An Open Letter

Someone on Reddit had a thread about social socialization. A lot of people said stuff that resonated with me, and one person said something that I had pretty much Word for Word and so I ended up turning on voice to text and just kept talking as a response, ending up with a couple paragraphs. I had someone then reach out to me asking if they could ask for advice. I think it’s so weird how I’ve come from a kid that was not socialized at all and did not really have any friends to someone who is giving people advice now. The weird thing is I don’t even think it’s wrong for me to give advice, I’ve had so many recently talk about how they envy me for being or ask me on tips or how to do things like make friends. And I feel like that’s an indication that I’m doing something right. I also realized talking with M how so comfortable being uncomfortable in new situation and how it’s to go and make friends now in those weird foreign situations. Like I’m now the person that is the social glue. I’m really proud of how far I’ve come.

There's a lot that I would want to say today but also nothing at all. But I did see a couple quotes or posts that really resonated so I kind of wanted to notarize them here.

10 spears go to battle, and nine of them shatter. Did the war forge the spear that would remain? No, all the war did was identify the one that would not break.

I'm going to paraphrase here for this one, but it was talking about the story of Icarus. One of the things commonly is how his father warned Icarus about flying too close to the Sea, because the water would stick to the wings and make it too heavy to fly. What would the world have looked like if the idiom was don't fly too close to the sea.

I really liked that one because I really love the entire myth of Icarus and a lot of the symbolism behind it. But I also really like the acknowledgment of the counterpoint, how it is almost equally as dangerous as driving for too much to strive for not enough. I don't know if this is just a universal human thing or if I have just always underestimated myself, but I think about how many things in my life I would not have done if I did not decide to chase it. It is arguably worse to die to the sea, because the alternative means you get to enjoy the Sun, and the fall.

I feel like I should be more hurt or stuff like that but I only really think about it when it's the end of the day and I'm journaling and I feel obligated to talk about the whole thing that happened with T. I think part of me does the potential of a close friend like that, but at the same time I do feel like I dodged a bullet and also because I am surrounded by other friends and I don't feel like I'm missing anything, I really feel okay. I guess this is the importance of maintaining and working on a diverse social network instead of just being satisfied once a few places fill that .

I surprisingly don't feel that bad today. I talked with a few friends, and I'm also interacting with people normally. I also finally rested and started trying to work out without fatigue, and I felt incredibly good. I want to focus more in my recovery so that I can do this more often.

That chapter is now closed. I want to say that I got closure, but I didn't really, mostly because F had a really good point on how they might have just been trying to find an excuse to get away. I don't think this was something conscious, but I think the conflict and discomfort having to things while already struggling in real life became too much, and I find it reasonable to think that she defense mechanism'ed me and went nuclear. It would explain why this happened without an explicit event but was rather delayed, and also why she didn't try to communicate it or resolve it. She told me her reasons, and they were all things that to me were misunderstandings. But because I did not have a way to know or clear things up before this breaking point, what happens happened.

In the entire time I knew her, she never once mentioned knowing about my blog. But it turns out she knew and also kept up with it. The day we got into a conflict voice-to-texted a lot of stuff, to try to process and vent. If I knew that she might potentially see it I would have edited it instead of just letting it be a continuous stream of emotion. It sucks because whenever people I know mention that they know about this website, I kind of talk with them and let them know that I don't want them to keep up with it and also that anything I write is not what I believe or what I think, it's just meant to be somewhere where I can fully vent and try on different thoughts. It's like a kid getting mad at their parent and saying “I hate you I hope you die”, even though they wouldn't want that at all. I guess this was meant to be my place for that, because I don't want to tell people things that I don't mean. But she read those posts, and she misinterpreted several big things and she stated those as the reasons why she ghosted me. The biggest one that hurt to hear was that she thought I wanted to hurt her. That broke my heart to hear, because I hate the idea of making anyone uncomfortable let alone hurting someone. Especially someone that I care about like a friend. Like even in sparring with L or N, I would constantly be holding back even when they would be rougher, because I just could not handle the thought of hurting someone. But at the same time I see how that’s at odds with the things that I wrote that day.

