The "in LCL" Series [8/7/2023 - 27/11/2023]
Writing used to be a way for me to vent all of my self hatred and angst to an audience of no one. It always came the most naturally to me, compared to analysis or creative writing, which explains how everything I manage to finish always turn into painfully personal anecdotes and stories.
This "In LCL" motif I was going with was no different. I started it with a simple play on words that served as an update, but eventually turned it into a place for me to talk about whatever depressing thing was bothering me at the time. Was it cathartic? therapeutic? Self-indulgent and ignorant? Should I have spent the time self-analyzing and self-flagelating outside in the world instead? I don't know, but time heals all wounds. So, in light of me switching from Medium to Blogspot, here are these posts that I once deemed too personal/terrible to publicize.
I came back to Latvia. The message I got from the world when stepping into my room for the first time in 40 days was obvious. Contrasting the new apartment in China we had bought in 2019 (that due to the virus we could only move to this year) that was new, shiny and empty, the room in the Latvia apartment I had been living in for the last 7 years reminded me of who I really was. Empty, large coke and water bottles scattered on the floor under the bed, piles of paper stacked randomly on the desk, and a bed I haven’t even tried to tidy for at least a year. The only place that was clear of garbage was the place the mouse, keyboard, monitor and the pc was. The first thought I had when I stepped into my room was: “I need to write down a plan.”
I called with my Latvian friends Kirill and Moscow, now with better internet and tech. Moscow, being a guy to whom the concept of filter is non-existent, casually said how bad I was at this game we were playing, and made jokes about “that’s why you’re in a school for special kids”. I agreed with him.
During my stay in China my perception of money has changed a bit. As I jokingly said to my friend “after living there everything here feels so expensive”. So I thought this would probably be a good time to cut out the fast food I’d been binging before I went back. I went to a McDonalds the first day we got home. I told myself “this is just for trying it out for the first time in a while to test out the difference between the 2 countries”. I still can’t tell you the difference. The next day I went to KFC and grabbed another burger in McDonalds.
I sneezed a couple times in a row while waking up today. Last night Dad closed the wide-open window in my room when I went to sleep, only for me to open it up once again. My parents today told me that if I keep getting myself sick in the new semester again, I’m gonna be dropping out and going back to the Chinese countryside. Of course they provided a plan that every time I got sick, I go 3 days without using the computer. A safe and good plan to quit this bad habit.
I struggled to not tell them that most if not all of the times I got sick and had to skip school was faked, like my mom suspected. Telling them that would be pretty useless anyways. What started as the odd day off turned into a pattern, to a point it was genuinely impressive I wasn’t absent at all for a whole week. It started in the last school I went to, Riga State First Gymnasium, and was probably the biggest reason I left. I didn’t prepare for the tests, I skipped class. I knew how to barely get away with it. I kept skipping and eventually I was known for not showing up much, which made people think I was unreliable and generally not taking this seriously, a death blow to the students of the most prestigious public school in Latvia. That’s what my only remaining friend there said anyways. I never attended enough to feel that. It did nothing but to made me more scared.
I was afraid of judgement. Judgement that I failed a test, judgement that I skip classes, judgement that I skip classes in order to not write any tests. Somewhere in there was probably a judgement of appearance, too.
That’s why when I found Youtube, I became so obsessed with it. It was a space where, yes, you can be unknown for potentially years, but you won’t be judged to indulge in all of your nerdy bullshit. It was a place for me to escape judgement and adopt a different persona online, a persona that didn’t show any of the horrible parts of myself.
Eventually my English teacher found me skipping class in a cafe. Twice. I guess I thought I was really lucky.
That made me want to go to school even less. Eventually the school I first attempted to transfer to asked my English teacher to write her opinion on me, and it went as well as you’d think it go.
It’s so stupid. Normally, that alone wouldn’t be enough for somebody to tank their grades so hard they drop out. But I was cursed with one more thing — a delusion that my shitty Youtube channel will take off before I have to get my shit together, to face other people, to face the real world.
The new semester is approaching and the same fear is flooding in. I’m afraid. I had a brand new chance to start my high school life anew, but it was rife with skipping classes again, this time mostly PE because I couldn’t stand playing football or something with other people, and the stares I would get when I eventually fail. It actually started off ok, the first few lessons, and I really felt this could be a turning point. After one skip to “prepare for my English essay” which on retrospect did not fucking matter in the slightest, I rolled the ball down a hill and never looked back. Besides that, I had made precisely one friend, and 2 people incredibly pissed at me for various reasons. Thankfully one of them is transferring away.
I don’t know what I’m writing about anymore.
It’s not like I got any better in China. I had been scammed to buy an overly expensive suitcase even after my parents explicitly told me to try to haggle. I had bought takeout without telling my parents and interfered with the schedule. All of this sounds like the doing of a child who was never supposed to get hold of any money. I feel like a pathetic child.
I don’t know what I’m writing about anymore.
I argued with my dad about the aforementioned getting sick thing. I didn’t know why I was pissed. It pissed him off too.
He pretty much laid it out for me completely. I never listened to anything my parents said for 2 years. That’s how I got into the mess I’m in right now, where my parents are highly doubtful I can do literally anything. I have that doubt too.
My problem is this: I never look forward. Like some primitive animal, I only see what’s right in front of me. Discomfort, pleasure, it’s all immediate or nothing. I do everything to avoid discomfort. I do everything to get to pleasure quicker. I am terrible at preparing for anything — I always forget to bring something. Right now I’m typing this sitting in front of my apartments door, waiting for the others to get home, because I forgot my keys. I don’t even know how to classify this behavior besides being a petulant child.
I was aware of this part of myself yet I hated being judged about it. I hated walking around the streets and seeing all of the attractive people contrasted with myself. I hated people acknowledging how much of a piece of shit I was. I think I hated adults for that reason — none of them seemed willing to put up with my bullshit. They were competent.
I can go on about this for a while. After all, it’s the source of most of everything I have been struggling with for the past few years. Every failure could be attributed to my rashness and frail ego. It’s a surprise I could only piece all of this together today.
I don’t know why I’m writing like this. This piece originally came from a good place, when I finally realized my problem and had the resolve to do something about it. We’ll get to it soon, bear with me for a while.
Tim Rogers often divided his teenage years into “when I didn’t learn how to be sorry for myself” and “when I started to learn how to not be sorry for myself”. That hit especially hard today. I have a tendency to dwell in my misery. Anyone who’s talked to me for a long time probably knows. It’s not healthy to be that, I think most people would agree, but I never looked forward, only backward. I only saw my mistakes because I turned my back to my future. If you asked me what I wanna do in the future, I could definitely give you a rehearsed, vague response, but the reality is I have no idea what I’m doing. I was really looking forward to coming back home, you know. Finally, I can return to all of my facilities and restart the creative process, as well as prepare for school, now in an environment that doesn’t vaporize me away. But when I got back, all of that enthusiasm just disappeared. Because I never actually had any idea what I should be doing. So I turned to distractions like my computer and food again, for the 10 billionth time. That plan I told you about — I still haven’t written it. I literally have the pen and notebook placed right in front of me when I sit down by my desk.
No wonder I could only feel sorry for myself. No wonder for the past 3 years my life has just been getting worse and worse with no signs of getting better. No wonder have I felt I couldn’t do anything, whether it was academically, physically or even creatively.
