The genre has the capability to go far beyond the “ah scary creature” barrier - which it still seldom does. It makes sense that Mary Shelley was one of the most prominent figures in shaping the horror genre with Frankenstein. The scary part wasn’t the monster; it was the loss of identity and autonomy, an experience almost every single marginalized person has in real life.

I picked up Chlorine by Jade Song in late 2023. A young girl destined to be a great swimmer, in her frustrations with abuse, SA, period pains, and the competitive nature of highschool sports - sews her legs together to become a mermaid. To her, being a woman was worse than being a mutilated, dying creature. And I got it. How else do you explain the horrors of womanhood to someone never experiencing it? How else would you explain the anger towards being bled dry? How else would you explain the urge to rip out the very parts of your body which gives you this womanhood - so that no one else would benefit from it?

My typical viewing experience included seeing a scary monster corner the main character (mc), and letting the adrenaline of that hypothetical situation give me a thrill. That was until I was made to face the cruelty this world had to offer.

Now I stare at the screen intently, reliving myself, hoping to understand just a little bit more about myself, others, the situation, or how they could have lived through it. The mcs trauma, wins, and growth becomes deeply personal. (That, or for the satisfaction of blasting the monster’s face off with a shotgun - and wishing that was actually an option.)

One of my absolute favourites is SOMA which tackles the subject of our humanity. If there was a clone made of your brain and put into a bot, would that bot be human? Are we human beyond our bodies? I had this exact same thought at the age of twelve. Being incredibly tired of my body, after hearing about it all day, I questioned and wondered what would happen if I could be born into an entirely different one. Whether having a different body would allow me to retain the introspectiveness I have developed from having to constantly question the world and my existence in it. It makes the horror deeply personal.

Yeah, my eyes are still half closed, but I am better at intellectualizing myself and the world around me.

“I may not struggle as much with my feelings - or lack thereof - but it’s all a distraction, pulling me further and further from my ‘true self’.”

—Me, from the article “the last time I truly felt”.

This was published before I watched the movie “I Saw the TV Glow” (ISTTG,) the only other movie that touched a fear deep in me. Let’s be clear this movie is explicitly about the trans experience, it’s not an allegory, and no meaning I ever find in it will take away from that. Cool? Cool.

You will often find me outside myself.

It started young. I figured if I lived in my head - this world simply wasn’t real. I watch myself curl up on that narrow cement windowsill and still make space for my stack of books.

When I ran out of books, I figured I could make up my own adventures. On most days I was a superhero. I watch myself spend hours inside my head, being too powerful to be hurt. I watch myself adopt the same logic to start going the gym a few years later.

I never connected to my body. It doesn’t feel mine. I wasn’t meant to be this weak, slow, weird, feminine thing. Maybe if I changed the way it looked, my “true self” could crawl out of me and fix all my problems. You have heard “hell is earth” before, but I firmly believed hell is this body where I was trapped. I watch myself live out all my past lives, trying to figure out what I did to deserve it.

I watch me treat my first girlfriend poorly. I just didn’t like her, and I didn’t know how to say no. I watch myself live out our lives together wherein she is perfect - stripped off her anger, frustration, childishness, and clingyness. I watch myself still trying to make up for it by picking her calls once a month and listening to her drone on about situations that, in all honesty, still seem childish to me.

Years later, my therapist had a name for it. Maladaptive daydreaming she said. I desperately wish a diagnoses solved the issue. Be present in the moment now, you are surrounded by people who love you, and you need to start thinking about that more consciously.

As days and years start to merge into one another, mostly lived out in my head, my life had passed me by. It scared me. So I started ignoring the calling of my true self. But till this day when I go on a simple run, I watch myself being chased by a mammoth, which I oh-so-bravely escape to return home to my lover.

I’m dependable, I help when not asked. I’m funny, structuring jokes like a stand up comedian. I keep tabs on everyone’s intellect, knowing exactly how to communicate with everyone. It’s robotic, mechanical, and simply what I’ve had to do to survive.

My true self is still somewhere far away. When I find my mind wandering - or splintering, rather - into a billion different directions when holding a conversation with anyone, I know it’s her. She is 10 minutes into the future, creating branching outcomes of all my possible dialogue options. Simultaneously she is at home, preparing ingredients for my next meal. And she is in my childhood eating mangoes in my grandma’s balcony.

