...It's been a while.

October 4th, 2024 — 8:45 PM

Mood: Could be better
Listening to: Abstract (Psychopomp) — Hozier
Drinking: Water

Hasn't it? Since we last caught up? It feels like both entire lifetimes and mere moments since I was last working on this site, last writing frenzied blog entries early in the morning, slaving away over my thoughts and suffering. I guess I still do that — I just post about it here less. This one is a doozy, it's full of emotions and heavy stuff, so I don't blame you if you don't want to read it, ha-ha. It might serve you best if you don't, especially if you want to think of me in a better, cooler light, but I can't exactly stop you.

I figured I might as well write One Whole 2024 Entry at the very least, in order to have things look less Dumb on the sidebar here. Don't think I could live with myself if I missed ALL of 2024 in terms of Organizational Problems. So. Either way. Things have been... weird. I figure I might as well write a little bit about the things that have changed in my life over the past year and awhile, given I never do long-form personal content like this anymore it'd be nice to get back into it. Anyways... well, for starters my sibling has continued to tank their relationships with everyone around them with false allegations of abuse and three-thousand other things, among them general dickholery; of course, aside from their, what, fifteenth girlfriend-cum-sugar-mommy? This, of course, is completely in line with the things I discussed and even predicted in a previous locked entry — which, by the way, none of those will ever see the light of unencrypted day again, given I lost the passwords. It's better off this way, to be fair; I said a lot of terrible things in there that I regret, hence the reason I locked them in the first place. This doesn't mean I disagree with everything I said in there, just that... well, I find myself caring less and less every day. I don't ever feel like I trust people (and that statement doesn't discriminate) no matter how much I'd love to say I do — and that statement is bonafide on its own, there's no need for a split-filled 3000 character rant about that to catch the public's eye. Regardless... this was about my sibling. I'm not surprised at how they've turned out, but on the funnier side it turns out all it took for me to become the Liked Child was for the coddled "underdog" to start threatening to kill people — what a surprise! It doesn't make up for years of invalidating my problems (and in all honestly, this trend has continued) and struggles, and brushing me off constantly, and ignoring me in favour of doing everything from chaperone for their school trips and not mine to doing their classwork for them, thus turning them into a lazy asshole who leeches off of everybody else and gets physically and verbally violent when confronted, but that's neither here nor there. We'll all end up the same way eventually.

On the brighter side, to give you a brief reprieve from my downtrodden, melancholic moping — it hasn't all been bad. Last August, I was able to fly down to Columbus last year and meet up with some friends of mine. If you know me, you know the ones — the good old Fruit Server, HBC-Wrought-Server gang. And we did quite a few fun things, to boot; visiting the zoo, catching a movie and seeing the inside of a Spencer's for the first time, having my first taste of Outback Steakhouse, late night Dollar General visits in rural Ohio, hitting that shit with pals... oh, and yeah, one of my favourite experiences was chugging an entire American Large iced tea, unsweetened, and eating Wendy's, then proceeding to get violently ill but refuse to actually vomit or anything because I hate it so bad. Not funny in the moment, but very much so looking back. It's kind of crazy when I think about it, but it was honestly lovely, and I really had a great time — though if you told that poor sod back in high school that the people they were trading jabs with on their phone would not only be their friends years later, but that they'd also be able to meet them in person, and actually enjoy their company, feel wanted, in some way... well, they'd have probably got up and left the library they were using to 'do schoolwork' in (read: work on character sheets in Google Docs).

And this July, too, during Stampede — a friend flew up here to visit me, too. Can you believe that? I finally got to go to Stampede with someone I care about, see a concert with someone I care about, see Calgary, or parts of it at least, with someone I care about — hell, sing half-drunken karaoke with someone I care about. And for a while, that really has made me feel better, makes me feel lighter even thinking about it, but as of late it's just been... hard, again.