Today I was sitting down at the park watching a Youtube video, blocking myself away from the world, as always. A message I sent to my previous school’s principal, asking to return some documents so that I finally get officially out of the school system, got a response that I didn’t see until it was too late. I didn’t check a single time because I thought notifications would do its thing. I probably wouldn’t have forgotten to check if I wasn’t glued to my computer screen.
Anyways. I looked up to see a 40–50 year old man calling out to some woman. They were walking together, so they were probably family or friends. He didn’t necessarily look Latvian, but the words coming out of his mouth were. I don’t really know what struck me in this image. Maybe it was simply the culmination of everything I’d been thinking up to this point. But in that moment, I’d finally started to understand the perspective of adults.
This piece is falling apart. I didn’t account for any dramatic throughline at all.
After that, I thought of my actions from the perspective of an outsider, something I finally realized I never did. I thought about how to look at my problems, outside of the lens that I’m just broken, and that I’m never going to get better. I thought about what a 40 year old man would tell me to. I thought about how to stop “feeling sorry for myself”.
Subarashiki Hibi (tl. Wonderful Everyday) featured a protagonist who, due to some traumatic things that has happened in the past, plus a hearty dose of fucked-up bullying, has stopped trying to face the world, locking himself in a secret base with his porn and anime all day. I thought he was pathetic when I played through his chapter. Most people would. But now the scene where he’s entering the classroom for the first time haunts me.
He visualized his classmates as eyes that eternally stared at him, voices that forever mocked him, and he responded by visualizing horrific executions of every single one of them in his head. In this scene, the player is painfully aware of why he couldn’t handle being in the classroom anymore.
I never went as far as thinking things like that, or started a suicide cult in order to cope with trauma. But I really connected with the fear of judgement, as I came to terms with everything I’d been writing about. It’s funny because I found solace in how the game portrayed social outcasts before this point.
Minakami Yuki is the game’s first protagonist. She’s attractive, incredibly smart, capable in martial arts, and has a great sense of humor. Despite her grades being at one point almost national level, she now skips most of her classes and smokes or reads on rooftops, waxing philosophically about whatever subjects that come to mind. She herself didn’t really know why, either. I liked that about this character. She was like me, I thought.
Until, I guess spoilers for this visual novel, it’s revealed that Minakami Yuki is not a real person, but a personality manifested by the protagonist I first described. It’s the personification of everything the main personality, Mamiya Takuji, wanted out of life, which included not being able to see his twin sister, for more trauma avoiding reasons. I liked this revelation at first for its narrative boldness, but only now could I realize how much of a slap in the face it was to me.
Minakami Yuki doesn’t and cannot exist. She’s a persona created to avoid the real world, like the one I created on the cyberspace we call internet. She’s Curious. I’m 倪千乘. She can indulge in the wonderful everyday. I can’t.
When I skipped school, when I did destructive things to myself and others around me, I wasn’t being cool, or even feeling lost as a teen, as all the movies say, I was just being stupid and selfish. I wasn’t skipping school like Yuki, I was skipping school like Takuji.
Enough of identifying the problem for now. I’m not going to dismiss the solution as “laughably simple” and end up not changing a thing, because everything’s so vague. It might sounds pathetic after 2000 words of slamming my self worth into the wall repeatedly, but I have things I want to do. I want to create things I’m proud of. I want to live a good life, an honorable life. (I used to think that if art never took off I would rather live on the streets or something, but that was just a lie I told myself, which corresponded with my dwindling self worth. I mean, if I’m worthless, what’s the matter if I end up starving on the streets?) I want to meet people I like, and not struggle to think of anything I can bring up about myself, that I’m proud of. I want to visit some of my best internet friends someday, on a big road trip across maybe not the world, but at least the US.
The proposal I have for myself is this: Be aware of your tomorrow. Be sure of what you’re doing for the foreseeable future. Don’t push things away because they’re unpleasant. Your experience says that doing that will just cause more unpleasant things to bubble up. Don’t avoid people that you think might judge you. Welcome it, and be better. You always hated competitive people, and in fairness most of them are fucking assholes, but there is no wrong in striving to be respected in your community, by proving your worth. If you think there isn’t any worth, make some. It’ll be scary, being on your own, but get out to the real world.
I don’t have much else to offer, at this current moment. Maybe this will all end up as lip service — but to remind myself, it’s up to no one but me to decide. Stay Curious.
This image’s relevance will probably only be understood by me, and that’s okay.
When I got rejected, the first thing I did was tell my friends about it, after which I returned to continue playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Then I told more of my friends about it, none of them really having much of a reaction. Then I kept playing games and writing and listening to music and playing games.
I would like to say “I tried to not think about it”, but even that is stretching the truth. I did think about it, every hour after she sent me those messages. The thing is, there wasn’t much to think about. She wasn’t interested in me romantically, she thought she’d finally say something after I invited her to what was obviously a date, to clarify the misunderstanding. “There was more to it”, I kept telling myself, but to essentialize, that was it. Loudly typing this out and processing the series of events, it probably wasn’t worth distracting myself so much over. Everybody’s on friendly terms, she wasn’t a talkative person anyway, and I could return to school life next Monday as if nothing happened. But I tried to run away from it. Not because it hurt so much in the moment, but because of the fear that if I keep thinking about this, something in me is gonna irrevocably change. That with those to-the-point messages, she had taken something away from me I haven’t realized. That in order to stuff down this empty urge, I would keep telling myself worse and worse things to find something, anything that would explain it.
Falling in love includes you constantly being reminded of her by everything around you, as she occupies your mind 24/7. It’s a very sweet, butterflies-in-your-stomach kind of feeling when your enzymes are rapidly catabolizing the love potion you mistook for black tea, but surprise, surprise, that feeling ain’t so great after you just got dumped.
Every mundane thing I do or think somehow relates to her. I try to study; I have biology, English literature and most classes with her. I try to write/create; I told her about my channel/blog and was trying to share my stuff with her, as long as the first post on my Medium wasn’t a 2000 word long depressive diatribe. I try to listen to music; I recommended her all of my favorite albums, none of which, besides Slowdive’s Souvlaki (thank god), did she ever listen to, while I ate up all of the stuff she even tangentially mentioned; I try to watch anime featuring romance, well, that one was self-explanatory; I look into the mirror, I wonder if I were more attractive none of this would’ve happened.
I hope one day, I can tell the story of my fleeting attempt to get with a crush like a stupid childhood anecdote like Tim Rogers, but now the memories of her are just stuck in my mind. Regular stuck, not the cool kind of stuck. Remember, [INSERT NAME HERE IM NOT TELLING YOU HER NAME] still doesn’t like you.
It’s quite ego-defeating, as expected. You think you were being smooth conversationally, and then you discover you are so very obviously into her she could tell after like 3 days. You think she was being shy, but she was just thinking of the best way to reject you. You think you have a chance, but in reality you never did. You gave your everything to her: your passions, your views on existence, your hopes and dreams, your past and regrets, and none of that mattered to her at all. What if I’m actually just not good enough for anybody to like me?
