Category: STEM

Time is finite. You can’t cheat time; buy more or waste it. It passes us by, both quickly and slowly by the second, minute, and hour. Time has made us a slave of us. Our perception of time skims above the laws of nature that determine the alignment of the big hand at one and twelve. Let me explain why this seemingly boring physics concept will help you carpe diem the fuck out of life. 

To begin we must discard the idea that time, objects, and the universe exist as singular entities. Instead, let’s think past the physical dimensionality and see these as a series of bonds, atoms, and forces that exist in the world. So, unless you are a woman in STEM, it’s time to draw out your GCSE physics knowledge as we use the most fundamental law of physics to understand the evolution of the universe and the passage of time. Light work.

Let’s wind the clock back…In the 19th century, engineers were concerned with the efficacy of steam engines – the newest coolest means of transport! They all sounded like this (cue winey male voice): ‘How hot should the fire be? What substance should you boil in the steam engine? Should it be water? Why did I study engineering at university?’. These were the hottest questions. Out of this steam arose the science of thermodynamics: ideas of heat, temperature, and energy danced between the mouths of scientists for the first time. And thermodynamics brought their radical new friend entropy to the party. 

Entropy explains why, when left to the mercy of the elements of our weird little world, mortar crumbles, glass shatters, buildings collapse, ice melts, and my mint tea goes from scolding to freezing in the Slavonic annex in the library. The majority of these processes are seemingly irreversible, moving in one direction like life itself… But why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I am the Science Sheriff, let’s lay down the Laws of the Land:

–   Law 1. Conservation of Energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transferred from one form to another.

–   Law 2. Entropy: The total entropy of an isolated system will always increase over time. 

So, entropy is the measurement of disordered energy in a structure. But what counts as disorder? Is a glass of room temp water or crushed ice more disorderly? 

So in the atomic bonds that make up everything in our world, energy is stored in the bonds. Energy pockets hold indivisible units of energy (aka quanta) more energy = hotter. I must have so much energy in me because I am smoking! I’m sorry, back to thermodynamics.  

Energy doesn’t stay put; it continuously moves between neighbouring bonds (energy lowkey ADHD coded). There are numerous ways the energy can be distributed in the solids yet still have the same amount of energy. These possibilities are called microstates. As energy moves the configurations change because of the distribution of microstates: there is a 21% chance that the system will later be in the configuration in which the energy is maximally spread out, 13% chance it will return to starting point and an 8% chance that solid A will gain energy, more ways to have disbursed energy (high entropy) than concentrated energy (low entropy) the energy tends to spread out. 

If you put a hot object next to a cold object, the cold once heats up and the cold one cools. But remember, there is an 8% chance the hot object could get even hotter, so why does this never happen? The size of the system so lets make things bigger, bigger is better 😉

The likelihood of each state becomes smaller and bigger. 

So it’s not impossible, it is improbable. 

Entropy is the measurement of this disordered energy. The energy configuration in which the energy is most spread between the solids has the highest entropy, low entropy means the energy is concentrated. Frozen ice melts into lukewarm liquid, plump tires deflate into wrinkled husks, and your warm dinner cools, all because these states have more dispersed energy than the originals. There is no mysterious force nudging the system towards a higher entropy, it is just always statistically more likely. Statistics yuh! Statistics! This singular direction of energy exchange gives the meaning to time, time is facilitated by entropy facilitated by life, yes you. 

Entropy is dubbed time’s arrow, if energy has the opportunity to spread out through you and the world you inhabit, it will. 

So let me ask: if energy will always spread out, when did it begin and, more importantly, when will there be no more butter to spread on our toast? 

Our world came about with the big bang, contrary to maybe all religious institutions. Above you will find a Cosmic Microwave Background, a microwave telescopic photograph of the cooled remnant of the first light that could ever travel freely throughout the Universe. We can see how the universe started with a very dense and hot phase of low entropy that expanded outwards and cooled itself into high entropy. 

Ultimately, entropy teaches us that reality is moving closer and closer to complete disorder. A comforting thought indeed. Each day has a higher entropy than the next. In our world things tend to go from orderly to disorderly because there are many more ways to be disorderly, it is more probable. Maybe one day we will reach the heat death of the universe, the systems that increase the overall entropy of the universe push us to the maximum entropy, a maximum level of disorderliness and chaos. Or it will be a simple equilibrium: the maximum chaos will lead to nothing interesting ever happening again.  

