so i’m just gonna start off this by saying that i respect proper english grammar & punctuation, love her she’s a sweet girlie but i’m going to play by my own rules here. this is a home cooked meal fresh from the depths of my mentally ill mind. it’s not professional, it’s not classy, it’s just business. unless it substantially changes the intended meaning, typos, weird phrasings & incorrect punctuation will be left the way they were originally left. i don’t really like writing serious essays because i get too caught up in the formalities & “correctness” or whatever you’d call it - it disturbs my line of thinking.

i feel an intense need to purge thoughts out of the catacombs of my mind because if they stay in my mind they will fester and turn into demonic entities that will haunt my life. a lot of demons from my childhood & adolescence currently haunt me to this day because children were seen and not heard, and my peers didn’t really understand or feel the need to carry my emotional burdens. at the time i resented them for this which only fueled the fire of the demons’ birth but as an adult i’m obviously more sympathetic to their reasons. like looking back i can totally understand why a random 7th grader wouldn’t want to be burdened with the weird kid’s depression.

i never had a lot of friends & out of the few ones i have had they’ve never been particularly close. the exact reason has changed depending on the phase of my life.

one - when i was a young child, it was pretty much simply due to having a different communication style caused by autism. i actually was very social & empathic but i often struggled to express that i was capable of understanding this and this was before the double empathy problem study was published. because i was 6 years old, partially nonverbal and when i was talking it was in a way that seemed to be out of alignment with what was going on around me, it was assumed that i was the one struggling with social cues. understandable conclusion to arrive at but ultimately not true. according to a recent anecdote from my grandfather (who i lived with at the time), i did actually have some friends when i was in kindergarten & 1st grade so i don’t think the autism by itself caused much issues socially.

two - once my mom came back into the picture once i started to enter 2nd grade, some new problems began to arise. firstly, she was rather emotionally neglectful - a fact that i’m only starting to realize at the age of 20. secondly, me moving back in her with her was the first in what ended up being a very common occurrence in my life which was me getting uprooted & having to move to a new place, start at a new school, and make new friends. these two things didn’t initially prevent me from making friends and i actually made quite a few. but the area we lived in wasn’t the best compared to where my grandparents lived so this was my first time getting exposed to the less favorable aspects of the world. the fourth thing is that my dad, who i did not live with because he & my mom divorced and my mom got full custody, died. while i was exposed to trauma before that, that was the event that allowed all of the previous trauma to begin rooting in once was previously impenetrable ground.

for the rest of elementary school in general but especially 3rd grade, i started to act rather erratically. at the time every authority figure just thought it was the autism. sometimes i want to give the benefit of the doubt because my autism manifested quite strongly as a young child, i did have the tendency to self-harm and i was nonverbal at some moments. but i also was experiencing grief and i just don’t know how not one person looked at my situation and didn’t think “we need to put this kid back in therapy.” the way the grief was being expressed was probably in a very autistic way yes, but did people really lack empathy to that level for autistic people & children? one open-minded student, at my 3rd grade teacher’s insistence, eventually connected with me and i made my first friend at that school which caused the erratic behavior to mostly subside & allowed me to make other friends at that school.

of course all good things must come to an end so my mom ended up meeting this guy who was a walking red flag from the beginning & decided to ignore her family, friends, children and his ex-girlfriends who were basically all opposed to this. we move, i get uprooted, new school, whatever. except this time, there’s also a new man in the house who clearly doesn’t like me and only sees my mom as a bank account. so naturally, the erratic behavior starts again and by this point i’m entering middle school. unlike the last school where we were all still at a relatively innocent age, i was not shown as much kindness. i do look back on my behavior and significantly cringe - i don’t really blame anyone for not wanting to be my friend, but i do also see a kid in crisis.