As my friend said, though, this will be my first and not the last. I’m ultimately glad to having gone through this right now, and not when I’m 25 or something. Life sometimes just goes that way, you end up liking a person way more than they like you, and it’s not the end of the world when that happens. I didn’t write about the rejection or the short-lived friendship right after it happened, because I was afraid of the conclusions me in that state would come to, but now I think it was worth doing one of those classic reflection moments, and put this snapshot of my existence to rest. As much as it could rest. Maybe I’ll talk about how everything went before that, but all of that just looks a bit too meaningless for me right now. Digibro in Insomnia Analysis 3: No Fucks Left expressed how the line between art and life, as the self-proclaimed Otaku Gonzo Journalist, someone who writes about their own life, their own perspective and experiences only, has been blurred so much it doesn’t matter anymore. Conceptualizing this post, I wondered if what I’m doing here could be considered art. My video I’m working on right now even talks about the art/pure unadulterated expression divide, but that hasn’t helped me come to a conclusion. Guess that’s up for the reader to decide if they liked my overly sentimental baby’s-first-rejection post. Stay Curious, or whatever.
Life is just an Eva reference tbh
It’s been a while since my infatuation of her started, during which everything truly felt like a haze — one I’m slowly snapping out of.
I think I have a tendency to idolize people. After all, it’s much easier to pile praise on others, latch onto their good qualities and blow it out of proportion, making yourself feel small in the process, rather than looking into yourself to see why you feel like a piece of shit and need to be reinforcing it. I thought my best friend at my previous school was the coolest guy ever for both making music and not completely fucking up his studies. I thought my friend at this new school was the most virtuous and mature person of all time. It keeps happening, because unlike others, who can project an image of themselves onto you, you’re forced to see yourself for what you are — an animal. Despite what I try to do on this platform, I struggle to face my actual self without immediately looking away. But what I should have known is that in the end, everybody is an animal. It’s just a matter of time. Everything is, really.
If my friendships can get this unequal, it was no wonder a crush would fuck me up so much. Well, it actually is kind of a surprise, because the signs were so obvious there was no way I couldn’t have seen them.
In my Medium writing expedition so far, Fluctuating in LCL was the post that evolved the most in the writing process. It’s pretty hard to beat a story of romantic realization that turned into a rejection story in like a week. In one of the many, many early drafts that eventually became the disorganized Fluctuating, I tried to describe the reason my crush on her started, and the best I could come up with was “Well it doesn’t matter anymore once the feelings start flooding in”, when, in reality, it very much mattered.
I still distinctly remember this, which I really should be grateful for. It was one of the only classes that me and her share without most of her friend group taking up all of her attention. I probably had romantic thoughts about her before, she is cute, after all, but I remember it was that class when I first started daydreaming about me and her being together. I thought about what we could do together — hold hands, kiss, cuddle, so on (surprisingly not a lot of thoughts about sex, I don’t really know what that means about myself); I thought about how we could indulge our shared hobbies like anime and music; I thought I could watch her draw all day; I thought how great it would be to have somebody who you share an intimate connection with. I thought about how much happier I would be if I had [Insert name] as a girlfriend. After those thoughts brought a ridiculous smile to my face, I suppose something registered in my brain, and from that point onward, I started perceiving her differently, kickstarting this entire clusterfuck. Do you see the problem?
I didn’t fall in love with the person. I fell in love with the idea of that person as a partner.
Legitimately, when my mind decided I had a crush on this girl, I knew absolutely nothing about her. I knew she was smarter than usual, I knew she drew anime-esque art, and I knew she liked Demon Slayer. That was it. It sounds so superficial and creepy when I spell it out like that, but I have to stress, everything else was filled by selfish imagination. But it gets worse.
Thankfully, I am not a total social fuckup, yet, and I actually managed to approach her soon after the chemicals decided I had a crush on her. We started talking a lot in DMs, and sometimes also at school. I learned about her. I learned about how socially awkward and unresponsive she was, how she led a pretty uneventful life, how she didn’t really have much of a goal in the future. She was the type of girl who had never went against her mom’s orders. I learned I didn’t have much fun talking to her, because I had to constantly push the conversation forward on my own, and when it did happen, it was all either schoolwork or recommending music and anime to her that she never actually tried. I had time to learn all of that about her, yet my imagination was running so wild, everything she did I still found immensely and indiscriminately attractive. All of her unremarkable details I remember like it was my own, all of her incompatible traits I saw as a quirk. Unlike with my friends, there wasn’t a moment where I realized that the drug addict producer friend is probably not doing all too well, or that the “mature” friend is sometimes too nonchalant for his own good. Instead, since she was The Crush, I put her on the highest pedestal possible, because, again, I was infatuated with the idea of her. That idea was made stronger by how I was talking about it with other people. Don’t want to throw him under the bus, but when me and my buddy Gray had a period where we both talked about our crushes, it made it a lot worse and a lot easier to fully replace the person with the idea. Eventually, the illusion of that idea fuelled to me enough to fly too close to the sun, and my wax wings melted in an instant.
The rejection was predictable — so, so predictable. Let’s be clear, despite everything, we had still kept a civil and generally friendly vibe before the rejection. I am pretty certain she saw me as a good guy to talk to when we interacted online. We did have quite a few lengthy and fun conversations. Here’s an embarrassing screenshot I kept for some reason.
(yeah i think i'd be better off deleting it now)
The reason why the relationship has soured, is because I fucked it. That kind of unequal relationship I had in my head was not sustainable at all. She’s not stupid, so she could most definitely see the obsession oozing out of me, and when that eventually happened, she started distancing herself from me. She was clearly sending the signals which spelled out “I don’t see you in that way please stop”. I, however, was so convinced that getting together with her is gonna fix everything about me, so convinced that I was on the right track despite us having as much in common as Playboi Carti does with Elliott Smith, I asked her out on a date. And she did the reasonable thing. I, predictably, saw it as the end of the apparent fucking world.
More about my immediate reaction of the rejection in Fluctuating in LCL, but I can talk about what happened a bit after that — it was a miserable struggle.
I went to school, hoping we’d still be able to talk to each other like normal. On the last period, with a coarse voice I asked her a random question about studies, and she looked at me with an inexplicable expression of disgust and hatred. At least that’s what I saw after I’d been silently repeating to myself that I was worthless as a human. Maybe she was just tired.
That discouraged me to ever ever talking to her again, or to feel any good feelings about myself. That did not mean that I “moved on” from her at all — in fact, I probably thought of her even more after we stopped interacting regularly. During that period, I entered another depressive haze that felt eerily similar to the one that eventually crashed me down in the previous school. Even through all of that, I never fully gave up on the idea that if the right time came, we would become friends again. Maybe the details of the period’s worth writing about some other time, but for the purposes of this story, fast forward to when I made a Bocchi the Rock AMV to celebrate the anime’s one year anniversary. Before then I’d recommended Bocchi the Rock to her, which, thankfully, seemed like the only one that stuck. She watched without ever telling me and became a Ryou kinnie (her own words). I sent her the AMV, expecting her to ignore it. She did eventually reply with a simple “it’s cool”, which was her response to most things I said and showed to her. I knew there is a very likely chance she doesn’t want to do anything with me anymore and is just replying to not be an asshole, but what did I know, I was still very into her, so I saw it as a conversation starter. Later on I had a few more conversation starters: I gifted her a digital drawing pen on her birthday, and I sent her the video of me playing a song off the Totoro soundtrack on guitar. We had sometimes brief, sometimes longer conversations again, all initiated by me, of course. I don’t want to say the relationship has gone back to how it was in the beginning, but it’s at a more neutral state than “Completely not talking at all”. …Yay, I guess?
