literaryanxiety

[literaryanxiety]

Why does the library back home not look like this?

—State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 🇦🇺

[literaryanxiety]

I have procured a new child (oops). Introducing Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, a sci-fi short story collection. In recent years, I've found myself increasingly questioning our place in the universe. Life just seems so pointless sometimes. We work and watch TV and work again. I just don't think we're supposed to live like this. We have no time to connect with our emotions or with the wider world around us.

I don't think it's a coincidence that I've been increasingly drawn to science fiction. It seems like the human condition is better explored through constructed worlds, without the constraints of "reality". I'm eager to get into Chiang's writing as I've heard that he places a lot of emphasis on the human soul—which is exactly what I need right now.

[literaryanxiety]

[literaryanxiety]

10 Nov 2019

Fresh out of corporate drudgery and back where it feels like home. This year's Singapore Writers Festival was heavy as hell. With panels structured around the theme of language, writers, arts practitioners, journalists and academics wrestle with the implications of language on societies and individual lives. This panel was about the body, especially marginalised ones. Fat bodies, black bodies, queer bodies. What it means to inhabit a body that is relentlessly scrutinised and policed by the people around you, and how language contributes to marginalisation. On the panel were Joel Tan, a queer Singaporean playwright, Kagiso Lesego Molope, a South African writer now residing in Canada, and Roxane Gay—well, we all know Roxane Gay.

[literaryanxiety]

Poetry or prose?

People always associate English majors with a penchant for daydreams and rhymes. But I'm really more of a prose person. Which do you prefer?

[literaryanxiety]

I am uncharacteristically in the mood for something romantic (and possible Romantic).

Anyone have any recs for movies or books? It’s a bit out of my area!

[literaryanxiety]

“She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”

— The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

[literaryanxiety]

Just corporate life things #5: How to know your boss gives fuck-all about you

He drops you into the department group chat without an introduction.

He doesn't include you in conversations.

He never acknowledges your work.

He never gives feedback.

He starts giving feedback, but only negative ones, and loudly so everyone can hear.

He forgets to invite you to calls and meetings.

He calls you out for being distracted and when you tell him there's nothing much to do, he gives you menial work like recording the audio of a video clip and sending it to him because he couldn't be bothered to open the video file himself. Also printing receipts and scheduling his calls.

He never updates you on completed projects so you never know how your work contributes to the bigger picture.

He openly mocks millenials in front of you and your millenial colleague during a multinational department meeting.

He doesn't tell anyone that you're leaving.

The absolute worst part of this is that he's a straight white man and I'm none of the above.

[literaryanxiety]

Eh

Sometimes you look around you and everybody's on their screens and you want to say you're not okay but you feel bad for disrupting their lives so you just keep it inside and then you just feel so alone and the feeling is so unbearable and compounded with the badness of your existing feelings that you wonder how everyone else is carrying on with life

[literaryanxiety]

It's finally here. Just six days to go. I've recently been waking up at 4am no matter what time I go to sleep. I can't believe how heavy the burden is on psychological services across the country that there's a consistent three-month waitlist for first appointments.

Two months to my psych appointment. My current workplace is full of triggers and it’s taking all my energy to try to stay sane. I had a lie-in today because I just couldn’t shake off the intrusive thoughts. I can’t eat, I can’t work, I can’t do anything.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by sticking it out in a place I don’t feel comfortable in. Is it just my anxiety speaking or is the job a poor fit?

[literaryanxiety]

Parents be like that’s my emotional support eldest daughter

[literaryanxiety]

I always forget to remove the tea bag until the tea tastes vile. I feel like that says something.

“For my novel, there was a lot of world-building, during which the story evolved. There comes a point for me with any kind of research, be it historical or technical or about other cultures, when I have to let go and trust that I’ve sufficiently internalized what I need to know such that the relevant details will organically find their way into my scenes. It’s like taking the tea bag out of the water when it’s steeped just the right amount. Then it’s time to write.”

—Lisa Gornick, in conversation with Christina Baker Kline in “Historical Fiction: The Pleasures and Perils of Writing About Other Eras” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2019)

[literaryanxiety]

I intend to make my own way in the world. LITTLE WOMEN (2019) DIR. GRETA GERWIG

[literaryanxiety]

My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away—but oh how I sing in my gold cage

A.S. Byatt, Possession

[literaryanxiety]