Preview
I am selfish.
Though I suspect this is a universal condition, I can’t help but believe I’m more selfish than others. Every action, whether deliberate or instinctive, is *always* a result of self-interest. Even altruistic gestures are in self-regard. If a decision is ours to make, then whatever decision is made is made because it was, in some sense, wanted.
Recognizing this, though, does NOT absolve me. If anything, my belief in psychological egoism makes each of my decisions *more* inescapably mine. I get no comfort that others can, in believing my motives can be separated from what I want. If every action comes from some form of self-interest, then everything I do must also come from it too.
I’m afraid I’ll start making selfish-perceived decisions, knowing that no matter what I choose, I will be selfish anyway. I’m afraid people will see that all my perceived goodness was never selfless to begin with. I’m guilt-ridden that every choice I’ve made & every choice I make comes from self-interest. I’m guilt-ridden not because of that fact, but because I don’t care that my decisions are selfish, only that I am, & that I know it. I’m guilty because no matter what I can or will do is good. That I don’t do good because I can never be good.
Knowing that I act in my own interest doesn’t stop me from resenting others when their interest seem to be met more easily. Someone else’s existence always feels like a subtraction from my own.
I don’t know how to stop it. I’m the most jealous person I know. I’ve learned how to keep it discreet; people don’t believe me when I say “I have jealousy issues,” *because* I’ve learned to faux disinterest. But the smallest things make me feel physically ill; When someone repeats something I’ve said, when someone is born into more privilege than me, when someone I know directs their attention somewhere that isn’t me. It’s rarely dramatic, just moments that make my chest tight & myself nauseous.
Even worse, I don’t want to get better. I’m comfortable being jealous. I don’t feel guilty for it, I just feel sick when something triggers it. I don’t think someone like me could improve even if I tried anyway. I’m too curious to look away from the things that upset me. I’d rather know & feel awful than live in something resembling blissful ignorance. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction will always brings it back.
I can’t stop checking, comparing, measuring myself against anyone or people I already know I resent.
There are people who hurt me years ago whose lives I still keep up with. Someone who practically “took” my interests now lives more comfortably than I ever have. Loved, supported, financially secure. Why did someone who has so much still feel the need to treat me so cruelly..? And still, I look. I see how much more beautiful they are, how much more unique they are, how much happier they are.
Others who once pushed me toward the worst parts of myself have gone on to reinvent themselves publicly, moral-farming & philosophy preaching. Now unwaveringly supported. They get to move on & what I do is measure my life against theirs. I’m disgusted by how much I want to know, & how unwilling I am to stop.
I must be addicted to feeling horrible about myself.
No matter how sick it makes me, I return to it. I chalk it up to “insatiable curiosity,” but that must be cope. There must be some quieter part of me that craves what follows. Comparing so meticulously, the drop in my stomach, the slow ache of coming up short.
Less like harm & more like habit. I don’t know whether to feel guilty for wanting it, or angry that I do.
I *must* be addicted to feeling horrible about myself. Every day; without fail, I think about my appearance for at least half the time I’m awake. It crowds out everything else. It’s selfish & it’s self-indulgent. But, I can’t stop. I’m grotesque & misassembled in ways I can’t correct. I’m so monstrous. I fit no beauty standard. A voice too deep, features that don’t align, none of my proportions match on my body, an unflattering personality. I feel guilty for thinking it, & guilty that I can’t think of anything else; but it is true. I am the ugliest girl I’ve ever known & ever will know.
I feel sick because I think about it so much & I feel sick because it’s true. People I know tell me it isn’t true. A countless number have. They insist I’m wrong. But I can’t stand a liar, & I hate it. It sounds like pity, or politeness. A lie I’m expected to accept in order to keep things comfortable. I get so angry at hearing it & that just makes me all the more disgusting.
I’m told there’s no evidence & that I’m inventing it. But appearance is everyone’s first impression. And, subconscious or not, will determine how you’re treated. I’ve felt it in the way I’m looked at, the way I’m spoken to, the way I’m made to feel excessive or inconvenient before I’ve said a word. Like I’m something less than human.
I’ve gone out of my way to stop complimenting people, I stopped saying “I love you,” I do everything in my power to not look in a mirror, yet I obsess over how to “fix” what I see. I try makeup, clothes, angles, lighting, nothing improves anything. Nothing alters the verdict. No amount of flattering fabric, no pigment, no reassurance will ever be strong enough to override my appearance. No amount of anything will make me look good to a populace. I look the same to myself, & I look the same to everyone else.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter to me, & that *I* truly don’t “care,” about my appearance. That if I seem preoccupied, it’s only because appearance dictates how people treat you. That I’m forced to care & look like I care, because the world cares first. But if I believe I’ll be treated like a burden regardless, then why does it still matter so much to me..? Why does it consume me if it’s already decided..?
As open as I seem now, it’s incredibly contradictory to me. For someone who claims to dislike herself this much, I spend an alarming amount of time writing about her. It feels contradictory, narcissistic, to center myself so deliberately, to keep saying “I,” “me,” “myself,” as if I’m something worth annotating. Yet, despite how exposed this may read, this blog is anything but vulnerable. I am the most open book out there.
I am still consumed by how unattractive I am. I feel guilty for the people who have to see me; my friends, my coworkers, even my family. No one should be subjected to the torture of being in the presence of my face. No one should be subjected to having to treat me like I’m normal. People who have to pretend I’m ordinary for the sake of kindness :(
I wish someone would throw acid in my face or cut me up, to sand down my features. Then I’d be all the more beautiful. I’d be so easy to look at.
I don’t deserve a single thing I have. Not anything physical, not any ability or skill, not even the conscience that allows me to recognize it. Despite this, I’m so grateful. Grateful for where I was born, for what I’ve been given, for the people who choose to stay near me. My gratitude doesn’t feel warm so much as it feels suffocating.
I’m hoarding something meant for someone better.
Every kindness is misplaced. Every good thing I have is delivered to the wrong person & I’ve just been too cowardly to return it. I carry it all with more guilt! Someone so horrible & so horrifically ugly shouldn’t be trusted with anything beautiful, least of all the things I’ve somehow managed to keep.
