I’m a pretty fucked up guy in the sense that, whenever someone enters my life, I often feel like a deer who is noticed by someone in the wilderness, and he’s about to take off. I recognize this isn’t a very healthy way to live, and like I’ve said before: if everyone acted like me in life, no one would ever become friends with each other. They’d just keep to themselves and never talk, just chilling from pond to pond and darting off whenever they were noticed.
I’m not sure exactly why I’m like this, because there is no one reason. I can’t pinpoint and tell you, “This is the exact reason I’m like this.” But it’s always been this way. If I had to guess, I would probably say it’s because I have had more negative interactions with people than positive. This has been changing lately, which is nice, but there is always that side of me that will always remember the bad times. It’s like a scar you got from falling off your bike or some shit; whenever you look at your knee you’ll always remember how you got it. I have a friend who has told me, for example, the reason why I continue to not have a girlfriend is because I have had lots of bad experiences with women, and this has caused me to form a bad view of them as a whole, and it’s a never-ending cycle because I view those situations as doomed before they even start. I would say it’s like this for me with not just women, but people in general.
To give you an example of what I mean: I’ll quickly tell you a story I may have already mentioned on here before. I can’t really remember anymore because so much has happened in the past 2 years (and I’m still in a state of coming out of a recent unhinged phase, lol).
A couple of years ago, someone reached out to me and was very complimentary about my first novel, Absolute Anhedonia. We talked and sent e-mails back and forth, and it turned out this person was running some kind of website for independent authors and so-called “underground” books. They said they were interested in an “updated” version of my novel, in which I added more to it, expanded the world a bit more, and they would pay me to put an audiobook version on their website. This all occurred in my broke mid-20s, and I’m a millennial, so I am of course a whore for money like most people my age are. I said yes, got to work, and we corresponded back and forth for awhile. We were friendly with each other and shared book recommendations and shit like that. Not a bad way to pass the time talking with someone; very pedestrian, innocuous shit. No politics or anything of the sort mentioned, just art being traded.
Anyway, long story short: this whole thing reached a climax when the dude told me to fuck off, and seemed to be experiencing some kind of extreme mood shift. It didn’t feel like the same person was even writing to me, it felt like I was witnessing some kind of bipolar or manic episode in which the person I was talking with the whole time was being taken over by some kind of demon. They were negative about all my work (despite telling me they enjoyed it), contradicted certain things they said, etc. It was clear this person was going through something weird.
Anyway, I’m not saying I let this one experience ruin my time online and I have closed myself off to people for good. But I mention all of that to contextualize some of my behaviour moving forward regarding how I interact with people online. I’ve met some cool people since this occurred, but at the same time, the memory of this incident lingers. This is why I didn’t laugh at those women too much in that Tinder Swindler movie, because I could slightly relate: the dude pretended to be my friend, was complimentary about my work, and then out of the blue completely shit all over it one day. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced; one of those times you can’t even be offended or hurt, you just scratch your head and think, “Is this person for real?”
It’s one thing to make friends with people as a kid on the playground, and then grow up with each other and check in once in awhile and blahblahblah. That’s a natural type of friendship. But it’s another, totally unprecedented thing to meet someone online and become friends with them. Because the stakes seem like they are so low when it comes to effortless online communication, a lot of people don’t realize they could be ruining or making your day by how they reach out to you. So it’s imperative that you do not get too invested in other people, and remember why you’re there in the first place: to get your work out there. The socializing aspect is much different, and can be helpful, but also very harmful and counterproductive. You could be dealing with an actual crazy person and you wouldn’t know it until it’s too late. I see guys with girlfriends like this all the time: there are a lot of dudes in relationships with shitty girls out there who are in them entirely due to the fact that they got themselves “involved,” so to speak. It wasn’t a real connection or anything, it’s just that this girl followed the dude around enough and sort of claimed him for herself through sheer will and manipulation (that’s why the word MAN is in that word, that’s what they do😂). The dude didn’t even realize it the whole time, but he let certain situations happen to him. It’s tough, but it’s the same thing as being an internet person: you have to always be careful you’re not attracting the wrong people.