What was I doing?
Stringing together generic conversational topics, clinging onto the brief platonic relationship we had, even though from the very start, I didn’t approach her with that intension? What did I even expect?…oh, she messaged me again, let me check.
What gave me the last push out of my pathetic haze was a lengthy conversation I had with her — the final one. It wasn’t anything special, just about our school projects, and music. She was writing a long essay on art. Coincidentally, the same guy my buddy Gray (hello if you’re reading) wrote about in his piece about Texhnolyze. She was struggling with her collaborative extracurricular project…thing everybody in this diploma program had to do, and I, in a spark of inspiration to keep some kind of relationship between us, suggested that she would…draw art assets for my videos. My fingers are twitching with embarrassment.
She gave a vague response, most likely so that she wouldn’t have to feel bad for rejecting me out right. I accepted my fate, so that part wasn’t too surprising, but somewhere along the conversation, I mentioned how I liked her distinct art style. To my shock, instead of taking the compliment, she immediately snapped back with “No, I don’t have a style. I just draw. You’re taking me way too seriously.”
It wasn’t a fierce pushback. She, and this entire story, is milk-toast as fuck. But, in that moment, when she made me realize that my perception of her overwhelmed her reality, the dominoes in my mind were tipped, and there was no going back.
I started spotting all the incredibly obvious signs that lead me down a self-destructive path, which I’ve outlined in this… thing so far, and understood just how much my idea of her was different from the real her. Moreover, I found people online echoing many of my problems, videos ruminating over the idea of the crush, or the “nice guy”, which all dragged out depths of my soul bafflingly easily. It made me feel heard, but also made me feel real fucking stupid for not putting two and two together until now. No matter, I’ve sunk enough.
I don’t know anything. Through the vocations of my own thoughts posted onto the digital mainframe, I can only approximate the actual me in the world. I don’t know if anything I said here is right, or even how I really feel. But if there’s anything that finally got through my thick skull, it was that no matter how hard I’d try, there was nothing left here. So just swim up. It’s okay now. Face reality.
We’re still technically on talking terms, talking as in when she needs something from me. It’s safe to say we both ran out of things to say each other. It felt good. And right.
This should be a big life event — teenage boy gets over his first rejection/crush, but I wish I could say I’m better now. It’s still hard seeing the embodiment of your colossal fuck up going around, doing things, like a person. It’s still hard to face just how low I’d stooped to feel like this. But this time, I’ll know if I’m falling into the same trap. See what I just did? Instead of referring to her as a person, I said she was the embodiment of my failures. Nobody is that. Every person is their own world we only see a sliver of, if they are gracious. At risk of sounding incredibly corny, I was just never meant to see her world. Not the me right now. Our lives may never cross again, but I’m done assuming I understand her, hands and arms and legs and et cetera. Yeah I had to sneak in Twin Fantasy somewhere.
Humans are surprisingly adaptable creatures. I know that one day, some things will go back to normal. I’ll be able to look at her, and feel nothing at all. I know that some things will be forever changed. Songs about love that felt like it belonged in a completely different world now stung intimately. The way I look at myself has irrevocably changed. As always, it can only take time to tell how exactly these changes will play out. Nothing is for certain — remember the girl from the last post? Well, she got back with her boyfriend after what I thought was a definitive breakup. Still, regardless of what will happen, I want to give myself somewhat of a pat on the back for reaching out my hand before the LCL swallowed me whole. Floating is better than being flooded, I guess. Breathe in, breathe out.
This "In LCL" motif I was going with was no different. I started it with a simple play on words that served as an update, but eventually turned it into a place for me to talk about whatever depressing thing was bothering me at the time. Was it cathartic? therapeutic? Self-indulgent and ignorant? Should I have spent the time self-analyzing and self-flagelating outside in the world instead? I don't know, but time heals all wounds. So, in light of me switching from Medium to Blogspot, here are these posts that I once deemed too personal/terrible to publicize.
Vaporizing in LCL
Jul 8, 2023I dont have many cool pictures on my old laptop. When in doubt, use Joe 2.
So, I’m back in China. Yay. It feels weird proclaiming this for the 3rd or 4th time across podcasts, unreleased rants and notes, but let me just say it one more time just in case.
I’ve been here for more than a week now, and despite not possessing the freakish memory of Tim Rogers, I still get blasted with numerous waves of nostalgia and 4 million other feelings every day since I stepped foot on this soil. Of course I also get no shortage of the literal heat waves. My European ass can’t handle this shit, man.
It’s been a bit overwhelming to say the least, but since this is pretty much a glorified vacation where I’ve got no choice but to stop editing 25 hours a day all day every day, I’ve decided to document my thoughts and feelings as much as I can. Which translates to a few big, thicc, chonky, huge, badonka loonka dooka sized blog posts coming in a month or so — currently I have one planned about China, and one finally saying my whole piece (no the 44 minute video wasn’t it) to a dear old friend and companion, Oshi no Ko. Of course, I’ll try to sprinkle in some Media Diaries in between.
But in order to write more about media, I should obviously consume more media, which is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few days. The Kindle Paperwhite I got just a few days prior to leaving turned out to be more than handy, as it now carries the entirety of translated Monogatari Series and Zaregoto volumes, which I have little to no excuse for not reading right now. I’ve churned through Tsukimonogatari and Zaregoto volume 1 in around 4 days, which seemed to rekindle the passion of reading back into me, for the first time in actual years. I finally read Look Back and reread Goodbye Eri by Fujimoto, which both left me an emotional mess I can’t wait to wordily untangle; I read Malice by Keigo Hagashino, one of my favorite authors as a pre-teen who instilled a love for the mystery genre, and ended up reading for 4 hours straight. Needless to say after all of these years, his work still holds up.
It’s well known to the people who know me that my content brainrot has no way of curing itself by this point, so unsurprisingly, all of these experiences, thoughts and more, no matter how miniscule, were accumulated into notes, some finished, some not. The Tsukimonogatari notes are almost 6000 words long and I’m nowhere near done. Help me.
To be honest, there probably isn’t any point in me trying to crystalize every one of my thoughts into some barely coherent ramble, but I am doing it anyway pretty much out of curiosity — What if I max out my content brain for 45 days? It’s fun for now, but what will happen after more than a month? Will I go completely creatively bankrupt or ascend to a new level of Weeb Talk? I’m kind of excited to find out. And also, I’ve developed the belief that no matter how insignificant something looks, there’s value to gain from it, and this is me trying to prove that maybe to myself, or, what’s more likely, my past self. That story is for another day, though — another far more important occasion.
Oh yeah, and the podcast I’m doing with my good buddy, SoulsSekiroRingBorne sensei and fellow media overthinker Graylink is still gonna update as frequently as we manage, since I thankfully did bring my mic to China. We both see this as a pretty great opportunity for us to train our abilities to talk off-the-cuff, but above that, it’s just really fun to talk shit for like, 3 hours.
