How Can You Even Be A Woman Without Going Absolutely Batshit Insane

“And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.” - Edgar Allen Poe

i have the complexion of a sickly victorian child, the disposable income of a 10th century serf, and the fashion sense and eccentric personality of a professor of the arts in the 1920s who does a lot of cocaine

dear gods just imagine the stories of women in a dark academia setting. 

women with squared off shoulders that strut down the hallways as if they have the whole world at their hands. women playing the male roles in the plays. women adjusting their jacket before storming off. women gently putting on red lipstick with a bloodied hand. women with hunched shoulders and dark eyes frantically reading a book, because they cant get enough of it. women with a secret just poised on their lips if the perfect arch. women with messy hair and disheveled looks stumbling into class. women seducing everyone around them with their raspy voices. women having everyone’s attention with their soft voices. women knowing how to handle blood. women knowing how the plan things perfectly. women reciting poetry over a fresh grave. women with their arms linked running across campus, their laughs rising above the quiet of the night. women tasting like strawberry wine and the faintest hint of whisky. women helping women when things go wrong. just women in the dark academia genre where they aren’t used as the lust interest in the room. 

you know what i want? a friend group in which everyone has read plato , aristotle and the secret history by donna tartt or has at least watched dead poets society and loves literature, poetry , philosophy , art and we can just talk about all these and our fear of academic failure . a friend group in which we can read classics together and talk about the deeper meaning of life and rant about how much of a failure this society is . i want to share my passion for life and writing and all the things i mentioned with someone that will be equally as excited as i am .

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’m sorry but if you’re not proud af of your girl and supportive of all her positive and exciting decisions, then you don’t deserve to have her as your girl.

one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic

ok so just to soothe my aching sickened soul id like to point out that catcher in the rye is about a boy dealing with intense depression and grief over losing his younger brother and this is why he fails out of school. he spends the book searching for deep human connections and grows increasingly frustrated that no one seems to understand him and everyone only seems to be surface level interacting. he just wants to feel seen and loved. 

he also recalls, upon visiting his old teacher, the way that he was molested as a child. the entire point of this book is that holden caulfield is a boy struggling with depression and trauma and he wants to save other children from experiencing the harshness of the world that he had to experience when he was younger. 

pls stop saying this book is pretentious and that he’s sociopathic. all that is doing is demonizing very common depression thought patterns and making people who suffer from trauma and mental illness seem like they are sociopaths. ty send post 

How you, yes, YOU, can be both PUNK and A PRETENTIOUS BASTARD (dark academic) at the SAME TIME.

(yes, I do recognise that making a 'how-to' type list is basically the opposite of punk, leave me alone.)

Read poetry (I highly recommend John Cooper Clarke).

Be angry all the time, not at people around you, but at capitalism, social injustice, the government, and societal constructs.

Read Marx.

Doc Martens should be your best friend. Yes, they're expensive. But they're also high quality and will last you a lifetime (I've had a pair for about five years now, and they've literally grown with me).

Ratty blazers are cool.

Drink fruit juice, don't take drugs. In the beginning, the punk movement was very anti-drugs, so gangs of them would get together to drink fruit juice instead.

Only quote the insults from Shakespeare's works.

Wash your hair in beer. (Just trust me. My great grandmother washed her hair with beer, and she had great hair.)

Berets

Black velvet (whilst usually more goth) can definitely be adopted.

Know that 'modern' or 'new' doesn't necessarily mean 'better'.

Go to protests, talks, lectures, anywhere where you might be able to make a difference. Say something about anything you feel passionately about, don't stand for things you feel are wrong.