Now, this isn’t to push you into a pit of depression or to start reading existentialist philosophy (though Camus is fantastic). I’m telling you to live. Life and energy is flowing within you, the bonds that make up your very being are swelling with energy attempting to diserpate. We exist within this process, we are servants to these laws that define our world but it does not have to be a subordinate existence. As the poet Paul Celan says ‘the world is fucked, I must carry you’. Celan’s right! The world IS fucked in its own laws, so fuck it. The pursuit of men for centuries has been the domestication of this chaos. Instead, embrace it. Ask someone out, cut off your hair, and live outside the lines of fear. For life is storming forward and I beg you follow the call and see what lies before you in the stars. And I pray they shine as bright as you. 

3.3 billion years ago, due to extreme heat and pressure Diamonds started to form beneath Earth. The carbon atoms in a diamond uniquely bond in pyramid structures creating the hardest and most coveted substance on the planet. Diamonds are found in many countries around the world, with 65% found in Africa. Modern mining of diamonds started during the 1870s in South Africa, following the discovery of The Star of South Africa Diamond (83.5 carats in size) on the banks of the Orange River (at the border of Namibia and South Africa) in 1869. By 1937, British companies had forcibly taken control of the market and unearthed one million carats annually — an amount currently worth  $2 billion to $25 billion. As Britain and its companies grew richer, the miners and indigenous people earned almost none of this profit; the polishers,miners, distributors could only dream of owning that hunk of rock. 

By the late 1930s, the very beginning of N.W. Ayer’s campaigns for De Beers, a Diamond industry tycoon, the amount suggested to be spent on an engagement ring was one month’s salary – $4,887 – now worth around $89,764.53 in 2024. De Beers created “The Diamond Dream”, ‘The allure that diamonds have for consumers, based on their association with romance and a sense of the eternal, and the fact that they are seen as a lasting source of value.’ The luxurious wealth of diamonds is more comparable to carbon’s second allotrope graphite: a malleable construct, with weak forces of interaction allowing its layers (and facade) to be pulled apart. They appear at Sotheby’s auctions with immense back stories like superheroes. Or worn in the mouths of your favourite celebs in Grillz and atop of the Queen’s head. As the popularity of diamonds has grown through their role in pop culture, a simple case of the supply and demand paradox has occurred. 

The wealth of diamonds in the construct of marriage and the idea of the engagement ring dates back to the 1300s. The Archduke Maximilian of Austria in the imperial court of Vienna in 1477, upon his betrothal to Mary of Burgundy, gifted (to her father, not to her!) as a symbol of their wealth: a diamond ring. After rumour spread throughout the court of Austria, many other women desired such a gift of adoration, this notion continuing up to the present day. The wealth of a woman in modern capitalist society has became conflated with the number of carats on her left hand; “ring finger”. Being so rich in “wealth”, so in demand and “rare”, the production of synthetic diamonds was inevitable.

Copper-fastened for centuries by a decadence of glamour and greed, diamonds are now being rivalled by their lab-grown counterparts.  “Real” and “synthetic” diamonds don’t differentiate on a molecular basis, as scientists unearthed a way to mimic the natural formation of diamonds, replicating the very same conditions occurring below the earth’s mantle. Succumbing to the immense weight of pressure and heat, magically these carbon atoms transfigure into high quality, authentic yet synthetic, diamonds,  successfully leaking into the melee of the industry. Synthetic diamonds have been commercially available since the early 1990s,  and can even be manufactured to have the same pockets of nitrogen in their structure as a “real” diamond. These lab-grown diamonds are mostly created in China, and trickle through the hub of the world diamond trade: India. Almost all of the world’s diamonds go through India at some point in their lives, and have reportedly bled into the diamond markets of the world. They may even have landed on your mummy’s finger. If the ring is fake, is your daddy’s love for her too?

So maybe Shirley Bassey is wrong, and diamonds are not forever. The capitalist allusion is that diamonds are a work of “magic” created under incredible natural forces, a prize of God’s work. But in truth, diamonds are an opportunity for the prosperity of our imagination. They are a symbol of wealth that the majority of society will never have access to, but with a necklace or engagement ring, we can pretend. In reality, a diamond is a lump of carbon, scaffolded by consumerism and buffed to shine by the roughness of colonialism, and capitalist consumption.  