I guess that’s kind of it from me, for now. I’m moving onto Onimonogatari and Zaregoto volume 2: Strangulation soon, as well as finally starting to read “real books”, as they say, including Catch 22 and The God of Small Things. I hope, no, I’m sure, they’re all gonna be valuable experiences. Did you know Stay Curious is actually the slogan for Medium?
So, I’m back in China. Yay. It feels weird proclaiming this for the 3rd or 4th time across podcasts, unreleased rants and notes, but let me just say it one more time just in case.
I’ve been here for more than a week now, and despite not possessing the freakish memory of Tim Rogers, I still get blasted with numerous waves of nostalgia and 4 million other feelings every day since I stepped foot on this soil. Of course I also get no shortage of the literal heat waves. My European ass can’t handle this shit, man.
It’s been a bit overwhelming to say the least, but since this is pretty much a glorified vacation where I’ve got no choice but to stop editing 25 hours a day all day every day, I’ve decided to document my thoughts and feelings as much as I can. Which translates to a few big, thicc, chonky, huge, badonka loonka dooka sized blog posts coming in a month or so — currently I have one planned about China, and one finally saying my whole piece (no the 44 minute video wasn’t it) to a dear old friend and companion, Oshi no Ko. Of course, I’ll try to sprinkle in some Media Diaries in between.
But in order to write more about media, I should obviously consume more media, which is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few days. The Kindle Paperwhite I got just a few days prior to leaving turned out to be more than handy, as it now carries the entirety of translated Monogatari Series and Zaregoto volumes, which I have little to no excuse for not reading right now. I’ve churned through Tsukimonogatari and Zaregoto volume 1 in around 4 days, which seemed to rekindle the passion of reading back into me, for the first time in actual years. I finally read Look Back and reread Goodbye Eri by Fujimoto, which both left me an emotional mess I can’t wait to wordily untangle; I read Malice by Keigo Hagashino, one of my favorite authors as a pre-teen who instilled a love for the mystery genre, and ended up reading for 4 hours straight. Needless to say after all of these years, his work still holds up.
It’s well known to the people who know me that my content brainrot has no way of curing itself by this point, so unsurprisingly, all of these experiences, thoughts and more, no matter how miniscule, were accumulated into notes, some finished, some not. The Tsukimonogatari notes are almost 6000 words long and I’m nowhere near done. Help me.
To be honest, there probably isn’t any point in me trying to crystalize every one of my thoughts into some barely coherent ramble, but I am doing it anyway pretty much out of curiosity — What if I max out my content brain for 45 days? It’s fun for now, but what will happen after more than a month? Will I go completely creatively bankrupt or ascend to a new level of Weeb Talk? I’m kind of excited to find out. And also, I’ve developed the belief that no matter how insignificant something looks, there’s value to gain from it, and this is me trying to prove that maybe to myself, or, what’s more likely, my past self. That story is for another day, though — another far more important occasion.
Oh yeah, and the podcast I’m doing with my good buddy, SoulsSekiroRingBorne sensei and fellow media overthinker Graylink is still gonna update as frequently as we manage, since I thankfully did bring my mic to China. We both see this as a pretty great opportunity for us to train our abilities to talk off-the-cuff, but above that, it’s just really fun to talk shit for like, 3 hours.
I guess that’s kind of it from me, for now. I’m moving onto Onimonogatari and Zaregoto volume 2: Strangulation soon, as well as finally starting to read “real books”, as they say, including Catch 22 and The God of Small Things. I hope, no, I’m sure, they’re all gonna be valuable experiences. Did you know Stay Curious is actually the slogan for Medium?
Drying in LCL
Aug 22, 2023I came back to Latvia. The message I got from the world when stepping into my room for the first time in 40 days was obvious. Contrasting the new apartment in China we had bought in 2019 (that due to the virus we could only move to this year) that was new, shiny and empty, the room in the Latvia apartment I had been living in for the last 7 years reminded me of who I really was. Empty, large coke and water bottles scattered on the floor under the bed, piles of paper stacked randomly on the desk, and a bed I haven’t even tried to tidy for at least a year. The only place that was clear of garbage was the place the mouse, keyboard, monitor and the pc was. The first thought I had when I stepped into my room was: “I need to write down a plan.”
I called with my Latvian friends Kirill and Moscow, now with better internet and tech. Moscow, being a guy to whom the concept of filter is non-existent, casually said how bad I was at this game we were playing, and made jokes about “that’s why you’re in a school for special kids”. I agreed with him.
During my stay in China my perception of money has changed a bit. As I jokingly said to my friend “after living there everything here feels so expensive”. So I thought this would probably be a good time to cut out the fast food I’d been binging before I went back. I went to a McDonalds the first day we got home. I told myself “this is just for trying it out for the first time in a while to test out the difference between the 2 countries”. I still can’t tell you the difference. The next day I went to KFC and grabbed another burger in McDonalds.
I sneezed a couple times in a row while waking up today. Last night Dad closed the wide-open window in my room when I went to sleep, only for me to open it up once again. My parents today told me that if I keep getting myself sick in the new semester again, I’m gonna be dropping out and going back to the Chinese countryside. Of course they provided a plan that every time I got sick, I go 3 days without using the computer. A safe and good plan to quit this bad habit.
I struggled to not tell them that most if not all of the times I got sick and had to skip school was faked, like my mom suspected. Telling them that would be pretty useless anyways. What started as the odd day off turned into a pattern, to a point it was genuinely impressive I wasn’t absent at all for a whole week. It started in the last school I went to, Riga State First Gymnasium, and was probably the biggest reason I left. I didn’t prepare for the tests, I skipped class. I knew how to barely get away with it. I kept skipping and eventually I was known for not showing up much, which made people think I was unreliable and generally not taking this seriously, a death blow to the students of the most prestigious public school in Latvia. That’s what my only remaining friend there said anyways. I never attended enough to feel that. It did nothing but to made me more scared.
I was afraid of judgement. Judgement that I failed a test, judgement that I skip classes, judgement that I skip classes in order to not write any tests. Somewhere in there was probably a judgement of appearance, too.
That’s why when I found Youtube, I became so obsessed with it. It was a space where, yes, you can be unknown for potentially years, but you won’t be judged to indulge in all of your nerdy bullshit. It was a place for me to escape judgement and adopt a different persona online, a persona that didn’t show any of the horrible parts of myself.
Eventually my English teacher found me skipping class in a cafe. Twice. I guess I thought I was really lucky.
That made me want to go to school even less. Eventually the school I first attempted to transfer to asked my English teacher to write her opinion on me, and it went as well as you’d think it go.
It’s so stupid. Normally, that alone wouldn’t be enough for somebody to tank their grades so hard they drop out. But I was cursed with one more thing — a delusion that my shitty Youtube channel will take off before I have to get my shit together, to face other people, to face the real world.
The new semester is approaching and the same fear is flooding in. I’m afraid. I had a brand new chance to start my high school life anew, but it was rife with skipping classes again, this time mostly PE because I couldn’t stand playing football or something with other people, and the stares I would get when I eventually fail. It actually started off ok, the first few lessons, and I really felt this could be a turning point. After one skip to “prepare for my English essay” which on retrospect did not fucking matter in the slightest, I rolled the ball down a hill and never looked back. Besides that, I had made precisely one friend, and 2 people incredibly pissed at me for various reasons. Thankfully one of them is transferring away.