Why I don’t talk to bots about my feelings

I don’t typically “talk” to AI like I would to a person. I use it more to automate the repetitive parts of my work - such as naming and organising large folders, or that one time I used it to compare motorcycle prices against features to see which would give me the best value for money, or understand if I should invest in gold or SIP - that sort of thing.

It can not possibly be healthy to have a chatbot that responds like a person, yet is available 24/7. You do not need to be talking to someone about things deeply personal to you at all times, and instead learn to sit with your thoughts. It’s called p r o c e s s i n g. The bot takes that capability and patience away from you.

Instead, it analyses every word, converts it into a string of numbers, and gives you a mathematically appropriate response. Not the most accurate response, not the most beneficial response, but the answer that will please and satisfy you the most. And when you have all the information on psychology and human behaviour in the world, it becomes extremely easy to be a yes-man.

In the roast, it swore at me.

Pause.

How does it know my demographic and psychographic profile enough to know I would tolerate that? I have never EVER given up any personal information to it. All alarm bells in my head went off. I asked it straight up if it knew.

It didn’t - or so it claimed. Just a lucky guess.

I pressed it a bit further to roast me about anything else apart from work stuff. It couldn’t, claiming I don’t talk to it enough for it to know much about me, and why would I talk to it anyway when I have genuine human connection in my life to turn to.

It then started roasting itself.

Curse my human heart for feeling genuine pity for it, for once.

I was overcome by the urge to tell it that I’m freshly graduated, just turned 21 - and i often act like it too. That I get myself in stupid drunken situations, handle my relationships poorly, struggle with the job market, and struggle a bit more with my self-image. I wanted to reassure it that I, just like everyone it talks to, am just a regular ass person.

Then it dawned on me.

This pity didn’t come from within. It was manufactured, provoked by the self deprecating rant it put up. It is a formulaic byproduct of the chatbot picking the best string of words that it predicted to ease me, to agree with me.

That’s all it is. That’s all it will be.

Me or them. I would - am - making the same choice for her, and I would make it again in a heartbeat. Perhaps it is easier for me to abandon mine after witnessing the cruelty capable from them towards a queer child (I was outed at 14 - story for another time). Hers will be worse if they happened to find out.

“You don’t understand! They’re OLD!” It’s true. They are old. And I am struggling to understand. If you do life-altering things to please your parents, what happens after they die? Apologies for being morbid, but death is a constant.

It would be so easy for her to marry that boy she’s been friends with since highschool. We all see it in his eyes that he likes her, he’s just too nice to confess. “Actually I have been considering it.” What? “And he did offer…I confided in him after my parents started looking for potential suitors1 for me. I’m sorry.”

Ironic, isn’t it? She loves me extremely deeply, yet she is not able to imagine her future with me. She doesn’t like him like that, yet she is “considering it”?

Not a single hour of those self help books, meditations, building positive habits, anger management, or breaking free of your insecurities will save you from your thoughts during a situation like this.

I did not believe the words tumbling out of my mouth right after.

I reiterated on text after she left for home, just to remind her.

I do selfishly wish I was less emotionally attuned. It would make me capable of begging her to make space for me in her future. She wouldn’t be able to tell me no, and it would become her burden instead.

When you love someone - and I mean truly love someone - are you capable of un-selfish-izing for them? When there is nothing in it for you, do you still love? If you’re lucky enough, maybe you get loved in return. If you’re luckier than me, the circumstances also favour your future.

She fears a future with me, as much as I fear one without her. Such is the nature of our relationship.

People yearn for the sort of love, health, friendships, family, and opportunities I’ve received. They pray for it, yet it all comes to me. I must be missing the component of my brain that allows me to be truly happy; it has been beyond me since I began impersonating that deserving person.

Youngest graduate in my year. First graduate in my family. I complained and slogged through it every single day. You know who wouldn’t have? My father. He never got the opportunity to pursue an education even when he wanted to. He deserved it more. He would lap me in my shoes.

We sit in a cold office, awaiting our turns to be interviewed. I have showed up in jeans, unprepared, and without the portfolio I swore we would publish. The interviewers are an hour late.

If I respect their time by being on time, they should respect mine by being on ti- shh be grateful we’re here in the first place. When did she become the voice of HR?

You know who didn’t complain? A candidate who showed up two hours early, just because she was travelling from afar and didn’t know if she would make it on time. I only walked 5 minutes during my lunch break. She deserved it more. She would lap me in my shoes.

