood began to shift from cortisol-induced frustration to joy.

It was strange—I don’t often shift from despair to pure glee in the span of a single conversation. It wasn’t just the person or the subject but rather how reminiscing about the things I grew up with and the elements that define me helped me reconnect with my core. It reminded me of who I am, where I come from, and what my essence is. I realized that no matter how chaotic the world becomes, the essence of who I am can never be taken away.

Home.

A trip home was way overdue.

So here I am. Writing this from my bed in my mother’s house.

And it’s hard.

Coming home, it’s a double-edged sword.

How can I see all this beauty around me and not feel guilty for those who simply want to live on their own land—a basic human right everyone else in the world is entitled to? How can I enjoy the familiar tastes of food, olives, fish, and the smells of grass, land, air, shore, and sea—knowing some people are labeled terrorists on their own land? How on earth can you be a terrorist on your own land?

The first few days were tough. I hadn’t seen my family in almost two years, and the beginning is always rough until we all adjust to each other again. Just when we finally settle in, it’s time to leave. I’m something of a strange presence to them—an unknown entity that floats into their lives once a year, if we’re lucky. They’ve resigned themselves to the fact that I’m part of the family—not that they have a choice—even though my life is a complete mystery to them.

Others.

I’m at that sweet spot where people message me to stop posting about the genocide in Gaza, while other people message me asking why I haven’t posted anything about Gaza today.

I’m used to it—I’ve always been the kind of person who fits everywhere yet fully belongs nowhere: not quite Croatian, but never entirely American; a girl, but far from girly; a tomboy, but not exactly a feminist. I’m well accustomed to these impossible expectations.

In school, I excelled in languages, literature, art, and math, while also playing two sports, one at a national level—a strange mix of brain functions that don’t typically go hand in hand. Trust me, this isn’t a flex; those who try to do everything often end up achieving not much—other than maybe impressing a few people along the way.

Quest.

As you can tell, I’m on a soul-searching quest. It’s been a hard year. I’m trying to regain myself.

I want you to use this article to soul-search, too.

Coming home always means confronting countless truths—the ones we’re ready to face and those we’d rather ignore. It’s about reconnecting with parents, encountering people we left behind, wandering the streets that shaped us, and stumbling upon things in the home we grew up in, reminders of who we were before the world hardened us.

And if that weren’t enough, enter genocide—unleashed by a lunatic state that not only covets another people’s land but aims to annihilate everyone who doesn’t belong to their kind, while ruining the lives of the people opposing such medieval violence.

Add to this a global superpower that hasn’t gone a single day without dropping bombs somewhere, keeping its citizens in a state of fear to pacify them from demanding universal healthcare, affordable education, and reasonable housing costs. An empire that pits us against each other with identity politics and divisive issues, distracting us from uniting to challenge those in power.

Truth.

By finding some peace of mind back home, I came to a couple of conclusions. Radical truth: the only way out of this labyrinth of violence, gaslighting, lies, manipulation, and injustice is by consistently speaking radical truth, at all times. No matter which side you’re on, what party you belong to, or any other affiliation—just be in a constant search for the most brutally honest truth you can find, and SAY IT. And do it with yourself as well. There’s no change we can create without constant self-reflection, rejection of all tribalism, and an ongoing search for radical truth.

The only way I see us moving forward is by being authentic to the core—by representing an absolute truth within ourselves. I receive messages daily on Instagram from people asking me how I keep going. After everything we've witnessed, how do I find the motivation to move forward? How do I pick myself up from the disappointment of what this world has become? How do I overcome all this hopelessness?

The answer is by being the representation of what you want to see in the world, regardless of not seeing it. By being a constant reminder of radical truth and speaking it out within the system, regardless of who hears you. You have to be an anomaly in this messed-up world, full of lies, deception, violence, and gaslighting us into oblivion. You have to be the link in the chain that breaks this propaganda-induced coma.

This is exactly where I regained my hope and renewed my pursuit of humanity in a deprived and unjust world. I realized that while I may not have the power to end unkindness, injustice, propaganda, and lies on a global scale, I do have the power to disrupt these within myself.

Falsehoods.

I realized that I must exist in a creative space where I continuously confront and highlight the falsehoods surrounding us, reminding myself and those who are willing to listen about the realities of what our governments are endorsing and funding. I must exist in the space where I rebuff legacy media in shaping our perceptions through their extensive control over information.

