I miss when ads were a single click and then they’re gone. Now every ad has a minimum of three phases where you watch a video, exit the still frame of fake gameplay, and then exit the app download. That doesn’t even touch on the ones that forcibly take you to another app after opening a tab in safari without you ever touching the screen.
I hate advertising. I hate that you can’t do anything without companies jumping down your throat with mostly bullshit ads. I hate that billboards exist. I hate that every company unanimously decided to make their ads longer and longer. I hate that ad blockers try to charge you money and there are in app purchases to remove ads. I hate that my attention has become commodified. I hate that there’s nothing I can do about it.
Do not hide away the part of yourself that’s unhappy, bothered or hurt just because you feel like doing so will make others feel more comfortable. You don’t live to make others comfortable, you live for yourself, which means you owe it to yourself to be honest about your true feelings. The only way to let an open wound heal properly is to take care of it, not to ignore it.
Around this time 3 years ago I felt like I had everything going for me. I finally landed a job that I applied to for years, I felt like I was expanding my social circle after years of not being able to do so despite attempting, I had a dynamic with someone that felt like a breath of fresh air and gave me a lot of excitement.
And over the course of a few weeks, it started to collapse.
The circle felt like it was collapsing and I felt shut out, the job I desired slowly peeled back the mask, and I unintentionally sabotaged the dynamic that made me so hopeful, with seemingly no chance at redemption.
And it feels like I've been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.
Picking up the pieces of how to manage my feelings about my job responsibilities changing and being pushed aside for someone else despite being there first. Picking up the pieces about how to navigate social situations. Picking up the pieces of how a dynamic that had so much promise fell apart because of my actions.
I feel like the last one hurts the most. It felt, for the first time in I don't know how long, that I was chosen, that I was seen, that I could exist alongside someone without having to constantly show up for them. I could just exist in silence, and they would exist right alongside me. And if I wanted to come out of that silent shell, they would be right there. There was just this energy that we both understood, that no one else did. But no one else needed to.
I think a lot of that recovery has been putting the blame on myself for something that I did and thinking that I'm beyond redemption. For hurting someone in a way that I didn't mean to, because I couldn't have it in me to straighten my own things out. And then when I finally did, everything fell apart.
That happened in July, I don't think I felt close to my normal self until November. It was just several weeks of being on autopilot while trying to work past that.
And then 2024 felt like I was turning a page, but I still felt this emptiness. This void of what once was. I still did my best to get through the days and weeks, because it felt a bit more normal.
Then 2025 came, and I just felt this overwhelming burden. This burden of trying to accommodate everyone else's needs and wants, with no ask of my own. Really, it started at the end of 2024, on my 30th birthday. Shutting myself down and turning my phone off because of the slow realization that for as much as I show up for other people, it did not feel like a lot of them show up for me in the same way. It felt dark, it felt lonely. It also felt like the only way to fix the situation. If I wasn't going to feel like I'm having my needs and wants met, then I just wasn't going to show up for other people. At all.
In hindsight, that was the canary in the coal mine for me. Everything just came down in early 2025. I felt overwhelmed, and felt like no one could help me. So I just dropped off from communicating with people as much as I could. I didn't really particularly care, I just wanted to feel something different. Something that wasn't constant responsibility. Something that wasn't trying to make sure someone else had what they needed while I was just there not having anyone do the same for me.
Days turned to weeks, which turned to months. Eventually I started feeling better, things felt a bit more manageable. Then the crushing feeling of sadness turned to the crushing feeling of anxiety. It felt like snapping out of a blinded outrage and seeing all the destruction you've caused. All the people that have been pushed away, all the hurt you've caused, all because you had to take care of yourself and it couldn't wait another moment, and letting other people know also wasn't an option. After all, that would also be catering to them.
So it's been carrying that weight of anxiety ever since. I've been seeing a therapist every week for months, I'm still not sure how much it's actually helping, but I do feel some change in my mindset in terms of socializing.
Ultimately I think I'm better in figuring out how I respond to people. I don't really feel like I grew up with the most gracious people in terms of socializing. That, combined with the social media era, puts me in a place where my default is to leave people alone. I'd rather suffer in silence for years before reacting out to someone who may potentially have a negative reaction to me. I do not want to be a burden on anyone, and I also don't want to be on the receiving end of someone's negative emotions. I don't feel like I have any way to retaliate without getting violent, and I do not want to absorb their negative energy, so in the end, I choose silence. Is it the healthy thing? I don't know. Probably not. But it's where I find myself.
I wish a lot of things turned out differently. I wish the summer 0f 2023 wasn't just one long process of me being sad about losing someone because of my actions. I wish I hadn't lost so much time away from people that I've talked to because of my own fears. There's so, so, so, so much that I've wanted to share that I feel like I've missed because of my own fears. But my fears are something that I just can't get past sometimes. For someone that exercises so much, one would think that I wouldn't have so much fear. But it's had a real grip on me, and I'm not entirely sure of how to work around it.
I don't really know what's next for me for the rest of the year. I'm almost done with grad school, but I still have some hurdles to get past. I still haven't told my parents about it, because of the same anxiety reasons, even though I haven't lived with them for almost 5 years. They don't let things go, and I'd rather not be reminded of what they consider a wrongdoing so often. Debt is another big problem, no idea how I'm going to get past that. I don't even know if the people I haven't talked to in so long would still want to talk to me. I guess there's only one way to find out, although I fear their negative energy or silence much more than I fear not having any more conversations with them sometimes. Age is another thing. Although I won't be 32 for a few months, the fact that I've crossed into the 30s feels like the aging process, and mortality as a whole, is more tangible than ever. And I'm nowhere near where I'd like to be for myself. That's another reason I shut myself off for my birthday in 2024: the weight of the expectations I had for myself. It just feels like a lot of failure, a lot of shortcomings, a lot of not being good enough.
Socially I've been trying to expand. I've identified which settings work for me and I'm trying to do my best to just "be myself" even though I still feel like a fish out of water. I don't know what I'm going to do with everyone else though. Like I said, I fear their anger and silence much more than I have any hope of happiness and willingness to reconnect. And mentally, I don't really feel like I'm in a place to retaliate in kind. So it might just be solitude for me.
I don't know. I've had a lot of thoughts over the past several months. I'm not sure if a lot of them make sense. Some of them I don't feel like I even have a right to have. Regardless, I have them. I don't know what the future holds. I don't know if it's going to hold what I want it to hold, even if I try to set it up for that. Sometimes I feel like that boat has passed me by and I'm stuck in this hellhole of my fears and anxieties. I'm trying to work out of it, but sometimes it's too much to overcome.
I guess overall what I want is support. Support to help me when I need it, support to carry some things that I can't, support for just about anything. It's difficult to get support or even ask for support when, in so many areas of your life, you're in that role for other people. Making them feel complete, catering to their needs, eing thoughtful for them. Sometimes all you want is for that to return to you, the way it's best for you. And I think that's what hurts the most about three years ago. It felt like I had finally found that, and through my own actions, I messed it up, seemingly never to return. And every continued action of support for other people that isn't reciprocated makes those turn of events sting more and more, and also plunge me deeper into the abyss of not wanting to be social.
In any case, this is where I'm at. I don't know where anything goes from here. I just know that I'm here until I'm not.
Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
