s00ngone
All you can feel is the weather
- Mar 21, 2025
- 20
Trying to describe my reasons for ctb is bizarre. On the outside, everything looks fine: I'm young, able-bodied, currently being financially supported by my parents, intelligent - I have everything going for me to live a good, or at least decent life, no problem.
And yet...
If I was ever a person with interests and goals and a fighting spirit (debatable), I certainly am not now. And it's a bizarre tale behind why that is.
Let's call me J. I'm 22, living with my family of 4, mom, stepdad and sister in California. I'm working as a behavior technician for one of the better ABA companies in the IE (that I know of), which I was re-hired to after quitting recently - more on that soon.
My road to ctb hasn't been a surprise, exactly. I'd consider my life fairly traumatic, in my experience, and I've been depressed/anhedonic/generally mentally unwell for most of it. My mom was deported when I was 11, right after I'd been awarded a scholarship that would've been a full ride to college; I suffered through an intense, destabilizing relationship with my only friend in high school with a person with BPD who relied on me for their will to live (and whose ctb attempt I called 911 to stop one day after school); and most recently, I had an experience that put me so far out of touch with reality that it has made the idea of living a life at all completely impossible for me to comprehend, let alone want.
We begin circa a year ago. (I don't really care to keep my timelines accurate right now so bear with me - I'm just gonna guess what happened when and roll with it.) I'm roughly 20~ or 21~, already with few to no hobbies except excessive gaming, YouTube binging and... ruminating. Writing poems circlejerking my own misery, I guess. Becoming my own echo chamber. I'd been agoraphobically hermited since long before COVID, and at this point I'd become pretty seriously solipsistic. Not really any friends to speak of except the one guy who I spoke to/went out places with.
At some point in the recent past, I was working as an intern at a local water district through a sponsorship by a youth group that the previously mentioned guy, Cal, suggested I apply to. This was a welcome step for me at the time as I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and promptly dropped college when my own procrastination and inability to keep up with coursework caught up to me. For 6 months, I did education/outreach about water, and for another 6 months I learned real property stuff. The relevant part is that I had really bad OCD symptoms during this time, of varying flavors and degrees. Just-right OCD about what I said/wrote, moral scrupulosity OCD, the works. But by far the worst development was a nagging feeling that'd come up a few times, and in a few forms, since high school: gender dysphoria, or what I couldn't distinguish as dysphoria or trans OCD.
I was watching some ContraPoints at work for the humor and entertainment factor and the thought hit me like a truck: what if I'm trans? From that moment on, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It consumed my every waking (and sleeping) moment: what if? How would I know? How could I be sure? What if I decided I wasn't but then regretted it later on? And was the mere fact that I was thinking so hard about it enough confirmation? I'd been seeing my therapist for probably two years at this point and our sessions all began to revolve around this, to pretty much no avail. I shaved my legs/stomach. I tried on feminine clothing. Tbh, I still couldn't tell you whether I'm trans and repressing or what - it's still up in the air for me. Part of the chaos, the noise.
I'd always been existentially troubled, but it was starting to get really bad here. Super dissociated, constantly thinking about suicide, the end, my own depression, the state of the world, etc. etc... you name it. And with no one to really break up the stream of thoughts outside of the brief time I spent at work, I just sank deeper and deeper. There's a Reddit post I wrote during this time that I find haunting to read where I describe going to my only in-person friend's house (from high school mock trial) to watch a Marvel movie, feeling super dissociated and terrible, and the entire time feeling like I could "see through" the acting in the movie at the actors just playing pretend, arbitrarily. I wrote about watching Elden Ring shorts (the only thing that I cared to do for a little while) and feeling the same thing, hyperaware of the characters as models and encounters programmed in this fictional world developed by a game studio for the purpose of our, the gamer's, enjoyment... totally reductive, detached thinking that would become the basis of the episode that was to come.
I ended up going on a drinking binge at the height of the anxiety from the trans OCD/dysphoria conundrum. Just drinking half a bottle of my parents' vodka in a night, no regard for myself, clearly just avoiding myself in whatever way I knew how. I even attend an AA meeting online that night, drunk, per my therapist's suggestion. It's a bad fucking time. And I manage to rein in the drinking, thankfully, but then I replace it with a lot, and I mean a lot of weed consumption once I turn 21.
This is when things start going off the rails, and it only gets weirder from here. Buckle up.