I wrote about how I sometimes get dreams about getting in fights or being in situations where someone attacks me first and it is morally justified to defend myself and in the dreams I'm overly aggressive and I struggle to sleep because my heart keeps racing but my brain keeps going back there. And I like those dreams, it's not like it's a nightmare. It's not something where I want to dream it or I try to, but whenever I do it feels good for a lack of a better word. And so I sat there thinking about where is the dissonance between me being a non-violent person and having these violent fantasies. And I think I kind of figured it out.

I only have these dreams whenever I start to feel triggered or a lack of control over my own well-being. Plenty of people have had it worse than me, but at the same time I know that you can't compare struggles but I at least wanted to say that first. But I grew up in a house where I was emotionally neglected, sometimes physically abused, and also sexually. It's not something I really like to talk about for very obvious reason, but also mostly because I don't want people to feel uncomfortable or to look at me any differently or with pity. I'm pretty well adjusted, and I'm really thankful to therapy and introspection for that. But there absolutely are plenty of scars, including ones that I keep finding. And one of those is I think my issue with emasculation. I remember when things happened to me as a kid, especially the SA, I always blamed myself because I could have stopped it and I just wasn't strong enough to. It wasn't a question of physically, but I just kind of mentally shut down I wouldn't think about it and I would just go along and do it. I also didn't have any trusted adults or people I could talk to and so I just kind of dissociated and as a result I don't really remember my childhood at all. That was all I could do because I was hurting so badly and it's not like I could have done much else. I was a kid. But I always blamed myself for it, and so a consistent narrative in my head has been that I will never be that weak again. I will be strong enough to be able to protect myself. And it's irrational because it was never question about my physical strength, or my masculinity. But if I'm what I always see of men, of being emotionally strong, independent, resilient, and not victims, if I'm that, then I am safe. It's really hard to write this out. Whenever I would feel emasculated, I would feel weak, and I would feel vulnerable. Like if something was to happen to me again I would need someone else to come and save me or help me, and the only thing I learned growing up is that no one will come. The only thing they would do is make it worse, and so I need to be strong enough to deal with it by myself.

I remember with T, it wasn't the homophobic comment that she made towards her ex. That of course sucked, but I would have been fine. It was me taking a risk and telling her that what she said kind of hurt me, and her responding saying I don't care, and that she will keep doing it. And when I told her I don't think she understood what I was saying, she said she did understand and doubled down. This is one of those things where what she did really isn't the worst thing in the world, but I just have my scars in exactly the spots she hit. That immediately made me feel like I did all the time growing up, where if I ever said that I was hurting or that I was struggling, it was met with aggression and indifference. There was never any empathy from my household, because my mom and my sister were always struggling with their own mental illnesses. But that's just been burned into me, that if I beg someone to help me, the response I've been trying to unlearn was aggression. And thankfully the people I've surrounded myself with have been great for that, I have plenty of friends that I'm so incredibly thankful for that have been there for me. And so trusting T in this situation and having it go right back to what I was trying to unlearn was too much. And so it hurt me so much deeper than it should have.

I'm thankful for the silver lining of this scar being pushed on hard enough for me to know it's there and to give it a name. I can talk with my therapist and more about this so that hopefully I can start to let it heal properly. But it really does hurt have someone who was a really close friend block me on every single platform, remove me from our mutual server, and even have other friends block me and take sides without me getting any say. I'm happy that they have people that will be on their side no matter what, because I know how important that is. It just really sucks that I don't think it's a good idea to just do that, to fully block someone and exonerate them without any communication. And I also always try to make sure no one has to choose sides, which is why I didn't mention any kind of conflict or the things that she was doing what was our mutual friends. But because of that I'm left defenseless and out in the cold. This is such an ugly pity party of a last few sentences, I'm sorry for rambling with voice to text again. It just hurts that her friend that I became friends with didn't even give me a chance as a person. I'm glad because that means she has people on her side to support her, and I have other people and I'm strong enough regardless now. I'm still sad because it hurts me way more than it needed to. But maybe it's a good thing, the whole thing about comfortable discomfort.

