No, I’m not a middle aged obese Chinese woman who went to prison for insider trading. The truth will sit here in broad daylight unbelieved by most because it’s uninteresting and doesn’t serve any of the popular narratives, but that’s okay, I learned to accept I have no control over these things about three years ago when I accidentally stumbled into a rather stoic and fatalistic attitude about the world through a series of traumatizing and unfortunate events. I do like to think I’m more mature and enlightened than you for doing so, and I also like to think I’m more mature and enlightened than you for admitting that. I’m sure one day I’ll learn that this was just another stepping stone to the next revelation and I’ll move past it, but that’s where I’m currently at in life, a sort of positive nihilism. The world is wretched and there’s nothing you can do about it, but that’s okay because God loves us anyway.
I’m from the Midwest, not china, no CCP father, no hapa heritage. I grew up with Midwestern values, but I think they're annoying and childish. I’ve always longed for something beyond passive aggressiveness as a core tenet of maintaining stability, I think it either gives you cancer or a high functioning personality disorder. Nevertheless, I am a Midwesterner at heart, whether I admit that or not. I’m practical, generally avoidant of confrontation in my real life, and I’ve struggled a lot with a certain kind of naiveté where you think the world is essentially fair. I can complain all I want, and I do, because I enjoy complaining, a lot, but I keep coming back here, because it’s home and that classic midwestern mix of autistic protestant German-Anglo-Scandinavian blood runs through my veins, along with a couple other things.
About a year after 9/11, we had a little detour from life in the Midwest. One day I came home from school and my mom told me we were moving to the Middle East for at least two years. She had gotten a job with the Defense Department apparently and we’d be leaving Chicago behind in a month’s time. I was in complete shock and extremely upset. All I knew about the Middle East at that age was terrorism and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why we were upending our whole life to live by the people who blew up our country only just last year. I was certain we would die. But we didn’t, and in fact living in Bahrain was one of the best times of my life. I loved life in the desert, it introduced me to the concepts of eternity, mortality, and the endless cycle of life and death. Living as expats, I also found that our sense of community was much stronger there, daily life occurred in a smaller space but it was richer, both materially and spiritually. Somehow every day felt like an adventure but I also had every creature comfort a child could long for. Bahrain was definitely my aristocratic era, it was how people are supposed to live. My mom was set on extending her contract, after two years we didn’t want to return to America after all. Unfortunately not long after we made this decision, the Bahraini government released a group of terrorists they had apprehended and the US military had to evacuate all non essential personnel, so just like that the party was over.
I’m also an only child so no one ever told me to shut the fuck up in my house. People can whine about it all they want and call me annoying for “not knowing my place,” but they’re just jealous of my confidence. It’s true! Only children are to sibloids what Americans are to Europeans, our aura is just more powerful and it irritates the children of the longhousing matrix that is sibling relationships. In high school I went on this religious retreat where our classmates who had previously attended would write us very personal letters (honestly it was mostly centered around trauma dumping and it made me pretty uncomfortable because I didn’t have any problems and I don’t like talking about feelings). My friend Anna, who had previously not liked me when we first met, wrote me a long apology detailing how she had been mean to me because “You were just so comfortable with who you were and I wasn’t, it made me mad.” I remember being surprised because I hadn’t experienced that sort of envy where you hated the person who had something you coveted since I was a small child. I wanted to be friends with people whose qualities I wanted in hopes they would rub off on me, and I assumed others felt the same way I did. But these are the attitudes you naturally develop when you’re not competing with other children for love and food in your household, a sibloid will never understand growing up without such scarcity, they only know fighting for every meal and hug.
It took me a long time to realize just how preoccupied people are with each other on a personal level and it really confused me once I did. I’m not saying I was a total sperg with zero interest in human relationships or anything like that. I always wanted to fall in love and have a family, I loved spending time with my friends, I loved visiting my cousins and grandparents, all the usual things like that, but there was a certain human quality I seemed to be missing, and I don’t even know what to call it really. I just know that I don’t care if someone is a bit annoying or off in some harmless way because I’ll just not interact if I don’t like their company rather than worry and complain about it, that I enjoy gossip in the moment because it’s bonding and fun but I’ll forget most of the information within a week because it holds little emotional weight for me, and that people’s intense and ongoing emotional investments in the lives of strangers is something I will never truly understand. I care about the people in my life, and I’m fascinated by human behavior, but I don’t care about people in general.
This particular lack of understanding probably explains why I wasn’t cool in high school, but it never mattered all that much anyway. I had a solid group of friends and we had a lot of fun together. Overall I enjoyed my teen years, but it was a harrowing experience for many of my peers. Our school was academically rigorous and that could be exhausting sometimes, but it was manageable for the children of the very privileged which most of our school was. It was the cultural environment of the 2000s that made it hellish. Eating disorders were rampant, several of my friends were hospitalized at some point. Boys were exceedingly cruel, picking apart girls’ bodies, objectifying them, pressuring them into sex they didn’t want, sexually assaulting them and then tarnishing their reputations. Teenage boys could introduce a prison-like quality to even the nicest of prep schools. I walked away pretty unscathed mostly because I didn’t go through puberty until the latter half of high school and by then I had seen enough abuse that I had no interest in dating. Insults about looking like a “little boy” also didn’t really hit at a time when anorexia was in vogue. Sure I had no boobs, but at a predominantly white and upper middle class high school in the 2000s, it was a much greater sin to have body fat. I felt incredibly lucky, it was a great blessing to not be sexualized during the peak of Raunch Culture, it preserved my relationship with my body as well as a great deal of my self esteem, plus I figured I’d have better to pick from once I got to college and boys were less evil.
I got a tiny bit cooler in college, I wasn’t in a sorority or anything, although greek life wasn’t all that big my school, but I did keep growing into my body and stopped being scared of underage drinking. I also got really into politics but quickly learned that I needed to separate my online life from my real one. I’d spend my week nights staying up until 5 AM posting in Facebook groups that were centered around 4chan tier politics, being a lolbert, Donald Trump, and arguing with liberals while I spent my weekends at the bar with my normal friends who had social skills. I enjoyed my “double life,” it was the only way for me to live out different parts of myself, namely the part of me that feels male and the part of me that feels female. I think the biggest reason I get so many trans accusations is that people are very much encountering my spiritually incel animus online, then they’re shocked when they meet me in person because that person is very much a woman.
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