CW: Sexual violence and pornography 

‘You look lonely, I can fix that…’ – Joi, Blade Runner 2049 

As the cosmos of tech exponentially engulfs every aspect of our lives, the behaviours most intrinsic to human nature struggle as they are being overridden. Our innate lusts to mate and find companionship links back to our primal instincts, our base code. Human consciousness is grounded in this desire, our existence built around socialisation. The monogamy of humans is subject to debate; with varying perspectives on hetero/homosexuality and polyamory. However, the simplicity of mating and love in the animal kingdom is far less complex than humans. Thanks to our consciousness, the abstract ideas of sexuality, fetish, the patriarchy, and sexual freedom have implicated the difficulty of finding our “perfect match”. This complex issue of intimacy has puzzled humankind for centuries; portrayed in plays, music and paintings. Now we have found a new piece of software to decode: the internet. 

Thanks to Zuckerburg and the Silicon Valley brotherhood of “Tech bros” who sought to connect us through social media, the opposite effect can be argued to have been achieved. Facemash was Zuckerberg’s first project at Harvard, giving him the building blocks for what would become Facebook. The website was used to rate the “hotness” of women on campus against one another. He built it by hacking into the school’s student directory and stealing women’s ID photos for the site (and we wondered why he was ok with selling users’ data to help Trump and Brexit?). Zuckerburg testified before two U.S Senate committees in 2018 relating to his connections to Cambridge Analytica and the role he played in destroying democracy in the 21st Century. When asked about the initiative behind Facebook, the hailed genesis of social media, he casually replied ‘No, Facebook wasn’t invented to rank hot girls –That Was My Other Website.’ 

As the helpful and joyous aspects of tech developed and we were able to message relatives overseas, connected in a way never before seen, so did the taboo and dark aspects of the internet and technology. The most central social aspects of our lives were built by white men with elements of centuries old misogynistic ideals at their core. The relationship between tech and the patriarchy is undeniable. The increased commodification and sexualisation of women in the 21^st Century has been born out of the rise of fringe social media sites: QAnon, 4Chan, Reddit, and IsAnyOneUp.com. 

The Porn and Camming Industry can most notably be identified by platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans. They have become recognised as part of the user’s everyday life, just like Facebook and Snapchat. Pornhub was founded by web developer Matt Keezer in 2007 and while on the surface this direction brought porn out of the pages of playboy magazines and into our hands, a sea of controversy lies beneath. Pornhub has been involved in numerous lawsuits regarding non consensual material, child pornography, theft of online property, sex trafficking, and unpaid labour. This infamous industry aiding in the upholding of rape culture resulted in the call for “ethically sourced porn”, birthing sites like OnlyFans. This discourse produced by the Feminist Sex Wars seemed to be partially solved by a site like OnlyFans creating sexual empowerment for sex workers. However, the risks of cyber security and exploitation are unavoidable in the enigmatic matrix of the internet. This digital screening of intimacy impacts our understanding of sex and consent, resulting in damaging effects on the human brain leading to habits of addiction that we are still trying to decrypt.

These developments aren’t contained to the online world as the development of digital sex toys, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality are feeding into our hunger for a new age of digital sensuality. Sex toys have advanced from “Cleopatra’s bees in a box: DIY Vibrator” as female sexuality has entered the mainstream. The intersections between tech and male focused sexuality centralise around the combination of women and commodity. This has become a fantasy of the techno-industrial empire, to reduce women to a consumable good. While the extremes of the Japanese originated sex robots, A.I cam-girls, and Hentai illustrate this, it’s evident in simpler parts of our lives.

Think Siri. Your humble personal assistant that goes with you everywhere, confined within her machine and submitted to a life of servitude. Your wish is her command. So, while the impact of tech has influences over digital sexuality, it has IRL consequences. The prevalence of the perfected female android is a fantasy ingrained in our consciousness produced by big tech: EVE, Ex-Machina, NPC Live Streams, and Joi from Blade Runner. The perfect merging of production, tech, and sexuality. One we must now navigate by regaining our connection to the motherboard of reality. 