Under the influence of weed, I start to overzealously examine some of my experiences, looking back on some haphazard scribbles and doodles from while I was at the water district job. I'd grab a sticky note and write whatever nonsense came to mind, completely stream-of-consciousness. It was 100% a boredom-killer, but in my high mind, I start to draw connections between my scribbles... and Doug Rattmann's from Portal. And what do I do? I essentially diagnose myself schizophrenic on the basis of these notes and other things "making sense" under the schizophrenic umbrella... which I can now see were not in fact the case, and were instead me gradually going deeper and deeper off the deep end under the guise of "self-exploration."
I mean, it should've been enough of a red flag when I was "using weed for self-exploration", but I digress. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I then retroactively create a narrative for myself where it makes sense that I've been schizophrenic all my life. I do actually have some pretty interesting memories of experiences from when I was a kid, like playing "creepy clown" on the playground and pretending there was a clown across the fence, but I turned these childhood experiences into some kind of mythological foundation for an "imaginary friend" that I convinced myself I'd been seeing since I was a kid. And the worst part is that... I bought it, fully. I indulged this self-induced psychosis like it was some kind of revelation, some kind of answer to a problem I'd always had. I was "talking to" this clown friend through notes, drawing him, getting high as fuck and taking photos of the backseat of my car expecting to literally see him there.
Like it was some kind of game.
Now, with the stage set for my mental state at this point, enter the reality creation shit. A lady's videos start appearing in my YouTube feed sounding very mystical. She's talking about manifestation and creating your own reality and shit (things that would ordinarily have sounded completely bunk to me, but clearly I wasn't thinking very clearly). At this stage, I'm willing to drop the $33 a month to join her "exclusive" group because why not? What else do I have to lose? And at first it seems like a great thing for me: a sense of community, a platform to connect with people...
Except it's the kind of people who believe in aliens, water consciousness experiments, and the worst of all, Alice in Wonderland-esque reality alteration and literal magic. Here is where things get batshit crazy.
I reach out to a "White Rabbit" character on this self-described "lab" and quickly hit it off at the height of this self-indulgent psychosis. Looking at it now, it burns my soul alive to see that I ever believed a single word coming from someone who described themselves as "three entities and three consciousnesses sharing a single body"; who proclaimed to be the literal god, and whose entire relationship with me was spent encouraging me to fracture my sense of self and believe such delusions as "I'm dead and this is the afterlife" and "the SCP Foundation is literally real"; and other senseless bullshit I can't even articulate well enough to describe now.
This is at about October of last year. And frankly, I'm feeling great! Because of course I am - I'm completely out of touch with reality and surrounded by people who encourage exactly that kind of thinking. "Alchemists," "sorcerers," people who profess to be in touch with the divine and the universe and with God, who manifest in esoteric spiritual dimensions and change reality through will alone. Sickens me to say now but it's where I was.
Around this time, I meet a guy on Grindr who I hit it off with great - shockingly well, for having introduced myself practically as "hi, I'm schizophrenic!" He had no idea the extent of my delusion at this time, but regardless he was remarkably open-minded, gorgeous, intelligent and altogether a really solid guy I would go on to talk to/go out with for the next few months - while and until my tenuous reality unraveled.
See, under the "guidance" of this White Rabbit, I was developing some kind of... magical ability? Some affinity for reality manipulation? A genuine belief that I would be able to "manifest" a future with this guy effortlessly? I was acting as some kind of envoy for the SCP Foundation, in my mind, continuously smoking weed and quitting my job (which I had already called out of plenty, pretty much whenever I didn't feel like going - all this is good evidence for why I don't consider myself a "good person" at all anymore, whatever that means) in the hopes that my very important, very consequential magical "work" would fundamentally alter the state of the world, of humanity, of the need to actually work at all...
Which, naturally, it did not. Nothing is more emblematic of this time and the depths of my delusion than an episode with a guy named Seth that White introduced me to... as an "alien." He invited me to watch Interstellar, which I agreed to, so he picked me up from the local library I was at (which, to my family, was essentially me hanging out with a total stranger out of nowhere) and we drove out to see it. Good film. Not so good was me agreeing to stay the night over at his house, drink, smoke, and have some fucking hape like we're best buds and I can totally trust this guy.