I am not myself anymore. Even if I deserved everything I have now, it still wouldn’t belong to *me*. I am not me. There is nothing I regret more than the change that brought me here. Not because change itself is wrong. Everything is supposed to change; with time, experience, environment. It’s a natural progression.
I didn’t change like this though. I forced myself into it. I shaped myself into someone I believe I had to become, & in doing so I am anything but myself. Deliberately sculpted by my own hands & now I can never return to who I used to be.
I used to be such a pushover. I was blunt & honest but tried so hard to remain timid. I would do almost anything anyone asked of me, rarely questioning & NEVER arguing. I was strangely outgoing. I would compliment strangers without hesitation, asked people directly if they wanted to be friends. I was never embarrassed, unapologetically myself. Albeit extremely cringe, but anyone who knew me back then knew me without restraint. Now, I’m the most embarrassed girl in the world.
As time passed, I grew more & more embarrassed. My nature began to be humiliating. People pushed me to be uncomfortable & ashamed. I became blatantly aware of how I appeared. Perceived horribly. I don’t blame others; it would be dishonest to pretend this was only their doing. The change was still my decision. It’s only a factor in why I changed. Social matters, familial matters, maybe even political & cultural matters.
I made myself normal in anyway I could. I stopped speaking to strangers so easily. I stopped complimenting people without thinking. I began to think before I spoke. I didn’t want to look like a tone-dense fool. Now I’m too cruel & too restrained.
No one likes a happy, outgoing; ugly girl. If you are going to be cheerful, open, & freely expressive, you must also be beautiful. Those traits are forgiven in beautiful people. They are charming in someone beautiful. But in someone ordinary or ugly, they are treated as delusion.
But even knowing that, I don’t care anymore. I want to be myself again.
Now I’m afraid of the smallest things. I hesitate to tell new people something as simple as my favorite food. I miss so badly who I was. Blunt & unafraid, constantly cheerful
Now it feels like the people I meet never truly know me. Worse than that, the people I’ve known for years don’t know the real version of me anymore, because I’m the one who hid it. I’ve put myself in a box & I don’t know how to get out of it. It’s made me sick for years.
I’m a faux Yaya & now anyone who knows me or meets me will only know a faux Yaya.
I’ve gotten a boyfriend recently. I know in a *lot* of my excerpts I end up confessing guilt over something. Unfortunately, this is another one of those. I feel guilty about it, not about him directly. More broadly; guilty about the situation.
He’s so objectively handsome & so conventionally attractive. He’s tall, well put together, has perfectly placed features & more. But even if you stripped away all the physical attributes, he would still be remarkable. He’s stereotypically romantic, gives constant compliments, flowers for no particular occasion, planned dates instead of vague suggestions, small gestures. He’s so genuinely kind. He’s Socially competent, warm, outgoing, & thoughtful to people. He’s a hypothetical kind of man. He is so much more than a catch.
I feel guilty because he’s my first boyfriend. I’ve known, easily, more than a hundred girls who have been in relationships. Bad ones & good ones, but always with men who could never be what my boyfriend is. Girls who dated guys who were careless, inattentive, immature; or girls with good guys, guys they’re happy with, who still would not do what my boyfriend does naturally. It feels so wrong that my first experience with a relationship is so fortunate. Like someone trying a hobby for the first time & purchasing the most expensive equipment & immediately finding success. I am so spoiled. I skipped a necessary difficulty that other women had to endure.!?
It feels like a ridiculous stroke of luck.
But sometimes I go back & forth on that idea. It’s not as if I’ve never thought about romance before, or never pined after someone. I probably just expressed less interest in it than the people I knew. It’s also not as if there were never people interested in me either. I’ve had a couple of “suitors,”.
They were just always incompetent. Whether they were handsome or not didn’t matter. They all acted the same. The people who pursued me had no social awareness, no conversational ability, or they were so painfully stupid. Others would jump from relationship to relationship with no pause, no mourning period, & suddenly claim they had feelings for me. Clearly just desperate for *any* relationship, not me specifically. If someone isn’t fit to maintain basic friendships, it’s hard to imagine them sustaining a healthy relationship either. This was 99% of everyone who pursued me.
Sometimes I wonder if my boyfriend wasn’t a ridiculous stroke of luck because of this. Maybe I’m just competent. If 99% of the people who sought me out were like this, this must be true for other women. But many women I know have had far more relationships than I have. Maybe I’m just not a blinded, hopeless romantic who attaches to the first person who shows interest.
This is unfair of me to say though. The girls I know aren’t oblivious. Maybe I am lucky.
I don’t have the best relationship with my mom. It’s really hard to forget all the things she did, but at the same time it feels like I can’t remember anything she did. All my memories are so lost, they all feel fabricated. Like I can’t remember anything correctly. It feels like it’s her fault.
My whole life, & even now, I refuse to call the things she did to me abuse. People around me do. Sometimes they tell me about their own families, things that are much smaller, & they use that same word for them. My whole life I felt like I was attempting to prove myself to her, proving I deserved to be housed, to be kept. When love becomes something you must constantly earn, it stops feeling like love at all. All I ever really wanted was for her to treat me how she treated my brother.
I’ve moved out now. I live with my father. Everything she did seems to echo louder now than it did when I was with her.
When I was little, we all lived in my grandparents’ house. I barely remember her from those years. She was always gone, working I think. I have no memory of her raising me the first seven years of my life. I only remember her hitting me, & being the reason I broke my arm. When we finally moved away, my memories of her became clearer, but not kinder. Sometimes she could be gentle, almost convincingly so, but the pattern never changed. Apartment after apartment, it followed us. Punishments for things I did, punishments for things I didn’t do, beatings that left bruises or wire marks. Once it went on until I couldn’t walk. After my dad moved out there were days she simply didn’t feed me. None of these things happened every day, but they happened often enough that they became the shape of what I remember childhood being.
