Accent · Issue Two
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Accent · Issue Two · Letter
Content note: this piece contains references to suicide, depression, alcohol, and controlled drugs.
This article is intended as a letter, to be read by a younger version of myself. While this is a work of fiction, the information included within, is as far as i'm concerned, my lived reality, (which is of course always relative.) The letter is a sort of guidebook, I would have benefitted from as a child. In this piece I am not attempting to generalise the experience of millions of neurodivergent or depressed people, but instead, to try and create a piece of writing that can serve as an anchor for Accent issue two, and most importantly, in the hope that a real person may read the letter, and find resonance in it.
For Kazim forever ago,
Being alone is like having a palette, with a myriad of colours, but for a moment you're colourblind, and the curator of your thoughts is colourblind too. Together, you take a large brush, and splatter something onto the canvas. As the colour reappears, it's world beating, or self-defeating, you have a dangerous mind.
That mind can make you a wild inventor, with enthusiasm bordering on delusion. It will be excited, charismatic, intense, and highly creative. You can visualise and construct, you're risk aggressive, you're an individual in the truest sense, trying to push the needle, or ride the wheels off anything that interests you.
That mind is unrelenting too. Driven to burnout repeatedly, sat in hospitals, sat in tears over emotional dysfunction, consumed by washes of shrinking and growing anxieties and regrets, lying awake, unable to move for days, unable to eat normally, unable to face the thought of social interaction, unable to do anything or tell anyone because your brain is wired to be more lenient to strangers than you are to yourself.
Sleep as the city wakes up, awaken in the evening, and wait, just wait, waiting for a gift, waiting for something. Feel the weight of your short sighted eyes. After a few hours brush your teeth, put your contact lenses in, and go back to waiting. Think, swirl, bunch your jaw, sigh, think about going to lidl, but keep waiting, keep staring, your water is finished, it's been finished since yesterday. You're well aware. The room is airy, dark and quiet, your conscience is shrieking but nothing is giving, just visions of blackout and rest. A comforting, smiling, fuzzy thought, which becomes deafening and ringing. Something isn't right, something has to change, but there's no explanation. Death becomes welcoming, you're capable of anything you believe in enough, so you squeak like a mouse in a trap, petrified and exhausted. Still, your head creates, replays, when you don't need second glances. The self-loathing, the fear of laziness, the lack of action, and cycle of self inflicted self-destruction.
Surprise! You're neurodivergent. On April 16th 2026 at 6:34pm, it will be a sunny evening in London, you'll sit at your desk, with tears blotting the inked pages underneath your head, and as Nico Zamora wrote in 'Ghost Elephants', "Cry with the desire of a lifetime". Accent issue 2, (despite a single published poem being written by me), is mainly a harmful, anxious, and lonely project, which aims to capture the depravity of the hypermodern world we inhabit, in which individuals and their lives are commodities for elitist superstructures. Realising I was neurodivergent, combined with taking medication, namely stimulants, is what let the light back into my brain. I could face the world again, with a weird sensation, that felt like hopeful realism in my squeaky clean eyes. The issue ends on transformation and transparency, a table of contents is washed away, and the canvas is once again blank.
I had not realised the depravity of my state of mind until after I was diagnosed and medicated. My experience with neurodivergence is endless performance and masking to appear neurotypical. It's why I cannot drink alcohol without getting drunk, why I love acting or impersonating people, why I struggle to regulate when responding to perceived injustice, and why I can be difficult to predict or understand to even those who believe they have a complete understanding of me. It is hard to say no to people, it is hard to confront people over little things, it is hard to seek help because it would make you vulnerable, it is hard to socialise on a basic level, I would feel more calm on a stage in front thousands of people, than in a lift with another person.
Burnout is inevitable, and it's difficult to know when you're going to hit that wall. It can be a bad comment from someone, a security guard not letting you bring grapes into the library, a t-shirt not ironed that you planned to wear. That breakdown is like a falling lift, hurtling through stories until you're crashing into an all-time low. I have little advice on that, but fill your heart with love, and forget your head. You can read social dynamics well, (a skill from a lifetime of masking), but you cannot control anything. Say sorry to the people you let down, and love the people who let you down. Try to love yourself and others even when hatred is much easier.
Question why you want tomorrow so much, when all it can promise is something hard to do. Live as a human is supposed to, day by day. You're told that you lack emotion. If you are emotional, others often act bewildered, or annoyed. You're not moody, you're not angry, you're not annoying, it is okay to be giddy, excited, breathless to tell people about something that you love. It is okay to be sad, upset, closed off, and to cry. It is okay to be angry, confrontational, annoyed, and to let people know that their actions are not okay. You're allowed to go to the toilet in an exam, to say no to people, to be frustrated at people who can't use the escalator on the tube properly. You are weird and non-conforming in that which interests you. Be like yourself aged four, screaming and throwing yourself against Granda's car window at trains passing, before you remind him of all of places it stops between Dublin and Belfast, in perfect order. You will always have strange special interests.
Lastly, for Kazim forever ago,
Give me your hands.
“Oh no Love, You're not alone.” - David Bowie, Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, 1972
Epilogue
In the midst of paranoia and hatred for the world, Accent was born. Accent exists because people have always been scared of language: scared enough to burn it, ban it, die defending it. It absorbs you in a way films, or paintings, or music can't, it leaves you destitute. Ink, paper, and your brain. When you read something arresting, there's nothing to look at but the page, no swelling currents underneath to tell you how to feel. Why do people die for written ideas? Why do people live by religious texts? Why have writers and academics always been imprisoned or executed in oppressive regimes? Language is the only thing that's ever done anything.
Thank you to every contributor in this issue, everyone whose language didn't make it in this time, and everyone who shaped Issue Two without knowing it.
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