What is it like…

To spend your entire day and night both weary and fearful? To be enraged all the time and also to be so tired, to stay awake until the point at which you absolutely cannot keep your eyes open anymore, and to wake up, the next day, heart racing without caffeine, still scared and wary, still many hours to pass before the next day.

Nothing is free or safe. Every act is up for being taken for something else. (I wrote out a list of acts here that men think are for them, things like standing on the balcony, breathing in the air outside, and then I realised I could just spend all day writing out acts)

I cannot spend my time thinking why are men like this or why they aren’t. There is no point. Men have so much to say anyway - so much to say on twitter, never enough to say to their sexist friends and colleagues and parents, never enough to do to change the world they occupy, the places they live in, the offices they run. So what is the point? Men seem to have begun this new thing of congratulating themselves as allies — ffs, men need a fucking award and a title for having a half-baked thought that perhaps a woman’s life here is tough, let alone understanding any issue at even a surface level. This language — the equivalent of a man-flu for heterosexual men - is so infantile. Congratulations, Mr. Man, for occupying even more space, for sucking all the air out of the room, for doing nothing while pretending you stand for something.

It isn’t until you’re not fearful anymore that you realise what you’ve lived with your entire life. The incessant policing, moral, social, economic, your clothes and bra straps and dupattas, all out for measurements with a tape measure, everyone ready to take measure of your soul. It’s a fleeting glimpse of a life that could have been, of the space that could have freed up in your brain and heart to focus on something, anything else. But instead, I spend my life living with my heart in my throat, clenched jaw, a frozen expression, a body so tense it never knows when it will ever calm down.

So I stay awake. I look at the locks and the doors and the windows from where I can, sometimes, hear the sounds of a woman being beaten up or harassed. I am tired and exhausted all the time, and yet I am also always enraged, always ready to start the next day, always on edge.