sugarrush-77

Realizing my degree of singleness

Sometime in between the ages of 20 to 30, you start to feel a pressure. And it’s not like a blood pressure kind of pressure, the kind you start to develop if you work an office job where you sit around all day and eat unhealthy things like your boogers while typing away at a keyboard. It’s the pressure of looking down the barrel of the gun of eternal solitude. Everyone else around you is dating. Except you. You’re a little abnormal, right? Somehow, everyone’s found someone, and that someone ain’t you.

I was taking a walk with my coworker and he was talking about his friends. “Yeah, we don’t meet up much because we’re are all dating and shit. I miss the old days sometimes, you know?” That innocuous statement, which really just was him describing his life with no special spin on it, hit me like a one-two throat punch. The one being that I’ve been single for the last 4 years, and my last and only dating experience barely counted since it was 3 months, so if you don’t count that, single for the entirety of my life. The two being that even if I’m single, I have no friend group to hang with. Imagine having a friend group. Sometimes, I talk to myself in different voices and personas to simulate social situations.

< my imaginary friends >

Nowadays, a lot of people describe dating as a market, and if you aren’t dating, it usually means that you’re unwanted goods. It’s as if if you were a snack, and a company sold only you, they would be out of business in 3 hours. In Japan, they used to call women above 25 Christmas cakes because after their 25th birthday, they weren’t good anymore. I’m not a woman, or Japanese, but I’m basically a Christmas cake male at this point. Once I’ve gone bad, I’ll have lost my use, and I’ll be tossed in the incinerator, where all the other Christmas cakes go. Whee!

I may be at a degree of singleness that is truely irreparable. If this was a videogame, I’d be pressing the surrender button and typing in chat “Go next gg get me out of this game”

Why I’m single 1/n

There are many reasons I’m single. One reason is that women don’t see me as a protective figure. I’m 5’5 and built like a twink. I’ve got that Asian babyface, and probably could still pass as a high school senior, so the only people I look threatening to are 5 year olds that think I look hideous, and ask pesky questions like “Why do you never leave your room?”.

And if you factor in my personality, I become more of a safety hazard than protection. If you’ve read the other things on my blog, you would know that I’m not exactly the spitting image of mental stability. My brain is like a bomb that’s constantly on a 5 second timer. The only reason I’ve not exploded yet is because every time it reaches zero, I just tick the timer back to 5. I have a looser grip on reality than most people, and I’m afraid I’ll just lose it one day and go batshit insane. My mind usually chooses to go in directions that conflict heavily with polite society, and I have a wild imagination that lets me self-insert into practically any fictional story of my choice. I’ll sit there for days, in a catatonic prison of my own devices, staring into a screen, enjoying my absolute disconnect with reality. I can’t even watch non-animated shows anymore. I think the way real people move and talk are boring, and I’d rather immerse myself in a world of beautiful art and fluid movement that real humans could never replicate.

The end of the pity party

I’m drafting this important manuscript at the wee hours of 1am getting off a cold having done nothing all day but do laundry and eat snacks. I have zero self control. I opened a pack of gummies and just sat there watching youtube and eating gummies for what seemed like 5 minutes, and all the gummies were gone. I wanted to cry. Not only were all the gummies gone, I also felt really fat. Now I see a panda when I look in the mirror. Dark circled fatass. It’s probably because my lifestyle closely resembles that of a panda. Sit around and masticate. I need to start eating bamboo instead or some shit.

If you’re not single, and you’ve read this far, I want to tell you that I don’t want your pity. This is a pity party, but a pity party for miserable single people who just want to give up and feel defeated instead of being disappointed again. You’re not invited. Actually, no, you can come, but we’re all going to talk about how single we are. Not only do we have nothing better to talk about, but also we are making our best effort to make you feel excluded.

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#humor

Even if you are not a Christian, imagine you are for a second.

The God of the entire universe wrote a book and inside that book He tells you everything you need to know in this life. Who He is, why He created you, what kind of life you were meant to live, and what the meaning of this crazy thing we call life is. That's the Bible. Is it not the most important book to exist? Is it not impossible to read too much of it and think too much of it? You might have it rotting away on your bookshelf in pristine condition, but if you only opened it, and had the eyes to discern it, it would completely turn your life upside down.

God also gave us the ability to pray. He gave us the ability to speak directly to Him, and yet we don't do enough of it. Is God not the most interesting being to talk to in the entire universe? He created all things, including you, and knows everything about the world and the universe, down to where an electron will be in a given moment of time. Would He not be more interesting to talk to than your friends, your significant other, celebrities, or anyone else in the world? He's the best. He's the one and only. There are none like Him.

#personal

I'm walking down the street. You come up to me, front kick me into the gutter, soccer kick me in the ribs, then pound me in the face until I look like a panda. Then you keep my face firmly anchored in the gutter with one hand, forcing me to make out with the algae stuck to the cement. You light a cig with the other hand.

I think I would just let it happen, and watch as you extinguished the cig on my face. I don't have the energy to defend myself, or even hate myself anymore. I probably would have the energy to scream, however, and you'd probably get arrested.

I am just deeply convinced that I am a worthless person, and my existence is largely inconsequential. But to be clear, I don't want to die, and I still work hard at my life. What this means is that I still work out, try to meet people, and take a glance in the mirror to fix my hair once in a while. But I also don't tell people about my problems (I'm not worth being concerned about), I don't have much intention of dating / marrying / starting a family, and don't make any long-term future plans at all.

