An Open Letter

I ended up sending a message to L on faith that she would understand and not double down on it – and she completely did. She apologized profusely and said she was just trying to banter and didn’t mean it. I’m very happy I did reach out to her, because in my mind I was afraid of doing that, on fear of a negative response. The reality was the opposite of that – she didn’t mean it in a negative way and all of the things I was paranoid about weren’t true.

I’m glad I checked my unconscious brain, but at the same time pre workout like that is far and few between lol.

L & L lol – I couldn’t let that one go unnoticed.

I met L today in person for the first time, we’ve known each other for 2-3 years now and we play games almost daily. It was a nice day, we hung out for like 6 hours or so. I guess you kinda do know someone after spending hundreds of hours with them, other than some strange quirks here and there. The second L comes in because I noticed they set their status as “that fucker is kinda short 💀”. For the record, I am 5’9.5” last I went to the doctor, so I’m 5’10” with shoes. This person’s 5’6” or so, so it’s not like they were my height. I am most likely not going to see L in person for a while anyway, so it has no consequence at all, but this comment did for some reason affect me way more than I thought it would.

My gut reaction is to defend myself – my posture is naturally pretty bad, but I also noticed I was never standing fully upright and was being incredibly passive with my body language, which I attribute to not wanting her to feel uncomfortable or scared at all. I was always leaning against something, or sitting down and never stood straight while facing directly at her. After all, she is a few years younger than me and is way more at risk meeting up with an internet friend if I was a murderer compared to the other way around.

I guess I kind of take offense to things like these because they feel emasculating. I’m not rigidly masculine in a traditional way, so it’s not emasculating in the same lens of toxic masculinity – but I guess I just feel weak and vulnerable. I grew up incredibly short, weak, and fragile. I ended up eventually growing around 10th grade, got physically stronger, and mentally tougher over time. Those are all things that were never guaranteed to me, and I had to work hard for some of them. I have a fear of going back to that state I used to be in. Or maybe the fear is being perceived in that state I was in. I didn’t think that anyone could be attracted to me, and I guess by some continuation of that love me like that. As time went on, I ended up becoming someone who was more self-sufficient, and stable. Now I have people consistently finding me attractive or wanting to pursue things, but I guess my mind has not caught up with the rest of me. I still see myself as the person I was for 90% of my life – weak, frail, and unloved.

I set my status to “Somehow every body of water leads me back to this ocean”. I guess I wanted to go back to my roots and sadpost, but I can’t really do that when I have a ton of students constantly reaching out to me over Discord given this strike. I set the status while in the shower in my childhood home – a place tied to a lot of horrible emotions for me. That image is synonymous with all of the pains I had growing up, and I felt like it was almost inevitable to end back up there. No matter how far I climb, or how deep inland I run, the rains drag me back into the ocean where I drown.

Professor on strike, I have been trying to help students as much as I can for their sake. I had my first meal at 8pm while starting to drive down to SD, which took another 4 hours. Too tired.

Today was the first time in a while that I had some semblance of a fire. I once heard someone talking about the problems with dreaming – and how it was just prematurely getting high off of an achievement. I felt like it was just stealing joy from that thing if it ever did happen. I don’t know if I stole joy or if there wasn’t much to begin with, but I at least felt this with my whole lifting goal I guess. I had watched so many videos of Matthias Steiner and just wanted to chase that high. I wanted something to overwhelm me, and fully encompass me for just a moment. I wanted to shake, just like he did on that stage. But when the time came, the lights were more of a soft glow. Faint enough that I didn’t notice they were on. I somehow find myself still getting high off of that dream, of some event that already had passed. I find myself thinking about just collapsing shaking in utter disbelief of my achievement in the face of adversity. I have to remind myself that it had already happened, and nothing like that happened. I miss the rage.

To me starting has always been the hardest part. I tried to pick it apart a little bit to think about why that’s the case, and I guess it’s mostly because of my perfectionism. Or probably better put, the disjunction from my creation, and what I want from it. I think this is just another form of a fear of failure if I look at it that way. I know that this fear has held me back in several different ways, and as much as I romanticize doing things anyway, without the guarantee of success I still struggle to do it. Oh well, I hope I still try.

with putting this shit off lmao. It’s 2:51 AM and I don’t even feel that tired, that’s probably a pretty good sign that I haven’t been good to my sleep schedule. Apparently the strike is happening, and I personally am not going on strike. I both financially need the support, but also feel more obligated to my students in this course. I TA for a mandatory required course, and it has been a very rocky quarter and so a lot of students are concerned they will not even pass. Because of that, I want to make sure that they will have adequate help and I want to do as much as I can to help them at least pass. This course is a beautiful one, and it pains me when students are fighting for their lives. It’s hard to appreciate a waterfall when you’re directly under it drowning.

it’s 2:24 AM, and I am pretty exhausted. I’m just going to attribute it to being exhausted from yesterday, and so I’m just going to postpone writing. Today I finished the linear cryptanalysis CTF, and so I’m done with all of my homework. Finals are almost over, and I’m honestly just exhausted. This was a good year.

// TODO: write this post when you are not about to fucking pass out after driving for so long

I just got back from the concert, and found a random church parking lot to sleep in. I miss hash, but also I had a really fun time. I'm looking forward to tomorrow where I have another concert but also a day to do absolutely nothing.

Tomorrow I’m driving down to Santa Ana, and sleeping overnight in my car so I can go to two concerts back to back. I’m going to have a full day of downtime in between where I’ll be in my car, so I’m planning on just exploring and maybe finding a nice library to chill in. I hope I can sit down and actually write then. Oh well, time to get some sleep for it since it’s 3 AM. God I hope I can fix my sleep schedule at some point.