The prosperity, innovation and advancements in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths or STEM, is recognised by annual award ceremonies most notably the Nobel Prize. There have been 346 Nobel Prizes awarded in the Science Categories: Physics, Chemistry and Medicine or Physiology.

26 to Women. 320 to Men. 

The world of “STEM” has an infamous reputation coded in sexism and misogyny, the discoveries of women have been the backbone of scientific development. The prize winners (a common motif within the prominent figures of life) are most often old, cis white men. The voices of generations of women are callously silenced and their successes snubbed. Their intellectual property and groundbreaking discoveries that have changed the course of history have been stolen entirely. Examples of  outright theft: discoveries plucked from the hands of our legendary ladies and credit passed on to the white man in his white coat.

What do these all have in common?   

• The structure of DNA
• Nuclear Fission 
• The Cure for Leprosy
• The development of electronic frequencies.

No, it’s not that they are some of the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries that have been made.

They were all discoveries made by women, and stolen from them. 

Rosalind Franklin is the uncredited discoverer of the double helix structure of  DNA. Franklin was fierce and, according to her fellow (male) scientists, ‘short tempered and stubborn’. So much so that they claimed to find working with her to be a ‘challenge’. 

Oh Franklin, you would have loved DIVA by Beyonce. Franklin, you have been the number one diva in this game for a minute.

She worked alongside Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick. Franklin had immediate beef with Wilkins; their conflicts leading them to work in relative isolation. Unknown to Franklin, Watson and Crick were right nosey nannies and read some of her unpublished data, including the beautiful “Photograph 51“.  Photograph 51 is treated as the philosopher’s stone of molecular biology, the key to the “secret of life” . Using Franklin’s photograph, Watson and Crick created their famous DNA model. Franklin’s contribution was not acknowledged, and in 1962 Crick and Watson won the Nobel Prize for Physiology. Franklin had died from ovarian cancer 4 years prior to this. She wasn’t mentioned once, leaving her as the wronged heroine of DNA. 

Dr Lisa Meitner was the Queen of Physics. She was one of the first women to earn a doctorate from the University of Vienna but fled after Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. She moved to Sweden and began researching with her partner Otto Hahn (WARNING: MASSIVE ARSEHOLE). Meitner discovered nuclear fission, one of the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries made in history thus far. When publishing their research, Hahn conveniently left off mention of Meitner’s name. In 1944 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Meitner wasn’t mentioned once. In 1992, element 109 was named Meitnerium (Mt) in her honour. Many consider Lise Meitner the “most significant woman scientist of the 20th Century”.

Dr Alice Ball was the first woman and black American to get a PhD from the University of Hawai’i. She was also the first black chemistry professor. Big slay. She found the cure for leprosy, ‘The Ball Method’. Ball chemically modified Chaulmoogra oil to become water soluble to be absorbed by the body. Unforntionally, Ball died at only 24 years old. But her story doesn’t end there.. Her advisor Arthur Dean (I think you know where this is going) continued the trials of her treatment. Dean published a method of extracting the active ingredient in chaulmoogra oil without acknowledging the research by Ball. It was known as the ‘Dean Method’. 

Hedy Lamarr was an actress turned inventor. She was a sexy scientist spy. Girlboss. She created a secret radio system that could frequency hop during WW2. She presented this invention to the Navy, but after claiming they didn’t want Lamarr’s technology they stole it for themselves. Lamarr’s work is with us everyday, she birthed Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. She is Mother. 

So, Women have always been in STEM, and  always will be. Even if forgotten, unacknowledged, robbed or  ridiculed – women in STEM prosper whether we see them or not. Misogyny is grounded deep within the foundations of every aspect of modern society, with intellectual property ownership in STEM being no different. I want to highlight this theft of success, do we not owe that to these women? To amplify the voices of those affected by cruelty of men in hope of fostering a more equitable and inclusive community within science and engineering. I believe that is the true meaning of strength, to fly in the face of ignorance and continue on for the betterment of humanity. 

So, this is my love letter to all women who have been or are in STEM.

We see you and appreciate you.

In October of last year, the British Library fell victim to a cyber-attack and user data was stolen, harvested, and auctioned off on the dark web for a starting price of £600,000. The library refused to pay and was left with no WiFi, no computer access, no website, and no phone lines, and they are still grappling with the waves of consequence. The hacker gang Rhysida is thought to be behind the attack: a ransomware-as-a-service group, meaning clients pay for the group to target a victim of their choice. The attack highlights a new vulnerability that many of us have never acknowledged: our data. 