As I grew older, the things she said to me became clearer than the things she did. Most of my weekends & school days were spent cleaning. Floors, counters, dishes, the same surfaces over & over again. Not just chores, it was a form of punishment. If something wasn’t clean enough, if I missed a corner or left a streak of dust somewhere, she would yell, or she would hit me. Mistakes were treated like proof of something deeper wrong with me.
Sometimes she would call me a slave. My own mother saying it, a black woman even more than I am. She would say it if the house wasn’t clean enough, if I didn’t move fast enough, if I looked tired or upset while doing it. She would say that if I couldn’t even clean her house properly then I wasn’t good enough to be one. I wasn’t allowed to have friends either, & she told me that didn’t matter because no one would ever see me as an equal anyway, being black meant the world had already decided what I was worth. And to her that was essentially nothing. Then sometimes she would sit me down & make me watch history documentaries, telling me I should be grateful for my ancestry, that I should appreciate where I come from. I remember the glow of the television more clearly than the lessons themselves.
When we finally moved into a real house, nothing really changed. This all persisted. By middle school I had started wanting the ordinary things other kids had; to go outside, to have friends, to stay after school for something that wasn’t going straight back home. But none of that was allowed. From 12 to 19, I wasn’t to be outside under any circumstance other than school. No friends, no staying out, no extracurriculars, no job, I couldn’t even get a permit.
By then she was older, so the beatings weren’t always as rough as they used to be, but something about them felt more unpredictable. She started doing weird shit. Sometimes she would threaten me holding a kitchen knife, once she strangled me & repeatedly yelled she was going to kill me, another night she woke me beating me, the worst I’d ever had it, saying she meant to beat me to death because I hadn’t finished the dishes. There were other things, times when she would behave in ways that were deeply uncomfortable, she would masturbate at the most awkward times & force me to hug her or give her any sort of physical contact.
I really wanted her to love me. I really wanted to be a daughter to my mother.
Now I’m not under her rules anymore. On paper I have no excuses now. I can get my license. I can go outside. I can build a life. But I can’t stop thinking of the years that came before this. I still think about the things I missed; friends I lost because I could never hang out, friends who stopped believing me when I tried to explain why. School dances, field trips, ordinary moments everyone else got without thinking. Things that made me the jealous girl I am today.
What frustrates me most is how everything seems to change depending on where I stand. When I lived with her, people told me to leave without remorse. Now that I have, voices tell me to forgive her, to go back, to try again. She acts kinder now too, at least from a distance, especially when other people are around to see it. It makes me feel like my memories are false.
I can’t even fit half the things she did into a single excerpt. Camera’s in the house where I tend to reside, putting on her clothes for her, publicly scratching my skin, making messes so I have to clean, letting my brother hurt me. I feel ashamed to state any of this.
The most beautiful thing I own is my Franklin Mint, House of Faberge, ‘Imperial Rose’ carousel horse.
I have a lot of carousel horses (though none true); I have carousel music boxes, carousel *horse* music boxes, carousel windchimes, a 5ft carousel horse party decoration, carousel horse statues, spinning carousel collectibles. But none compares to my Imperial Rose.
I love carousels, I love horses! My whole life I’ve liked horses, & majority of my life I’ve loved simple, spinning rides. But my real fascination with carousels began in early middle school, when I started researching them obsessively. Their history, the hand-carved horses, the cost of creating one. Somewhere in all that reading, I formed a loud dream of having my own carousel. Not necessarily a great one, a simple one would be nice.
Horses are so pretty. And when pierced with a pole, gilded, frozen mid-gallop, they are all the more beautiful! The carousel is proof that people will build entire worlds just to keep beauty turning.
Again, what do you know; I’m writing about guilt. Except this time I don’t actually feel guilty, I’m just culpable. I walk around acting like I’m this sweet thing, like I’m incapable of lying. I present myself like an open book, open for anyone who cares to read. As if everyone who meets me walks away knowing me completely.
I do tell people things!! Real, personal things. Technically, none of what I do share is lies. I push the boundaries of honesty further than most people probably would. It’s why I seem absolutely open. I’m just deceitful.
There are things I will never tell anybody, things I won’t even write here. I know I am totally manipulative for this. My vagueness will make this come across as an exaggeration, but I don’t want to incriminate myself by being anything but vague..?
I pretend like I’m incapable of lying so that I can get away with lying. Writing this feels sucky. Unpleasant, sharing a thing meant to be unshared by me. But why am I admitting to something I don’t even feel guilty about..? I don’t have a noble answer for that, I think I just wanted to write.
[TOO RAW]
It feels selfish to confess this, especially when people are so generous with their compliments about my body. I hear these compliments often enough that I should believe them; that I am well-shaped, soft in the places meant for softness, curved. By every reasonable measure I am healthy, ordinary, & maybe even fortunate. But I want an eating disorder. I feel a dissonance, a small & persistent discomfort with the weight of my own form. The body I inhabit brushes against itself, chafes, occupies space; I’m always reminded of it. I can’t be carried, I know. Sometimes I imagine a different silhouette, slimmer, quieter. Narrow & delicate, a body fragile. I would be so light. To look sickly & faint is always beautiful to me.
It’s a little irrational. Though I know I would never go through with obtaining one. I’ve been in spaces that promote this behavior for a decent amount of time now. I just lack the resolve that this destruction demands. I enjoy food too much, flavor too much, the simple sensory joy of taste. Anorexia seems absurdly impractical when I imagine the hours wasted, the indignity of it. Bulimia would be the way to go for me; I can regurgitate quite easily. But I’m too idle.
Too idle to diet, too idle to sculpt myself through discipline, too idle even to pursue unhealthy fantasies. I would like to make my body disappear. Maybe this idleness is all the more reason for me to have one.
Not long ago, I suffered from an addiction to consuming gore-”graphy”. In a way that someone might describe their dependence on pornography or adrenaline. I never enjoyed what I saw. It did not excite me or fascinate me in any way. Every viewing made me physically ill; my stomach would churn & burn, my forehead would throb, & my blood would feel like it got warmer. But the feeling itself was very singular, I’ve never encountered that particular nausea anywhere else. Only ever when I was watching someone be hurt.