I can't believe I wrote all of this shit when I really only meant to write this last paragraph. I think this blog has been a really cringy stupid idea that I somehow have not gotten backlash over, or enough to motivate me to stop. But at the same time this is now the third time someone close to me has utilized this as a resource during conflict against me. And that makes me feel really unsafe writing, because it no longer feels like a journal but rather like I'm going on the record and that it's going to be scrutinized and leveraged against me later. I don't really know why I want to have something that's public in the first place. I think a big part is because I truly do believe that I am not perceived enough for this to matter, and that no one is going to notice this in a way that actively affects me. But I absolutely hate lying and so people close to me usually find out about this in some way or another, and then in the conflicts with some people they then have access to this one way glass into my mind. And I think that's something I'm not really comfortable with anymore.

I like the idea of somewhat documenting my emotional progress throughout my life, and it's pretty nice to be able to look back and see how far I've came. And I've had a couple people reach out to me and say how been helpful or nice to see what I'd like to think is just a very intimately humanizing view into someone else. But I find myself more and more becoming worried about censoring things from a stream of consciousness which defeats the purpose of journaling. My current idea has been to rewrite my own blogging platform so that I can change it from a traditional feed into instead a random post. I think this way people can see small little windows, but I don't have to be afraid of someone peering into my mind without me knowing, especially when I'm struggling. I'm not sure though, I feel like an overall net negative to have this be something publicly on mine, but I still want to do it which I don't get. I'm glad I have this journal though, it really helps beyond belief to be able to have a place to just yell into the void.

I was hoping it was some kind of weird fluke but consistently T is online and also responding to other people in the server we share without responding to my messages. This really caught me off guard because this wasn't even directly after we had some conflict, but we even had started to interact like normal again and then out of the blue, gone. I guess to some extent there was the writing on the walls, where she showed a lot of red flags, of course not things that she needs to do but just different issues that end up causing so much damage in relationships with others. It's really weird to write that out, because I'm so worried about the way it's perceived. But at the same time victims that are innocent can also end up with red flags of their own, like this is separate but I remember when I first had my experiences with a jealous or clingy girlfriend, it quickly became apparent how that's actually way worse than what I expected. And this kind of stuff happens in so many different aspects, and it's super easy to romanticize or act like these things are harmless compared to the red flags of aggression or lying. But at the same time, what I'm guessing is conflict avoidance has fully just trashed what was a good friendship. I'm at a weird spot where I know what she is doing is irrational and is not something that I should beat myself up about. I think there's probably some things I did or said that are either miscommunications, or are things she didn't like. But especially because this kind of happened out of the blue, and her response being a complete lack of communication and ignoring my attempts to ask if everything is okay, I'm really thankful I'm experienced enough to know that trying to diagnose and fix this issue completely blind is unrealistic and unhealthy for me. I really hope this doesn't come off as me saying I did nothing wrong and I am infallible, I feel okay because I tried to communicate, and it is unreasonable for me to ruminate on this and overthink to try to diagnose what happened from her point of view.

It still sucks a lot. T with someone I considered a really close friend, and it's one of those things where you just click. We've known each other for about 3 months or so, and it sucks because I know a lot about them. And I actively do care for them and I want the best for them as a person, And sometimes I caught myself because I felt like I was falling too much into that caretaker role. And it sucks because that means that someone mattered to you, in a way that's good, but that space in your brain can be put to rest. It would have been nice to be friends, but at the same time I guess I'm thinking that with the version of them in my mind. The one where we get along and there's no problems. But once there are some problems, the fact that we couldn't communicate about it in a way without it exploding like this, even without me making a choice that's a deal breaker. I've had enough relationships with people in my life where things blow up at the first conflict, and I've had so many relationships where that hasn't been the case. I think this is a scary thing, since this is my first time living and so I don't know if it's my fault or some big issue that I'm doing that I don't know about that causes this. But thankfully through years of talking about this topic in therapy, I think I have a fairly grounded view on it. I think because of the person that I am, I get along and attract people with their own share of issues. And I think it's a fairly good indicator when people struggle to maintain friendships, but I'm not that person. And so I feel fairly okay. I'm of course super sad, and I probably will be for a bit, mourning what could have been of this friend, but I will be okay. And it's not going to hurt me as much as it has in the past. And so I'm really thankful for the work that I've done because this doesn't dig into that scar anymore.