I'm not in any distress, and I feel calmer than ever. I'm even getting better at handling negative events in my life, and continuing with the motions despite how I feel. I've decided that I'll keep on living until I no longer am. But I wonder how long I'll be okay with this way of life. When I get even lonelier and more alone than I am now when all my friends get married, have families, and move on, will I still be okay with everything? I wish I knew, because my dating and marriage prospects are pretty fucked if I decide to start looking when I'm 30-something.

Please do not tell me to go to therapy. I've already made an internal vow to never go to therapy. Therapy is for people that are schizophrenic, deeply depressed, recently divorced, something like that. For people like me that were brought up in fairly happy families, it's rare that there is more to be said than variants of “suck it up; life is pain”, “take a chill pill; stop overthinking and take a nap”, and “love yourself”.

Especially that last one. “Love yourself.” Some of the greatest brainrot of the twenty-first century produced by Western pop culture is the message that we somehow, do not love ourselves enough. Homo sapiens is the most self-obsessed being on Earth, maybe even in all the universe. So much that we decided to keep telling ourselves that we need to somehow value ourselves even more than we already do.

“But how can you love other people when you don't first love yourself?” It's literally possible. I already do this in some capacity every day. If it's possible for me in the grace of Christ, it's possible for you too in the grace of Christ.

I don't blame people for drinking the kool-aid because this rhetoric has already permeated every millimeter of society and we are now indoctrinating people with it. I typically don't voice my disagreement though. I pick my battles, and this is definitely not worth dying on a hill for.

#personal

I recently joined a small group at church. They seemed friendly. We started talking about God, and they seemed genuinely invested in their faith. I was excited. Then we were talking about community and spending more time with each other and getting to know each other. I was so down.

So the very next day on Monday I sent out a text to our group chat. I suggested that we volunteer at a nearby food pantry in the morning and eat lunch together. I had been there a couple times, and I was always overtaken by the warmth within the people that served there and the way they treated people that came to the food pantry for food and the volunteers that came to help.

Kakaotalk (Korean whatsapp/ wechat / whatever) has this feature where you can see how many people have read your message.

There were a total of 7 people in the chat, so when the number dropped to 4 and nobody responded, I was still okay. And then it dropped to 3, and my social anxiety started to kick in and I was imagining never showing my face at the church again, and then it dropped to 2, 1, and 0 by the time I left work.

I know it's not the most convenient hangout. You wake up at 6:30 A.M., walk yourself over to the train, then make your way to the food pantry, get there at 7:30 A.M., then you fucking starve till 12:00 P.M., get some lunch, and go about your day. Or in my case, go back home and sleep until 6 P.M..

This is an overreaction, but I just want to blow my brains out. I think I'm the only one without any kind of social circle in that whole entire group of people. I've moved around all my life, I just got to this new place for a new job 3 months ago, and I barely have friends here. I feel so embarrassed that I even tried to do this. Honestly, I should have asked people for when they were free, taken recommendations for what the group wanted to do, etcetera, but that kinda shit never works in my experience. Everyone wants something different, you can never find a time when everyone is free, and enjoying time with other people is more about the mindset you have going into it than anything else anyways.

I'm going to keep trying to make something happen, and I don't blame these people at all for not being free on a Saturday morning – you might want to sleep in for once, plan something with friends, or something. But I feel like such a loser for trying, and then having people just tell me that they aren't free or just ghosting me. Nobody's forced to wake up with me at 6:30 A.M. on Saturday and have the only thing to look forward to after it be a lunch with me.

This is a pattern in my life. Sometimes at work we'll talk in a group about what we did over the weekend. If there's ever side conversation happening during when someone's talking, it's always me. It makes me a little flush on the inside, and I don't even feel like talking anymore, because it feels like nobody even cares about what I'm saying anyways. I'd rather not talk then. I'm wasting my breath, and I'm wasting everyone's time.

I've been coding way more than I've been talking to anyone recently, and I'm not confident that people like me anymore. Before, I would just lie to myself that people did, and I would manifest it in the way I carried myself. But I'm not so sure anymore. I think everyone's too busy in their own lives probably to give any attention to me. I'm always worried that someone will hate me at work, despite the fact that it doesn't even matter if they hate me. I don't want to leave my apartment anymore. I don't want to see anyone anymore. I think I actually do, but also I really don't.

Marriage is what most people do, and well celebrated in Christianity. But celibacy is also seen as a gift in the Christian faith, one that allows you to dedicate your free time and life wholly to God. I've been walking the path of celibacy my entire life, and maybe this is it for me.

This blog post was over half a page ago. If I've learned one thing from writing for fun for many years and taking classes here and there is that you want to be concise, kill your darlings, and keep things as compact as possible. But I didn't want to stop talking, because I feel so damn lonely right now, and I'm not going to call someone at midnight to rant for thirty minutes. I'd feel a little bad about that.

I'm going to go to sleep. I want to go on vacation, and rot in my room. I just reread everything I wrote, and I sound like such a loser. I also got so much worse at writing. I'm a useless human being. The world with me in it is no different than a world without me. I wish people didn't look at me like I'm crazy for just being myself. Half the time I enjoy it because I'm desperate for any kind of attention I can get but the other half I want to disappear into thin air. I don't want to ever die because I'm selfish, but if someone killed me, it would probably be a net benefit for the world.

PS: Don't hate church people because of this one post. The people at my church are amazing. I'm just horrible at dealing with rejection and failure. I catastrophize frequently and I'm very neurotic.

#personal