Public Apology/Confession

Hey guys. It's ingx24.

I understand a lot of you are upset about what happened today. I know I certainly am. I still plan on taking an indefinite leave of absence from my main twitter account, but enough people were genuinely hurt by what I did/said today that I figured I owed you guys an explanation.

To put it bluntly, the version of me that most of you know is a complete lie. The way I act on my twitter account is a carefully crafted persona, which I've used since at least late 2014 in an attempt to cope with my insecurities and hide my social awkwardness. Let me explain.

As some of you may have vague knowledge of (or even remember if you've been around long enough), I've always been a bit of a pariah in the speedrunning community. Since I became a part of it in late 2009, I've been known for being very emotionally unstable and having periodic outbursts of anger that are completely disproportionate to what was warranted. These used to happen MUCH more frequently, and with much greater severity, but they do still happen from time to time despite how much I've improved. In the middle of 2010 I started making a conscious effort to better myself, and while progress was a bit slower than I would have liked (thanks in no small part to a group of troublemakers on IRC who were VERY good at pushing my buttons to get me mad on purpose), things certainly did improve. The problem was that I still cared way too much what other people thought about me, and that was one of the reasons why some people were able to push my buttons so easily.

In early 2012, when I was at the end of my junior year of high school, an incident happened with a girl in one of my classes that caused a chain reaction, one which lasted for over a year and which drew me away from the internet and speedrunning for the most part. This was around the time I got my Twitter account, and anyone who followed me in those early days will tell you that my tweets were pretty depressing overall. To put it simply, I was quite a bit too open about what was happening in my personal life at the time, and I whined about it. A lot. And people didn't want to see that kind of stuff - most people followed me for speedrun related stuff, not to hear me make vague whiny comments about some girl IRL they had never heard of. So after a while I stopped doing that as well, and mainly just retweeted stuff I thought was funny.

After I graduated high school in June of 2013, having never gotten closure with this girl, I had a mental breakdown and regressed into a whole bunch of symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (which I was diagnosed with in 2007) that had been dormant for years, and I became extremely depressed for a very long period of time. It was so bad that I couldn't even play video games on consoles anymore because I would just get stuck in a loop of repeatedly checking (sometimes for literal HOURS) to make sure I turned it off correctly. Needless to say, this all drew me away from speedrunning completely for about a year and a half, until early 2015 when I started to make a bit of a recovery.

In late 2014, when my depression was at one of its many peaks of severity, I started using Twitter as an outlet for my attempts at comedy, which were heavily inspired by so-called "weird twitter" people like @dril and @Ironghazi. This was basically a coping mechanism; people often use comedy to deal with sadness, as famously expressed in the "I post ironic memes because I suffer from crippling depression" meme. And this is exactly what I did. I even made a second account for the shitposts that I felt were too hardcore even for my main account (this account still exists under the name @RandSpear). But over time, this shitposting began to take a more elaborate form.

Essentially, as I drifted back into the speedrunning community, I created a new persona, heavily based on "weird twitter" people (@Ironghazi in particular), that was both an attempt at comedy and an attempt to drive off my earlier negative reputation. Instead of being emotionally fragile or unstable, I became a clown who always had something (ostensibly) funny to say. Instead of caring too much about what other people thought about me and being vulnerable to trolling, I became a "professional shitposter" who was openly self-deprecating and didn't give a shit what anyone thought.

Instead of being too emotional and open about my personal life and who I was, I became a caricature of my actual self and tried to only show people what I thought would make me look cool and funny. And instead of being socially awkward and always saying dumb shit that got me into trouble, I would *intentionally* say dumb shit *all the time* so that people could never tell if I was being serious or not, and thus would tend to interpret any social faux pas as intentional jokes so that I wouldn't get in trouble. Essentially, I tried to purge my bad reputation by setting the bar intentionally low so that I couldn't have any meaningful "fall from grace". And I tried to protect myself from being hurt by others, by showing as little vulnerability as possible and trying to avoid close attachments whenever I could.

But the persona I use on twitter isn't the real me. It is a genuine manifestation of my sense of humor, to be clear. But it isn't anything like how I am in real life. And it's cracked quite a few times. I'm not the overconfident, callous, self-deprecating, doesn't-care-what-anyone-thinks joker that most of you know. I just play one on TV. (Or on Twitter, rather). In reality, I'm an overly-sensitive little kid who never fully grew up, who can't stand the thought of being disliked or of hurting anyone else's feelings, who's been hurt enough times that he's put up barriers against anyone but his closest friends. Ask anyone who talks to me privately, and they'll tell you I'm a MUCH different (and probably more likeable) person in private than I am on my Twitter account. I just never show that side of me to anyone else anymore, because I'm too scared that people aren't going to like it. (They certainly haven't in the past, that's for sure.)

None of this is meant as an excuse. I've been accused of making excuses or avoiding responsibility by playing the "emotionally unstable" card, so I just want to be clear that I'm only giving *reasons*, not excuses. Being emotionally unstable is a reason for why I act the way I do, but I don't mean it to be an excuse that absolves me of the responsibility to apologize and try to do better in the future. The reason I lashed out like I did today is because I genuinely felt like I had run out of chances. I've been through this same dance so many times - fuck up, lash out, threaten to leave forever, calm down, change mind, apologize - that I feel like I've become a lost cause. No matter how much I try to change, I can't truly change the fundamental character flaws that make me this way - my paranoia, my abandonment issues, my desperation to be liked, my inability to control my own emotions.

So I figured it was best to not even try this time, and to just go with a "nuclear option" - cut all ties with everyone, blow up everything, destroy my twitter account, and start from scratch somewhere else. But in the process, I only hurt more people. I came home to a lot of sad/angry/upset notifications on twitter, and it really hurt me to know that I had actually caused people genuine pain by saying the stuff I said. I didn't actually mean any of it; I just wanted people to think I was tough and unfazed by what had happened, and that I was too "cool" to be emotionally dependent on people who could yank their support from under me at any moment. I never meant to hurt anyone, and I feel awful knowing that I did. I honestly didn't think anyone would care enough to be hurt by what I said - I figured most people just followed me for jokes and didn't actually have any investment in me as a person. Clearly, I was a bit off the mark there.

I want to personally and publicly apologize to the following people: Torje (@Txrje), Fox (@TheWayfaringFox), Nathanisbored (@nathanisbored1), PoodleSkirt (@PoodleSkirt2), BounceyBoy (@Bounceyboyy), WooferZFG (@wooferzfg), Skozzy (@SkozzyM), Sporter (@SporterTwenty2), KirbyMastah (@KirbyMastah), and anyone else who was involved in this incident who I forgot and/or couldn't find in the various reply threads. I hope you can forgive me for all of this.

I will be taking an indefinite leave of absence from my main Twitter account, and will likely leave it deactivated until then. In the meantime, if anyone wants to keep in touch, I'm on Discord as ingx24#0648, and you can send a follow request to my alternate twitter account (@edx32) if you want to. (I'm somewhat selective about who I accept on my alt twitter account, so PLEASE don't feel insulted or unimportant if I reject you - there's just some stuff on there that's pretty sensitive that I'd rather most people not see.) I don't know when I'll be back on my main twitter, if ever, but I hope to be more genuine and open going forward.

Thanks for taking the time to read this if you did. It really means a lot. And again, I'm sorry for everything.

-Steven "ingx24" Brown