Blue Cup

I bought this cup in 2019 when i moved out on my own for the first time. Since then everything has changed. I dont believe the same things anymore, the people who were in my life are now long gone and I don’t remember half the names
or dramas that once consumed us. The readings cafe and my apartment in the shabby building have faded and the forgotten aspects have been replaced by my imagination and nostalgia. The dreams I dreamt then are gone too. The things I wanted, the people who centered me all of it has gone and many times over since I have started over, dreamt new dreams, met new people, made new homes, been evicted or locked out or outgrown them.
When life is like a fast paced ever shifting dream you try to hold on with all your might, for something to stick. The strangeness is so overwhelming one trys desperately to find comfort, looks for a familiar face or place or dream or routine to make it all anchor and make sense. A consistent gesture or show of affection might mean sanity for an anxious person. The absence of it, chaos, threat, disaster, death. So we try to hold on. A physical object, person, gesture, scent that pulls you out of the drowning sensation into reality, into safety. I hold on sometimes by a thread, a leaf, a birth mark, a cup. Sometimes it is enough, other times it is not and it feels you are being waterboarded. Sometimes the will to live is purely instinctual and evolutionary not a conscious decision or action. My therapist says relational wounds can only be healed in relationships. Safety that was broken by caregivers or people can only be rebuilt within intimate relationships. But who in the 21st century can take on your burden or even hold spcae for it, when we are all already carrying our own boulders. Who can be a safe space when everyone is wounded and hurt.

I dont know if our hearts can ever feel light anymore but there is always the relief of not having to feign lightness when you feel crushed. I think more than the heaviness of the heart, it is the weight of the pretense that ultimately takes us down. Ptsd, anxiety, depression are similar to a physical disability. You just can not function the same. Often times it feels like if you are dragging along a broken leg. It hurts and bleeds and weighs you down but noone can see it. Our nervous system needs rest, constant strain damages it’s ability to protect us.

And while we believe capitalism is at the root of it, if we fail to make safe spaces, relationships and communities to acknowledge and heal collectively we will never make it through. If we leave it all to capitalist therapists and big pharma they will inject, medicate, numb, drug, self isolate and self love the fuck out of us.Isolation, over emphasizing of the self cut off from community and loved ones, placing the entire burden on self to heal is nothing but a capitalist way of further alienating us from eachother. Cosumtive self love, selfish self love. Consume this buy this treat yourself this treat yourself that. Cut off everyone. Treat people who love you like shit. Is there really a sense of freedom without a sense of responsibility and duty towards loved ones and community? Give all your money to your therapist. Go to a rave. Take it easy. There is genocide in Gaza but take it easy. Your friend killed herself last week but take it easy. It’s all you, you feel too deeply too strongly feel less. Feeling less is the solution. The system needs you to feel less, care less, love less. It makes you believe the woman dying in gwadar has nothing to do with you.
“The butterfly effect describes how the consequences of tiny perturbations can very quickly grow to have a major impact on a system’s final outcome, as in the metaphorical example of a flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil ultimately influencing the development of a tornado in Texas.”
But people dying and suffering all around you has nothing to do with you. Put your head down go about your day. Take it easy.

2 days of extreme anxiety that I tried to self soothe, and this cup is all I had.

How does one continue to live without revolting against such a system? Where a genocide is going on in my backyard and my Baloch friends are being killed every day. 28 people died in Bannu not more than 2 weeks ago. Parachinar is under attack. I have comrades self isolating for weeks, drug abusing and drinking themselves to their deaths. Some worried they can not pay their sisters school fee this month and other worried about the next Rizwan Beyg collection. Regressive liberals posing as progressive Marxists. Why must you deny my pain to prove your theory right, why must the pain be the main reason that proves it right. When do we stop this competition of privillege and hurt who’s is bigger who has more. The billionaires are all taking vacations in Geneva together. We are fighting over who has a suzuki Mehran and who has a bike. We are fighting over women issues and there issues being cards and relationships and expressions of love making us less of a person. In this emergency where our next breath isn’t promised we are calculating how many minutes or hours to let go by before replying so we seem cool. Whaf is this pretence. This pretence wont save us. What is this dystopia? How does one survive it alone? How is fighting for revolution and loving eachother madly not the only rational response?

“We revolt simply because for many reasons we can no longer breathe.”