The disgust is immediate & overwhelming, but I always returned to it again & again. I think the revulsion itself is why I was addicted. The forbidden has a strange gravity; "The very things which revolt us most violently can become the objects we circle obsessively, precisely because they fracture our sense of order." I suspect that is what held me there. I gained no pleasure from it, no dopamine, no thrill. Only a sickening “awareness” .
I have since stopped watching those kinds of videos. It has been years since I’ve seen true gore in motion. But I’ve not entirely left it behind. I seek it out in smaller, diluted doses. Images of people post-accident, aftermath of violence that has already passed, or even special effects. "Humanity possesses an almost pathological curiosity toward its own decay." I prove this true in some sense.
My ‘curiosity’ is cruel & wrong, but sometimes the images carry an uncomfortable beauty. Death can be beautiful. I still feel guilty for the things I watched, for the deaths & tortures I knowingly sought out & witnessed from a distance. That guilt won’t ever leave me. And what disturbs me most is that sometimes now I can feel the old craving returning. A desire to experience that terrible nausea again.
This excerpt is basically just a song analysis & to make up for my political guilt. I am who I criticize. (The song is Insanity - Oingo Boingo) Approximately 7 verses in. If compared, the influence is apparent
Political culture in the United States has been growing more & more tense. And more & more taboo. Every opinion risks becoming a liability, post-2024 election, hardened cultural policy; Immigration, education, reproductive rights. Every space I find myself in mirrors & magnifies hostility. Surveillance is in doorbell cameras, workplace monitoring, algorithm on social media.
There is more moral-performance now that I’ve seen than previously. Conservatism grows with our red office. People will call out sin & refuse to look inward. Online, I see self-proclaimed defenders of “law” who dehumanize immigrants & reduce entire groups to statistics, to “pattern recognition,”. These people use legality in a ways to justify their lack of morality. They frame suffering as deserved. So there’s no need to talk about it anymore.
Hypocritical when religions, which preach purity, continue to be exposed for decades of CSA. Even now, we have scandals involving powerful figures & child sex trafficking. We are a culture obsessed with condemning hypothetical “crimes” while real violations dissolve into nothing. We sit in our comfort & only story-tell of corruption.
To speak plainly about any of these, risks you social exile. Politics has become something people claim not to care about, unless it affects them directly. But by then, it *will* be too late! People who do care before they are directly affected are essentially rejected socially. The flock will wander from you if your mind wanders from them. But, we still are a fractured collective, we do not organize, we are split by “party,”.
The past few years have accelerated regarding falsehoods. AI-generated images, political lies, headlines made only for reaction. How will we be able to tell what is true documentation when compared to today’s fabrication..? “Reality is no longer distorted, it is replaced.” Our reality is being imitated. Our ability to think critically is being dulled.
Generative AI is trained on vast & most of the time, unconsented data. Faces, voices, & art are all absorbed, replicated, & redistributed. Paired with the normalization of constant recording; cameras at every threshold, archived interactions. To be listened to while not even speaking. This makes us sound like a surveillance nation.
The insistence that “we are all the same” has also grown louder. Especially as inequality is becoming more visible?? It is repeated as reassurance & dismissal. Avoidance to conversations that might “ruin your comfort,”. Evidence proves this extremely wrong. Federal abortion protections have left access dependent on state & income, immigration enforcement has intensified in ways that disproportionately affect specific communities, & educational restrictions reshape our history. But sure, let’s make believe that we are all the same.
Lately, politics is spoken about the way people talk hypotheticals. Like it’s entertaining, a conversation to pass the time. People sit comfortably & debate rights, bodies, borders. As if these are abstract ideas & not of lives being lived right now. “what would you do, what do you think, what’s your stance”. Things debated casually in one room is someone surviving in another. People untouched by it can afford turn it into discourse, they can afford to not care. It is easier to speak lightly about suffering when your life is not shaped by it, easier to moralize when the cost will never be yours.
There is also a subconscious hierarchy that persists in these conversations. Whiteness continues to function as the baseline for most. This is our assumed neutrality. It’s what allows for so much disengagement, for the belief that politics is optional. The system does not impact everyone equally, no matter how often it is claimed otherwise. We pride ourselves on our progression, yet we are stuck in all of these issues. One million years of evolution & we still repeat. We still have our Danny Quayle.
I want to write something meaningful & to be something meaningful. But all I am is a shallow. All I do is reflect my own image. I don’t care for anything larger than myself & I can’t feel anything larger than myself.
All I have ever experienced is here. In my own body & skull, In my own nerves & my own memory. I am confined to my own consciousness, & so is everything else to me; history, suffering, nations, revolutions. They’re all things I can only hold. Things I know & will not *truly* understand.
How could I ever truly grasp something bigger than myself, when nothing has ever overwhelmed me enough to replace me..?
But I *know* that there are things bigger. There are systems that decide who eats, who sleeps, who dies quietly & who dies loudly. There are even people larger than me; philosophers, revolutionaries, artists. People who have changed the world & have legacies larger than anyone else.
I study writers who wrote without comfort, who believed that history itself had a direction. Writers who didn’t just observe the world but really tried to change it.
Compared to my writing. I write to compensate for what I am not. I write as a form of self-correction, & even self-deception. It is *so* humiliating. To construct meaning artificially, to only simulate depth instead of live it. And still, everything I think has already been thought. Everything I want to say has already been said. And it’s been said more eloquently, louder, & more violently than I could ever potray it. My words are anything but unique, & I am still trying to make my words original.
“While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.” Proof that thoughts & ideas will outlive flesh. I’m still writing, “hoping,” my ideas, added to the already acknowledged pile, will do something. Hoping my repetition will act as a form of participation.
If I am honest, my beliefs, if defined, line up with Marxism. Because of recognition. When I look at the structure of things, they are rigged in ways that are so obviously deliberate. Inequality today is very present, & still maintained. It’s only refined. My nation is decaying more apparently than it was before. And all people do is theorize suffering.