It's not like we're just hanging out being bros. At this stage in my fully-fucking-lost-it-ness I'm believing I can switch between alters and that I'm a vassal of Cthulhu and... just generally being very not grounded in reality, as I keep saying. It gets to the point that I'm channeling some alter that's "in love with him", that he's "in love with", and it's the strangest fucking thing I cannot describe. I'm in awe at the fact that this happened as I'm writing this.
The next day, we're out driving somewhere senseless, he's asking me to "use one of my alter spirits' future sight" to lead us down some path that'll be meaningful somehow, and we end up down these back roads an hour or something away from my house. He presses me on why we're there, I of course have no fucking clue, so we drive back to some "weird-looking" corner of gas stations and he starts imploring my "Doug Rattmann" alter to take us to the SCP Foundation, ASAP. Yes, it's that crazy. Yes, I was buying into it. Clearly, I was, because we spend the entire night there trying to... summon a portal? Or magic us to the Foundation? Get ourselves a limo ride there? I don't even know at this point. He presses me to practically interrogate this tattoo artist at a shop on the corner because it "seems anomalous" and "could be Foundation-affiliated."
I end up climbing a ladder in this tattoo shop bathroom to the building's attic for some reason, believing it to be significant.
When I fully fucking break down and lose my shit over my family AND the guy I'm talking to calling me nonstop because I was missing and no one had heard from me in hours, this Seth guy is completely unsympathetic... go figure. Same guy who was claiming to feel Cthulhu's evil grip from my heart.
I cut him off pretty soon after, not even for normal "this guy is clearly unwell and needs serious mental help" reasons but because he was asking too much of me to "magic up" too soon, I guess? A lot of this stuff is too bizarre to even properly communicate. Suffice to say that he's good fucking riddance - though with a huge caveat, one I don't even know how to describe.
He was convinced (and I was too, for a brief second) that we would move to Mount Shasta together with the guy I was seeing and... "study alien stuff"? So, this guy and me being a gay couple, he defends us against his homophobic grandparents, which leads to him being kicked out... because of me? There's no other way I can see it now, and I am so mortified, between all the other feelings I have from all this collapsing. We'll get there.
So I keep talking to this White Rabbit, building up this Wonderlandian mythos, until I hear from a Reddit friend who'd been a trusted voice of reason for some time in the midst of all my previous issues. She asks how I've been, I tell her about all the magical bullshit, and she very gently tells me that I've been very deep in what sounds like a cult. And when I hear it, I agree. Only, when I do actually cut this White Rabbit off and try stepping away from the (spiritual grift of a) "lab" I'd been engaging with up until then, it burns. Because then I'm landing back in reality, simple reality, as it is, and...
Well, we finally reach my reason to ctb. That I can't. Fucking. Do it. Just live. Be okay with living, being human, "participating." My mind was already broken by this point, but it isn't even the end - I'm holding on by a fucking thread, hoping for anything to keep me going, but when the guy I'm seeing invites me to LA with his friends to the LA Athletic Club, my agoraphobia and dissociation catch up to me and I just... completely shatter inside. The entire affair is too much. From being out with his friends, seeing the homelessness right next to the luxury, the arbitrariness of it all, my tiny world spanning my 4 walls of my bedroom suddenly exploded into the entirety of LA (yeah, I was that sheltered)...
Too much. So I regrettably go running back to White Rabbit to try to catch myself, and the spiritual bullshit continues. Every day, she's "rewriting reality" or "mapping out the 4d" or whatever the fuck. She's convinced humans are going to develop fictive alters within 5 years. It's the most bizarre stuff, but I eat it up, because what other choice do I have? Yet day after day since quitting my job so brazenly, sure that I'd be able to either a) find another one ASAP and easily or b) never have to work again, magically, I'm spending every day literally in my bedroom, sat at a single chair, texting her (and no one else), for a long time actively lying to my parents about having some medical scribe job just to keep up appearances. (This is not new behavior, I'm not proud to admit.)
It's at this point that ctb becomes a real, tangible thought in my mind. And it just keeps growing. And growing. And I just keep pretending, and pretending. I eventually come clean to my parents about not having the job, and go back to my ABA job that thankfully takes me back. I pay my parents $600 in rent, and come January, the guy I'm seeing is the one I go to to cover it because I would otherwise have been kicked out and homeless (which I now feel I deserved to be). I'm not even with this guy anymore - he has no idea the extent of my fucking craziness, and I just ghosted him for two weeks because I've been so out of everything I didn't even have the decency to properly break up.
