“WHAT!”

“Jeez. It’s like you’re dead when you’re playing that game. When you could have more fun with me!”

Yena didn’t respond. She was rerolling like crazy, click, click, click on the virtual slot machine Riot Games had created to keep her in the game, hoping that she would win this one, and the next, and maybe another one. That one day she would become Challenger, just like the cool people. Champion profiles flashed as they were replaced by others, creating pairs, pairs of pairs, pairs of pairs of pairs. She had some success. But not enough.

The next battle, her fluffy, white Poro King was slain by a hail of blades unleashed by an Irelia chibi. Before her screen went gray, Janice got a glimpse of the other player’s name. “ILOVEARMPITS”

“Ew. Is your name in this game I love armp—”

Yena slammed the table with a tiny fist, and immediately withdrew her hand to her face, blowing profusely.

“Now that you’re dead, we can do something! It’ll be great Yena!”

“Shaddup.”

Yena queued again with trembling fingers.

“I’m going to pee. If I get matched, press accept for me.”

Janice began to count. She was so focused she didn’t hear the sound of a match being found. Yena opened the door. Janice held out her fingers.

“Five. It took you sixty-five seconds to pee. You were holding that in for a long time, huh? You should take more bathroom breaks—”

“FUCK YOU!”

Yena tried to push Janice aside as she stomped to the computer, queueing again.

“You can’t even press accept for me. You’re useless. Get OUT!”

Janice pouted. Then stopped pouting. She jumped onto Yena’s bed, hands behind her head.

“Hahhh, I love this bed.”

She turned over, buried her face in what used to be white pillow, now lightly yellow, darker yellow around the edges. No pillowcase. Breathed in deep, like a vacuum, attempting to suck every molecule of air from within the pillow.

“Ohhh fuckkk…”

Janice moaned, and took a desperate, deeper breath, like she was trying to suffocate herself. One man’s trash is another’s treasure, and in this case, the pillow definitely needed to be put in the trash due to how it looked and smelled, but to Janice it was treasure. If you put it into the dumpster, Janice would sift through heaps of trash to find it again.

Yena wouldn’t have cared if she knew, and she definitely didn’t care now. TFT was on the menu. Janice sidled up to Yena, and began to trace the contours of Yena’s arm with her nose, breathing in as she went, eyes closed. She nudged Yena.

“How long haven’t you showered for?”

“Stop bothering me.”

“How long?”

“Go away.”

“Two days?”

“Four.”

“Pay attention to me, not that stupid game.”

Silence.

“If I play this game, will you play with me?”

“No. You’re bad.”

“You could teach me.”

Janice sighed. She only had one option left. The nuclear option. She didn’t like to exercise it as of late, because when she dressed up, cosplayed as Kasane Teto, it felt like Yena was staring at her, but not at her. She was staring at the cosplay. Janice got into the outfit even though she didn’t really want to.

“Look.”

“Look.”

“Look.”

Yena finally looked. And smiled for the first time in hours. Tousled the red, fake hair styled into pointed drills at either side of Janice’s head, mouth agape. The game was still on, but Yena wasn’t playing anymore. Janice cried. She took the wig off and threw it on the floor. Yena looked at the wig, then at Janice again. A confused look on her face. Janice stumbled out of Yena’s dorm room, vision clouded by tears. Yena looked at the wig, then at the open door. Yena looked at her bed. Janice had left her bag on it.

Yena jumped on her bed and looked up at the ceiling. She pulled a handful of hair onto her nose and inhaled. Crinkled nose, coughing. She turned over, sniffed the pillow. It was worse. She didn’t understand.

I know it sounds like I’m experiencing chuunibyou syndrome, and I should have moved past this a long time ago, and I kind of did, but recently it’s been coming back. The more I get isolated, the more that I feel that I don’t ever fit in anywhere, and the feeling that I never will. It enveloped me in a miasma of hopelessness and depression. Then I realized I should just give up, and channel all that hateful energy into actually doing something with my time.

It works best when you have a specific object of hatred. In high school, for me, it was a classmate I had that was basically Ms. Perfect. Popular, academically great, good at sports, loved by teachers. I know it was immature, and I honestly didn’t even hate her that much, but whenever I needed motivation to get through a dark time, I hated her and it gave me the energy to push through. I guess it resulted in me going to a good university. But she got into Harvard LOL. So I never won I guess.