I sit here, aware. Aware of systems, of suffering, & of inequality expanding. And I write about it. I just make it into something consumable. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” And look at that, I don’t change anything. “But what am I going to do as an individual..?” A typical statement said throughout histories of injustice. One that I follow along with. Using whatever sorry justification for it, same as the last guy. It’s just permission to remain still & to remain theoretical.
People, myself included, are so comfortable believing we are too small to matter. It has us believe we are absolved. But history was not moved by people who believed this. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Does my writing count as movement, or am I just as blind & bound..? I do feel chains, though I feel it in the same place where I feel everything else, internally & selfishly. Even my being upset is filtered through myself, even my empathy comes back to me. I am tender in all the places I have already begun to rot & that tenderness is only honest part of me. The awareness of decay without the strength to stop it. I can only articulate collapse & will not interrupt it.
I am almost human, but 100% myself, this is my problem & the only thing that has ever been true. To be human requires dissolving the self just enough to let something larger pass through you. To act & not only observe. One must risk being changed by the things you claim to care about. But I am still here & I’m still intact. And I am still writing. Trying to make my “self-awareness,” something meaningful.
As of April 4th, 2026, I am doing absolutely horrible.
Everything I have is slipping out from under me. I’m being replaced in almost every part me. At work, around people I know, even in the things I thought were mine. I’m being replaced by random fucking girls on the internet. New people come in & fit better than I do & move easier. More liked, more wanted. I’m being phased fucking out.
My interests, my ideas, MY THINGS. I see them reflected in other people, but done better. I’m just a rough fucking draft for everyone so they can find their better Yaya.
Whatever small amount of confidence I had feels completely undeserved now. As of today it’s so clear. I’m not interesting, or sharp, or even present.
The people around me don’t favor me. They don’t even fucking like me. I’m there only to take up space. I talk, but it’s just noise more than anything meaningful.
I’m so cruel & I’m so angry & I’m so ugly. I’m so angry at myself & how easily I can be replaced. I wish I had enough control to just pull away from everyone entirely, to stop putting myself in places where I clearly don’t belong.
I’m just so fucking angry, & I’m so so sick, I really want someone to talk to me.
I’m naturally a happy person, & I’m so ashamed of it. If you interact with me in person, it’s obvious. I get excited easily, I sound quick & careless, like I’ve never had a real problem in my life. It makes me come off as stupid or naive, as though I don’t understand the weight of things.
People who act as happy as I do are usually seen as people who don’t know anything. So I mustn’t either. I act as though I’m unaffected by bad things, as if I’m too slow to comprehend bad things. I can’t measure my own intelligence because the things that happen to me are so vastly different compared to the way I react to them.
My happiness makes me look ridiculous. I get excited too easily, in turn I get loud & expressive & so impulsive. When something serious happens, or I have to hold someone accountable, or need to make a difficult decision; I can’t follow through the way I should. My same happiness sustains & I let things slide that I know I shouldn’t. I can never follow through with critical or retributive decisions because I’m made happy so easily.
I make decisions in moments where I feel good, when I should be firm. And later, when that feeling fades, I hold so much regret. I let important things pass because I was too comfortable & quick to feel okay again. My ecstasy is a hindrance.
I am proud of my writing. I think I make it clear, eloquent, direct, articulate. Not perfect! I’m not trying to gloat >_< I think I just shape it with care.. But when you place it beside the way I speak, it’s disorienting. Like the two don’t belong to the same person.
When I speak, I rush. My words tumble over each other & act as though they are impatient to exist. I stutter, I skip things, I lose motivation mid-sentence. Sometimes I stop altogether *just* because continuing feels like too much effort for something so fleeting. Speaking itself is too much work.
But my vocabulary is still there, my thoughts are still there. They just don’t arrive well at all. I sound like my speech is scattered by nerves, it’s something I’ve never learned to control. What reaches people is only a portion of what I mean. Everything lingers in my head & I always regret never being able to say what I mean.
I think writing became a kind of refuge for me. Nothing, especially myself, can interrupt me; not time, not pressure, not needing to respond instantly. On paper, I am not rushed. I can refine a sentence until it comes off the way I intend. I can revise, annotate & polish my thoughts until it feels like it belongs to me *truly*. There’s no easier, effortless way to get my words out of me. If I can’t speak, I must write.
To sit for hours editing & rearranging. Turning my raw ideas into something legible. There is no emergence or performance. Just portraying my own thoughts at a pace that I can.
Sometimes I feel bad that I can’t speak as well as I write. That the version of me people hear is not the one I know I am capable of being. But, the only reason my writing has become what it is, is due to my inability to speak. So maybe there’s something to be grateful for in my rushing & bad cadence.
I take no pride in writing this, I’m actually kind of reluctant.
If you’ve read other parts of this blog, you might have noticed that my sense of self, in many ways, is tethered to my ‘blackness’, or actually the way it is perceived. I am only a quarter Black. I’m not even technically African American. But for some reason, that fraction has governed the majority of my lived experience. It is the first thing noticed & the first thing judged. That (other than being a woman) has shaped how I am treated, seen & refused.
This is my lack of pride; for years, I prayed to be white. There was nothing more I wanted than to be white & blonde. I wanted to be white, to have been raised that way, to be recognized that way. This was not a fleeting one-off wish. And compared to the age I am now, this persisted *late* into my life & it still lingers.
The reasons are both obvious & ambiguous. The things my mother highlighted my entire life, strangers who felt entitled to cruelty & to threats for no reason other than my perceived race. Not even only strangers. People around me, other family, people I even labeled friends would treat me so cruelly. When I say cruelty, I don’t imply calling me nigga or even “nigger,”. There’s more than just a nasty, word used for shock-factor.
Despite this, I don’t feel I’ve had any true, obvious form of self-hatred, or retaliation to my ethnic group.
But still now, sometimes I wish to be white. I used to search for ways to alter myself; bleaching creams, surgeries, anything that would make me into an image that promised safety & primarily acceptance. Light skin & straight hair. A way to make myself deemed beautiful to the general eye.
Beauty, especially in the United States, as well as internationally is ideological. The beauty standard & most views of ideal beauty are petite, white, blonde, & American. To fall outside of that is not necessarily to be different, but to be undesirable.