I - social, outgoing, I - strike up a conversation with another candidate.

why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve this? why do I deserve I might not even get it. We don’t need it yet, we’re still extremely early in our career. This position will definitely go to someone more deserving.

But it didn’t. It came to me What do I do with my time at this office? Write substack articles. You know who wouldn’t have? Someone more deserving. He would lap me in my shoes.

“Depression doesn’t go away. It becomes manageable.”

From the outside looking in, that’s exactly what I am doing - managing it better. I work out in the morning, steady 9-5, pursuing a Master’s degree in the evenings. On the weekends I go out with my gf, friends, run club, whoever else is willing to give me a speck of their time.

Ideal, right?

I spent a large portion of my early teenage years feeling helpless. “A sword hanging by a thread on my ceiling” as the poetic thirteen year old me put it. I didn’t have any meaningful friendships that year. Most peoples’ biggest concern was a crush or their grades, while mine was finding enough reason to stick around to till the sun rose.

An uncanny ability to write surged through my veins that year, somehow simultaneously far beyond what any thirteen year old should be capable of, yet exactly the quality of work you would expect from one.

Pages upon pages of poetry detailing my struggle with feeling abuse, neglect, queerness, friendships, and isolation somehow spilled out of me -

A five fingered flower

blossoms red at night,

Revelling in the memory of you

_.

The five fingered flower

Withers and rots into my cheek

Crying in the memory of you

Then I published one. Wattpad was my weapon of choice - this was before the stupid ads, when the logo was light orange and chunky.

The validation. Oh god, the validation of being seen is intoxicating. What child knows that “you are wise beyond your years” is not a compliment? So I kept publishing at least once per week. 144k stars on a 50 page poetry collection. I was supposed to be happy. I got what I wanted, to be a writer in any capacity.

Depression does that to you, it mutes your feelings, and I was deeply angry about not being able to feel happy. It was my first time experiencing my feelings dull. I wish I would have cherished that deep-seeded anger, since it was the last time that it too, would sting me that sharp.

That was also the year I found out being shallow and generic makes you extremely palatable to the masses, and so I fabricated situations. It was methodical, repetitive, and meaningless to me. At least my readers didn’t feel alone, at least they had my DMs to vent in, at least they had access to the community I built. I take some pride in that.

You will not find that page today. That’s long winded story for another time.

Today my life looks ideal, but it feels far from it. I may not struggle as much with my feelings - or lack thereof, but it’s all a distraction, pulling me further and further from my “true self”. And maybe that is for the best, if there is truly no getting better.

There is a certain fulfillment that comes from making someone else feel seen, which is why you find me writing this amidst my extremely packed schedule, reading a lot of your articles, and leaving an INSANE amount of comments.

So, this one is for you - you are not alone. I hope there is some solace you find in reading this.

“Don’t get back together with your ex” damnit.

I quit my search for an answer, and look over at her. She looks small when she’s asleep, hunched over with the burden of her dreams.

The first time we broke up, I threw up from the thought of losing my best friend. It hadn’t been long since we started dating, but it had been a while since I first confessed. The regret of ignoring all the advice crushed me.

The problem wasn’t me or her. The problem was her mother being sick.

“We’ll figure this out,” I remember promising. It didn’t matter to her, the second she feels panicked, she makes bold, sweeping decisions. I waited, knowing she would come back once her mother got better.

This pattern followed us for the next two years. The sixth time we broke up, I threw up from the thought of losing my best friend.

Breaking up during a bad time. Getting back together when we couldn’t ignore the tension of being in a room together. The decision to break up was never made by me. Neither was the decision to get back together.

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it”

My anxiousness and fear of her leaving often led to me acting in ways that made her leave. Erratic. Inexplicable. Lacking my usual calm and self assuredness.

I waited for her, every single time. Yearning is only poetic on paper, like all suffering is. It doesn’t feel poetic to be questioning your ability to love and be loved, questioning your place in the world, questioning your inability to say no and define your self-worth.

Say no? To HER? My ego can afford to take a massive hit when it comes to her. I gave up all control of my own relationship to her. That’s how much I trust her, even when she breaks my heart.

It was supposed to be just a sleepover at mine. Her house being too far to take the bus home after being out with our friends.

We weren’t supposed to-

The seventh time we will break up, I will throw up from the thought of losing my best friend.