A thingy from a loser

Being as self-centered as I am, I'm glad to take the opportunity to give my entire life story, painting myself as a tragic victim as much as possible.  I'm not being sarcastic when I say that, just self-deprecating.

I grew up in a suburban house with my parents and a brother who was significantly older than me.  My dad is a pretty blue-collar type of guy, my mom is kind of nerdy (she really likes sci-fi).  I don't know how they met or much about their past lives or anything, I asked my mom once and she just said "ohh...in a bar," or something like that.  I don't care much either way.

I don't remember much of my early life, but within a few years after entering my elementary school, I became the target of bullying.  It's a small school so basically anyone from my grade who wanted to bully someone picked me; I remember once another student pulling me aside and apologizing for making fun of me, saying that he only did it because he was worried that if he didn't, he would wind up being a target too.

I don't know how much I brought on myself.  I don't remember how I acted during those years.  I think my entire being is conducive to bullying though, because I have a personality that's both annoying and meek, and a body that's short and weak.  I was a terrible crybaby in response to bullying or any other frustration or annoyance up through age 13 at least, probably a few years later.

My parents have said that my brother, from day one, was jealous of me for stealing attention from him, but I don't know how much of that is just the parental tendency to blame everything on one or two narrow problems.  Anyway, he and I were constantly at each others' throats from a somewhat early age.  In part due to the bullying I experienced at school (plus his own tendency to be an asshole), I interpreted almost everything he said or did as an attempt to make fun of me or piss me off -- not that he didn't do plenty of this already, but I was hypervigilant and basically made life harder on myself.

I made some friends during elementary school.  I had one friend starting in kindergarten who stuck with me through eighth grade.  I loved him (not really exaggerating, I'm probably bisexual).  We played video games, pretend adventure games modeled on JRPGs outside, did shitty drawings of swords and axes and made up stuff for our own pretend RPG games, talked about whatever it is that kids talk about, it was great.  One time at age 5 or 6 we were wandering in the woods outside my house, there was a thorny bush (we called them "prickers", not thorns) in the way and I was scared of it -- so he, with his calloused hands, just grabbed the thorny branches and pulled them off to clear a path, proclaiming "NO PRICKERS ARE GONNA HURT MY FRIEND!"

I made some other friends, but I don't have any interesting or meaningful stories about them.  As time went on though, they changed and I didn't.  One of them got a girlfriend, and instead of sitting around and playing video games they wanted to go watch sports and do other things.  So eventually they just decided to stop hanging out with me.  I don't know what it was, really.  Maybe my horrible Asperger body language (staring) creeped out the one guy's girlfriend.  Maybe they decided that a kid who liked nothing but video games was too narrow-minded and boring for their more varied interests.  Maybe I was offensively self-centered, inviting friends over and then just teaching myself HTML while they had nothing to do.  Maybe I was just really annoying.  Maybe it was all those things, I don't know.  But I lost all my friends.  The summer that they separated from me, I was somewhere around age 13-15, and I cried almost every day.

At this point, I really started to get used to being alone.  With my brother working a part-time job and both my parents working, I would get up after everybody left and spend the day just playing games and watching TV.  At some point we got an internet connection, and I used it to talk about my favourite game (Fallout 2) on the official message boards.

Around my senior year of high school, my family became increasingly dysfunctional.  My brother had trouble with his grades in college, which he largely took out on me, through mockery, provocation (trolling, but face-to-face), and a general attempt to prove that he was the dominant/powerful one.  My father, for reasons I don't understand, developed massive anger problems; almost everything he said to any of us was in the form of screaming and insults.  I am suspicious that he at least tried to be unfaithful but I don't know for a fact so I won't accuse him of anything.

Also by my senior year of high school, I had discovered music.  Up until just a year or two prior I didn't listen to music, but suddenly there was something that could command my attention and offer an escape on par with that of video games.  To this day I still can't really articulate what makes music in particular so amazing, but it became the most important thing in my life around this time period and persisted for many years.

Random note: I also got a job at a store during this time.  My parents pressured me into it, I don't know why they hired me given my anxiety and my terrible body language, but oh well.  It had its ups and downs.

In school, I was of course disconnected.  I didn't have the social skills to understand how to start a conversation with another human being (I still don't).  In part thanks to fiction and my dad belaboring the point of how pretty any random girl on TV (or in person) was to me, I internalized the idea that having a girlfriend would make me happy, and did make some efforts to go out with girls.  I slipped one a desperate note begging for a single date, claiming to have incredibly strong feelings for her, when all I really had were strong feelings of wanting a solution to problems I didn't even understand I had.  I never got anywhere with a single girl and essentially stopped trying after high school.

At some point in my senior year, I tried to off myself, just for the sake of attention / as a cry for help from a stupid kid who didn't understand how to ask for it.  It resulted in me going to a therapist that I saw for many years.

After high school came university.  I was absolutely certain of two things:
1) I was going to be a video game developer, and
2) Living on-campus in the dorms would help me meet people, so I wouldn't be lonely anymore.

