żal.pl

żal.pl (a Polish slang phrase meaning both “grief” and “how pathetic”) is a narrative, autoethnographic essay about grief as a structural condition: the result of living in a society that can render a person simultaneously visible and invisible—present, yet unacknowledged. The book moves from the author’s unwanted birth, through years of trauma and depression, into adulthood, where the central realization is that no breakthrough will come—and that what remains is the logistics of survival.

At the book’s core lies a hunger for love: a permanent craving, chronic deprivation, a desire so basic it becomes almost humiliating. This is not a romantic subplot but an existential axis—love as a physical, brutal, non-negotiable need that nonetheless stays out of reach. The text traces what prolonged lovelessness does to the body and psyche, and how belief in love becomes a luxury one cannot afford if survival is the priority.

The narrative unfolds through scenes and anecdotes: the violence of normativity, class shame, everyday mechanisms of exclusion, life lived in constant time scarcity and insufficiency. The style is unapologetically raw, threaded with black humor—written in the register of “visceral pornography.”

żal.pl speaks of “dying” without death: the ways one kills oneself while remaining endlessly alive—socially, relationally, linguistically. Grief here is neither a character flaw nor a private wound, but an experience that accrues under prolonged exclusion and the absence of love. This story has nowhere to hide. It ruptures silence, stating plainly what is usually muted, smoothed over, or repressed. In Polish.