E1en1ight3nment

About me:

★ Devoted wife of Dr Pepper ★ Allegedly dresses like "a thirty-year-old English teacher who is trying to be cool" ★ DemSoc, and open to civil discussions on that ★ Gregor Samsa is a mood ★ Cursed with overanalysis, blessed with a good coat ★ I stan the Dark Academia aesthetic ★

★ Now, it's time for me to talk about a knowledge-based subculture largely followed by people with 0-2 sets of qualifications 🤓.★

★ I live in the UK, so naturally my education and interests lean toward a Western framework - but I hate how the Dark Academic community implicitly supports epistemicide. (I know we also glamorise burnout, that's not OK either, message me if you'd like to know why I think this is a lesser issue.) It doesn’t take a PhD in Cultural Studies to realise the entirety of human knowledge didn’t come from dead European men. If you’re a Dark Academic who thinks it did…please actually read the things you tell people you’ve read - and annotate them for substance, not just style. How can you appreciate Enlightenment philosophy and not the scholarly legacy of the University of Timbuktu? Or admire the development of Greek democracy without honouring the Iroquois Confederacy? I know we have to actively seek this stuff out - but if this subculture is really about discovery and forbidden knowledge, what better way to express that than by educating ourselves on intellectual and cultural achievements that we would not hear about otherwise? ★

★ If you know of any scholars, texts, or traditions that push against the usual grain, I’d love to hear about them! ★ Also, if anything in my profile layout feels misrepresented, please tell me - I’m not here to appropriate culture, but to honour and celebrate a globalised, inclusive vision of Dark Academia. ★

★Also: the playlist on this page is for the space between candlelight and caffeine. Every video has aesthetic visuals, every track tested under real study duress. And if you read the titles in order… you'll find that every beautiful thing is laced with ruin.★

Who I'd like to meet:

★ There are far too many people I’d like to meet - everyone carries a different truth, a different lens, and I want to borrow them all. ★ I want to speak to people who’ve cried in art galleries. I want to sit beside those who walk slowly in cemeteries not out of grief, but reverence. I want to ask strangers what they regret most, and what they dream of when no one is watching. ★ I want to meet philosophers who doubted themselves and poets who burned their drafts. I want to meet everyone who ever kept a journal and everyone who ever wrote a love letter and never sent it. ★ I want to meet people who remind me of people I miss. ★ But if I had to choose just one - one person to step through time or dream or memory - I think it would be my maternal grandmother. She died before I was born, but I’ve been told I mirror her - in face, in habit, in the odd tilt of my thoughts. ★ We share a name, too. ★ I imagine her with a book in one hand, a half-smile playing on her lips, watching the world through soft but sharp eyes. I’d ask her what she feared most. I’d ask her who she loved. I’d ask if the restlessness in me once stirred in her bones. ★ I wonder if she'd see me - truly see me - in the quiet way very few people can. ★

★ I’d like to meet my older self - not for answers, but for presence. I wonder what I’ll carry, and what I’ll have finally laid down. Will I be softer, or sharper? Will I have made peace with my ghosts, or just taught them to dance more elegantly? ★ I imagine her with ink-stained hands and lined eyes, still wearing black in midsummer, still loving things too deeply. I’d ask if it was worth it. All of it. And I’d listen carefully to the silence between her words. ★

★ I want to meet the versions of people that only exist in moments - the midnight version, the version crying in the backseat of a car, the version who finally said no. I want to meet the girls I used to be - the child holding a little torch and a Lemony Snicket book long after her bedtime, the young teenager who wrote emo poetry on rainy days at school, the version of me who believed magic was real and never stopped. ★

★ I’d like to meet fictional characters I swore were real - the ones who understood me before anyone else did. And I'd like to meet whoever I’m meant to become, and tell her she’ll be okay, even if she isn’t yet. ★

★ And yes - I want to meet the people I wasn’t supposed to. The ones fate never introduced me to. The ones I passed on the street and never looked up for. The almosts. The nearlys. The never-quites. ★

★ There are far too many people I’d like to meet. But maybe that’s what this life is - a long, strange procession of introductions and goodbyes, with a handful of souls who leave fingerprints on the inside of your ribcage. ★