But in my attempt to take advanced math and computer courses I flunked out, and in the dorms, I wound up giving into my anxiety 100%, literally spending almost all my waking time on the computer.  I do mean literally almost, I completely stopped going to classes and I don't know what my roommate might have thought of me.  Given the circumstances though, I have to say he must have been a really nice guy, because he didn't insult me or act like a jerk at all that I can remember, even though I'm sure I cramped his (normal) style and attempts to get laid and etc.

So I flunked out, and then went to a 2-year school with no idea what I was interested in or wanted to do.  I have some rose-coloured glasses here, but I feel like this was the best period in my life; all the work was so easy, I only worked a few hours a week at the store, and I spent the rest of my time on the internet talking about video games, music, and /d/-type hentai.  Near the end of this period, I watched Cowboy Bebop and a couple other shows on Adult Swim, and then later was drawn into downloading fansubs of Death Note, beginning my love affair with anime.  Anime was my next great escape, I would marathon entire series the way I used to spend all night grinding in Final Fantasy 6.

After finishing that school, I went back to the university (commuting this time) for a social science degree.  Easy stuff, very interesting, completely useless from an employment perspective.

Afterwards, I spent two years half-heartedly searching for a job whilst working just a few hours a week at the store, and living the rest of my live on the internet, anime, video games, and TV.  In my frustration, self-centeredness, and internet-dwellingness, I became a libertarian and heavily leaned towards Ayn Rand's Objectivism.  I think I somehow believed that as long as I was able to parrot her bullshit about being productive and dedicated and etc. in internet arguments, this would make me eligible for a good job of some sort.

At one point I became completely discouraged and reverted to a complete slacker attitude, idolizing the NEET lifestyle.  I wanted to just be a loser bum and didn't care if it meant living with my parents indefinitely, working just a few hours a week at the store.  My dad liked to volunteer at community charities where people in politics also volunteered, so he was able to secure me some interviews and eventually net me a full-time job that paid pretty well, so I took it.

Unlike the job at the store, this was an office, with mature adults all over the place, and I had to interact with them repeatedly.  There were so many unwritten rules and I had no idea what was going on in general.  For example, they said that if I had no assignments to work on, I should ask for something to do -- but then when I did, they would brush me off and give me nothing.  This is not even considering the social aspect of things -- people made good faith efforts to talk to me and I had no idea how to respond.  What is appropriate humor?  What is appropriate to talk about?  What are appropriate attitudes to take?  How "serious"/"professional" should I be?  What kinds of jokes are immature, unprofessional, offensive, weird?  I never really learned.
Also unlike at the store, all the people being old (30 or older) meant that I was afraid to even admit that I played video games, let alone talk about my actual interests like eroge.  Not that I was close with anyone at the store, but at least I felt less stressed from it all.

Anyway, the gist of it is that I was under horrible stress for 40 hours a week, and was in the mindset that because this was a "career" job, it would lifelong, and I'd be stuck here for 30+ years.  I had nobody to talk to during the evenings and weekends, certainly not my parents, who would rather harass me about why I hadn't gotten promoted after a month than sympathize.

So I escaped into the things I had.  Internet, anime, video games, music, hentai.  I became particularly obsessed with chaos;head during this time.  I didn't know what waifus were, but Sakihata Rimi was mine.  I identified with Takumi (protagonist) a lot -- a complete loser, incredibly anxious, desperately wanted to escape from his problems but couldn't, etc.  And there was Rimi, who was so kind and gentle and supportive of him, accepting of his creepy otaku ways, and she stuck with him through the worst of everything.  I remember watching that Rainbow Girl youtube video (the song about the eroge girl loving the player but being unable to express it) and weeping, but not really understanding why.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn what waifus were for a long time afterward.  I didn't nurture or even understand how I felt, and let it fall by the wayside, so I cannot claim to have a waifu now.  It's a shame, because I feel like I could use one.

Anyway, as far as the job goes, I accepted the fact that they weren't going to fire me as long as I did OK at the work they assigned me.  I barely even care if I screw up or slack off, because I don't do badly enough to get fired.  A lot of younger people got hired, and I tried to connect with them and be talkative (in part because of pressure from my bosses and co-workers), but I wound up just bringing back my annoying Aspie personality.  Interrupting people, saying stupid irrelevant boring weird things just for the sake of having something to say...now I'm ostracized and people don't really try to talk to me anymore, and I don't expose myself to that level of shame and embarrassment by volunteering to talk, either.  Thankfully, being adults means that unlike in elementary school, they don't beat me up or make fun of me to my face.

So where am I now?  I moved out of my parents' house, I don't talk to anybody at work, I don't socialize, I don't do much.  I have made some meager attempts to be social outside of work but I have nothing but negative experiences to show for it, and more and more I feel like the only positive thing in my life is the time I get to spend sitting alone in my apartment using the computer, living vicariously through the NEETs on tohno-chan, reading heartwarming experiences about people who love their waifus.  And of course living vicariously through the exciting or romantic experiences of anime and video game characters.  I accept that the only way people will tolerate my presence, even on the internet, is by saying as little as possible and just reading or overhearing the interesting conversations and stories of other people.  And since hanging around people and listening to them in person is creepy as hell, I'll just do it on the internet.

The moral of the story is this:
Cherish your waifu.
Cherish your NEETdom.
Cherish your isolation.

Because as silly as it sounds, some of us envy you.