An Open Letter

Today I went to pilates for the first time with D and K, and afterwards we ended up just talking for a long time. I ended up getting to know K a lot better, and she seems like she could be a good friend. I did notice, however, that especially with N, M, and K, they are absolute bombshells, and the kind of people that get put on pedestals as some sort of prize. But both getting to know them as people, and also learning about their flaws and shortcomings, I weirdly feel like it’s such a weird perspective shift. I think M is a great example, she has a few thousand people on her stories thirsting over her, and is conventionally very attractive and fetishized. But to me she’s a fucking dumbass that’s stubborn, a bit reckless, but well intentioned. When I think of her I don’t see an image of her body or anything like that, but I rather see her aruging with me about how alcohol is not a diuretic like I’d imagine a little sister would. Same with K, we talked a lot about socializing and the struggles of connecting to people, and how we both struggle with anxiety. And then I go home and look at her instagram after exchanging it and she looks like one of those ABG models. It’s so funny that these profiles you see online are slightly awkward goofy people in real life, that you have so much more in common than you’d think. I was crushing HARD on N today, and I think that’s kinda mellowed out after D brought me a bit back down to earth saying she doesn’t think N has a crush on me. I think it’s funny how someone may see N at a party or like that and think she’s an insane baddie (which she is), and they don’t know how she gets pissed when doing ass at the light-up square arcade game I dragged them to. Or how she is slightly awkward and does this high voice mocking thing. Or how she is subtly prideful about different things about her, and how she gently looks for that validation.

I think it’s a weird thing when people are so beautiful, I think similar to when someone is very unattractive it’s hard for people to get to know them. I think on both ends people don’t get to see who they are because of how they look. What a weird horseshoe spectrum.

I thought my crush was gone, but I think I’m kinda falling for N. It’s a shame because I don’t think she’s emotionally available, and I don’t think she feels the same way. But I can’t really help myself; every small hint feels like a possibility. She even hit me the way I like. And my god, she’s beautiful. She’s masculine in the ways that I like, and she’s feminine in the ways I like also. Plus smart, funny, and kind to me. I find myself wanting to be better for her in some ways, like I wanted to look better and I want to be stronger and push myself to impress her. She asked what love feels like and I feel like I could give her a better and better answer each time I interact with her. Or at least what a crush feels like. I guess I just really want to get to know her better.

N asked what love feels like, and I said the answers I have already thought of. But on my drive home I thought a bit more and I think love is the absence in your heart once it’s gone. I think you really feel love when you finally are faced with potentially losing it. But maybe that’s an unhealthy view of it. Am I saying I think love is when you don’t want to let something go? Because sometimes when you love you let them go for their sake. Maybe the pain is how you know you loved.

I think it’s not a brave thing to bottle things up. There’s a really weird notion that masculinity is the refusal to ask others for help or to reach out when struggling. But when I think about it, I think that’s the cowards approach, to afraid to be hurt from admitting you want help and someone saying no. It’s admitting that you would like someone else to be a part of your life. It’s admitting that someone matters to you and that they help. And I think that’s a terrifying thing for a lot of people, and so I think it’s very brave when people are willing to put themselves in harms way. I think it’s the same bravery that I feel proud of myself for, I’ve been abrasive and I’ve been myself and I’ve been weird and I’ve done my best to be unapologetic about it, and that authenticity has helped so much. But I don’t think I’m fully authentic, because when it gets late I feel this crash emotionally, and suddenly the little things get to me. Two people walking on ahead and I think about how I am the outsider and I am the first to go, and there is not a safe place for me where I know I am wanted. And I know that I’m wrong, and I know that it’s insecurity and delusion and it’s issues from childhood that I can do nothing but give myself sympathy for right now. And I guess I can also remind myself that it’s not true. But it sticks with me.

