Ahou Mostowfi

This is how I flirt

To respect and recognize the weight of lived experience is to let in subjectivity, contradiction, etc. everything the clinic was built to manage or exclude. Listening like that isn’t neutral. It’s political. And medicine people are terrified of politics.

Many medical professionals aren’t offended by lived experience, they’re terrified of it. Not because it challenges their knowledge, but because it disarms the Law of the Father that granted them the authority to listen in the first place.

Got inspired to integrate Zotero-enhanced Obsidian into my writing process. Now I feel awful. Haven’t felt this dumb in a long time. Funniest part? Most of the tutorials are by neurodivergent folks. Love that for me, a bad neurodivergent 😅

I’m heartbroken for the trees, cats, dogs, and birds of Tehran. My chest tightens when people ask me about the situation in Iran, I feel nothing but distance. Alienation. I have no one left under those missiles to worry about. No human ties. Only the weight of old traumas, resurfacing like ghosts.

Even by the standards of an evil administration, this is extraordinary.

youtu.be/f6i6gkN3OZ8?...

Overjoyed and deeply moved by the tender, richly layered conversations on chronic illness and pain at TONGUES, the #NNMHR conference. Rare to feel so intellectually nourished and intimately seen.

Art exists only in relation to the inevitability of death. There is no “AI art.”

Think I am addicted to the adrenaline of last-minute chaos. Not mere procrastination… I deliberately delay things just to feel a specific kind of bodily intensity; painful, but also weirdly ecstatic. Almost erotic. Like my nervous system finally feels real under the weight of impending failure.

In reality, even minor errors can render text incomprehensible. When you’re able-bodied, you rarely notice these barriers. Or worse, you notice but don’t acknowledge them. You fail to take responsibility. You continue past them unaffected… until suddenly, you can’t.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Truly, ragefully reject the argument that “we’re all a little disabled” for erasing the politics of disability. However, reviewing a doc for accessibility, I’m struck by how able-bodiedness creates the illusion of clear communication
and even omniscience…

I think if I can just reach the stage of being a largely harmless person who doesn't make the institution I'm part of actively worse I'll feel better.

Sometimes even I can’t find a way to deal with myself… don’t know how to move forward without making the wounded animal inside me rage.

The saddest part? I message my advisor, but I can’t bring myself to call.
Not out of fear they’ll be cruel, but because even a kind word would pierce the surface.
I’m clinging to the calm of limbo, where nothing is confirmed, nothing collapses.
The draft stays untouched. So do I.

Autonomy terrifies me. Not because I can’t work, but because I’ve always waited to be told I’m allowed to.

But here’s the truth:
I subconsciously crave a master. A god. Someone to say, “You’re allowed to continue.”

Been sitting on a chapter draft for two weeks. Not editing, not moving forward — just waiting for my advisor’s feedback. Telling myself it’s “productive waiting.”

Watch of the day: Free Churro – BoJack Horseman.

And now Mother’s Day finally comes to an end. It serves as a reminder that I survived a woman who thrived on control, fear, and dependence. She didn’t raise me; I fought my way out from under her.

She taught me resilience by being the reason I needed it.

Thank you for the trauma, Mom.

What endures is the quiet violence of being seen. The body carries meaning whether we consent or not, and the gaze becomes a kind of judgment we can’t opt out of.

The urge to judge doesn’t come from vanity. It comes from fear—of harm, of being outed, of being on the wrong side of power. I’ve felt that fear before. Now I see it again, reframed as vigilance, resistance or moral clarity.

Now, in the current context of Global North, I see a hauntingly familiar logic. Masks, keffiyehs, flags, posts. New codes, same mechanism. These markers signal allegiance, risk, dissent. The visual field becomes a minefield.

When I was living in Iran, I often carried a quiet, gnawing guilt about how instinctively I judged people based on appearance. Veil style, beards, tucked-in shirts—these weren’t aesthetic. They were political codes. To survive, I had to decode them. Judging was self-defense.

Imagine having only one god.
It'd like eating nothing but potatoes.

KOÜ rektörü Cantürk'ten engelli tuvaleti isteyen öğrenciye: "Bağış bulursan yaparız" KOÜ rektörü Cantürk'ten engelli tuvaleti isteyen öğrenciye: "Bağış bulursan yaparız"

In Turkey, speaking up for disability rights often meets not support, but mockery, dismissal, and fury. A university rector told a disabled student: “Find donations if you want a toilet.” This isn’t just disgraceful — it’s systemic neglect in plain sight.

t24.com.tr/haber/kou-re...

Özledik çok. Çıktınız, içimiz açıldı.🕊️🌿

Such a powerful and humbling disillusionment practice.

Sometimes I blame my stuckness on not writing in my native language, believing I’d be much more expressive in my mother tongue. Then I remember my friend’s words from years ago: he said he writes daily to combat the illusive thought that if he documented all his ideas, he’d be a great author.

Maybe it’s the mix of self-doubt, being a foreigner from a “lesser” country, and writing on Turkish art history. Or maybe it’s just the PhD version of intellectual puberty.