As these thoughts conceptualized in my mind, I read a brilliant piece by Caitlin Johnstone - We Need Both Outer Work And Inner Work To Truly Free Ourselves. It might be exactly what your soul needs if you, like me, spend most days swinging between we’re completely doomed and we CAN build a better world together:

“It’s just not good enough to blame all our suffering on the system. Doing so just encourages people to keep masturbating their inner wounds on everyone around them instead of growing up and doing the hard, uncomfortable work of becoming a conscious human being.”

“As individuals, none of us have the ability to single-handedly uproot all the unkindness and falsehood in our world, but we can each as individuals uproot the unkindness and falsehood within ourselves. And by doing so we make the world a kinder and more truthful place by just that much, because we tended the little plot of land we were given—our own personal slice of the human plight—with care and responsibility.”

“What matters is your intention to uproot any untruth and disharmony within yourself, and a sincere curiosity about where such things might exist within you.”

Seeing.

“Clear perception is what moves things toward health, and the lack of clear perception is what keeps things in dysfunction.” — Caitlin Johnstone

“Seeing is the first step toward health, which is why every unhealthy aspect of humanity does everything it can to avoid it. We will not have a healthy world until we become a conscious species, and we will not become a conscious species until we all have unrestricted perception, both inwardly and outwardly.”

Truly seeing the world and all the falsehoods around us is the concept with which we all must operate. We must never again allow ourselves to lose focus, get sidetracked, or fall into hopelessness due to the brutality of those who rule us, making us submit.

We simply cannot afford to succumb to hopelessness. That’s precisely why the ruling class conducts their atrocities in full view of the public—to make us feel disoriented and powerless, as if we can’t affect change within the system. Their strategy is to instill a sense of futility, driving us to retreat into the manageable aspects of our lives. Neither we nor the Palestinian people under siege can afford our hopelessness.

I expand on this in one of my previous articles.

As I’m finishing this article, the smell of seafood pasta slaps me from my mother's kitchen. “You have to come now, this food is worthless if it gets cold!” she yells. “Coming,” I respond, knowing all too well she’ll say this six more times before I actually come. We sit at the table, and I pull out a bottle of olive oil that my friend from the beginning of this article gifted me, cultivated by her family, for my mother. It’s packed in a homemade soda bottle, and if you know anything about olive oil, you know those homemade bottles in completely inappropriate containers are the world’s treasures.

After lunch, I’ll walk down to the beach below my house to meet my father, jump in the sea with him, and talk trash about his friends who are annoying him, while they stand next to us

In the evening, I’ll walk around the famous Roman Empire palace, 1800 years old, built by Emperor Diocletian. Walking on those stones always connects me to the history that transpired here. It’s a place woven into the souls of every single citizen of this town.

Every single step I took during my visit home recovered my ailing heart. Everyone that noticed I wasn’t doing well with covering what’s happening in Gaza for the whole year, was right—getting in touch with your roots is what every soul on this earth needs.

Land.

Now, why do all of us, every single person on earth—have this privilege, this right, the most basic human right of all; all of us but the Palestinian people?

Why do I get to enjoy all this, while they cannot? They get shot at if they fish too far into the sea, their olive trees are uprooted, their houses are stolen, their kids are arrested, abused, kidnapped, or killed, and they cannot enjoy the land they were born on. And all of this, just because some other people decided that, instead of sharing the land, their safety depends on destroying the people who were already there.

Spending time on my land, made me weep for their inability to cultivate, live, own, and enjoy theirs—even more.

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Taylor Swift has a new boyfriend. Possibly! Maybe? We need this. Lately, the world has been exceptionally exhausting.; a joyous event unfolding before our eyes, even if carefully crafted in some PR office, we’ll take it. Lie to us! But lie well. So far it has been well. Someone on Twitter phrased it beautifully: “It’s awesome, it’s fun and it’s American culture in all its corn-syrup glory. Are you not entertained?”. Yes we are @awi_sinha, yes we are.

Some could say we discovered Travis Kelce through Taylor Swift. And I would say I discovered her through him.

I didn’t always understand the phenomenon of Taylor. Huge fan base, awards in plenty; I couldn’t quite see it. I’ve heard her perform live and Adele, she wasn’t. In fact, people on The American Idol sounded better than her. It took me a little while to grasp what it is about her that makes her a global phenomenon. The understanding of music. Melody. Arrangements. Songwriting. And above all - storytelling.