So we reach the present day. I owe my parents nearly $2,000. The expectation is that I'll move out and buy my own car soon, get a better job, a certificate, a license, something to make a way for myself. But honestly? Honestly? All I can think about, all the time, is ctb. It's fucking crazy, people. I don't even know if I could call it "feeling numb" - I just feel nothing. At all. I've kept telling lies, like if a kid cancels my 5-7 session I stay out until 7 at the local cemetery just to seem like I'm at work, or not have to be home. I feign all my interactions. I don't feel good, I don't feel bad.
I just can't comprehend living a life. I couldn't before this and I sure as fuck can't now, after the sheer chaos of believing such pure and total nonsense. That I'd transcended humanity, that I'd touched God somehow, that... I wouldn't have to exist as this, somehow, for the entire rest of my life. I hate, absolutely hate, the thought of traumatizing my family, especially when I seem completely fine, just kind of weird on the outside, but...
I can't. I already have my SN on the way when the DMC payment posts. I can't imagine anyone has ever been in my position before, so I can't expect anyone to be able to relate, just... I'm sorry? I guess? Every day my mind circles the fucking shitshow my life has been up until this point, how I've never once been anything close to "normal" or "on a normal trajectory." How I've lied and cheated just like my own biological father, who's been an alcohol addict since before I was born. In a way it's like a terrible vindication that I'm "just like him" or "following in his footsteps." Some part of me burns knowing that we both weren't made for this world, I guess.
Every single part of taking part in this world overwhelms and terrifies me. I guess I shielded myself so hard from the realities of the world; of violence, of death, of suffering, of war, of genocide, of even simple givens like the need to work to survive, to feed yourself, etc. that when I realized that they were real, and unavoidable, it broke me.
I'm sorry to my parents. To my younger sister. To Shayan, my very short-lived boyfriend who I wish hadn't ever run into me. To my extended family. I'm sorry to everyone, despite how fucking empty I feel.
And yet...
If I was ever a person with interests and goals and a fighting spirit (debatable), I certainly am not now. And it's a bizarre tale behind why that is.
Let's call me J. I'm 22, living with my family of 4, mom, stepdad and sister in California. I'm working as a behavior technician for one of the better ABA companies in the IE (that I know of), which I was re-hired to after quitting recently - more on that soon.
My road to ctb hasn't been a surprise, exactly. I'd consider my life fairly traumatic, in my experience, and I've been depressed/anhedonic/generally mentally unwell for most of it. My mom was deported when I was 11, right after I'd been awarded a scholarship that would've been a full ride to college; I suffered through an intense, destabilizing relationship with my only friend in high school with a person with BPD who relied on me for their will to live (and whose ctb attempt I called 911 to stop one day after school); and most recently, I had an experience that put me so far out of touch with reality that it has made the idea of living a life at all completely impossible for me to comprehend, let alone want.
We begin circa a year ago. (I don't really care to keep my timelines accurate right now so bear with me - I'm just gonna guess what happened when and roll with it.) I'm roughly 20~ or 21~, already with few to no hobbies except excessive gaming, YouTube binging and... ruminating. Writing poems circlejerking my own misery, I guess. Becoming my own echo chamber. I'd been agoraphobically hermited since long before COVID, and at this point I'd become pretty seriously solipsistic. Not really any friends to speak of except the one guy who I spoke to/went out places with.
At some point in the recent past, I was working as an intern at a local water district through a sponsorship by a youth group that the previously mentioned guy, Cal, suggested I apply to. This was a welcome step for me at the time as I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and promptly dropped college when my own procrastination and inability to keep up with coursework caught up to me. For 6 months, I did education/outreach about water, and for another 6 months I learned real property stuff. The relevant part is that I had really bad OCD symptoms during this time, of varying flavors and degrees. Just-right OCD about what I said/wrote, moral scrupulosity OCD, the works. But by far the worst development was a nagging feeling that'd come up a few times, and in a few forms, since high school: gender dysphoria, or what I couldn't distinguish as dysphoria or trans OCD.
I was watching some ContraPoints at work for the humor and entertainment factor and the thought hit me like a truck: what if I'm trans? From that moment on, I couldn't stop thinking about it. It consumed my every waking (and sleeping) moment: what if? How would I know? How could I be sure? What if I decided I wasn't but then regretted it later on? And was the mere fact that I was thinking so hard about it enough confirmation? I'd been seeing my therapist for probably two years at this point and our sessions all began to revolve around this, to pretty much no avail. I shaved my legs/stomach. I tried on feminine clothing. Tbh, I still couldn't tell you whether I'm trans and repressing or what - it's still up in the air for me. Part of the chaos, the noise.
