things i've changed my mind about.

the notesapp clear out. vol one.

• rosters. why punish one man when you can punish multiple at one go? the admin arithmetic required almost feels worth it.

• debuts having to be good. witnessing the debut is quite literally gathering around a sapling, puzzled at its blatant infancy. how odd to expect anything remotely complete from an artist just beginning to give themselves permission to create. voice and perspective are earned. we should give artists the time to earn them.

• olives. they’re delightful little pebbles of umami. i was merely a tasteless freak.

• artpop by lady gaga. what i thought to be ‘just’ a great pop album exposed itself as a literal revelation of an art criticism thesis on a random relisten last year. gaga’s self-awareness on that album about her place in the culture is what charli has been chasing these past two eras. she saw God in the studio.

• pretty little liars. everyone involved should be put in prison, chained to the back of a car and dragged through the streets, forced to spend hours in close proximity to timothee chalamet, have only blonde men in their dms etc, etc. there is nothing more alarming than revisiting a seminal work from your childhood just to see how dedicated it was to normalising old man peepee. criminal. and all for a man with a perm.

• productivity. you are not a machine whose value depends on output. you are a person. living is the point, not figuring out how much you contribute to your country’s GDP.

• addison rae. i’m charmed by her grit, her hunger. striving looks good on women, especially ones who know how to resourcefully turn infamy to their advantage. she surprised me. her take on taste being a privilege set off a lightbulb for me. i’m rooting for her.

• the idea that art saves lives. i think people save themselves. all we do is reflect our audience back at themselves. we cannot conjure up from within you a strength that you do not already possess.

• la la land. my love for technicolour and emma stone initially blinded me to how insidious the entire film is. i meant believe that blonde white man is more invested in the gatekeeping of jazz/ black classical than his black bandmates who have sold out to the man. you are the man we should be gatekeeping from damien chazelle.

• men in arsenal jerseys. if you can support the same team for eleven years, there’s a hidden emotional strength within you i would love to test the limits of.

• the mid-twenties takeoff. denzel washington didn’t discover acting until he was 27. i’ve only begun to learn myself, my taste. i’m a fawn discovering her feet. i refuse to rush this, or to believe that this is the only point where my perspective is valuable. i’m this good at 24 mashallah. imagining me at 34 is making my nipples tingle.

• liberalism. you can’t good vibes and slogan tee your way to revolution and equity.

• american vogue. watching andre leon talley report from the top of the met gala steps as a teenager entrenched the publication in my mind as the pinnacle of fashion reporting. i read his autobiography and realised very quickly that it wasn’t vogue that was special. it was him. it was us.

• men with literature degrees/ photographers. never again. wallahi.

• heeled boots. i once hated things that brought me prolonged pain but now i simply cannot leave my house without some variation of a heel on my feet. few things bring me more satisfaction than pulling out my earphone to hear the sound of my boots against pavement. it fills me with a lokian sense of autosexualism. how erotic and violent.

• a seat at the table. who does the table serve? making it as a minority is not proof of the system’s success.

• the beach. i have always hated sand, but i have of late been daydreaming of our shores and lido beach and somali mermaids and pearls. perhaps i don’t hate beaches. perhaps i only hate the ones away from home.

• being nice. niceness is a prison built to cut the lives of women short.

• fan fiction: write as you please about adam driver’s nipples. atleast it’s not AI has forced a loyalty upon me that (more often than not) no longer discriminates. there is an ethical way to rip someone off; just ask larry fiction writers on ao3.

• socks with slides. this depends entirely on how sexy you are. does not apply to non-blacks. soz.

• having a niche. are you a coffee creamer? why the constant need to label and self-categorise? which is more natural: having multiple interests or being devoted compulsively to one version of yourself? not to expose my teen dystopia era, but divergence is normal. reducing yourself to one thing so your ‘content’ is easier to tag on instagram is veronica roth levels of bleak.

• non-metallic jewellery. growing up is realising that you have to set aside your east african magpie-ism and accept that not all jewellery has to be shiny (read: gold.)

• k-pop. go listen to house of cards by BTS and tell me once you’re done that you don’t want to take all your clothes off. i’m certain my sexuality can be summed up with this picture of yeonjun choi:

  

• originality. novelty is seen as currency, and that’s exactly the problem. why must something be new to be valuable? as though the history of art is not the excavating of the same wounds, returning to the same pain over and over? newness requires isolation from context and shared experience: complete novelty is impossible.

• men’s fashion/women’s fashion. true drip is androgynous. i direct you once again to the above picture of yeonjun choi.

• listening to albums in pieces. it has always felt odd to play songs out of context, separate from the rest of the album. you can technically read a short story from a collection as a stand alone sure, but why would you? i’ve begun picking an album for the day and giving myself over to it in its entirety. artists don’t work that hard on sequencing for us to force our own interpretation.

• non-black hijabs. i love a color hijab on everyone else: eye simply refuse to look like mayak gyeran. i’m convinced a dark coloured hijab against dark skin has the same gagging effects as someone dying their hair the same colour as their skin. delicious.

• new york. shit. maybe it is the greatest city in the world.

• shakespeare as ‘highbrow’ or inaccessible. that man was one of us. the bizarre elevation of his work in this country to a rich cultured’s past time strips the bard of the very thing that gave his work teeth: class solidarity. to feel out of place among his work spits in the face of the text itself.

• non-violence. we found out that elon musk is the world’s first trillionaire today.

• playing it cool. i am cool. swallowing a compliment proves nothing other than the fact that your inability to seem earnest conceals a crippling insecurity. a smile is charity. an honest compliment must be one too.

• double denim. exhibit a:

you don’t want to know what i’m thinking. you really don’t.

• revisiting work. you are not the same person you were a year ago. there a thousand versions of every film, every book, every album. it cannot be a waste of time to see what new thing reveals itself to you. it’s perhaps the critic in me but give yourself permission to change your mind.

• pretending to not be vain. i like pretty things. i wouldn’t be an artist if i wasn’t unnaturally moved by all that is beautiful. in fact, i believe we were all born deserving of leisure and beautiful things.