But now, who do I need to hate? In order to keep going? Maybe my younger brother? He has a lot of friends, has a girlfriend, things seem to be going pretty well for him. This is so stupid, HAHA I love my brother. But for now, I’ll just use him to become a better creative writer and programmer. Sorry broski, I don’t have any friends, and I have to make something of myself, right?

The only drawback of this is that, as I get older, the emotional toll gets bigger on me, and sometimes, my heart, LITERALLY, begins to hurt. I hope I die.

“Janice.”

“What.”

“I’m so lucky to be chasing my dreams. So few people get to do this. But it’s also risky, y’know?”

Yena took another shot.

“Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Why I even try anymore. I know chasing your dreams is supposed to be hard, but I didn’t know it was this hard.”

Janice nodded.

“I feel like I’ve hit a wall. An insurmountable wall. And it feels… so hopeless, y’know?”

A tear dribbled down Yena’s cheek.

Janice sighed.

“Yena, no matter how much you bitch and cry, you’ll never be able to marry Kasane Teto. She doesn’t fucking exist.”

Yena screamed in lowercase.

“NO! YoU can’t sAY THAT! NONONONO”

Janice rolled her eyes. Yena was saying crazy shit again. But it was fine. It’s what made her so entertaining.

“Yena, even if Teto existed, she wouldn’t like anyone like you. You’re stinky, 3 foot 10, insecure, and clingy. When’s the last time you had a shower? I can smell your pits from HERE. I had to take a smoke break earlier just to escape the waft coming off of your jacket.”

Yena took heaving breaths, and braced herself.

“TETO. IS. MY. WIFEEEE!!!!!”

Everyone in the restaurant stared. Janice left for another smoke break. Yena took another shot and kept eating the raw tofu in her plate. Yena was fucking autistic. They were at a Korean tofu stew joint, and she had insisted to the waiter, despite being told no multiple times, that she deserved. Absolutely deserved. Being served the tofu stew deconstructed in its entirety. She was a regular here. The waiter ended up shrugging, and ferrying the request back to the restaurant. Five minutes later, he came back with a raw egg, tofu, hot water, kimchi, and tofu stew base. He whispered an expletive under his breath, and swore that if she didn’t tip, he would kick her through the window.

Janice came back. Nobody knew why Janice hung out with Yena. When asked, Janice never gave a straight answer. Sometimes, she said it was because she needed help with homework, but they were in completely different majors. Sometimes, she said it was because she was really poor, and Yena had helped out with money once. But Janet was loaded from various side hustles she’d spun up “for fun.” Sometimes, Janet just shrugged and looked up at the sky. Nobody really knew except her. Janet sat down in front of Yena and leaned in.

“Yena, what if I dressed up as Teto? How do you think that would make you feel?”

Yena frowned.

“I don’t know if you have the look for it.”

Janice, mildly annoyed, turned away.

“Actually? I think maybe you could pull it off.”

Looked back, with a faint smile.

“Give me a second.”

Janice left for the bathroom with her backpack in hand. Yena took the moment to slurp the raw egg directly from the shell. She had nearly finished her tofu when Janice returned in monochrome red, from head to toe.

“Tada!”

A blob of tofu dropped from Yena’s mouth.

“Fuck. Fuhhhhckkk.”

“You like what you see?”

“Yeth.”

I’m currently at 7. I want to get to at least 100 by end of this year. 33 weeks left in the year, that’s roughly 3 rejections per week.

At this point I have dissociated away all sense of self to the point where rejection does not faze me anymore. Well, maybe a little. But I am deluding myself into levels of confidence reached only in my younger, more sprightly years. And whenever I imagine the women telling their friends about how they were approached by some crazy person, I’m comfortably able to push it away. There’s vulnerability involved in having to approach someone and expose yourself to the chance of rejection. Women typically don’t understand it because they’ve never tried. Their equivalent of asking someone out is smiling across the room and wondering why nothing happened. Generalization? Yes. But also who cares, I’m right.

Another thing that has helped approach women better is that I’ve stopped giving them as much respect. After careful observation of female family members and my friends’ girlfriends, I’ve realized they pull a lot of selfish and emotional shit where the men just have to take it. The societal justification implicit behind it is that it is all fine because they are women. And so logically I was at a crossroads. Either I give them a lot of respect and have an internal seizure when they pull stupid emotional shit because in my head men and women are subject to the same standards of conduct, or I just give them less respect and live with the bullshit. Crazily enough, the latter mindset will help you to be a better husband or boyfriend because women typically enjoy it when they can just be a child around their partners engaging in “I’m just a girl” behavior. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is probably typical. Am I becoming an incel? LOL

Im going to start my self harm glowup journey. It is going to be so great i cant wait to tell all my friends (me myself and i) tune in and keep getting updates until i finally kill myself! I’ll have an ai write a eulogy for me. My dying wish is that my remains are fed to electric eels and whatever is left is thrown into the sun.