There were a lot of things I wanted to write today, but they're kind of short-circuited I guess. I remember when I was going to park my car how I wanted to write down today how I started to finally feel like myself again. But a wrench kind of got stuck I guess.

T and I had our whole conversation a few days ago and I was kind of happy because I feel like the first fight is when you really get to learn if a friendship will last or not. And I thought things were good, but I've been fairly socially busy and I felt like there was some weird tension and that we were more distant than we were before. I saw they sent a message in the server, and then I looked at Instagram where they had seen my messages and not responded. I had also sent them messages on discord that they did not respond to, and I can see that they are online. It sucks because without communication there's not really anything I can do, y'know? And that makes it tough to have this be a long-term friendship. It's a shame, but I'm also really happy that I have a diverse support network of friends because I don't feel like I'm drowning or anything close to that. It just sucks though, because I was hoping we would be good friends for a long time. And maybe we still will be, maybe she's dealing with something else or she just needs some time or space. Lord knows I'll anyway be busy for the next few days.

I really like this quote because I like to interpret it in an unconventional lens. I think of what you can do as what you are capable of, and your potential. And so the quote becomes fully realize your potential. And I think that's a good reminder, because everyone is capable of way more than they think they are, you only find out once you push and see that that boundary isn't actually there.

I talked with M today as we hung out for like 6 hours. At one point it came up, and I mentioned how she hasn't really gassed me up ever even though we originally talked about it, and she apologized. I told her it wasn't a big deal, but we talked about it more later and she mentioned about how as an attractive woman, if she tells me that she finds me attractive in the way of a compliment, she is afraid of losing my friendship the potential of something physical. And then I kind of got it. To me, it has mostly felt like I am not actually important and not someone to look at, and that I am essentially cast aside compared to all of the other men she sees, and that I'm not enough to notice. Or that I am not worthy of any compliments. But that's not the case, she told me she does find me attractive but she's more afraid of losing me and the boundary we set about not being physical as friends. And I guess ultimately just not wanting to lead me on, because a lot of men of course are starved for that validation and whenever we receive it it feels special.

So thinking about it this way, I understand that it's not that I am untouchable or undesirable, but kind of the opposite I guess – too important to risk. I wonder if a similar thing is happening with T, because she stopped gassing me up and mentally I did take note of it. Maybe it's better for me to think a similar situation is happening, where it's not that I am undesirable or unattractive, but there's something else at play that I just don't I think about.

T sent me something today that hurt and it was the same issue that I tried to tell her yesterday. I sent her messages about it carefully thought out, and she immediately doubled down and said she doesn't care. I told her that if that was the case I don't really feel comfortable with some of the jokes we make anymore, and then she realized it's a miscommunication and then I had to clear it up. But the damage was kind of done. She did something that pushed on a sensitive topic for me that she knew about, I brought it up to her, and she doubled down. That broke a lot of my trust in her because I told her that something she did made me feel uncomfortable and her first response made me feel like she didn't care. If I seriously talked to someone about something that affected me, and that's their response, the only logical thing I can really do is just acknowledge how that person handled a situation that hurts me, and keep armor up around them. And I don't want to do that with someone who I consider a close friend.

Without going into details, I felt emasculated by the things she said and her actions. This has always been a sensitive subject for me, because I guess masculinity has been something that I've somewhat struggled with. I'm not a “toxic masculine” person, but masculinity is a big part of my identity I guess. I also have feminine traits but that's not who I am predominantly. And I think this issue is really more prominent because of how much of my personality changes based on the people I'm around. It's not like I'm faking anything, but it's just that I behave differently around different groups, and around T I mostly act more feminine, because that's the kind of person she is. We have a running joke of me being a twink, and I was fine with it till now. She used femininity to insult someone that was really really bad, but to me that felt like all of the times she joked about me being a twink was not in jest, but rather an insult. And then I felt like all that I am is being reduced to some bitch because that's all she knows about me.