I don’t know what I’m writing about anymore.
It’s not like I got any better in China. I had been scammed to buy an overly expensive suitcase even after my parents explicitly told me to try to haggle. I had bought takeout without telling my parents and interfered with the schedule. All of this sounds like the doing of a child who was never supposed to get hold of any money. I feel like a pathetic child.
I don’t know what I’m writing about anymore.
I argued with my dad about the aforementioned getting sick thing. I didn’t know why I was pissed. It pissed him off too.
He pretty much laid it out for me completely. I never listened to anything my parents said for 2 years. That’s how I got into the mess I’m in right now, where my parents are highly doubtful I can do literally anything. I have that doubt too.
My problem is this: I never look forward. Like some primitive animal, I only see what’s right in front of me. Discomfort, pleasure, it’s all immediate or nothing. I do everything to avoid discomfort. I do everything to get to pleasure quicker. I am terrible at preparing for anything — I always forget to bring something. Right now I’m typing this sitting in front of my apartments door, waiting for the others to get home, because I forgot my keys. I don’t even know how to classify this behavior besides being a petulant child.
I was aware of this part of myself yet I hated being judged about it. I hated walking around the streets and seeing all of the attractive people contrasted with myself. I hated people acknowledging how much of a piece of shit I was. I think I hated adults for that reason — none of them seemed willing to put up with my bullshit. They were competent.
I can go on about this for a while. After all, it’s the source of most of everything I have been struggling with for the past few years. Every failure could be attributed to my rashness and frail ego. It’s a surprise I could only piece all of this together today.
I don’t know why I’m writing like this. This piece originally came from a good place, when I finally realized my problem and had the resolve to do something about it. We’ll get to it soon, bear with me for a while.
Tim Rogers often divided his teenage years into “when I didn’t learn how to be sorry for myself” and “when I started to learn how to not be sorry for myself”. That hit especially hard today. I have a tendency to dwell in my misery. Anyone who’s talked to me for a long time probably knows. It’s not healthy to be that, I think most people would agree, but I never looked forward, only backward. I only saw my mistakes because I turned my back to my future. If you asked me what I wanna do in the future, I could definitely give you a rehearsed, vague response, but the reality is I have no idea what I’m doing. I was really looking forward to coming back home, you know. Finally, I can return to all of my facilities and restart the creative process, as well as prepare for school, now in an environment that doesn’t vaporize me away. But when I got back, all of that enthusiasm just disappeared. Because I never actually had any idea what I should be doing. So I turned to distractions like my computer and food again, for the 10 billionth time. That plan I told you about — I still haven’t written it. I literally have the pen and notebook placed right in front of me when I sit down by my desk.
No wonder I could only feel sorry for myself. No wonder for the past 3 years my life has just been getting worse and worse with no signs of getting better. No wonder have I felt I couldn’t do anything, whether it was academically, physically or even creatively.
Today I was sitting down at the park watching a Youtube video, blocking myself away from the world, as always. A message I sent to my previous school’s principal, asking to return some documents so that I finally get officially out of the school system, got a response that I didn’t see until it was too late. I didn’t check a single time because I thought notifications would do its thing. I probably wouldn’t have forgotten to check if I wasn’t glued to my computer screen.
Anyways. I looked up to see a 40–50 year old man calling out to some woman. They were walking together, so they were probably family or friends. He didn’t necessarily look Latvian, but the words coming out of his mouth were. I don’t really know what struck me in this image. Maybe it was simply the culmination of everything I’d been thinking up to this point. But in that moment, I’d finally started to understand the perspective of adults.
This piece is falling apart. I didn’t account for any dramatic throughline at all.
After that, I thought of my actions from the perspective of an outsider, something I finally realized I never did. I thought about how to look at my problems, outside of the lens that I’m just broken, and that I’m never going to get better. I thought about what a 40 year old man would tell me to. I thought about how to stop “feeling sorry for myself”.
Subarashiki Hibi (tl. Wonderful Everyday) featured a protagonist who, due to some traumatic things that has happened in the past, plus a hearty dose of fucked-up bullying, has stopped trying to face the world, locking himself in a secret base with his porn and anime all day. I thought he was pathetic when I played through his chapter. Most people would. But now the scene where he’s entering the classroom for the first time haunts me.
He visualized his classmates as eyes that eternally stared at him, voices that forever mocked him, and he responded by visualizing horrific executions of every single one of them in his head. In this scene, the player is painfully aware of why he couldn’t handle being in the classroom anymore.
I never went as far as thinking things like that, or started a suicide cult in order to cope with trauma. But I really connected with the fear of judgement, as I came to terms with everything I’d been writing about. It’s funny because I found solace in how the game portrayed social outcasts before this point.
Minakami Yuki is the game’s first protagonist. She’s attractive, incredibly smart, capable in martial arts, and has a great sense of humor. Despite her grades being at one point almost national level, she now skips most of her classes and smokes or reads on rooftops, waxing philosophically about whatever subjects that come to mind. She herself didn’t really know why, either. I liked that about this character. She was like me, I thought.
Until, I guess spoilers for this visual novel, it’s revealed that Minakami Yuki is not a real person, but a personality manifested by the protagonist I first described. It’s the personification of everything the main personality, Mamiya Takuji, wanted out of life, which included not being able to see his twin sister, for more trauma avoiding reasons. I liked this revelation at first for its narrative boldness, but only now could I realize how much of a slap in the face it was to me.
Minakami Yuki doesn’t and cannot exist. She’s a persona created to avoid the real world, like the one I created on the cyberspace we call internet. She’s Curious. I’m 倪千乘. She can indulge in the wonderful everyday. I can’t.
When I skipped school, when I did destructive things to myself and others around me, I wasn’t being cool, or even feeling lost as a teen, as all the movies say, I was just being stupid and selfish. I wasn’t skipping school like Yuki, I was skipping school like Takuji.
Enough of identifying the problem for now. I’m not going to dismiss the solution as “laughably simple” and end up not changing a thing, because everything’s so vague. It might sounds pathetic after 2000 words of slamming my self worth into the wall repeatedly, but I have things I want to do. I want to create things I’m proud of. I want to live a good life, an honorable life. (I used to think that if art never took off I would rather live on the streets or something, but that was just a lie I told myself, which corresponded with my dwindling self worth. I mean, if I’m worthless, what’s the matter if I end up starving on the streets?) I want to meet people I like, and not struggle to think of anything I can bring up about myself, that I’m proud of. I want to visit some of my best internet friends someday, on a big road trip across maybe not the world, but at least the US.
The proposal I have for myself is this: Be aware of your tomorrow. Be sure of what you’re doing for the foreseeable future. Don’t push things away because they’re unpleasant. Your experience says that doing that will just cause more unpleasant things to bubble up. Don’t avoid people that you think might judge you. Welcome it, and be better. You always hated competitive people, and in fairness most of them are fucking assholes, but there is no wrong in striving to be respected in your community, by proving your worth. If you think there isn’t any worth, make some. It’ll be scary, being on your own, but get out to the real world.
I don’t have much else to offer, at this current moment. Maybe this will all end up as lip service — but to remind myself, it’s up to no one but me to decide. Stay Curious.