N asked me if I felt bad when people said I was big, and I told her that I never think that I’m big. How funny that is given my username, and I guess domain name lol. But I told her how I feel good about myself in the mirror when I feel happy, but then I put on clothing and I think I’m again just a small boy. I look around and I see men, and I see people with large arms and taller than me, and it doesn’t feel like they have to posture up or convince others that they should not be fucked with. But then I look at myself and I feel like I’m fighting and working so hard to fall short of what other people have by default. I’m doing so much to try to convince the world that I am a man. And so I kind of resigned to it, and so I take solace in the fact that I’m not really a man in the common eyes of society, and this gives me the freedom to be weird and feminine and strange. Look at this blog as an example. I wear stupid pieces of clothing, and I have very pronounced mannerisms and I’m very expressive. I don’t do this from full freedom though, I do this because I’ve kind of accepted that I’m not winning any performance, and so I have the freedom of losing. You’re not afraid to do things when you’ve already lost. And I don’t think that I’m someone that is easy to love, and I’m a little bit afraid for if I think that I am. Let’s say someone convinces me that I’m not that hard to love, then that means that I have a chance and then I’m afraid to fail the performance. And so there’s a kind of comfort in this thought.

My eyes are already closing and I noticed I was falling asleep good night

It’s three in the morning and I just got back from clubbing. The people I went with loved having me there, and even the people that we met and random strangers I danced with also felt the same. One guy even bought me a shot. One guy complimented my shoulders, saying that I must be hitting the shoulder press. I didn’t know what to say back, and I felt bad. I felt fucking bad. Not even in a guilty way, but again like it felt like someone’s lying to me, like the entire world had an inside joke where they all compliment me on the shit that I’m proud of that I don’t think is worth being proud of. This happens consistently enough that I know I’m fucking insane for feeling bad about it, this never happened before and now it’s happened twice in one week. Before I went to the club I even worked out shoulders, and I felt super proud, all the way until I actually looked at the photos I took. And then I felt like I had nothing to be happy about. And so I took solace in my take that I would enjoy the gym regardless of how it made me look. I should be happy. I should feel attractive and I should feel wanted and I should feel like the person that I’ve become is someone that I want to live as. But instead I wonder if I’m going to be here until the end of the year, in time for D to make her instagram post. I’ve weirdly fallen upwards, I’ve just decided to do the things that make me laugh, and other people like that. But then the problem is no matter how good things look, there will always be a moment where doubt can creep in and fully obscure all sun. N sat with her legs pressed against T, and I noticed that I didn’t even want to go sit with everyone else at the end of the night. My natural tendency is to push myself lower down. I set myself up to get more evidence that I just can’t be loved, and that I’m not worth it. And no one is going to go out of their way to include me like that, and so even though I probably am liked, I end up fabricating enough proof for me to want to go home and be like the way I am.

I thought if I was attractive things would change. I was right, things did change. People treat me better, and I get positive feedback constantly. But also I was wrong, because I refuse to be happy deep down. D said that someone had a similar personality to mine, and I immediately pushed back in my mind, because I wanted to validate the fact that she doesn’t know me past this one face. It’s just a photograph of this weird constantly changing shape that I am. All of the parts that are in the shade stay that way. Unseen, and hidden. Necessary for the shape, but ignored by design.

D on the ride back while drunk, kept talking about how amazing sisters are. She also didn’t believe that I was no contact with my sister. That hurt. I would love to have a sibling, one where I could know what’s fucking happening in their life. One that I could fucking talk to once a couple months. But instead I get to have this pseudo tragic backstory that people don’t buy. What a fun fucking party trick, I get to say how I’m no contact with my mom and my sister. And I get to say in the same joking tone I always use, because what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to fucking break down in front of people, am I supposed to tell them that I don’t think I can be loved and that I don’t have a model for it because I didn’t have parents in my eyes, hell I didn’t fucking have a life. I fully planned to kill myself constantly, and while I’m happy that I didn’t, a large part of me wishes that I didn’t have to keep convincing myself of that fact. God, why could I not have been loved. I wish I could have a hug, but instead I’ve come up with all of these surrogate methods that can keep me from remembering how fucking nice it would be to not be so deeply alone all the time.

R asked me to yell at her to go to the gym, and the first thing I came to my head was that she should just remember how much she hates herself, because that’s what I do. There’s no one else that I can hate, because there’s no one else there. And these feelings have to go somewhere. I tell myself that hurting will make me pure. I can somehow only feel proud of myself when I’m by myself. I just refuse to believe that anyone else could see me and feel proud. Just a big bundle of shame.

I hope I die of natural causes.

2 am my brain is fried but me and TTV stayed up playing arena and I got 23k hp on alistar lmao. We ended with a first that was fire I’m happy.

I had my first date with J today, and While it was good, afterwards I felt kind of sad. I realized I learned a lot about her but she didn’t really learn much about me, because she didn’t ask any questions or try to follow up at all whenever I would say something. I ended up telling her over text, and she apologized a lot and asked me questions. I do appreciate that, but it did push on a nerve for me.