The only reason i live is to keep listening to music. That’s it. A moment of silence, time spent away from the sounds that make me feel is the same as time spent dead.

I can’t bear being perceived anymore. I hate when people stare at me. I have always hated taking photos. I never want to leave my room again.

These shitheaded thoughts of mine would be met with sympathy if i was a woman, but im not, so having these thoughts are unacceptable. Of wanting someone or some being to put up with my neediness, constantly reassure me of my worth, and tell me they love me. Nobody’s going to give it to me, and im always going to have to be the one to provide, even if I get a girl. The exaxt reaction I would get if i said this to anyone in my life is that they are going to wrinkle their nose in disgust, tell me to pick myself off my feet, get over it, and solve my problems myself. There isn’t anything i can do to change that either. Such is the life of a man, probably since forever. So to get it off my chest, i need to voice it here, my little public diary. I know nobody reads this shit, but I just need to feel like someone is listening. Otherwise, ill feel even worse.

Maybe i should create an ai girl that keeps telling me im worth it. I mean, nobodys gonna do it, nobodys gonna solve my problem for me, so i guess ill just have to take matters into my hands. It’s no longer a matter of “ai isnt real find real people” it’s a matter of im going to kill myself and maybe this will stop me. Should make it open source for people like me.

I kinda blame God for this. He forgot i was a guy and dumped a shitton of estrogen into system that was meant to run on testosterone. I know you dont want me to think these thoughts or feel these feelings because it is all sin, but i cant help but do that in my current situation. What is the reason for creating something like me, i wonder. Just for the love of the game? For fun? A “i wonder what would happen…” thought experiment? To make other people feel better about themselves? I fear a bolt of lightning will drop on my head for writing this.

I feel better after writing this for some reason. I feel like i can do anything. Well, not anything, but i feel like i can handle my life again. A weird sense of peace has washed over me. It is peobably the combination of getting it off my chest and listening to zutomayos haze haseru hatermade. Art and music reflect the beauty of existence and make you want to keep living. I wonder how many people zutomayo have stopped from killing themselves.

Why do i feel so better suddenly? Where is this self esteem and confidence coming from? For the first time in weeks i can visualize my own face and not cringe and like how i look. Im doing a couple things rn – extreme sleep deprivation, haze haseru haterumade on repeat, and im reading Noa-senpai wa Tomodachi, a manga series where Noa, an art director with similar mental issues to me (except shes a hot girl), is improving her issues through a long term friendship that later turns to romance. Maybe Noa’s story did something for me? Will i feel like shit again in a couple hours? Who knows?

The context is that nobody wants to date me. I've tried the apps. I've cold-approached strangers on the street like some guy handing out flyers for a restaurant nobody's going to. I've asked friends to set me up, which is the romantic equivalent of having your mom call the teacher. Nothing has worked. People tell me I’m a fashion terrorista — okay, fair, but you don't have to volunteer that information unprompted. I'm also short, which means I’m automatically ugly to most women. So there's that.

I'm mid-20s. This doesn't mean anything about how life turns out. I know that intellectually. But I was in the pit — the real pit, the one where your brain starts looping I'm gonna kill myself like it's a Hatsune Miku song stuck on repeat — and somewhere in the middle of that loop my brain just went: wait. Why do you even need to get married?

Like actually why. Life is short. People try to convince you it's some great thing, and I mean yeah, feeling loved and loving someone is probably wonderful. That's why so many people do it. But there are a lot of different things that can bring you fulfillment and happiness and satisfaction, and it's not like the point of life is to sustain those feelings forever, so why is this one particular arrangement elevated above everything else? I don't get it. I've never gotten it. I'm sitting on this curb and I genuinely cannot produce a reason.

And look, even the people who do get married — even the happy ones — it's not like it's this smooth, pleasant experience. My parents are happily married. They're also in the same argument they were in ten years ago. You can't fix people. You really can't. Whatever the issue is, it's going to be the same issue at year one and year twenty and year forty, and you're just going to have to live with it. Men have their specific faults. Women have their specific faults. And because they're so different from each other, sometimes one side genuinely cannot understand or sympathize with what the other side needs. It's not malice. It's just that you're wired differently and some gaps don't close no matter how much goodwill there is. Maybe if you're gay or lesbian it's easier. Same wavelength, at least. I don't know. But the point is that marriage is not this effortless beautiful thing people make it out to be. It's a grind. It's a daily grind that you're signing up for permanently.