And boy can she tell a story.

When I started to really dig her was when I realized all her songs are about some boy or a man she dated. That also came in three stages for me. First was, wow, petty, love it. Second was, a bit tongue-in-cheek, is it? The third was a realization that was all too familiar to me: I lived this story, and I own it, it’s mine and I can talk about it.

Too often we witness men run around disturbing women they aren’t ready for, playing house, flawed as they are, banging on you to accept things you didn’t sign up for. Convincing you suffering is just a part of love, and that’s our story, baby. Take it, have it. Claim it. Except, when the relationship or dalliance is over, they no longer want you to have that story. They are bothered when you remind them of it, and even more so if you tell it.

Her songs were fuck you, I lived this and I can talk about it. And if you’re bothered with it, why did you do it then?

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I can’t count how many times I got a call from an ex-boyfriend trying to police my articles. And I’m no Taylor, I’m subtle. “Why did you write this and this, I wasn’t that bad, why are you making it sound so much worse than it was”? Because our story is 50% mine and 50% yours. I lived it, it’s my life, my experience - how come it was fine to do it, but not fine to talk about?

I never discussed my breakups publicly, he didn’t either. Call it - we both have nukes so no one is throwing one. But my life will always be present in my art. Once, he tried to blackball one of my articles from being published, where I analyzed the society trying to convince you any man is better than no man. He was a man, certainly not any, but not for me. The audacity to expect my articles shouldn’t draw inspiration from my own experiences so that he wouldn’t be confronted with the reality of his actions was rich.

Jake Gyllenhaal didn’t like All Too Well either. It has nothing to do with him, he says, it was just her “expression”.

I was always a fan of this pink panther move of men who willingly inflict things on you but end up bewildered by your account of it.

“And you call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest” - will always be the sharpest sword. The art of hurting you with a sidebar of - I’m just being transparent. Actually, no, buddy. Transparent means explaining your heart before you do something, before the fact. They are grown adults who think being transparent means doing some shit and just telling us about it, after the fact. 

Was this loud?

I’m very into this cultural explosion of Taylor Swift, not overly sexy for a pop star, with a nerdy sense of style and awkward dance moves - while rolling an impressive Rolodex of men. It’s not her monumental fame but her confidence in what she is, outside of everyone’s expectations, that is her biggest flex. It’s attractive.

And if you’re able to have a Rolodex, it’s a sin not to go through it. Resentment that echoed in the society about Taylor and “many” men she dated always tipped me off, as a true Sagittarius, holding a door for Taylor, another Sagittarius; I want to give you a meal for thought - it’s easy to assemble these moral standards when no one wants you.

I always liked her roster, but Taylor was ready for Travis Kelce. And most importantly, we were ready for Travis Kelce.

Why are we all so taken with this guy? Because he’s pursuing a woman he’s ready for. Read that again.

There’s something about a guy who knows who he is, and he knows exactly what he can pull off, he precisely goes where he needs to go to move mountains to work in his favor. He’s Hollywood peak-level hot and he knows he can pull a Swift. He’s slightly show-boating yes, but he understands the popular culture well and he’s giving the masses exactly what we need.

He knows us well enough to give us the optics of jumping in a 1970s Chevy convertible with her, post game. He’s giving us 90’s movie teen movie, John Hughes or Licence to Drive; pick your poison.

He’s giving Americans their own Posh & Becks, less cool than the original, but every generation deserves their own athlete/pop-star reign to measure their life.

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But don’t let the visuals fool you. This merger is obviously much more than optics. Monica Hesse had a similar train of thought on the matter. In her piece for The Washington Post, she says:

“There’s an interesting case study here in what kind of celebrity power couples are acceptable and what kind are not, in what makes red-pilled fans decide that a beautiful woman is not a “Stacy” but just a self-obsessed bee-yotch.

Swift’s politics undoubtedly have something to do with it. In 2016, white supremacists were holding up Swift as an “Aryan Goddess”, but that was before Swift started speaking out for gun control, gay rights, and feminism, and calling President Donald Trump’s regime an “autocracy.” This month she encouraged her Instagram followers to register to vote, and the nonpartisan site she directed them to saw an immediate 1,000 percent spike in visitors. A woman like that is supposed to stick to dating softbois and poets (paging Timothée Chalamet), not rizzing up a superjock and screaming him on at the game.

