i used to do this thing as a child where i would pretend i was a youtuber, and i would make commentary on everything that i would do in isolation. i understood then that this act would appear, to put it plainly, utterly deanged to an outside observer. there was no camera in sight, what could i possibly get by putting on this show for nobody? why's this kid doing this to themself? what had to have gone wrong for them to think that this is a right and proper thing to do with their mind?
my best guess as to why this was a thing that i would do is that i didn't have any other way to keep my mind company, i always had known that my parents had wanted nothing to do with me, and all the books and video games in the world couldn't last me forever. naturally i watched as many lets plays of minecraft mods on youtube as i could, getting around my parents' internet restrictions any way i could manage; sneaking off into the bathroom at 2am with my sort-of-kindle sort-of-ipad with an internet browser that barely worked watching dantdm to distract myself from the fact that no child should be awake at this hour, or so distressed over having to watch some guy overexcitedly explain to the child audience what is happening on the screen. of course i wanted this for myself, as i started to watch more and more youtubers i wanted to do exactly what they'd been doing.
this thought has been in the back of my mind forever and it is a truly dangerous one, the desire to be a youtuber, or perhaps in the more modern incarnation of the internet, a twitch streamer. though in childhood i would use what i'd gleaned from the entertainment skillsets of others for my own personal use, i kind of always wanted to be an online entertainer in some way, and that desire has shifted every which way, mostly dependant on whatever i'm watching at the time. naturally as i've gotten into radio tv solutions i'd found myself wanting to have a style similar to what socpens does for his broadcasts. naturally i'd just end up being a knock-off anyway so why the hell would i even try, but it's something that appeals to me greatly. i guess all inspiration is theft at the end of the day and if this desire should ever grow stronger i'll need to tell myself that great artists steal, the phrase i've muttered to myself endlessly as every funny joke, every witty reply, every observation of the world around me, was stolen by somebody else.
to be frank that last paragraph ended up leading somewhere that i didn't really intend to go right now, but i surely will save it for later as it is something that i fear just as deeply as what i intend to describe in this essay/lecture/webpage
all that to say i feel as if my entire life is a performance, and i don't really exist without being percieved. naturally being transgender this has made living very difficult, as having a great distaste for existence and non-existence in the eyes of the other would bring upon a great deal of distress and bad feelings that cant do anything but ruminate in my head at all hours of the day.
every single time i post something on social media or even just send a message to someone i have to remove myself from all reactions to the thing i said until i'm prepared to carry the weight of having been percieved and judged.
that's pretty weird and i think is just a result of constant social anxiety as well as isolation and abandonment issues, etc.
i wasn't really going anywhere with that thought to be entirely honest, i just thought it was an interesting contracdiction to my ceaseless desire to be the center of attention, to hold a captive audience whenever i perform something, to have people pick apart the nuances in my act, put all those little pieces together into a coherent narrative and then maybe understand me as a case study on, i don't know, the importance of treating your child like a human being.
now, in this stupid dream that i don't really consciously hold myself to, it never gets to the point where i am *alive* and being seen as this. there always has to be a tragedy which brings people to dig up all of my work that has been hidden from anybody's eyes but my own. naturally this is unrealistic because typically when i am done with something it is disposed of within a year. i haven't held onto my old writings, they've been incinerated somewhere. those words will always remain folded somewhere into my head though, forever to remain because my brain will always be developing for the rest of my life.
i almost bank on others feeling pity for me.
as if it's the easiest way to capture that audience.
they'll care when i'm dead is what i say.
maybe you'll be happier when i'm not living here anymore is what she said to me.
i stopped listening to theo katzman when iot happened that the song 'nobody loves you like your mother' had rolled around in my head too long. i'd never listened to it though.
i've talked extensively about this already, but it seems necessary to reiterate that for every single day of my life i have struggled to connect with my peers, and more importanlty all of my friends.
it's partially self-inflicted because of this thing that i do. it comes as a result of my selfish need to be fully understood. i need somebody to see the depths of my soul and for just one second resonate with it, matching my frequency perfectly, not a single cent off.