Gradually, the value of online data collection has become a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. While the global oil market was worth about $1.7 trillion in 2019, the following year left this figure eclipsed by the global data market which valued at about $3 trillion in 2020. As the world moves online, our data becomes our identity. You might think that the platforms are the commodity: Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat.

But you’re wrong. Data is the world’s most coveted commodity and thus, we are the product.  

The concept of data is a tricky one to wrap our heads around. Every second we spend online, buckets of our cyber information are spilled into the web, cloud, or whatever non-threatening metaphor you choose to use. These data points come together to form something of a digital footprint which can be used by buyers to form a predictive algorithm. So, contrary to popular opinion, your phone isn’t listening to you saying you want to go on holiday or that you want a new pair of docs. The magical apparition of ads suggesting cheap flights to Malaga or Doc Martens on sale are not quite as magic as they seem. The data from our online activity across all our apps is used to create an accurate predictive model of our behaviour, all of which is explained in excessively convoluted language in font size 3 T&Cs that we accept without the bat of an eyelid. The algorithm knows you and is one step ahead. You’re just that predictable, bitch! 

Hyper-targeted ads may seem rather unthreatening, with the only tangible consequences being felt by your bank account (my overdraft is screaming!). However this isn’t the whole truth. Data, although it seems like it only has online consequences, could be sending us further and further into the Matrix hand-in-hand with Keanu. We saw this with Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the 2016 US Election and later in the Brexit Campaign in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm specialising in using data to push their client’s political campaigns. Alexander Nix, the father of Cambridge Analytica, claimed to have 5000 data points on every US Voter. When helping push Trump into presidency, Cambridge Analytica didn’t target every US Voter (a problem that safely lies 25-or-so years ahead of us, fingers crossed), instead, they used data to build a psychological profile and then target persuadable voters through psychographic online microtargeting. A mouthful, I know. To fall into the category of ‘persuadable’ you must fulfil one of the Big Five personality profiles: agreeable, open to new experiences, extroverted, neurotic, or conscientious. Psychological researchers have shown that the things we “like” on platforms like Facebook can be used to predict our personality traits. Like + Cat meme = agreeable. 

So, follow the programme:

1. Find persuadable personalities through psychographic microtargeting based on data profiles
2. Send them advertisements like fake Facebook ads 
3. Then you’ve made just enough change to sway the polls in your favour

Project Alamo, the online division of the Trump campaign under the direction of Cambridge Analytica, spent around $1M a day on Facebook ads, pushing the “Crooked Hillary” narrative. Fake news was used again for the Brexit agenda following Analytica’s (short-lived) success. 

Yes, it is rather gloomy and dark. But before you run off and delete every social media account you have ever made and change every password in the hopes that you will remain off-grid forever, let me relay some reassuring news. What Cambridge Analytica highlighted through their ability to incite real political change was the need for data rights to be covered by human rights (in the meantime, all that was sacrificed was modern democracy). We need transparency with how our data is being used because it is our property. Data rights are human rights. In this tempest of data advances, navigating this 3D digital chess board depends on our defences. We can prosper as a computer chip in the digital age through an education on data rights and restrictions. 

Technology can make a huge difference and will for many years to come, but it’s how we let it define us that is the big question. So, before you gobble up those  cookies or accept those privacy policies, take a moment to pause. Google is free, use it to educate yourself. Brittney Kaizer (@own.your.data), a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, saw the light and is now a data rights activist working with the UK Parliament to improve our data rights. 

The battle against cyberware is a long and arduous one. Take Dave Carrol. Following Cambridge Analytica’s bragging about data stealing for Trump, he embarked on the quest to retrieve his data and is still engaged in the legal battle. Cambridge Analytica was the lightning rod for a confluence of feelings about Trump’s election, Facebook, Brexit and the rising use of data modelling as psychological warfare. But it is bigger than just Cambridge Analytica. That big bad wolf may be gone but there are others out there and we must make it through the woods, red cape and all. 

Carrol won’t stop until he gets his data back because it means more than just him,

“All I want is everything, because I’m entitled to it. And so is everyone.”