Swift’s power undoubtedly has something to do with it. To those lamenting the relationship, Swift’s wealth and fame do not appear to be assets but rather threats, and signs that what she needs is a relationship that will take her down a peg or two. The same internet commenter who noted that Swift was turning Kelce into a “beta male” also commented that he had previously thought that “Travis was the alpha male Taylor Swift needed.” Instead, there was Kelce on the podcast he hosts with his brother, sweetly talking about how he had made Swift a “friendship bracelet” with his phone number on it, hoping to give it to her when she was in town for a concert. He wasn’t able to get through her security phalanx to arrange a drop-off, and they ended up meeting in person later, under different circumstances.

Making! A! Friendship! Bracelet! What was he even thinking, preemptively friend-zoning himself with a homemade craft? Might as well boil a pot of tea and get a cat.

The Taylor Swift backlash is a heightened illustration of the tightrope many famous women find themselves walking. She should be beautiful but not know it, have a lovely voice but not a loud opinion. Her feelings, if she has them, should be kept to herself or left to the masses to speculate over and imbue with meaning. She might be a worldwide influencer, but once she is in a relationship, it is she who should be influenced.”

My initial glimpse of Travis Kelce, perhaps as you did too, came through a video on the football field. He looked up, smiling and squinting in a cinematic, contemplative manner. His expression seemed to narrate a tale that I instantly wanted to read. The more I discovered - his tone of voice, constant joy, dancing, and effortless blend of confidence and humility; it was inevitable to draw comparisons with men I know or knew in the past.

Yeah, it’s easy to be a famous, rich athlete and be well-adjusted. But is it really? How many men do you know, public figures or just in your circle who can’t seem to align with themselves?

Taylor and Travis aren’t just a cultural explosion because of the merger of their enormous fan bases. They are a societal explosion by which we measure our own lives. They feel like what a healthy relationship should be. They both seem excited about each other’s careers and respectful of each other’s influence. They both seem to understand when to be a sidebar when the other is performing. It doesn’t matter who is more successful or who’s alpha or beta, they are both one or the other. “An elaborate scene of drawn-out pleasure, of almosts and near-misses, of denial and the controlling of masculine and feminine subject positions.”

I appreciate a spin by Anne Helen Petersen:

“Finding yourself enthralled by this sort of narrative, it’s about Travis and Taylor, or whoever, but it’s very much about you. You can take the basic architecture of a narrative fantasy and decorate it with the specifics of your own experience. That doesn’t (necessarily) involve taking up the role of Taylor or Travis within the existing narrative. It means you think about a Taylor-and-Travis-like scenario unfurling in your own life. A hot, thoughtful, BIG guy who also appreciates and respects your power and talent? Hello! It fosters or returns you to a feeling of frisson, the near-nausea that is the falling in love, not the longer (and differently fulfilling) labor of love itself.”

It’s my duty to finish off with sex.

Also Anne Helen: “The slow burn of the last few months has provided deep anticipatory pleasure — for Swift and Kelce, sure (and there’s ample speculation about what good sex she’s having). But it’s also offering a secondary form of pleasure for the fans, who assemble the disparate threads of the narrative.

There’s good sex, and then there’s an athlete good sex. Especially this athlete. And this woman deserves her screams.

I’m a big believer in regularly reminding ourselves of who we are. The pace of life we’re on is hectic and fast, it’s easy to forget who we used to be, what we liked, what got our hearts running. What was our passion? What did we collect as kids? What formed us to be what we are today? And what part did we lose along the way?

Today, we need to remind ourselves even harder. The uncertainty the pandemic left us; careers shifted, jobs lost, new ones we never got - the struggle to reinvent ourselves in this new normal, failing, getting up has been more challenging than ever before.

The year 2019 and the beginning of 2020 were such good, fertile, inspiring, productive years. Is it really surprising the pandemic landed at exactly that specific time? And how did it change us? 

I wrote so many columns and articles on the effect it had on our relationships and friendships. But I never delved into the professional aspect. Our jobs. Careers. Our aspirations. It changed everything.

I hear so many people fired, struggling, can’t get re-hired even though they are more than qualified for the jobs they are applying for; some used the lockdown to learn many new skills, and again, nothing. They can’t get jobs.

All I hear day in - day out is people telling me how many jobs they have applied for and no one calling them back. All while we hear the same sentence being banged on by people in charge: “There are so many jobs available but no one wants to work.”

