Hi.
Fist of all I wanna apologize for the last chapters bc I feel I'm only ranting about stuff, and although it's good for my mental health to vent sometimes, it's probably the most boring thing to read. If someone ever reads this, I'll try to go back to the time when I was telling you about me being a hikikomori.
In a way I still am.
I have a job, tho, but nothing else has changed.
You could say I'm an incel but without the hate and all the other shit, one who actually respects people, who knows that he's the one who barely has any relationship with anyone else bc he lacks socials skills and is maybe too comfortable with his loneliness.
I don't blame anyone for anything, and actually I'm trying to be more positive than before. I'm doing fine now, even though my mind is constantly trying to convince me I could do better, and I'm on the brink of losing it all. This year I've worked harder than the last one, and it shows. I've compared the numbers of this and last year and now I've practically reached the same income from last year, with two months to spare. But my mind quickly shoves that off and fills me with anxiety every day that I barely have any sales. "That's not enough to live on your own," my mind tells me constantly, "and it will never be."
"You're hopeless."
Every time I come up with something to be happy about, my mind tries to bury it down with something else, like it wants me to suffer.
Like it thinks I don't deserve to be happy, or to succeed in anything.
Last week, we went to my nephew's birthday party, and I was talking with my sister and his boyfriend about jogging. I told them how much I jog from Monday to Friday, and my sister told him that I was the one of the family with the most discipline, and for me it was a weird thing to say bc that's just part of my routine, but then I started thinking and realized I've been jogging for more than 15 years. That's kind of a lot, but my mind instantly makes me remember that I still can't live on my own, that my income is not enough to travel around the world or buy a car or have kids like everyone my age. And I know that what people post doesn't really represent how they live. No one shows you the full picture. Some of my college classmates are now posting about their kids, but I remember how they were constantly complaining about their jobs, jobs that they still have, and how much they hated them.
But still, they are having those pieces of life that I can't, they are way ahead of me in every aspect.
The funny thing is that I've felt this way since I was a kid.
When I was in like second or third grade, I started hearing about some of my classmates inviting their friends over, and my brother started doing the same thing with his friends. I had a couple friends at that time, but we never did that—or maybe they did it with themselves and never told me. I sometimes went to their homes when we had to do a group project, or when we had to go somewhere in the afternoon and my friend's mom picked me up, gave me something to eat and drove me there like I was one of her kids. But that was something different.
I got invited over until fifth grade, and it was great, you know. Food, videogames, movies. It happened a couple times, but I never invited anyone over, not even to return the favor; for me that was an alien concept. It never occurred to me that I could do that or that I should do that. Maybe I was so used to not doing it that I just never did, idk. Besides, at that time everyone else was starting to have relationships, which was basically hold hands and write some love letters to each other, but still they were way ahead of me.
And at that same time everyone got obsessed with Gorillaz. In every group project everyone wanted to call our team "Gorillaz". Everyone had their albums—I think they had only released two at the time—and many other more, and at the time the only music I was familiar with was the one that was in my dad's car, either the radio or his own CDs, or the songs we had to play in my piano lessons. I remember sometimes I had to play some Beatles' songs, and I always played them wrong bc I've never listened to them. So, when I saw some of my classmates bringing to class these giant folders filled with dozens of different CDs, I didn't have any idea who those bands were and what did they play.
In middle school, everyone was going to parties and chatting in messenger—the old one, the MSN one—and I didn't even know that existed. I opened an account practically in high school. When I did, I started adding my friends and was surprised that everyone else had a lot of them already. It seemed like everyone was friends with everyone but me. Even with the way they used to write made me feel behind. They used a lot of acronyms and shortened works or these cringy usernames, and I just started imitating them. One time one of my friends even corrected me bc I was using them wrong.
Even with their music they were way ahead of me. We didn't have internet at home until my brother got in high school, and we only got it bc he needed to upload homework and projects there. When I graduated middle school, we only had one pc at home, and I could've shared it with my brother, but my dad thought it'd be easier if each of us had his own, so he asked one of my uncles to build me one. He did, and he filled it with music and videogames, so I dedicated the last days of my summer vacation to listen to those songs, to know what everyone else was listening to. There was pop, rock, hip hop, metal, punk, ballads, even folk and country music. It had it all.
And that helped me a little bit. I met a lot of new people in high school, and I had something to answer when they asked me about my favorite bands; they then recommended me theirs and we started talking more and more. But I always ended up discovering they had been listening to music for years, so they had a catalogue of thousands of songs in their iPods and iTunes accounts, when I only had a couple hundreds, and I was constantly listening to new bands and songs.
Still sometimes I felt like an impostor, like I didn't belong there, but I had to convince them I did. One time someone asked me what I did after class, and I didn't want to tell her that all I ever did was homework, videogames and watch The Simpsons and Dragon Ball Z. That's something kids do, so I told her I watched MTV all the time bc MTV was cool in the early 2000's, right?
Needless to say, since middle school, everyone had been on dates and relationships and all that, and I didn't. At that time, I started going to parties, drinking and all that stuff where everyone had been doing it since middle school—yeah, we were too young to legally do it, but that's how it is.
Then, in college I noticed that everyone else was getting jobs or they had them already, and when I tried to follow them, no one really hired me, except for that one factory I talked about at the very beginning of this text? Book? Biography? Whatever.
And now, after so many years of hikikomoring, I feel more behind than ever.
But something funny happens: nowadays I've seen too many millennials like me talk about how they can't understand gen z or alpha, how they are seen by them as a bunch of cringy old people pretending they are still young.
They now feel like they have been left behind.
How funny.
Does that mean that everyone else has been always behind me in that regard?
Maybe, but it doesn't matter.
If things were different, if I kept everyone's pace I'd probably be married by now, I'd probably live with my wife and kids. Would that be a better life than the one I have right now? I wouldn't worry about living on my own or catching up to everyone else, but I'd probably still worry about money, about not earning enough. Wouldn't I worry that I just went with the flow and ended up with a life I didn't really want, and the point of no return is way past me? The day I became a hikikomori, the day I got that job at that box factory and realized how the rest of my life would look like was the point of no return for me, and it fucked me up so badly I haven't recovered yet.
Or am I just thinking that to feel good about my life decisions?
Idk, but as I said before, every time I have something to feel good about, my mind shoves it away and reminds me of my failures, and I don't see how things would be different in another life. This other version of me would still be me, he'd still get anxious about his failures, he'd still sabotage himself over and over again.
And if that's the case, if in any case scenario I'd try to sabotage myself and spoil my little victories in life, why not dedicate my life to doing what I really want? Why not doing what I'm most passionate about? I wanna keep writing and I wanna go back to drawing and I wanna keep this Funko dream alive, so I'm gonna do it, but I'll try to improve, to keep improving little by little until my mind runs out of excuses to spoil my happiness.