An Annotated Life
A rebranding of Stories and States
Welcome to my newsletter, where I catalogue shifting literary life and the narratives that shape us.
To be good had been the lifelong quest of the child I once was; the one who was the eldest daughter, realising slowly, that she sat enmeshed in the stomach of a war machine. Reading had been her way to navigate this life.
At heart, I’m a hoarder. The things I read are not to escape the world around me, but to equip me with the knowledge needed to survive it. Books have been my arsenal against injustice, being archived in my heart and writing to be fired at the ignorance of oppressive norms.
Life is interpersonal, it’s interconnected, and here at An Annotated Life, I seek to explore how the system seeps slowly into it to steer us away from the things that rest our soul.
As Bell Hooks put it:
The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies.
This is largely what An Annotated Life will seek to embody.
When presented with the way things should be, I’ve instinctively furrowed my brows, and outspokenly remarked ‘why?’.
Why should my mother long so painfully for a son?
Why should I be robbed of opportunity for being who I am?
Why should I endure because of the way we choose to live?
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.1
Is that you?
Life is tumultuous, and the systems that have chosen our way of living are crumbling away from the inside out, slowly, but surely.
So sit with me, let’s talk with a cup of tea and that stack of books on your bedside table.
An Annotated Life is a place where we choose to read not to escape our reality, but to corrode the injustice away from it.
Reading and writing are becoming harder to practice with mindfulness and moral integrity.
What does it mean to consume the right way?
What does it mean to produce the right way?
What does it mean to live freely?
These are some of the questions I seek to answer one book at a time, with one moment passing away forever, to the next.
To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.2
What you get by Subscribing:
Updates and Notes on the books I’m reading and notes on how they resonate with my goals as mentioned above this heading
Books that make their way on my TBR, categorised in neat and fun themes to be explored
Essays inspired by the books I’ve read, from a day to day life’s perspective
Personal Essays about life, universality, and the adventure that is your twenties
If you find yourself nodding for the above, consider subscribing to An Annotated Life to double check mindfulness, creativity, and justice!
coming up next…
What I Read in January
From Audre Lorde
From Bell Hooks
I'm excited to see where this goes.