Bullshit! Another mistruth we’ve been fed. Employers don’t want employees who can contribute, they want the ones that can be manipulated. They don’t want self-starters, they want followers. Listeners. Head-nodders.

I started a new job a few weeks before the lockdown. It was a job I was trying to get for almost a decade prior. It finally happened. The universe moved in such ways for it to align for me, I was exhausted and ecstatic. Then it all went crumbling, the CEO of the company started to panic, fired all new hires, kept only his founders and employees that were there from the start, and soon sold the company.

The factory that was producing products for my brand just shut down. No words. No explanations. No contingency plans. Never even sent me my patterns or my leather back.

Unless you had the same job for the past 20 or 10 years, and the pandemic affected you minimally; the rest of us had to scramble and reinvent ourselves. Seven. Million. Times.

God forbid you were one of those running your own brand when the lockdown struck. Rest in peace!

Writing saved me.

What do we do in this mayhem? When we need to provide but nothing wants us? When you know your worth, but no one sees it? When you know how much you can contribute, but you don’t fit anywhere? How to stay sane and on course, no matter the obstruction?

Day in - day out I try to find the answer and the solution. I strongly believe the pandemic landed smack in the middle of the most productive, fertile time to disrupt us all and re-order the world. How do we crack this code? Quitting is not an option.

And I think I finally figured it out. And I did it by accident.

We do it by going HOME. 

Hear me out.

By home, I don’t mean going back to your apartment or your childhood house; what I mean is - going back to that core, basis of who we are and what we were, right before we got out to this world that slapped us and threw us to the ground. Precisely at the moment of our highest worry, fear, uncertainty - we should go back in time, and remind ourselves.

I wrote an article about it many years ago, what going through my childhood boxes did for me at a time in my life when nothing made much sense. When I’ve lost the trail for a moment. Read it, it will inspire you too.

As I said, I ran into this revelation by accident.

Recently, I have been editing all my articles; by switching my website from one platform to another, my articles got reformatted in the process. I have written over 200 articles. Editing all of that is not an easy or quick task. But it’s life-changing reading your own words from 5, 10, 15 years back and see who I was, what I wrote about, what stroked my interest then, and what moved me.

As I edit, I have to read every word of every single article. And I have been on the most beautiful rollercoaster for the past few days, for of all the gems I discovered! Things I got reminded of; great films, life-changing books, art, quotes I collected from the people I admire over the years.

One stuck out!

You know that saying how you always run into things at the exact time you need them? This was it for me, and I hope it can be for you too! It lit the bulb over my head and reframed my brain from “why is this happening” towards an understanding: this unsettling period is just a cause. Talent only emerges when there’s a cause. And the cause is governed by survival.

Survival modifies us. Into the agents of change.

The article that lit my bulb was about Malcolm McLaren. If you don’t know who that is, he was a founder of Sex-Pistols, a husband and a business partner of Vivienne Westwood, a father of a founder of Agent Provocateur, a marketing genius (I think I called him a Svengali in that piece) and overall an epochal kind of legend.

Malcolm, his life, and his words are a reminder we need right at this moment.

Too much was said about him during his life, but what always stayed with me was how good he was with words. Yeah, he created Sex Pistols, masterminded New York Dolls, and was the father of punk, but it's his marketing genius that fascinates me to this day. He was sending slogans about his causes to the world in the most original ways possible. 

He was a founder of fashion with the cause movement, and many believe he only created Pistols to use them as a marketing tool, an outlet for spreading his and Vivienne's political and fashion ideas - through Pistols' stage clothes. 

His T-shirts, the famous ‘God Save The Queen’ and his legendary - ‘Cash For Chaos’ - a subject of analysis in fashion/marketing classes around the globe - just to name some, are - if you understand the times they were created (70's), the work of marketing Svengali.

There are so many words by Malcolm that would transform your way of thinking, but this quote, if I have to choose is THE life-altering one, the one that lit my bulb, the one we need at this time of struggle and uncertainty, and the one that made me construct this article:

“Magnificent failure is the only real means of effecting change in the popular culture. All of my obsessions are fueled by one thing: the power of the amateur. 

With Western popular culture split into a dominant, over-produced mainstream, remaining an amateur is the only true path to self-expression. 

A picture that is a magnificent failure actually breathes life and allows the culture to change. If you have perfection, there is nowhere to go. With perfection there is no communication. The disasters are what brings life and allow us to connect. Failure’s not such a bad thing. It’s just one long struggle. 

