Lorna

Get a pet. A pet will challenge you like no human can. I can’t get mad at my cat and I can’t tell her to wash herself nor can I wash her every time she becomes contaminated. She WILL become contaminated and I WILL want to pet and cuddle with her. Letting her in my bed was the biggest challenge, but the cuteness is just too hard to resist.

Reframe contamination as a sensory experience. If you can feel, smell or see the dirt, then your hand is contaminated and you can wash it. If not, try to resist the urge to wash.

To get myself to sit on my sofa with my pyjamas, which I was reluctant to wear outside of bed, is the desire to recreate the nostalgic childhood feeling of waking up in the morning and sitting on the sofa watching TV in my pyjamas. It gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Trying to romanticise my life.

“Intimacy can only form its defining attachments through attention, through a co-presence of space and time, the fundamentals of human life that have been reified into commodity under capitalism and carefully bought up so as to keep women bound to the domestic sphere.”

- p.70 in BFFs by Anahit Behrooz

“The game of capitalism lives and dies by the figures we made up on the screens we invented and not the numbers that rule the natural world. In essence: we are literally dying for figurative ideas, instead of literal and non-negotiable rules outside of our control as humans.”

- ismatu gwendolyn

“This reality of capitalism is but one reality out of an infinite and ever-expanding range of what is possible, and this reality reaffirms itself as real only because we all choose to believe in it and we choose to reinforce these beliefs with our actions.”

- ismatu gwendolyn

“In this world making, maladis really only become problems when they interfere with one’s ability to perform their daily job.”

- ismatu gwendolyn

“Reality is whatever we collectively witness” - ismatu gwendolyn