Fluctuating in LCL
Oct 1, 2023This image’s relevance will probably only be understood by me, and that’s okay.When I got rejected, the first thing I did was tell my friends about it, after which I returned to continue playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Then I told more of my friends about it, none of them really having much of a reaction. Then I kept playing games and writing and listening to music and playing games.
I would like to say “I tried to not think about it”, but even that is stretching the truth. I did think about it, every hour after she sent me those messages. The thing is, there wasn’t much to think about. She wasn’t interested in me romantically, she thought she’d finally say something after I invited her to what was obviously a date, to clarify the misunderstanding. “There was more to it”, I kept telling myself, but to essentialize, that was it. Loudly typing this out and processing the series of events, it probably wasn’t worth distracting myself so much over. Everybody’s on friendly terms, she wasn’t a talkative person anyway, and I could return to school life next Monday as if nothing happened. But I tried to run away from it. Not because it hurt so much in the moment, but because of the fear that if I keep thinking about this, something in me is gonna irrevocably change. That with those to-the-point messages, she had taken something away from me I haven’t realized. That in order to stuff down this empty urge, I would keep telling myself worse and worse things to find something, anything that would explain it.
Falling in love includes you constantly being reminded of her by everything around you, as she occupies your mind 24/7. It’s a very sweet, butterflies-in-your-stomach kind of feeling when your enzymes are rapidly catabolizing the love potion you mistook for black tea, but surprise, surprise, that feeling ain’t so great after you just got dumped.
Every mundane thing I do or think somehow relates to her. I try to study; I have biology, English literature and most classes with her. I try to write/create; I told her about my channel/blog and was trying to share my stuff with her, as long as the first post on my Medium wasn’t a 2000 word long depressive diatribe. I try to listen to music; I recommended her all of my favorite albums, none of which, besides Slowdive’s Souvlaki (thank god), did she ever listen to, while I ate up all of the stuff she even tangentially mentioned; I try to watch anime featuring romance, well, that one was self-explanatory; I look into the mirror, I wonder if I were more attractive none of this would’ve happened.
On Friday, February 12, 1988, a girl whose name I did not and do not know, quickly left the line, 20 places ahead of me, ran over to me, made a whisper megaphone of her two hands, and said: “Alyssa hates you.” Then, she ran back to her place in line, next to Alyssa. Alyssa covered her mouth with her hands, looked back at me for a moment, and then turned back around. I didn’t feel one way or another about Alyssa, though the remark hit me like a backhand slap at the top of my head, and it stays stuck there even now. As recently as one week ago, I might often look into the mirror after a clean shave, for example, and think to myself:
Not bad; on the other hand, Alyssa still hates you.
Action Button Reviews Boku no Natsuyasumi @ 4:13:22
I hope one day, I can tell the story of my fleeting attempt to get with a crush like a stupid childhood anecdote like Tim Rogers, but now the memories of her are just stuck in my mind. Regular stuck, not the cool kind of stuck. Remember, [INSERT NAME HERE IM NOT TELLING YOU HER NAME] still doesn’t like you.
It’s quite ego-defeating, as expected. You think you were being smooth conversationally, and then you discover you are so very obviously into her she could tell after like 3 days. You think she was being shy, but she was just thinking of the best way to reject you. You think you have a chance, but in reality you never did. You gave your everything to her: your passions, your views on existence, your hopes and dreams, your past and regrets, and none of that mattered to her at all. What if I’m actually just not good enough for anybody to like me?
As my friend said, though, this will be my first and not the last. I’m ultimately glad to having gone through this right now, and not when I’m 25 or something. Life sometimes just goes that way, you end up liking a person way more than they like you, and it’s not the end of the world when that happens. I didn’t write about the rejection or the short-lived friendship right after it happened, because I was afraid of the conclusions me in that state would come to, but now I think it was worth doing one of those classic reflection moments, and put this snapshot of my existence to rest. As much as it could rest. Maybe I’ll talk about how everything went before that, but all of that just looks a bit too meaningless for me right now. Digibro in Insomnia Analysis 3: No Fucks Left expressed how the line between art and life, as the self-proclaimed Otaku Gonzo Journalist, someone who writes about their own life, their own perspective and experiences only, has been blurred so much it doesn’t matter anymore. Conceptualizing this post, I wondered if what I’m doing here could be considered art. My video I’m working on right now even talks about the art/pure unadulterated expression divide, but that hasn’t helped me come to a conclusion. Guess that’s up for the reader to decide if they liked my overly sentimental baby’s-first-rejection post. Stay Curious, or whatever.
Floating On LCL
Nov 27, 2023Life is just an Eva reference tbhIt’s been a while since my infatuation of her started, during which everything truly felt like a haze — one I’m slowly snapping out of.
I think I have a tendency to idolize people. After all, it’s much easier to pile praise on others, latch onto their good qualities and blow it out of proportion, making yourself feel small in the process, rather than looking into yourself to see why you feel like a piece of shit and need to be reinforcing it. I thought my best friend at my previous school was the coolest guy ever for both making music and not completely fucking up his studies. I thought my friend at this new school was the most virtuous and mature person of all time. It keeps happening, because unlike others, who can project an image of themselves onto you, you’re forced to see yourself for what you are — an animal. Despite what I try to do on this platform, I struggle to face my actual self without immediately looking away. But what I should have known is that in the end, everybody is an animal. It’s just a matter of time. Everything is, really.
If my friendships can get this unequal, it was no wonder a crush would fuck me up so much. Well, it actually is kind of a surprise, because the signs were so obvious there was no way I couldn’t have seen them.
In my Medium writing expedition so far, Fluctuating in LCL was the post that evolved the most in the writing process. It’s pretty hard to beat a story of romantic realization that turned into a rejection story in like a week. In one of the many, many early drafts that eventually became the disorganized Fluctuating, I tried to describe the reason my crush on her started, and the best I could come up with was “Well it doesn’t matter anymore once the feelings start flooding in”, when, in reality, it very much mattered.
I still distinctly remember this, which I really should be grateful for. It was one of the only classes that me and her share without most of her friend group taking up all of her attention. I probably had romantic thoughts about her before, she is cute, after all, but I remember it was that class when I first started daydreaming about me and her being together. I thought about what we could do together — hold hands, kiss, cuddle, so on (surprisingly not a lot of thoughts about sex, I don’t really know what that means about myself); I thought about how we could indulge our shared hobbies like anime and music; I thought I could watch her draw all day; I thought how great it would be to have somebody who you share an intimate connection with. I thought about how much happier I would be if I had [Insert name] as a girlfriend. After those thoughts brought a ridiculous smile to my face, I suppose something registered in my brain, and from that point onward, I started perceiving her differently, kickstarting this entire clusterfuck. Do you see the problem?
I didn’t fall in love with the person. I fell in love with the idea of that person as a partner.
Legitimately, when my mind decided I had a crush on this girl, I knew absolutely nothing about her. I knew she was smarter than usual, I knew she drew anime-esque art, and I knew she liked Demon Slayer. That was it. It sounds so superficial and creepy when I spell it out like that, but I have to stress, everything else was filled by selfish imagination. But it gets worse.