Think about those Indian dudes you see commenting on the Instagram profiles of hot Scandinavian girls. Or the Twitter profiles of hot Onlyfans girls. I’ve been guilty of this myself, because it’s funny to me (and because I’ve made friends with a couple girls this way, ngl to you haha). But there seems to be a certain subset of brown dudes out there who don’t really seem to be living in reality: they think that if they comment, “Hey bb pls send bobs and lasagna,” to the right white girl living across the world, she will somehow fall in love with him and his unibrow. If you read the things they say to hot girls online, these are lost souls who are literally living in their own heads. They don’t understand that what they are envisioning is completely unreal, a form of psychosis being played out somewhere in Mumbai or wherever the fuck, and this girl views these guys as bots. I would argue that, on a low level, a lot of people online are suffering from this same delusion and aren’t realizing it. I always try to be very careful that I’m not someone’s hot blonde girl, if that makes sense. I do like to interact with people, and I do believe sometimes there should be a dialogue around art, but at the same time I fear for my life: I don’t want to make that mistake of getting involved with the wrong person again because it’s so easy to.
As a very online person, I’ve experienced this phenomenon a bunch of times now. You have to remember: I’ve been doing shit on the internet since before I was a teenager. I’d say since I was around 12 or so, I’ve always done shit online under different names, and I’ve always experienced feedback from it. I have gone through the “fame cycle,” before, if you want to call it that. What this means is I have experienced (extremely low levels) of fame and notoriety at various points in my life now. As a teenager I ran a blog that was inspired by Youth in Revolt, and it was a fun way of airing out all my hormonal grievances and being funny in the most politically incorrect ways. Complaints about not getting pussy in high school, mourning the loss of a girl who got a breast reduction, being shorter than all the other guys around me and wanting to murder them, being a loner, having no friends, that type of thing. I was an incel before it was cool, haha😂. It was all art of course, just comedic writing. An exaggeration of my real personality.
This led to a handful of people following my work, including some very weird individuals. Nothing too bad or dangerous, but still. When you’re a teenager and talking to people around the world and there was never any course for what you’re doing in school, it can be very weird. Then when I was in my 20s I made a lot of different videos for YouTube (dumb comedy stuff), and that attracted some weirdos as well. I just had another experience with an internet weirdo as recently as December 2021: there was one dude following me for awhile who I later found out was some kind of alcoholic and struggling with life. My persona on Instagram is mostly being a comic and a useful idiot for people who want to get on there and see that, but I guess this guy was vulnerable and needed a friend, which I was happy to be initially. He started off being very friendly at first, and then eventually became very abusive towards me and constantly negative, so I ultimately had to block him.
These are all different stories, but it’s the same short lifetime of being an online person thus far. What I am getting at here is that there is sometimes a pattern, but it can also be totally undetectable. It’s both possible and impossible to tell if you have attracted dangerous attention to yourself. It is unpredictable in the worst possible way, and like I said: you might not realize it until it’s too late. The best and safest thing I’ve found is to keep a distance from people, and make sure I don’t get too invested or involved with anyone past a certain point. I always leave room, I’m open minded, and I like talking to people like how it was when the internet was first conceived and it felt less dangerous…but still. One needs their limits.
And BTW, even when things go well, I’ve noticed that there are even people who will lose interest in me and what I have to say, unfollow me or stop reading my work, etc. I just had a group of high school kids following me who all unfollowed me recently: I am assuming because a lot of members of the younger generations do not like certain words and find certain things offensive and off-limits, and I have a very tricky personality in that I am polite in certain respects and look like I’m 12 years old, yet I have a very dark sense of humour and like saying dark and disgusting shit sometimes haha. I am not one of those people where you can put in a box and label as one specific thing, so I guess sometimes people follow for the wrong reasons and then take certain things the wrong way and unfollow. I wish I could be more normal and a focused artist in one particular area, but my brain is kind of all over the place in that regard. Sometimes I’m offensive to people, other times I’m not. There’s just something in my brain that does this, and it leads to disaster if people are hurt by what I say or do.
This is another reason why it’s just important to not take people you encounter on the internet too seriously: whether the feedback is good or bad, you should just think of other people as ghosts, and continue focusing on your craft primarily above all else. The criticism or praise basically amounts to the same thing: other people are essentially just using you to pass the time. They don’t care about what you’re actually going through or think of you as a person, they only see the internet side of you. Don’t take their comments too personally, don’t feel proud if someone or a large group of people likes your work, and don’t feel shitty if no one does. This place is a real mess, we’re still figuring a lot of things out about internet conduct, and people are scary, fragile, and unstable.