The Inked Path

Working real hard to actually excel at academics, because you realize that reading The Secret History or The Picture Of Dorian Gray once doesn't make you an academic.

Treating everyone, specially unfortunate people with kindness, because acting like an aloof douche doesn't give you Cool Points.

Holding yourself with dignity, instead of begging other people for scraps of attention and validation. No, really. Stop trying to act like a misunderstood serial killer, Susan, it's embarrassing.

Not falling into the traps of elitist racism, casual misogyny or anti-semitism, because you try to be intelligent and introspective, instead of following in the gross footsteps of some shitty, white eighteenth century writer.

Not having a superiority complex over the fact that you don't listen to pop music, because you are smart enough to respect art of all kinds, or at the very least, respect the fact that people are inherently different.

Okay now the fun stuff:

Short red nails

Reading to expand your mind

Flowy dresses or leather jackets or pajamas, because Dark Academia can be DIVERSE, babeyyyyy

Fluffy fat cats named Oscar

Toasting to Aphrodite and Persephone

Healthy friendships and relationships, because we need to STOP romanticising toxicity.

Handwritten birthday cards with pressed flowers

BLUEBERRIES

Lana Del Rey and One Direction. Hozier and Dua Lipa. The Shins and Nirvana. Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. Sam Fender and Coldplay. Taylor Swift and The Velvet Underground. Lorde and Florence. 5SOS and The Beatles. Zayn and Rihanna. Seriously, listen to whoever the fuck you want to listen to. Dark Academia is NOT a music genre. Listen to everything. To define is to limit.

Dancing at midnight

Fairy tales and horror stories

Falling in love

Only red lipstick on an otherwise bare face

Celebrating the birthdays and deathdays of your favourite authors and poets

Quoting Oscar Wilde to your houseplant

Ivory coloured notebooks

Watching Kill Your Darlings and Yearning

Watching Gone Girl and Yearning

Rock music in the shower

Constellations tattooed over your body, because you contain the entire universe in you babey

Doctoral programs and scholarships

Talking to stray animals like they're your old friends

Lying in the grass on a sunny day

Learning languages at your own pace, because you got nothing to prove to nobody

Studying to learn

Trying your hardest to live your life for YOU

Being who YOU want to be

Pushing yourself through dark times, because you try so hard to believe in yourself

Healthy sleep schedules, except the occasional all nighter to indulge your inner vampire

Happiness

“So many movies and stories give us characters who are either too glamorous or too terrible to relate to. So many heroes have bravery and grit that seem too challenging for us to muster. But in Gerwig’s Little Women, Jo March was the kind of brave hero that I needed, the kind of hero marketers didn’t initially want me to see.

So yes, Jo March: women have minds and hearts, dreams and hopes. We have ambition and independence, beauty and talent. We are feminists that demand and deserve respect. But we’ve got hearts that long with loneliness, too. It’s not wrong to feel lonely even when you’re lucky, and it’s not wrong to have needs. It’s human.”

Artist

Various canvases in different stages of completion stacked against a wall. Jars of brushes and pens on a paint-splattered desk, a sketchbook open on a page with a pencil sketch of a nude reclining like a dead body. A pile of wide hardbound books on your favourite artists serving as a makeshift table for a white marble bust. A bare window; you need all the light you can get. A box of drawers holding more supplies. A portrait of your muse hangs across your bed so you can look at her before you sleep. Sheets always rumpled. In the corner is a rag stained with what could be paint... or blood.

Poet

Hardbound dictionaries, spine-creased paperbacks with yellowing pages, thick anthologies, thin chapbooks all crammed onto the bookshelves, spilling over on tables, on the floors... Notebooks and pens always within reach, but there are words written everywhere, in book margins, on the back of torn envelopes, on hotel stationery. A list of words describing the darkness in your soul pinned to the wall beside a photo of Oscar Wilde, and a quote by Sappho. Your plaid jacket draped over the back of your chair. In its pocket is a list of names, half of them crossed out, of all the people you are writing poems about. Vengeance is sweet.

Scientist

Prints from old botanicals or anatomy books on your wall. Or cyanotype photos or x-rays or blown-up microscope slides. Or framed butterflies, wings already turning to dust. A row of notebooks on your table, the same colour and size, filled with your scrawling. Field notes, lab notes, therapy session notes, the consistency of format matters; the neatness of your penmanship does not. White coat hanging from a hook behind the door, front pocket full of pens, one of them bleeding. A skull on your bookshelf (not necessarily human) sharing space with a battered copy of Darwin, Campbell’s Biology, and a stack of pulpy sci fi books.

Theatre Folk

my dear,

we must do better. we have an obligation to think critically about the content we create and propogate.

white skin is not the only skin in academic spaces. neurotypical brains are not the only brains which can create. thin bodies are not the only bodies that can don a camel-hair trench coat. europeans and people of european descent are not the only people with valuable contributions to academia.

you want to be a dark academic? challenge the very notion that only white, thin, able-bodied, neurotypical, cis-het men can create something worth immortalizing.

i love you. ergo, i insist on bettering you.

your most tender and ardent lover,