summer wine.

i just read the metamorphosis and it was fucking devastating. there are so many readings you could take, ive heard people say kafka intended it to be about depression which is something that he struggled with and i heavily fw the trans reading, but personally i primarily read it as being about disability. gregor wakes up one day physically unable to work and his family reacts with not only shock but disgust and horror. it's not even that THEY now have to work where they didn't before; we see at the end of the story that working doesn't really bother them. it's about his presence in their house. now that he's disabled and can't work, they dehumanize him completely, even denying that it's him at all. they act like having to take care of him is this horrible act of sacrifice they're performing - and they don't even actually take care of him, they leave him alone all day no matter how badly he wants company, they don't clean his room and instead let him live in filth (in fact they put their junk in there making it more of a mess), they throw things at him injuring him further, and they don't feed him properly to the point where he dies of malnutrition.

“People start to heal the moment they feel heard.”