Flying On Clipped Wings

Here's some things I've learned during that period of frantic panic and caffeine consumption known as exam season, having gone through three bouts of it with my next period of it coming up in May. These aren't anything to do with my course material, rather they are little life lessons from the various things that I've experienced during them. 1: Listicles get clicks. This isn’t even me trying to be all meta with this article, I’ve clicked onto so many things which have turned out to be unfulfilling, watched so many end of year review list videos on YouTube, all due to this desire to just not have to engage with the foreboding behemoth comprised of powerpoints and pdf files staring me in the face. 2: Caffeine has a dark side to it. All those coffees, those cans of edge, those cans of red bull should you have the money to afford it, they may well keep you awake, but there is a crash and it will come. It may come midway through typing where you feel a wave of tiredn

Here’s some poems I wrote since last publishing a set of these on this wee blog, they’re a bit heavier going this time so CW for self-harm and depression, the self-harm one is at the very end so you don’t accidentally see it while reading that content warning for it. I'd gone for quite a while without writing any poems at all, but a particularly  bad autumn and winter of 2016 helped spark some creative impulse, or else I just needed to create something in order to understand the negativity inside me and possibly work up from there. Shot By Both Sides This is something I wrote about my experiences of being a non-binary  person in a world where things are gendered to a degree which seems pretty ridiculous, while I’ve been able to come to terms with it and feel a lot better than I did when the questions were going through my head, there’s still that overriding feeling of not fitting in, falling into some sort of empty space. A binary cage, torn apart by divergence,