the best way to hit someone's heart and [MAKE IT RING] is to create art, of course. nothing is more hurtful than a metaphor that slowly over the course of many years unfurls itself to you. nothing is as frightening as when this creature's face is fully known, because it is something formed partially of your own imagination, but you know to be ever so careful because the thing certainly bites with every single one of its teeth's teeth
one of the most stunning examples was one that i ran with for quite a long time, probably through all of my junior and senior years of high school. a friend of mine brought it up when sending me an instagram reel i think? the caption said something about people who haven't formed object permanance yet, and the visual content was evidently nothing to write home about, given that i can't remember what happened in the video whatsoever. she said to me, 'hey, it's you', prompting my hazy mind to dredge up a recollection of all the times i'd alluded to not having object permanance yet.
this time was the first time i was seeing my friends in person nearly every single day! i heard from at least 2 of them once a day for months on end, and when they get busy or sick or just miss a text message i send them, i would get really afraid. i would be terrified that they no longer existed as the person i knew them as. their image in my mind became mysterious, and something that couldn't possibly feel compassion towards a wretched thing such as i.
this might be a symptom of bpd? i'm not entirely sure, and that's not a mental illness i've been diagnosed with, though i wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the many glass balls rolling around up there given all the things that are definitely wrong with me.
i always would just make off-handed comments about never fully formed object permanance, trying to convey this idea in the way that it felt, the visceral feeling of never being sure if people were ever truly parts of my life. the fear that i had misremembered their friendship being present in the way that i thought it was, or that i just misplaced so many false memories and they'd never really been friends with me at all. this feeling has grown especially strong after losing touch with most people i knew in high school. i don't know how many of them i'll ever see again, truly, but that's a question that will be answered on a day that isn't today or tomorrow or this weekend, or maybe even this year.
similar to the 'object permanance' metaphor, i'd used the word "amnesia" as a shorthand to describe the feeling of being a completely changed person after my earth-shattering experience with getting back into utdr. obviously it isn't actually amnesia, i can still pull memories out of things that happened before june 4th. my memory is pretty shit regardless though so i suppose the word holds more practical use that it realistically should for someone at my age.
still, i was just using it to get across the idea that i can't fathom the thing that i was before. i see old messages on discord and old youtube comments i'd left on videos i don't remember watching, and i can't help but see an entirely different person doing these things.
i think back to getting faded in my car and going to a car wash while listening to masayoshi takanaka, and afterwards going to kohls to spend a christmas gift card i'd recieved months prior on one hoodie and a lot of dark chocolate. that was a distinctly different individual, that was not myself
i think back to how much of a pussy i was despite constantly talking shit, and how i failed by letting so many people get away with absolutely reprehensible things when i had the power to rip everykthing away from them.
i feel these violent urges and i can't keep fire behind them for long, because i honestly am just too tired and sad to hurt anybody.
anyway, point being, i've used a lot of metaphors in the past to describe what i was dealing with mentally, and i always expected people to pick up on the subtext of all these statements, but they never did. because normal people don't look for metaphors in day-to-day conversation. because normal people aren't trying to make performances out of their lives.
as i've talked about in previous writings, nothing feels real anymore. it feels like everything is just a mockery of life, everything is just a performance in the way that events mirror each other. everything that happens is just a heavily rearranged version of something i've already experienced. i had an undertale hyperfixation, we're just redoing that shit. every day is the same, we're just doing them all over again. i'd wished for the structure of my family to be heavily shaken up since i was like 7, now it's actually happened.
sometimes it feels like people are talking right through me, i'm a ghost. i'm an idea. though i just so happend to have an extremely offputting face and a freakish body, everything completely malformed since birth. despite this mode of existence, it feels like people never really grasp the full concept of my being anyway, rather just what some visibly queer, obviously chronically depressed teenager thinks about all day. frankly it isn't much that i can really talk about to normal people, which is why i write it all online to eventually make more accessible later so that when i'm gone people can realize just how fucked up i always was, that i'm probably the most mentally unwell person they know!
it's disgusting that a part of my mind takes pride in how horrid my mental state is. it's repulsive that i'm almost impressed at how shittily i've treated myself in the past. it's so incredibly fucked up how i look at the scars i wrote on my body like 4 years ago and only see something that makes me more of myself. i don't really have any sense of self to grasp onto, so i guess i can't really be blamed, but at the same time it isn't healthy to find to much of myself in my mental illness.