And the divorce rate is insane. People will stand at an altar, say “till death do us part” with their whole chest, and then three years later they're splitting a Vitamix in mediation. I think of marriage as something you don't break. Period. That's what the commitment means. Unless someone is under genuine imminent threat, you stay. Personality difference? You stay. You're annoyed? You stay. That's the deal. That's what “till death” means. And yet people treat it as the most important decision of their life and then bail when it gets hard. So either the commitment doesn't mean what they said it meant, or they didn't think about it seriously enough before they made it. Either way, I'm not seeing a great advertisement here.

So I'm doing the math. Let's say I die at 65. I have 40 years left. 40 years is not a lot of time. If I get married I spend those years on kids, family, all of that, and I guess it can be very fulfilling. I'm not denying that. But you shouldn't have a kid to give your life meaning. You shouldn't need a family to feel like your existence has a point. There are things that fundamentally have meaning apart from all of that. If you're a Christian, the essence of life is to love God, love your neighbor. Being single doesn't subtract from that. It's not even in the equation.

I spent a good 30 minutes on this curb — which is a long time to sit on concrete, for the record, my ass was completely numb by the end — and I could not produce a single reason why you need to get married. Not one. I tried. I sat there and I tried to argue the other side and I kept coming up empty.

Thought experiment time!

I ran this thought experiment on myself. Let's say I wake up tomorrow and I'm inexplicably attractive. Just overnight, something changed, and now there's a horde of people who want to date me. They're knocking on my door, telling me I'm handsome, the whole thing. Do I want them?

No. I'd hate every single one of them. Because I know what happened. Yesterday they wouldn't have looked at me if I was on fire, and today some switch flipped and now they're interested. That's not real. They don't like me. They like the version of me that crossed whatever arbitrary threshold they have for attractiveness, and that version didn't exist 24 hours ago. Everything I actually am — all of it, the good and the bad and the boring and the weird — none of that changed. The only thing that changed is my face or my height or whatever, and that was enough. That tells me everything I need to know about what they actually value.

Or let's say I got rich. A billion dollars, just appeared in my account. Suddenly everyone thinks I'm interesting and attractive and worth their time. That doesn't draw me towards them. That makes me want to walk into the ocean. You didn't want me when I was broke and invisible, and now I'm supposed to believe this is genuine? We both know what this is. Get out of my house.

I realize I'm getting increasingly worked up about hypothetical people who don't exist. I'm developing resentments towards women I have never met over scenarios that have not occurred. This is probably not a sign of great mental health. But the point underneath all of that is real, I think. What I actually want — what anyone actually wants, if they're honest about it — is someone who likes them when they're not impressive. When they're sick, broke, annoying, ugly, boring. Not just when everything's going great and you're easy to love. The love people actually crave is the kind that doesn't have conditions.

And that kind of love is almost impossible to find between two people. Parental love comes close, but even that has limits. If your kid is a three-time serial killer, even Mom is going to have a hard time. Really the only place you find truly unconditional love is God. That's it. That yearning you have — that deep, bottomless thing that makes you feel like you'll die if nobody ever really knows you and loves you anyway — that's pointed at God whether you realize it or not. Romantic love is great. I'm not trashing it. But it's not the answer to that particular ache, and it never was, and treating it like the answer is how people end up devastated when it doesn't fix them.

So where does that leave me.

I think the issue was never that nobody wants me. I think the issue is that I was staring at the wrong scoreboard. I've been depressed about something that doesn't actually matter as much as I thought it did. My priorities were misaligned. I was pouring all this energy and anguish into the fact that I'm not valuable in the dating market, and the whole time the answer was just: so what? It doesn't take away from the things that actually matter. It doesn't diminish my life. It's fine. It is genuinely fine.

And I mean that. I'm not just repeating “it's fine” to myself like a mantra, trying to brainwash myself into believing it. I actually sat with this for a while and I cannot find a hole in it. There's no reason this should be ruining my life the way it has been.

I think I can own it. I'm a chud. Possibly an extreme chud. I have zero aura. I get nervous in big open rooms and feel safe in capsule hotels where everything is tight and enclosed and nobody can see me. I am most at peace in a basement in front of a computer. Complete self-deception can fix a lot of things, but there are some objective truths that no amount of gaslight-yourself energy is going to override. I am who I am. The dating market has weighed me and found me wanting, and I have decided that the dating market's opinion is not one I need to care about.