In the absence of someone's presence it just reminds me how alone I am most of the time, how systematically I've been failed at every moment and how this has led to my own social incompetence, even as my learned shyness ebbs and flows, sometimes coming back full throttle, sometimes leaving for weeks; and please, trust me when I say I don't say this lightly, and I don't say it for pity. The last thing I want is for you to pity me, I barely pity myself; what I'm getting at is this — the constant emotional neglect, the ignoring of every problem I've ever had, has doomed me socially. My parents have never believed anything is seriously wrong with me; I've never been treated for anything properly. Growing up, no one wants to hang out with the weird kid; it doesn't matter if you have a school-system label on you or not because they can tell, they can tell something is wrong and offputting about you and thus beyond the first few years of school where everyone is a decently naive child fraternizing with every other naive child you become an outcast pretty fast. No one in my family even really noticed. Isn't that sad? Everyone was too busy dealing with my sibling to really care about me. I don't want to seem ungrateful. I know there are people who have had it worse than me, and I'm glad I was provided food, and shelter, and material things, and I know not everyone gets that; but, I don't know. All I've ever wanted is to be cared about, in some way beyond the way you'd treat a mongrel you brought in from the cold and hold a begrudging roommateship with.

Lately I've been writing a lot. More than usual, I mean. If you've been following my stuff, I've been really invested in a Specific Relationship right now, between what is essentially OC-ified AU versions of some characters. I really would love to talk about it more; I really love working on this stuff. In the grand scheme of things it's got a lot of really complex themes — racism and discrimination, body politics and autonomy, the general treatment of marginalized bodies, my own anti-prison and anti-death-penalty politics, all the emotions that surround all these things and whatever the hell else. To be honest a lot of these things are my family legacy, as an Indigenous person; I can't engage with things the way so many other people online do, with the same levity, because these are all very real things in my cultural legacy — our bodies experimented on, our over-representation in the prison system, yadda-yadda. And these all translate in some way, if not exact, to the themes of the stuff I've been doing. I'm consistently worried about being misconstrued, about people making jokes of my work, taking it lightly or in the wrong way; I want it to have a sense of gravitas, I don't want it to be treated like a toy or a novelty or a farce or a joke or anything else but the respect it deserves. It makes it exceedingly difficult to talk about because of that and even ignoring that I want to talk about it, so badly, but (and this is a me problem) I have to face the hurdle of feeling like people are feigning interest, not showing genuine interest, even when there's no real indication that's the case.

...Of course, there's a bit of romance in there. I'm a sucker for it in most things; when I do do it, no matter what form it takes, it's almost like a surrogate for a thing I don't think I can ever have.I'm just not cut out for it, I don't think; I'm constantly worried, even scared, about peoples' intentions, peoples' thoughts, the things they do, everything like that. I'm scared of people, and I just don't think that lends itself well to any kind of intimacy. The thought of being that close to someone is so assuredly out of my reach, so tempting a promise that it's repulsive to me. Er, glad my sister fucked someone in a hotel room and rubbed it in my face last year, though.

Moving on — I don't like looking back on the past, and especially not the last seven years, too hard, because it all reminds me of failure frequently. I'm incredibly grateful for my friends, and the things I have, and the fact that I've even made it this far, but it never seems to change anything. I'm always reminded of opportunities I've missed. I'm always reminded of people I let slip away from me, who I was too afraid to reach out to, who I was too afraid to care about, too afraid to befriend in general. It's dumb, but I even miss Twitch chat — not any Twitch chat, but I miss how it felt to tune in to, of all things, Wrought streams every week. Like, I miss the hyperspecific experience of sitting at the nail salon, looking out the window, thinking about going home and bantering with strangers. I miss the people I knew there. I miss my old internet friends, from everything from the FeralHeart hacker shitpost forum to the Klei Entertainment forum to the Spore Forum and everywhere in between. I miss the old internet. I miss everything and everyone I've ever loved. I still miss my cat, miss my childhood cats, miss my old dogs. I miss it all. I hate the world I live in; I love the world on a base level, but I hate the systems that govern it, hate the cruelty of people, hate the fact that I have the ability to conceptualize and know things. I hate the fact I can think. I hate the fact that I feel so constantly misunderstood, misrepresented. I hate the ways people treat me. I hate the ways people act, I hate the way so many people are, just about as much as I love people and their flaws.

There's no lesson to be learned here. I have no moral to leave you on, no closing remarks that will ever satisfy me. I don't know what I'll plan to do; whether I'll jump through all the stupid, bureaucratic hoops to move to a different country like a Good Dog should, whether I'll stay here and watch everyone slowly fade away, or even whether I'll... well, let's keep it open ended. Disappear. Whatever life may bring me, I just hope it's a fitting end. I'd like to think I might deserve one, when the time comes. But! For now, I'm alive, and I'll do something with it.