you know i had this fear for a while that i had died and was just experiencing the afterlife. ever since this moment i'd had this fear that i wouldn't even know when i had died. it never left me, and i don't think that it ever will. it began when i was either 10 or 11 (weird mental connection to figure out this range), and it was on the car ride back from sledding at a really steep and very, very slick hill. when i was on the sled, it was one of those circular ones that i really liked because they always got me going the fastest. i'd spin around a lot though when there was very little friction on the ground, and it'd be pretty scary especially when i was hitting the speeds i was on that thing that day. i saw an incredibly large tree in front of me, it was several dozen yards out though. some current drawn into the snow started to spin me around though, and the last thing that i saw was me heading straight towards that tree. i had probably just over a second--to give a generous estimate--to come to terms with the fact that my life was about to end, and that it would be my fault that this family outing was ruined by my stupidity. so i did, i threw out a final plea to god, and then the funniest thing happened. i slid right past the tree. on the right side of it. nothing happened. my life just kept going after this. i couldn't believe it. i was just headed down to where the rest of my family had ended up, right in a patch of far less deadly trees and feet of more powdery snow. i was in utter shock and horror, i couldn't properly express any single emotion, even the fear i felt wasn't present on my face. this wasn't anything new, having autism has rendered me unable to relaly make many facial expressions or really change the inflection of my voice to convey exactly what i want those things to. i've learned to work on it, bujt it's still an impossible struggle, especially with how i've barely been talking to people as of late. i didn't go down the hill again after that incident. i just waited for all of us to pack up and go home. and as i was staring out the window, i saw two parallel metal towers. 11. i knew right then whatever reality i was experiencing was mocking me for dying at such a young age in such a foolish way.
i can't be sure exactly how long this stuck around as a present fear, but it was certainly always in the back of my mind.
i thought i was always dead, and the afterlife was held together by toothpicks and glue trying to convince me that i'm still alive, while continuously recycling old memories to make me think that i kept on living after that.
this is of course worsened by the fact that it's extermely hard for me to percieve people as being 'real' in the traditional sense of the word. it changes depending on my mood, but i get really afraid that every single person around me is a philisophical zombie, a concept which i've become newly introduced to, but i think describes my worst fear pretty well. i get really afraid that people aren't who they say they are, they're way less genuine and meaningful than i desperately need them to be.
i stop relying on other people because what if they were just put there to put on an act to appease me.
for a very, *very* long time in high school i was so thoroughly convinced that my friends in band only talked to me because the director wanted to extend pity towards me. i assumed he said something like "hey that kid's clearly got a rough life, reach out to them and just try to be friendly".
one of the librarians at the school actually went up to us and asked us to talk to her son at lunch, seeing as we all ate lunch in the library. and so we did. we didn't really explicitly include him in conversations, just because at that point they flowed in a very natural way for us, we knew how to play all of our roles, but day by day he would grow to become a more essential part of the group, and it turned out that he was a really chill dude. naturally that made me realize that there's no shame even if it was the result of my old band director telling people to hang out with me, they still started genuinely caring about me regardless of the initial circumstances.
naturally because no human being can ever possibly feel love for me, i have to jump to even more delusional conclusions. like everybody putting on an act just for me!! by some weird force of nature everything lines up well enough to convince me that the world isn't fraudulent, at least convinces me enough to never actually act on it until i get insane enough to do so. with the state of the world, it's hard to interpret events happening as anything else than parody. the real things have been used up, but we've still got tape to burn through so just do your best to keep *something* running. every conversation i have lacks progress and meaning and i don't know what's happening anymore and i'm losing my fucking mind!
i wrote this because i watched the truman show a few hours ago. i knew i shouldn't have done it, but at the same time i already understood its entire schtick. hell, the whole reason i watched the movie was because my favorite deltarune fanartist made a drawing that i'd been thinking about for months (view here), so i already knew everything about it. conceptualy, the movie had been implanted in my head forever ago, so it didn't really change that much i think it just prompted me to reflect on it as a way to explain the constant state of derealization i've been in since thanksgiving break especially. after the window closed and i'm back inside a room where everything smells and feels scary and i think i'm suffocating but i might not even really need air because the world might forget that that's something that living creatures need to survive, and that's another crack in the non-reality that i must be living in. because nothing makes sense to me anymore, i'm living in a world that wasn't supposed to have me in it for this long, i'm having what feels like the same conversations every single day, why is the sky still blue in fucking january! why has it snowed like 3 times this season what the fuck is happening nothing can be real.
naturally the best way to combat this intense, persistant derealization is to overinduldge in fiction. i do this because it wouldn't ever lie about being real. it's real in its own very unique way, as real as i want it to be. i look at the characters in all the things i love and i understand that they will never lie to me. they won't ever dream of leaving me.