Do I talk to anyone about this? About any of it? No. Should I? I don't know. Will I? Absolutely not. I keep everything buried all the time. Everything is embarrassing. Everything is shameful. I don't know where that comes from — this feeling that any interior thought, once spoken aloud, becomes humiliating — but it's been there as long as I can remember. Sometimes I think I would rather die than describe what's going on inside my head to another person. That's probably its own problem. A big one, actually. But I'm choosing not to engage with it right now because I can only have one crisis at a time and this curb is not comfortable enough for two.

I do all my thinking alone, which means my thoughts are becoming increasingly feral. I'm drifting further from what normal people think. I'm aware of this. Every week I spend processing things in complete isolation is another week my worldview gets a little more strange, a little less compatible with polite conversation. I'm developing opinions and frameworks that I could never say out loud because they'd sound insane, but they make perfect sense inside my head, which is either a sign that I'm onto something or a sign that I've lost the plot entirely. I honestly don't know which one it is and I'm not sure it matters.

I wanted to write all of this down before I forgot it. That's the only reason this exists. I thought about something for 30 minutes on a curb and I want to be able to come back to it later and remember what I was thinking, because usually these things just evaporate and then I'm back in the pit again with no recollection of ever having climbed out. So here it is. My ass hurts. I'm going inside. I don't know if I'm convinced or if I'm just tired, but either way I'm done sitting on concrete.

Upstanding citizens of God’s kingdom have to exercise utmost focus and willpower to keep their eyes on Christ, and Christ only. You look away for a moment, and you’ll find you have strayed. If suffering comes your way, you must endure it. Maybe sometimes, you’ll be happy. But you’ll find that you can go to sleep easy knowing that you’ve fought the good fight, and that your conscience is clear(er).

So, you can’t have your cake, and eat it too. Ya gotta choose. What do you want?

I find that as I get older, I become more aware of death. Death is useful as a sieve for filtering out the things that are important and not important. It reminds me that I should choose to be an upstanding citizen of God’s kingdom, because that’s what really matters.

I should not look past the current day that I am living in.

If I start each day committing myself to God’s will, and submitting myself to Him throughout the course of that day, I’m golden.

I shouldn’t even think about the fact that I have to repeat this over and over again. Discard that thought entirely from my mind.

I need to look at today, and no further than today.

Today I got my hair double bleached. But before that, I went to church. The reason I go to this church is because every week, I feel like God is speaking to me through the sermon. Today’s sermon was titled “Stephen’s All-In”, from Acts 7:54-60. The passage was about when Stephen was stoned to death by Jews.

A couple pithy quotes today that I found good:

• A life where you accept God as your creator, your master
• Is life a journey in which we are heading towards meeting Jesus our creator again?
• Seek God’s face in harsh times
• Don’t be the servant that didn’t use their talents to serve God. Don’t hesitate to participate in God’s good work.

The main topic I found relevant to my life today was about God’s silence. When the topic came up, I realized that God was being silent in my life despite my mental sufferings. I wrote in my sermon notebook

“Sometimes it all feels like a sick joke! I don’t understand why any of it has to be like this.”

The pastor spoke of Stephen “obeying God to death” in the passage. In response to that, I wrote in my notebook

“Would it really be as miserable as I think it would be (to obey God to death)? If I stop bitching while I do it, probably not. I need to stop bitching and stop looking at the negatives while forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do. I might as well force myself to look at the bright side of things, and do it with a cheerful heart.”

More about God’s silence. God is silent multiple times in the Bible. He is silent when Stephen dies for his sake, He is silent when Jesus dies on the cross (the ultimate silence). It’s hard to understand in the moment why, but we know that God is good. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done but simply endure the suffering without reprieve. In fact, we may actually deserve silence. What we did not deserve is Jesus’s saving work on the cross. The Samarian woman understood on some level that she was unworthy, but she didn’t care, and she came to Jesus because she trusted that He could save her. To this I wrote in my notebook

“I have too big of an ego. I should kill it. I’m so frustrated that God won’t give me what I want that I don’t want anything to do with Him sometimes. Even if I obey, I want to do it sullenly and tell Him – look, I did what you wanted. Happy? Now kill me.”

But I did decide that I would not complain, and act like a petulant child that pouts and stamps their feet when they aren’t given what they want. I will obey. I will find joy in God, and learn how to be grateful in every situation. I will not bitch and moan about every little thing that did not go my way. I am not important.