I have been called unattractive by people who were supposed to love me unconditionally. Family & friends have been told me, directly & indirectly, that I am not the kind of girl someone will ever want. Some people wouldn’t even let me speak to them without treating me like I was overstepping an unspoken boundary defined entirely by race & appearance.
It did not matter who it was; what race or background. The standard remains the same! In every person I’ve ever been drawn to romantically, just before me or just after knowing me, picked someone who fits that ideal. White & blonde. It is very hard not to interpret that as evidence. It especially hurt when he would look like me.
Every instance of this made me internalize that I am less desirable, less worthy, & less human. Only because of what I am, only what I’m seen as. No matter how “diluted” I am, no matter how much I align & grew up with other identities, this singular perception overrides everything social.
I do want lighter skin. I want straighter hair. I do want to be deemed desirable. I want to exist without being interpreted.
There is more to my thoughts than just this. The reason I started this excerpt in the first place; my boyfriend is white, blonde, & blue-eyed. Writing this disjointed paragraph from everything above is quite odd, but the context of what’s above is needed for this next bit; I feel a kind of guilty(..?) about it. I have no preferences romantically, no physical ideals but I can’t help but find this so ironic. I’ve succumbed to the beauty standard that tortured & taunted me. I feel like a hypocrite, I’ve stepped into the role that mistreated me.
I don’t feel guilty about being with him. He is more than extraordinary, kind, real, & entirely his own person. And *so* undeserving of being reduced to symbolism & something as shallow as my mind. But it’s hard to not think it when my appearance has always been treated as a giant negative. A giant obstruction.
I think it’s painfully, obviously telling when I’m writing with passion versus when I’m indifferently circling myself out of habit. This excerpt will be a kind of in-between. I have nothing to say particularly but I feel I need to write anyway. The absence of meaning is its own pressure for me.
Recently I’ve grown very grossed out by the way I feel. Passionately. I was under the assumption that with age my emotions would grow steadier & quieter. But that hasn’t been my experience at all so far..! What was once erratic has become louder, angrier, & less contained. My emotions are escalating & it’s very awkward.
It doesn’t stay contained to me either. It’s apparent in what I write. I’m no longer subtle, disguised, or docile. My writing is overtaken with biased passion. I can see it happening as I write & I can feel it effect my ability to judge. I’m not only *just* cruel now, I come off as it too. Not cool.
Hello, it’s me! Happy 04-20-2026
I’m afraid this is the kind of excerpt I’ll cringe from later on. But I can’t seem to help myself, It feels more dishonest *not* to say it. I am, without exaggeration, the most unsightly thing I’ve had the displeasure of knowing. I’m so tired of pretending I’m not. Everything about me is so wrong, no matter how quietly I try to carry it.
I always think this might be temporary, that one day I’ll look back & feel neutral about myself & cringe at all this relentless self-dissection. That I’ll outgrow it, but at the same time, I still feel it won’t change. That’s why I keep writing it. If it’s going to live in my head indefinitely, it has to exist somewhere else too.
But the truth is, I look horrible. I sound wrong. I’m unflattering in all kinds of ways. The way I’m assembled, my face, voice, mannerisms, all of it is so off. And still, I perform normalcy so much. I don’t bring it up out loud. I accept compliments like I believe them, nod in places I’m supposed, I even act grateful now. I play the part of someone who is normal. But I’m really tired of it, constantly agreeing to lies. Being looked at & not seen at the same time. I’m both exposed & misinterpreted.
To add insult to injury, something absurd; I’m constantly being mirrored. Replicated in different kinds of ways. People meet me & leave carrying my things. Things *I* like, things I watch, the details I thought were at least *mine*. AND I watch them wear it better. That part curdles something in me. To feel this horrifically wrong & ugly, & to still be copied. Worse, to be copied by people who don’t carry the same repulsiveness.
It makes me feel sick. Like there’s nothing I *can* claim, not even my own preferences, without seeing them reflected back in a form that is more considered better & more acceptable. As if even the internal parts of me aren’t safe from comparison.
Sometimes I think about dismantling it all. Scrapping myself. Not so I can be considered beautiful & right. But so I can be ugly & have it all fit. To be wrong in a way that people will just have to accept as wrong. Nothing to copy & nothing to find interesting. To have something that isn’t immediately improved upon the moment it leaves me.
I consume *a lot* of media, easily. But more than that, I’d say I try to consume it deeply. Movies, books, shows, fanfiction, visual novels, video games, music, documentaries, songs, music, plays; whatever form it takes, I want to indulge in it. I want to understand, not what’s being made, but why. The hands behind it, intention & symbolism, etc. I don’t only love media, I *love* loving it. I love loving media so much.
But in my devotion, I feel this just might be a bad habit. Don’t get me wrong, I feel it’s a good habit; to consume things more than surface level, to get a better & real understanding, to digest what you’re indulging in. But I don’t only love things deeply, I love them immediately & intensely. All at once! It hits me at the surface before I even have time to consume more. The feeling comes at me too quick. I’m so easily overwhelmed. I’ll get headaches & tightness in my chest when I even think about the content I love. It’s almost parasocial. Just never to people, only the work itself, to the experience of it. I’ll be listening to a song or watching a show, & I’ll have heart palpitations. Simply because I’m thinking about how much I love it. I feel it so viscerally throughout my whole body.
My description is nothing even close to an overexaggeration. If anything, I’m probably understating it.
If that’s how it feels at the surface, imagine what happens when I do my deeper search. When I start analyzing, researching, participating. I love writing reviews just for myself, I love reading biographies of authors I recently finished the books of, I love participating in forum discussion, I love learning the intricacies of a band’s sound or a creator’s process. I love to immerse myself & to hurt myself doing so!
I wonder sometimes if it’s something I should bring up to a doctor. But the “solutions” are so easy to come up with myself; care less, feel less, stop seeking so much. Like I’d ever do any of those! I don’t want to dull it. Because even when it hurts, when my chest tightens & my pulse stutters; I LOVE IT!
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” But for for me, this feels inverted. Art is so raw, & so overwhelming. It *is* the human experience. I love art so fiercely I might die of it, & still it’s the very thing that makes me feel most alive.