To be an artist of any worth is a journey, and the journey never ends. You understand the struggle. That’s why you’ll survive. But don’t think you can just ‘fail’. Be a flamboyant failure. That’s better than being any kind of benign success. I’ve always believed that talent only truly emerges when there is a cause, a cause which is governed by survival.”

Flamboyant failure. Benign success.

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood made their T-shirts on the kitchen floor, silkscreened in the bedroom of their small apartment, and wanted to do rag-like, dipped in oil "impossible to sell T-shirts", commercially undesirable to even have in the shop. 

Malcolm didn't even want to sell them. He liked the contradictions of having the shirts hung in the store with the idea of "not for sale". Ironically, those T-shirts now stand as objects in museums and Sotheby's auction rooms, inside the frame. 

For me, that right there is his legacy, more than the Sex Pistols. 

Reinventing what he thought success really is, and not succumbing to society’s definition of what failure is. His failure was just his process, and his talents were the strongest when he had a cause that was governed by survival.

We’re in survival mode right now. I don’t know about you but I dragged creativity and ideas out of me at these times that I never did when my life was settled. 

There’s just something about that particular stage of survival, where you feel like an animal in the cage, bouncing left and right, top to bottom trying to find a solution and there isn’t one, but then you stop for a second and all that anxiety you feel slowly shifts to your brain and makes it so clear, focused.

Laying on a sofa in comfort can never generate the raw, honest, life-altering material, that survival can.

Let’s not dread this process. Let’s not compare ourselves with people who achieved some benign success and let them convince us we’re incompetent; benign success is safe, secure but it’s not life-altering. It just is, and it can’t be anything more.

And there’s something so poignant in this phase where we feel uncertain but alive, anxious yet powerful, these are the moments when big things develop, these times are agents of change. We are agents of change. Only when it strips you of everything, you can truly see what you’re made of, and what you can achieve.

If you have perfection, there is nowhere to go. With perfection, there is no communication. Disasters are what brings life and allow us to connect.

Benign success in the one-stop journey. Flamboyant failure is the beginning of something greater.

Not an original, but a COPY of Malcolm X Vivienne’s famous Seditionaries “Tits” T-shirt is currently sold for $1,342.00 and is SOLD OUT. A knock-off. Let that sink in!

We made it. Despite everything that happened to you, you are here. You managed. You survived. And you also thrived. Give yourself some credit right now, while reading this; your past year was full of challenges and trespassers trying to get in the way of your peace, and you survived them all with a stable head on your shoulders.

That’s major.

They did not damage you.

They just taught you.

Sit in this realization for a few minutes. Let that marinate.

I launched this platform last year with the plan and a promise to myself to write stories that are more personal. Shorter than my usual articles (here’s hoping), and deeper from the heart. I didn’t do the greatest job with my resolution, as there was always some event that occurred in culture, a moment in society, a phenomenon in relationships, or a series/movie that touched me, that was more urgent to write about.

Is it urgent? Or do I always just run towards writing an op-ed on something that’s not me?

Going deep is hard, people.

Unpacking things you experienced, writing about it - means you have to relive them again. A method writing as I popularly call it. Some stories are beautiful to relive, but let’s face it, all the stories that make a difference are the ones that nearly crushed you.

Pain reaches more. And teaches more. Also, heals.

I’m pretty proud of my 2022. Hard year, but maybe my best yet.

This year, finally I felt I truly arrived to myself. I was patient, steady, and weathered the storms with a stable mind. I analyzed all the hardships and laid out a plan for overcoming them. 

I’ve never felt more focused. Aware. Most of my previous years were spent in a sort of daze, not understanding where I’m headed, not realistic about many relationships I had; romantic or friendly, and failing to see my part in many of its demises.

You can’t be ready for someone if you aren’t still ready for yourself.

But in 2022, I fully got it. Other people’s shortcomings, my own; how I got in all these situations that don’t benefit me. 

I, like you, dealt with many dubious people in the past year. Some were so terrible I thought, how are these people allowed out in the wilderness, among humans? Yet, surviving those with a clear head on my shoulders made me - this, now. Focused. 

Unreachable.

I might have taken some time to get here, but I’m here, at this platform, where I feel warm and fuzzy like someone is handing me a cup of hot cocoa through the screen, vying to do what I have envisioned here on Antagolist.