Thankfully, I am not a total social fuckup, yet, and I actually managed to approach her soon after the chemicals decided I had a crush on her. We started talking a lot in DMs, and sometimes also at school. I learned about her. I learned about how socially awkward and unresponsive she was, how she led a pretty uneventful life, how she didn’t really have much of a goal in the future. She was the type of girl who had never went against her mom’s orders. I learned I didn’t have much fun talking to her, because I had to constantly push the conversation forward on my own, and when it did happen, it was all either schoolwork or recommending music and anime to her that she never actually tried. I had time to learn all of that about her, yet my imagination was running so wild, everything she did I still found immensely and indiscriminately attractive. All of her unremarkable details I remember like it was my own, all of her incompatible traits I saw as a quirk. Unlike with my friends, there wasn’t a moment where I realized that the drug addict producer friend is probably not doing all too well, or that the “mature” friend is sometimes too nonchalant for his own good. Instead, since she was The Crush, I put her on the highest pedestal possible, because, again, I was infatuated with the idea of her. That idea was made stronger by how I was talking about it with other people. Don’t want to throw him under the bus, but when me and my buddy Gray had a period where we both talked about our crushes, it made it a lot worse and a lot easier to fully replace the person with the idea. Eventually, the illusion of that idea fuelled to me enough to fly too close to the sun, and my wax wings melted in an instant.
The rejection was predictable — so, so predictable. Let’s be clear, despite everything, we had still kept a civil and generally friendly vibe before the rejection. I am pretty certain she saw me as a good guy to talk to when we interacted online. We did have quite a few lengthy and fun conversations. Here’s an embarrassing screenshot I kept for some reason.
(yeah i think i'd be better off deleting it now)
The reason why the relationship has soured, is because I fucked it. That kind of unequal relationship I had in my head was not sustainable at all. She’s not stupid, so she could most definitely see the obsession oozing out of me, and when that eventually happened, she started distancing herself from me. She was clearly sending the signals which spelled out “I don’t see you in that way please stop”. I, however, was so convinced that getting together with her is gonna fix everything about me, so convinced that I was on the right track despite us having as much in common as Playboi Carti does with Elliott Smith, I asked her out on a date. And she did the reasonable thing. I, predictably, saw it as the end of the apparent fucking world.
More about my immediate reaction of the rejection in Fluctuating in LCL, but I can talk about what happened a bit after that — it was a miserable struggle.
I went to school, hoping we’d still be able to talk to each other like normal. On the last period, with a coarse voice I asked her a random question about studies, and she looked at me with an inexplicable expression of disgust and hatred. At least that’s what I saw after I’d been silently repeating to myself that I was worthless as a human. Maybe she was just tired.
That discouraged me to ever ever talking to her again, or to feel any good feelings about myself. That did not mean that I “moved on” from her at all — in fact, I probably thought of her even more after we stopped interacting regularly. During that period, I entered another depressive haze that felt eerily similar to the one that eventually crashed me down in the previous school. Even through all of that, I never fully gave up on the idea that if the right time came, we would become friends again. Maybe the details of the period’s worth writing about some other time, but for the purposes of this story, fast forward to when I made a Bocchi the Rock AMV to celebrate the anime’s one year anniversary. Before then I’d recommended Bocchi the Rock to her, which, thankfully, seemed like the only one that stuck. She watched without ever telling me and became a Ryou kinnie (her own words). I sent her the AMV, expecting her to ignore it. She did eventually reply with a simple “it’s cool”, which was her response to most things I said and showed to her. I knew there is a very likely chance she doesn’t want to do anything with me anymore and is just replying to not be an asshole, but what did I know, I was still very into her, so I saw it as a conversation starter. Later on I had a few more conversation starters: I gifted her a digital drawing pen on her birthday, and I sent her the video of me playing a song off the Totoro soundtrack on guitar. We had sometimes brief, sometimes longer conversations again, all initiated by me, of course. I don’t want to say the relationship has gone back to how it was in the beginning, but it’s at a more neutral state than “Completely not talking at all”. …Yay, I guess?
What was I doing?
Stringing together generic conversational topics, clinging onto the brief platonic relationship we had, even though from the very start, I didn’t approach her with that intension? What did I even expect?…oh, she messaged me again, let me check.
What gave me the last push out of my pathetic haze was a lengthy conversation I had with her — the final one. It wasn’t anything special, just about our school projects, and music. She was writing a long essay on art. Coincidentally, the same guy my buddy Gray (hello if you’re reading) wrote about in his piece about Texhnolyze. She was struggling with her collaborative extracurricular project…thing everybody in this diploma program had to do, and I, in a spark of inspiration to keep some kind of relationship between us, suggested that she would…draw art assets for my videos. My fingers are twitching with embarrassment.
She gave a vague response, most likely so that she wouldn’t have to feel bad for rejecting me out right. I accepted my fate, so that part wasn’t too surprising, but somewhere along the conversation, I mentioned how I liked her distinct art style. To my shock, instead of taking the compliment, she immediately snapped back with “No, I don’t have a style. I just draw. You’re taking me way too seriously.”
It wasn’t a fierce pushback. She, and this entire story, is milk-toast as fuck. But, in that moment, when she made me realize that my perception of her overwhelmed her reality, the dominoes in my mind were tipped, and there was no going back.
I started spotting all the incredibly obvious signs that lead me down a self-destructive path, which I’ve outlined in this… thing so far, and understood just how much my idea of her was different from the real her. Moreover, I found people online echoing many of my problems, videos ruminating over the idea of the crush, or the “nice guy”, which all dragged out depths of my soul bafflingly easily. It made me feel heard, but also made me feel real fucking stupid for not putting two and two together until now. No matter, I’ve sunk enough.
I don’t know anything. Through the vocations of my own thoughts posted onto the digital mainframe, I can only approximate the actual me in the world. I don’t know if anything I said here is right, or even how I really feel. But if there’s anything that finally got through my thick skull, it was that no matter how hard I’d try, there was nothing left here. So just swim up. It’s okay now. Face reality.
We’re still technically on talking terms, talking as in when she needs something from me. It’s safe to say we both ran out of things to say each other. It felt good. And right.
This should be a big life event — teenage boy gets over his first rejection/crush, but I wish I could say I’m better now. It’s still hard seeing the embodiment of your colossal fuck up going around, doing things, like a person. It’s still hard to face just how low I’d stooped to feel like this. But this time, I’ll know if I’m falling into the same trap. See what I just did? Instead of referring to her as a person, I said she was the embodiment of my failures. Nobody is that. Every person is their own world we only see a sliver of, if they are gracious. At risk of sounding incredibly corny, I was just never meant to see her world. Not the me right now. Our lives may never cross again, but I’m done assuming I understand her, hands and arms and legs and et cetera. Yeah I had to sneak in Twin Fantasy somewhere.
Humans are surprisingly adaptable creatures. I know that one day, some things will go back to normal. I’ll be able to look at her, and feel nothing at all. I know that some things will be forever changed. Songs about love that felt like it belonged in a completely different world now stung intimately. The way I look at myself has irrevocably changed. As always, it can only take time to tell how exactly these changes will play out. Nothing is for certain — remember the girl from the last post? Well, she got back with her boyfriend after what I thought was a definitive breakup. Still, regardless of what will happen, I want to give myself somewhat of a pat on the back for reaching out my hand before the LCL swallowed me whole. Floating is better than being flooded, I guess. Breathe in, breathe out.
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