I thought about SVM and how each wrongly classified instance pushes the boundary towards the more correct solution, and I think dating is kind of like that. I think I’ve learned that I really want a partner that is interested in me and wants to know more, and wants to know what I’m thinking. I remember my relationship with A, and how I started to feel like she didn’t even know me. I want to feel like I don’t have to beg someone to see me. To be loved is to be seen.

One of the memories I remember is that when I was in middle school I told my mom on the drive home that I didn’t like being Indian. She stopped the car and yelled at me to get out and walk home, and I had to beg her to not do that and to take me home. That never helped my internal view of myself and my identity. It doesn’t help that I grew up completely detached from any form of culture that was not of my own, and so I was never able to really relate or interact for that matter with Indian people. The only interactions I have were with my immediate family, and the Indian boys at school that were very crass and immature and I did not hang around them. I don’t know exactly how or when, but without knowing a lot of racism became internalized to me. I became one of those people that betrays their own group to show that they are one of the good ones, and it was never a conscious thing. But to me I believed and I would say that Indian guys were weird, and I thought Indian women were unattractive. Being Indian was always like a stain, or it was a mark of shame. I think that still carries with me now, and it’s something that’s really difficult to put down when it’s been instilled in me consistently. I always try to avoid Indian content on the Internet, because until very recently I’ve always seen it in a very negative light, and the comments are just filled with racism and it just reinforces in my head. Recently I’ve started to get positive sentiment, and it shocks me to see people saying things nice about Indian people. It feels like pandering, or people lying in the interest of equality, and the difficulty I have accepting it is further proof of how much it’s been internalized in me. I don’t go by any nicknames which is kind of ironic because I don’t really like my name. I don’t wanna change it or anything, but at the same time I always feel like I’m asking people to accommodate me and to put up with me when they have to learn my name. I feel like if anyone tries to convince me otherwise, by saying something like “it’s an unique and cool name” it would only feel like pandering. I feel like in my eyes the way to be desired as an Indian person is to imitate being another race. Whenever I see attractive Indian people online, it always feels like it’s meant to mimic white people, or when I think about Indian people in media it feels like they aren’t like me. I guess no one necessarily is like me, in the sense that everyone is unique, but there are very little Indian people online that are popular, I’m really thankful for Squeex, because he is Indian and proud about it, and it doesn’t feel like a drawback for him. I am working on seeing myself in that same light. I look in the mirror and I see my face and I hear my voice and I think of my name and I see my skin color and I don’t see Indian. Until I do, and then I just feel sad. It feels pathetic that I’ve been beat down so much that I’m ashamed of who I am, and it’s not an intense thing, but that’s mostly just because I don’t consciously identify as Indian in my mind or in my view of myself. I believe that you grow from adversity, but I don’t really know how I feel about this. This hasn’t been a loud fight or a big battle, but rather just a slow bleed that feels like it adds friction to so many of the things that I care about in life. I want to be wanted, and it kind of hurts me that no one is ever going to have me as their type. I am not a traditional Indian man, but rather I’m an amalgamation of different cultures that I see and the environment that I was raised in, none of which have anything to do with being Indian. And so I’m just a discount white person.

Getting that off my chest and seeing what sticks isn’t how I feel about myself completely accurately. Even now there’s already things that I wrote that I disagree with, and there’s things that I know that I am objectively wrong in. But I think a soft version of that sentiment does hold, I would love if I could see being Indian as something other than a drawback.

I really enjoy interacting with people over text, especially with playful conversations like flirting. Pretty much my main goal is to make myself laugh and to clip farm To myself, and I think funnily enough the authenticity goes across pretty well. I’m still confused about what N thinks about me, but I matched with someone cool just now on Hinge and they were pretty funny and I enjoyed our conversation. I took so many screenshots from my own laughing sake.

I keep reminding myself that it doesn’t have to be a bad experience to move back and forth. I think I feel scared in some ways because it’s like a change in life or expectation, and I do like that structure. I think I honestly may be more autistic than I thought, and part of me wants to see if I’m diagnosed, but also I wonder how that changes my own perception of myself. I know that I identify myself with diagnoses and I almost try to fit myself into a mold to validate that, so I wonder how that would be for something that I don’t really think I identify with (autism).