I love participating! I love indulging!! I love following creation & creator & fighting myself while I do it. I love it so much it aches!!! AND I LOVE ACHING! I love what it proves >_<
There are few excerpts here that reveal true secrets of mine. There are few excerpts here that are at all passion-writing. *A lot* of what I have up right now are topics I wrote about neutrally. Revised until perfected. I’m thinking I should start blogging more rawly, akin to the way I text, so that this blog is truly meaningful in any sort of way.
I am made extremely uncomfortable by AI usage. It’s not that I feel passionately about the issue, even though I should. It’s just that I find it extremely corny. When I see an image that’s obviously been generated or processed through AI, I cringe. When I’m reading an episode or mechat & the dialogue or plot is clearly AI written, it gives me the worst secondhand embarrassment. Even people on neocities! When I go through a code to copy a unique CSS line & see blatant evidence of AI. It’s a strong discomfort that I don’t think I’ve experienced before AI became so common. I’m so lucky that 90% of the people around me seem to feel the same way, but every now & then I still run into It.
It has also come to my attention that many people don’t actually understand *why* AI usage is criticized in the first place. The conversation usually stops at creativity, how it’s replacing artists, writers, & other creative professionals, or how it risks dulling originality & weakening creative development (especially for those younger.) But, obviously, there’s more issues than that. There are concerns regarding consent, since AI systems are trained on datasets that include people’s work, images, or voices without permission. The security risks as well, from deepfakes to data exploitation (that can also be created without consent, leaving traces in it’s data!?) , that can be used in ways that are invasive & harmful. The environmental cost as well, AI systems requiring enormous amounts of energy & water to run & cool the data centers behind them. It’s contributing to quite the resource strain. Concerns like this deserve more attention.
I think it’s really just the accumulation of all these cons + the fact that people who use AI ignorantly sometimes end up doing genuinely harmful or unsettling things with it, which creates a certain connotation around them, just creates that whole mix that irks me so much.
My friend & I were talking just the other day, & he mentioned if our modern versions of revolutionaries truly burned with any of the conviction they preach, we’d be stepping over the carcasses of executives & politicians. We’d be killing these people. And, I can’t help but find myself agreeing We are imbeded in a culture where radicalism is just another aesthetic or style, it’s performative empathy. It is refined & prepared outrage posted for clout, while the agents of our suffering walk free. I see “eat the rich” making rounds *so much*, all while the rich are basking in the suffering they cause. CEOs poison entire bodies of water for profit, pharmaceutical executives price-gouge life-saving medications, tech tycoons build surveillance that track our everything, politicians carve public land into private territory, & banks engineer homelessness through debt. And what do we actually get from people who self-proclaim wokeness or radicalism..? A faux rage..? An anger solely maintained online..? Instagram infographics about dismantling capitalism get posted from phones built by exploited labor.!? It’s activism as content & conviction with no consequence. If the passion we claim to have is real, these people wouldn't just be exposed in documentaries & ideological news stories; they’d be shot dead. There are millions of us against a few hundred global oligarchs, yet we are *so* domesticated, we are wrapped in our own “comfort”. To make the message clear, that we refuse to be caged, that we will reclaim what’s ours, we have to kill these people. If we want them to take our requests seriously, we have to be serious about what we request. We have to kill these people. We cannot live in a state where pretending to care, to care for clout is the utmost extent. We have to revolutionize & we have to act in irreversible ways.
I AM SO HUMILIATED TO BE “WEIRD,” I *hate* being called that, & it upsets me that people now seem to treat it like something desirable. Not in the sense that they genuinely accept it in others, but in the way they only want to be *seen* as it themselves & to wear it like a label. And somehow, on top of all that, to still be the reason that makes me ashamed to be perceived it myself.
I don’t see why ‘weirdness’, or at least the label of it, has become something quirky & appealing, when my own experience with it has been anything but. I have been & am constantly berated & criticized for my interests. I am constantly bullied & berated for the way I speak. For the way I express myself. I’m embarrassed by the things I like, the shows, the music, & certain types of media. The way I like to dress, the vocabulary I like to use, my hobbies, what I draw, what I play. Even in the way I try to seek out relationships. None of it has ever been met with that same admiration people claim to have for “being different.” I’m so embarrassed by it because people constantly told me I should be. Now these same people think it’s a trait that should be sought out.
I feel like a joke. *Somehow* I’m “weird” in the ‘wrong way’. When it’s me, it’s too much, too awkward, too off-putting. It’s gross, or tone-deaf, or something to laugh at. But when it’s someone else, it’s cool, attractive. It’s acceptable. Maybe, I’m not even “weird” at all, & it’s always been about who is allowed to be seen that way in the first place.
Sometimes when I’m talking with someone, anyone, I get too afraid to share my thoughts or opinions. (Half-ly due to the fact I’m not good at articulating my own ideas & half-ly because I feel embarrassed by what I believe.) Instead of speaking, I catch myself saving everything in my head for later, preparing for how I’ll write it in my freaking neocities blog that no one will read. It’s gotten to the point where I’m almost tune out of real conversations, avoiding confrontation & avoiding being myself. It’s a bad habit I’ve fallen into. Gulp… #confession
Honesty for me is super fragile. I want to write about the places I no longer belong, about voices I miss, & experiences I’m grateful for. This blog is the furthest thing from a diary, every sentence I write is capable of finding eyes it was never meant for. I’m writing around things instead of through them, of them; I’m hoping the people who know me now never recognize the silhouettes I hide in my obscure formatting & indirect statements.
I’m scared not only of being percieved, but being perceived fully. All while longing for it. There are stories I cannot tell because they are not entirely mine anymore. Some names are dangerous to mention even when they’re not present. I miss certain people in ways that are difficult to justify. I’m afraid I am constantly being documented. I’m afraid I feel too much. I’m afraid I’m not making sense.
I write about finding myself ugly quite often, an embarrassing amount, actually. Every few excerpts circles back to it. Despite that, I post myself regularly. Selfies & proof of myself. It is contradictory. Contradiction that is indistinguishable from attention-seeking. Someone who truly despises herself shouldn’t be able to be perceived this badly.