I'd always been existentially troubled, but it was starting to get really bad here. Super dissociated, constantly thinking about suicide, the end, my own depression, the state of the world, etc. etc... you name it. And with no one to really break up the stream of thoughts outside of the brief time I spent at work, I just sank deeper and deeper. There's a Reddit post I wrote during this time that I find haunting to read where I describe going to my only in-person friend's house (from high school mock trial) to watch a Marvel movie, feeling super dissociated and terrible, and the entire time feeling like I could "see through" the acting in the movie at the actors just playing pretend, arbitrarily. I wrote about watching Elden Ring shorts (the only thing that I cared to do for a little while) and feeling the same thing, hyperaware of the characters as models and encounters programmed in this fictional world developed by a game studio for the purpose of our, the gamer's, enjoyment... totally reductive, detached thinking that would become the basis of the episode that was to come.
I ended up going on a drinking binge at the height of the anxiety from the trans OCD/dysphoria conundrum. Just drinking half a bottle of my parents' vodka in a night, no regard for myself, clearly just avoiding myself in whatever way I knew how. I even attend an AA meeting online that night, drunk, per my therapist's suggestion. It's a bad fucking time. And I manage to rein in the drinking, thankfully, but then I replace it with a lot, and I mean a lot of weed consumption once I turn 21.
This is when things start going off the rails, and it only gets weirder from here. Buckle up.
Under the influence of weed, I start to overzealously examine some of my experiences, looking back on some haphazard scribbles and doodles from while I was at the water district job. I'd grab a sticky note and write whatever nonsense came to mind, completely stream-of-consciousness. It was 100% a boredom-killer, but in my high mind, I start to draw connections between my scribbles... and Doug Rattmann's from Portal. And what do I do? I essentially diagnose myself schizophrenic on the basis of these notes and other things "making sense" under the schizophrenic umbrella... which I can now see were not in fact the case, and were instead me gradually going deeper and deeper off the deep end under the guise of "self-exploration."
I mean, it should've been enough of a red flag when I was "using weed for self-exploration", but I digress. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I then retroactively create a narrative for myself where it makes sense that I've been schizophrenic all my life. I do actually have some pretty interesting memories of experiences from when I was a kid, like playing "creepy clown" on the playground and pretending there was a clown across the fence, but I turned these childhood experiences into some kind of mythological foundation for an "imaginary friend" that I convinced myself I'd been seeing since I was a kid. And the worst part is that... I bought it, fully. I indulged this self-induced psychosis like it was some kind of revelation, some kind of answer to a problem I'd always had. I was "talking to" this clown friend through notes, drawing him, getting high as fuck and taking photos of the backseat of my car expecting to literally see him there.
Like it was some kind of game.
Now, with the stage set for my mental state at this point, enter the reality creation shit. A lady's videos start appearing in my YouTube feed sounding very mystical. She's talking about manifestation and creating your own reality and shit (things that would ordinarily have sounded completely bunk to me, but clearly I wasn't thinking very clearly). At this stage, I'm willing to drop the $33 a month to join her "exclusive" group because why not? What else do I have to lose? And at first it seems like a great thing for me: a sense of community, a platform to connect with people...
Except it's the kind of people who believe in aliens, water consciousness experiments, and the worst of all, Alice in Wonderland-esque reality alteration and literal magic. Here is where things get batshit crazy.
I reach out to a "White Rabbit" character on this self-described "lab" and quickly hit it off at the height of this self-indulgent psychosis. Looking at it now, it burns my soul alive to see that I ever believed a single word coming from someone who described themselves as "three entities and three consciousnesses sharing a single body"; who proclaimed to be the literal god, and whose entire relationship with me was spent encouraging me to fracture my sense of self and believe such delusions as "I'm dead and this is the afterlife" and "the SCP Foundation is literally real"; and other senseless bullshit I can't even articulate well enough to describe now.
This is at about October of last year. And frankly, I'm feeling great! Because of course I am - I'm completely out of touch with reality and surrounded by people who encourage exactly that kind of thinking. "Alchemists," "sorcerers," people who profess to be in touch with the divine and the universe and with God, who manifest in esoteric spiritual dimensions and change reality through will alone. Sickens me to say now but it's where I was.