three - my 8th grade year i made more of a concerted effort to be more kind and less intentionally prickly, although due to living in a now abusive household i was still basically completely unaware of how to properly behave in social situations. this was the first time i was living outside of my hometown & we were in the middle of nowhere so it was especially hard. i was adopted by this friend group of 3 trans guys who all kinda treated me like shit and looking back i don’t think they ever had good intentions - i think they really just wanted to improve their reputation by adopting the weird new kid. eventually when i made other friends that genuinely valued me more, they completely cut me off and shunned me. this would plant the seeds for the issue i still struggle with this day - crippling social anxiety.

pretty much every in person friend i’ve made since then has usually been due to a particularly extroverted person adopting me into their social circle and i moved so often at this point there was never any real opportunity to capitalize on that. eventually during the pandemic i started to seek community online. i started with mutual friends of people i knew in person and unfortunately i acted rather inappropriately with one person i developed a crush on, which ended up costing me most of my friends. while most of my weird behavior that embarrasses me now was usually due to my needs not being met, i kinda knew better and got really clingy anyway. it’s probably one of my few genuine regrets. part of me wants to apologize but i also feel like it’s probably better of an “apology” to just respect that person’s space due to the nature of the incident.

after the move to the city i live in now (although not the last move i’ve made within this city), i struggled to really make any meaningful connections with people at the high school i was at. while i did have a twitter with not many followers i occasionally posted on, as well as some forums i browsed frequently, i started actively posting on one forum in late 2021. while i developed a very deep reliance on it since it was really the first time i received positive attention, i also treated it like a test ground for basically re-learning social interactions with people. i think a misconception that’s come up whenever i talk about this period of my life is that the lack of social awareness is due to the autism but that’s honestly not true at all. i do understand that autism does affect social behavior & communication but it affects every autistic person differently and in my case it really affects how i communicate my thoughts. i’ve always been a very social & empathic person, and children are not automatically born understanding how society works and what’s socially acceptable behavior. the lack of social awareness was really due to never being taught that as a child & eventually learning a warped version of it from my peers, other authority figures and the media. i look back on some of the stuff i did then and i definitely feel an incredible sense of embarrassment, but i don’t really regret anything ultimately. there were both some genuinely lovely people i interacted with that gave me a healthy outlet to express myself, as well as some unfortunate people that both gave me a test ground for the more trollish behavior & a good example of a person that i shouldn’t be. i made one online friend i’m still very close with to this day during that period of my life, and overall i look back on that time with fondness.

the social anxiety is a major problem because i’m essentially self-sabotaging myself. i fear rejection so i never seek out opportunities that could work in my favor. i’ve been struggling to find jobs since i quit my job to become a student and as of this post i’ve only gotten interviews at 2 places, one of which was an immediate rejection over the phone due to scheduling conflicts. this is obviously fueling the anxiety but the fact that i’ve still gotten 2 interviews, even if one was a failure and one is still yet to be determined, shows that i should probably put myself out there more. individual human beings are probably going to be more receptive of my eccentricities than a job trying to see how they can capitalize off my labor.

the small online community i’ve built for myself within the last 2-ish years (after a brief stint terrorizing a group of members from the forum previously mentioned in a discord server i made) has given me an outlet to both express my truest self but also enrich & grow as a person. 2024 was supposed to be the year of my full bloom which never ended up happening due to an unfortunately timed family emergency, and despite the fact that the world is slipping into fascism i’m determined to make 2025 my year. i think the followers on my private twitter account are getting tired of my philosophical rants about whatever the fuck (especially because i gained all of my lovely fans from the music appreciation side of twitter), and conversely the followers of my bluesky (both those who migrated there from twitter & also some new followers) are not getting the full scope of my antics. this substack is basically meant to bridge the gap. i’ve also realized that the source of my unhappiness and anxiety is because i’ve been unintentionally suppressing myself - i’ve been too preoccupied with inconveniencing others & not taking up too much space. this is me standing on my soap box and taking up more space. i’m here and i’m gonna do whatever the fuck i want and you’re either gonna ride with me or you’re gonna get fucked.