I started posting because I thought disappearing entirely would make me look even worse. I am already ugly & already grotesque, & insecurity on a woman is treated like it’s worse than *only* being disgusting. There is something socially incorrect about being absent. In an age where everyone documents themselves relentlessly, the strangest thing I could do is consider myself exempt from this. So I posted to “seem normal,”. I’m only imitiating. Initially that was my excuse, & I’ve stood by it for a while.
I don’t know if it *is* an excuse anymore. I’m afraid that I am just becoming vain. I’m afraid that now, “to keep up appearances,” I am vain. My opinion of myself has not improved, if anything, the people closest to me tell me it’s now worse. Still, I continue to put myself on display. Even more contradictory than initially! I feel monstrous, & yet I keep offering this monster to be seen.
A girl messaged me recently >_< A girl who was never very kind to me, she was cruel, actually.
The message was a self-proclaimed apology & *I* think it was a good one at that. People like her usually struggle to sound genuine about anything. But I think this time, she sounded a bit sincere. She said she was sorry & she never fully understood what she had done wrong, & that she wanted to hear my side of things.
__________________
What I’m about to say is going to sound *horribly* petty & quite juvenile. My feelings should have waned the moment highschool did. But this was my first & one of my only experiences with a girl like her, on top of the fact my home life was constantly (see excerpt VII):
But, during my junior year of high school, I liked my pal, I called him John. I was enamored by how direct he was & how deliberate his words were. He speaks like he’s incapable of uncertainty, & I believed him the most out of anyone for that reason. How can someone so assured ever lie!
Another girl, Alanys, the girl who sent me the apology, liked him too. How awkwardly cliche. Two teenage girls orbiting the same boy. That’s so awkward. But that was when she started treating me the way I’d described. We only knew each other because we were both friends with John, & suddenly my just being was something she didn’t like very much.
For the first time in my life, there were rumors about me. Not misunderstandings or anything of the sort, actual maliciously-intended things.
That I was obsessive, I was a bitch, I pursued every guy I saw, that I led guys on despite having no romantic experiences previous to John, that I was fake & jealous, two-faced & weird. (This is where my biasness for the word “weird,” comes from. #influenced)
I remember seeing these things said about me from John himself & feeling sick & detached from myself. Like they couldn’t possibly be about *me??* Those words spread through a random little group she had built around herself, all because freaking John Snell would give me the time of day.
It seemed ridiculously relentless too.!? She would tell John horrible things about me, then turn around & tell me horrible things about him. The things she was saying were so absurd & throughout all this, the nigga believed her!
In her apology, she kept saying things like, “Well this happened, & then this happened, *but*” before bringing up things I supposedly did wrong that affected nobody. One of the examples she gave was that I drew John Snell “too much,”. She said it made *everybody* really uncomfortable. (Everybody being her, him, & niggas I didn’t even know & didn’t even know me)
I was called obsessive & weird for it..! Because I drew him..? The guy who agreed to be my muse, who got to keep the drawings post-process?? The guy who gave me explicit permission for every single reference photo I used..? Because I was just a teenage girl who liked somebody & went out of my way to make sure he, himself was okay with it😭
__________________
The things I name don’t even scratch the surface of the extent of her jabs & need for drama. She would do & say things to & about other people as well. But the apology this time was just to me, so there’s no need for a mentioning of those.
It feels odd to “plea my case,” to nobody. But I don’t think this is something I’ve ever gotten to talk about in full context.
__________________
During the conversation, she also repeatedly said, “Even though *I* forgave you for the things you did to me…” & I know the polite thing would have been to ask what exactly I supposedly did. But, I figure I already know whatever answer she’d given me would just be another bunch of lies she’d been telling herself & the people she could reach for years.
I never spoke badly about her, which is the extent of what I possibly could have done to her. Most of what I eventually found out about the rumors only reached me near graduation. No time to tell, even if I wanted to.
Rumors spread & people I didn’t & never will know talked about my “eagerness,” & my “weirdness,”. I almost lost friendships over it, I’m told. I was a teenage girl in highschool, my social life was everything.
And somehow after all this time, she tells me she never knew the extent of it. She says John just stood there & allowed everyone to say those things about me without ever intervening >:(
I believe that. I do blame John for some of what happened to me in high school. Not because of the romance itself, I don’t regret liking him, but because I believed him so completely. Half the time, he was lying to me with perfect eye contact. He told me himself.
Now I’m just conflicted about Alanys. Girls like her are usually doormats, sometimes narcissists. I still don’t fully understand what she gains from apologizing to me now, years later. Maybe it really is guilt. Maybe, she wants to believe she’s become softer than she used to be *or* she just wants to rewrite herself into a perceived kinder person.
As much as I don’t want to believe her, & as much as I am still affected by the things she did despite being so much better off than me. I am still the most gullible girl in the world, & still I will forgive her.
I have a lot of friends. A lot of people who confide in me & tell me things they wouldn’t tell others. They tell me things they wouldn't tell most people, I’m pretty sure. Not because I'm “likeable,” or popular, or even especially friendly. I think it's because I listen. Whether it's a personal issue, a meaningless tangent about something they love, or a rant or piece of gossip; I try to meet it with genuine attention. I try to give that comfort of being listened to whenever I can, I think.
What I've noticed, though, is how rarely I receive the same treatment. It’s the reason I have a blog to utilize! I have to speak somewhere if no where will hear me.
The things I love get made fun of, the things I feel become misunderstandings, issues or problems will get misconstrued & then never touched up on. When I try to speak honestly about myself, my words just disappear before they ever reach anyone. All while I sit through countless conversations about everyone else's. It’s an ultimately strange feeling; to spend so much time holding space for others, only to realize how little space exists for you in return.
People online call this feeling as being "a therapist friend," but that isn't how it feels for me. What I feel is less noble than that. I just feel like a joke. The people around you have become so used to being heard by you that they've forgotten you, too, have anything worth saying.
Soon to come, last updated 06-09-26
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