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1218772110#ref-15

What are girls made of? Hormones, Hysteria And everything nice…

Embarking on the journey through the man-made medical maze is a daunting challenge for many women; there is an undeniable history of perpetual misunderstanding, mystification, and misdiagnosis of women’s health issues. Harking back to the wandering womb in ancient greek medical texts, the Salem witch trials, and the days of “feminine hysteria”, and now to menopause, endometriosis, and postpartum depression. The etymology of “hysteria” is derived from the Greek word ‘hystera’, literally translating to uterus, reinforcing the misogynistic reduction of women and their wellbeing to their reproductive organs. There is a medical orthodoxy masking a horde of misdiagnosis and misconduct cases from male physicians and psychiatrists, creating a vast gender-based disparity in health research and treatment affecting millions of women across the world. 

The UK is thought to have the largest female health gap of all G20 countries with millions of women falling through it annually. According to the new digital healthcare service Livi, ‘over half of UK women fear they’ve been misdiagnosed at least once in their lives, with a quarter believing this is due to ‘simply being a woman’. The knowledge surrounding the differing effects of illness in men and women are unknown. The symptoms of a heart attack or stroke appear differently in women than they do men. The main conditions with severe, prolonged and debilitating symptoms such as PCOS, chronic pain, and endometriosis are woefully under-researched. But what we do know is that women are experiencing institutional scale medical misogyny.

PCOS, or polycystic ovary syndrome, affects  roughly 10% of women at reproductive age in the UK and causes fertility issues nationally. It can take up to 8 years to receive a diagnosis of endometriosis, a devastatingly haunting statistic, actively discouraging me from exploring the condition myself. Endometriosis is a chronic gynological disease where tissue similar to womb tissue grows around the body causing severe symptoms: infertility, fatigue, and period, pelvic and chronic pain. Endometriosis occurs in 4 stages, as it worsens it increases the difficulty to treat; this impact cannot be understated. 

The organisation Chronic Illness Inclusion represents disabled women, like myself, who report recounts of ‘gaslighting’ and ‘accusations of hysteria’ by medical professionals in examples of gender and disability prejudice. They’ve received more than 800 complaints of negative healthcare experiences of disabled women with energy-limiting chronic illness and pain. Chronic pain is prevalent in 34% of the population, but reportedly significantly higher in women. For these cases of chronic pain, the most common treatment is prescription opioids which are disproportionately prescribed to men not women. So women must turn to over the counter medication. 

Let’s take Feminax, a period painkiller, 1 pack includes 16 tablets at £5.49. With severe pain, one may need to take up to 2 tablets every 4 hours, totalling at 12 tablets every 24 hours. For a whole week, the average cycle of a period, that’s nearly 6 packets costing around £33. Annually, this totals at £400 to medicate just one week, every month. Not accounting for any muscular, neurological, or other illness. To self-medicate period pain for 10 years you could find yourself spending over £4,000 just to get through one week of the month. Issues like the pink tax don’t help this issue and create comercial economic misogyny. Feminax is 346 mg of Ibuprofen Lysine and targets women with its little pink box. However, migraine relief is the same medication sold for a fraction of the price at  £2.15. Women are continually misled with this information, encouraging them to spend thousands of pounds on, essentially, a pharmaceutical scam. 

All these symptoms of misinformation, negligence and simple misogyny lead to a bleak and horrific terminal diagnosis. I myself can, reliably, diagnose the UK with a callous case of terminal gender healthcare disparity. The NHS is infected. But this isn’t new. It traces back to Aristotle’s distinction between the superior male “form” and inferior female “matter”. Even Aristotle’s argument is fundamentally wrong and has been heavily disproven. The significance of this idea catalysed centuries of suffering for millions of women.

I must admit, while writing this I’m boiling with rage, frantically typing while listening to A Pearl by Mitski on a meticulously curated ‘female rage playlist’. 

Consider my fuse blisteringly burning…

But the truth I must sadly reveal to you is, I don’t have the answers; the miracle antidote to fix this festering and violent cancer that has infected our healthcare system to the core. But that shouldn’t be my responsibility. Healthcare is a basic human right that I shouldn’t fear or doubt. I want to be heard and respected. I’m not being a bitch, I’m being a fucking person. Women are people. And I will scream, shout, yell, and belt until you hear me and help us.