It's not like she's seen me in person. It's not like she knows how strong I am, or how many years I've done combat sports. And how good I am at them. She hasn't seen me in masculine environments. She hasn't seen me fight. She doesn't understand how fucking good I am at the things I do. She doesn't know about what happens behind closed doors. She doesn't know so much shit about me, like so many other people don't. And so all she fucking knows is the soft bitch sides of me that I am around her, because I want her to feel comfortable. Because I know she doesn't feel comfortable around men for valid reason, and so she doesn't see so much about me. I am a man. And it fucking pisses me off so much when shit like this happens, because if some guy says this shit to me, I can just beat their ass. But what the fuck am I supposed to do here? They are afraid of men, just like so many other people. There's a reason women feel comfortable around me so consistently, and that's because I am so much more than just the masculine parts of me. But I also absolutely am those masculine parts of me also. And it feels like I just have to fucking sit here and take it as someone laughs at me and treats me like a little bitch. And I can't do anything for their own sake.

Now I'm just filled with rage, and I couldn't even hit the fucking punching bag at the gym because my phone was about to die and I had to go home. And I don't have anything in my apartment that I can hit. But all I want to do is just beat the shit out of someone. I miss fighting people in Jiu-Jitsu that had 20 lbs on me and just muscling through them. I miss knocking people over from kicks while they were holding the pads. But I fucking moved and I haven't found any combat gyms yet. And so this part of me just sits fucking welled up.

I'm so much more than what any one individual knows. Especially in the case of T. I'm glad they feel comfortable around me, and that this is another person where I'm one of the only men they trust. I'm really fucking mad it comes at my expense.

I'm thankful that something is familiar to me. This comfort got me through childhood and for that I am grateful. But it doesn't serve me now and so I will bid my farewell to it.

That was just a somewhat pretentious way of saying I'm making a choice to not be sad anymore. It sounds really weird to say it like that, because I want to somehow give some kind of asterisk saying how it's not always just a choice, but it is more often than I think. The thing that really woke me up to this again is watching a video I had saved about the law of attraction. Whatever I think about and whatever I focus on will come. And it kind of made a lot of sense when I thought about today, and how I was finding all these different reasons to beat myself up and feel unloved. I have L asking to play games, and also T. And also J. But I wanted to focus on the fact that S didn't ask me to play. And that hit me hard enough along with the rest of the things today that I actually went and cried. I was playing a game of cs with T, and I remember I was doing really bad at the start of the game and they insulted someone else telling them that they needed to get more kills, while they had way more than I did and I was struggling. That one hurt, but it didn't need to hurt as much as I let it. I guess I kind of invited that hurt because that's just how I felt, I was hurting and I wanted something to justify it I guess. I wasn't hurting because of that comment, but because I'm coming out of a depressive episode. But that was really the issue, I'm at least glad that I can see where to point my pain. I remember I also got way more jealous than I expected or that I wanted to when I heard T changing her picture to one that I know she liked of herself, and being friendly with other people online. I really didn't expect to feel this way and so I wanted to look into that more in myself. I think I felt jealousy and this insecurity because it felt like being replaced I guess. I remember I was already feeling kind of distant because I wasn't feeling good and that's partially on me, maybe I could have spoken out a little bit more. But I already felt disconnected, and a little bit alone – and then hearing them talk about how someone on the opponent team friended them and trying to message them during the game, I guess that made me feel like I was ready to be discarded. But that's not the case, I absolutely know that I am a very close and valuable person to T, and I'm not just some toy to be thrown to the side. I think when I can unmask this issue, I can let it rest a little bit more easily. I know that it's not that I'm being replaced, but it's just that right now I'm suffering from that absence in my heart and it's just something that pushed on it a little bit. Nothing more malicious than that.

I guess another thing that I feel like I've been really fixating on is how none of my friends have been validating me in the way that I would hope. I have to stop myself immediately, because I know that J and M absolutely gas me up the way that I really appreciate. I think rather than focusing on the negative I should rather focus on the positive. I am really grateful for the ways they build me up. I'm also very grateful for the way that L asks me to play. I'm also very grateful for how T and S send me videos frequently.

I want to choose to be happy again, and I will.