Going deeper. Diving in.

My 2022 was filled with so much. Lessons. Travels. Great trips. Food. Wine. Meeting great people that pick you up when in shambles. There was some unexplainable magic, as the stars really saw me and awarded me for the struggles I faced and handled on my own in the past decade.

2022 might be the year I made the least money, but I did the best work and, somehow, got to travel the most. It was made possible due to laser-focused planning and making damn good decisions. I’ve seen cities and countries I’ve never been to; it changed my perspective of what’s important in life, and how much I appreciate the solitude, good food, sea, sun, and simplicity of life.

I visited Puerto Rico. It shocked me, in the best ways possible. I got to swim in the sea that’s not mine, yet I felt the same rebirth and healing that I only feel when I jump in the Adriatic. That never happened before.

The best way to find yourself is away from familiarity.

I enjoyed the simplicity of the people I met, the art on the streets, the history of every building, and the helpful, kind strangers on every corner. I traveled with a friend but decided to stay and enjoy the place on my own.

I had the best time.

Talking to strangers.

I wrote so much in the evening breeze; I could do this life, do my work, eat some great food, enjoy the sea, a glass of something after a job well done.

I went back to Los Angeles on a business trip, a city where I lived for 9 years and hated vigorously. I got reminded of people constantly trying to convince me one simply cannot hate the palms and the ocean. I also remembered how I always stood my ground, removed all the noise coming from people who simply don’t know what’s best for you, and finally moved to a city that fit me best.

We make the mistake of listening to the outside chatter often; friends who see your life through their lens and impose their takes on you, as well as American TV shows telling you palm trees must mean happiness, instead of trusting our intuition.

Los Angeles almost destroyed my mental health. The city is not about the palms, the city, at least for me, is about the people.

My coming back to LA after two years on a work trip was a victory lap and a confirmation of a good decision made.

I saw my former friends, shells of the people I left, with dubious lives I no longer understood or even wanted to witness for a few days I was there.

In 2022, I also shared my living space with a friend who was intent on obstructing my life, it wasn’t personal, as much as she was miserable and wanted a partner in misery I wasn’t about to give her; I simply have no time for empty socializing at this stage of my life. Every minute of my day is accounted for, and pointless conversations or TV watching where I learn nothing - no longer interest me.

It was the hardest living situation I have ever experienced, but I was the most productive in it. During those few months living there, I wrote more articles and chapters than in the past 2 years combined. I learned that my body goes into full-on combat mode when someone tries to prevent me from producing my articles. SWAT-style mode to achieve what I didn’t manage in the most serene living environments.

I never knew I could have such mental strength, and I feel unpenetrable for it.

I visited my family over the summer, usually a very Shakespearian undertaking. But this year, somehow, the beef I usually have with them was minimal - mission impossible for the past 20 years. I laid out some boundaries as I stepped off the plane, and after months of therapy and self-therapy, I finally learned how not to get affected by people who wouldn’t be able to walk 300 meters in my shoes.

Unapologetic.

I also ruined a relationship/connection I invested in for the past 2 years, or whatever you can call a union where two people live on separate continents; one half-fight, and a few misunderstandings later; we were gone.

No communication, no explanation, just gone. I didn’t take it well at first, but then I unwrapped this conundrum of realization: I often don’t make good choices in people, and the universe is here to assist me, to take away the situations I cannot, that aren’t best for me.

I didn’t need explanations, I didn’t need closure, and you don’t need it either.

Usually, when we say we just need closure, what we actually want is a window or a door back in. We don’t need it, we just want it.

You don’t want closure. You want back.

And back is where you don’t need to go.

In the midst of me still not realizing all this, someone else busted into my life. I wasn’t particularly nice to him, he was a rebound; I was annoyed, short, and even rude at times. When I was rude or assertive, he didn’t challenge me, he would just say - “Ok, you can elaborate on that when we see each other”.

My sister was spending the summer where he was spending his summer, the place he insisted I come to so we could see each other. I came intending to hate the place and everyone in it, hate him, and stay in that wallowing space. The first night I saw him he was slightly annoying me, or was I just too tired and worn out from the previous experience, that I didn’t have enough energy for someone’s excitement over our possible union.

I asked for Red Bull and he got it for me, but then ordered a bottle of wine at the restaurant and sat too close to me on the stone steps while we were waiting for the table. The scenario of him sitting too close to me so I couldn’t look at him to have a conversation, as well as having both Red Bull and a glass of wine in both hands wasn’t a perfect layout for a neurodivergent mind. I was annoyed and he was excited. Apparently, he wanted to meet me since 2004, or something slightly similar, but definitely in the Dickens vicinity.

We did meet briefly in 2006, and he said I wasn’t receptive back then. I might have been too popular to be focused on him, he says.

I wanted to be receptive now, but the Red Bull and the wine in both hands, sitting too close on the steps, and watching over a bottle of wine not to fall from the stone steps were unsettling me.

When we finally sat at the table, he across me, not sideways anymore, Red Bull in my stomach, tiredness subdued, wine glass and the bottle sturdily on the table, and a smell of the most amazing food in the Adriatic about to hit the table (and my mouth), I felt good. Bordeline enjoying it, but I didn’t tell him that.

I was wounded when I met him. Not in 2006, but now, in 2022. In fact, the first night we met was 3 weeks before the Red Bull and the wine situation; we met when he jumped in to remove me from decking some guy who had spit his drink on my hand in the club, to get my attention.

Yes, that’s how my summer of 2022 started.

And the summer ended with him nursing me back to life. He took me to the best beaches, and restaurants; we took boat cruises and went to all local exhibitions (“because we need to support Croatian artists”), we visited local stonemasons and admired their work, and we found the best secluded wineries on Croatian Islands. I wasn’t into wine that much before I met him. I could drink white wine here or some red when the hosts insisted, but I never enjoyed it like most people do.

He had a good tactic. He loved red wine (he’s French), but kept drinking white with me and slowly introduced me to drop of red here and there. I wasn’t there yet, but I drank it to make him happy; after all - all he was doing for the whole summer was trying to make me happy. And then one night, I had some red and actually liked it, without pretending. On our way to a restaurant, he knew a great little secluded winery on the island that had the best red wines in the country, I tried one, I don’t know if it was him or the wine, but that glass hit differently.

I enjoyed it.

It was a good day.

When I go out now, I order red wine, and not to make him happy.

He restored my faith in people. In men. He’s far from perfect, and not someone I want to stay with, but for that moment in time, and for a lifelong friendship, he was what the doctor ordered.

He calls every day and somehow manages to do every single thing he says he will do.

He doesn’t like texting. He calls you.

Sometimes he’s annoyed with the busyness of his life, and when I need to hear details about something that’s not logical to me, instead of explaining it to me, he just says - I can’t now I’m tired and never gets back to it. Not sure if that’s his tactic too, but it taught me to let go. Not everything had to make sense to me.

He keeps being there, day after day.

He taught my neurodiverse brain not to need to know the process of everything, sometimes things just ARE.

And to finish 2022, I also got the World Cup on top of an already mind-blowingly emotional year.

When I first heard the ’22 World Cup is to be held in Qatar, a non-football country, in the middle of the winter, I was offended. How dare you? World Cup is an event, the occurrence you watch in your tank top and shorts, half drunk in the middle of the day, talking smack with your friends and anonymous enemies online belonging to a country of your opponent.

And yet, this particular World Cup and all its dramaturgy worth of a volume of Sartre - delivered so much, in the exact time we needed it, finishing off not just 2022, but a period of taxing two years with a bow-out worth of Broadway.

Croatia. Back-to-back medal. Two Cups in a row. One columnist once said football is about who we are, but even more so about who we are not.

It was a perfect ending to an already crazy, taxing, and emotional year; an epilogue. I’m proud of this team. I’m proud of what we represent in this world and how we came about, how mauled we had to get during history to have this; the phenomenon that we are in football, and a question many sports commentators have - how does this tiny country and this team manage to do THIS?

A team reflects a nation, they say. But also it doesn’t. As one Croatian columnist said: “Football is just a metaphor for life. In the Croatian case, the national football team is the most convincing metaphor for the nation. But the nation is also just a metaphor.”

I like the metaphor of my nation, who they are, and what they allowed me to experience at the end of the arduous two years.

Or in the words of one distinguished Twitter Commentator:

“Croatia don’t dance, don’t make noise, get on their business quietly, and are one game away from back-to-back World Cup finals. Respect man.”

I read that last “respect man” in the voice of Wayne from Wayne’s World.

“None of us is only what we are, but also what we’re not. Especially when it comes to us who were born by hardships on the borders of the worlds.”

We are always what we are not.