Around this time, I meet a guy on Grindr who I hit it off with great - shockingly well, for having introduced myself practically as "hi, I'm schizophrenic!" He had no idea the extent of my delusion at this time, but regardless he was remarkably open-minded, gorgeous, intelligent and altogether a really solid guy I would go on to talk to/go out with for the next few months - while and until my tenuous reality unraveled.
See, under the "guidance" of this White Rabbit, I was developing some kind of... magical ability? Some affinity for reality manipulation? A genuine belief that I would be able to "manifest" a future with this guy effortlessly? I was acting as some kind of envoy for the SCP Foundation, in my mind, continuously smoking weed and quitting my job (which I had already called out of plenty, pretty much whenever I didn't feel like going - all this is good evidence for why I don't consider myself a "good person" at all anymore, whatever that means) in the hopes that my very important, very consequential magical "work" would fundamentally alter the state of the world, of humanity, of the need to actually work at all...
Which, naturally, it did not. Nothing is more emblematic of this time and the depths of my delusion than an episode with a guy named Seth that White introduced me to... as an "alien." He invited me to watch Interstellar, which I agreed to, so he picked me up from the local library I was at (which, to my family, was essentially me hanging out with a total stranger out of nowhere) and we drove out to see it. Good film. Not so good was me agreeing to stay the night over at his house, drink, smoke, and have some fucking hape like we're best buds and I can totally trust this guy.
It's not like we're just hanging out being bros. At this stage in my fully-fucking-lost-it-ness I'm believing I can switch between alters and that I'm a vassal of Cthulhu and... just generally being very not grounded in reality, as I keep saying. It gets to the point that I'm channeling some alter that's "in love with him", that he's "in love with", and it's the strangest fucking thing I cannot describe. I'm in awe at the fact that this happened as I'm writing this.
The next day, we're out driving somewhere senseless, he's asking me to "use one of my alter spirits' future sight" to lead us down some path that'll be meaningful somehow, and we end up down these back roads an hour or something away from my house. He presses me on why we're there, I of course have no fucking clue, so we drive back to some "weird-looking" corner of gas stations and he starts imploring my "Doug Rattmann" alter to take us to the SCP Foundation, ASAP. Yes, it's that crazy. Yes, I was buying into it. Clearly, I was, because we spend the entire night there trying to... summon a portal? Or magic us to the Foundation? Get ourselves a limo ride there? I don't even know at this point. He presses me to practically interrogate this tattoo artist at a shop on the corner because it "seems anomalous" and "could be Foundation-affiliated."
I end up climbing a ladder in this tattoo shop bathroom to the building's attic for some reason, believing it to be significant.
When I fully fucking break down and lose my shit over my family AND the guy I'm talking to calling me nonstop because I was missing and no one had heard from me in hours, this Seth guy is completely unsympathetic... go figure. Same guy who was claiming to feel Cthulhu's evil grip from my heart.
I cut him off pretty soon after, not even for normal "this guy is clearly unwell and needs serious mental help" reasons but because he was asking too much of me to "magic up" too soon, I guess? A lot of this stuff is too bizarre to even properly communicate. Suffice to say that he's good fucking riddance - though with a huge caveat, one I don't even know how to describe.
He was convinced (and I was too, for a brief second) that we would move to Mount Shasta together with the guy I was seeing and... "study alien stuff"? So, this guy and me being a gay couple, he defends us against his homophobic grandparents, which leads to him being kicked out... because of me? There's no other way I can see it now, and I am so mortified, between all the other feelings I have from all this collapsing. We'll get there.
So I keep talking to this White Rabbit, building up this Wonderlandian mythos, until I hear from a Reddit friend who'd been a trusted voice of reason for some time in the midst of all my previous issues. She asks how I've been, I tell her about all the magical bullshit, and she very gently tells me that I've been very deep in what sounds like a cult. And when I hear it, I agree. Only, when I do actually cut this White Rabbit off and try stepping away from the (spiritual grift of a) "lab" I'd been engaging with up until then, it burns. Because then I'm landing back in reality, simple reality, as it is, and...
Well, we finally reach my reason to ctb. That I can't. Fucking. Do it. Just live. Be okay with living, being human, "participating." My mind was already broken by this point, but it isn't even the end - I'm holding on by a fucking thread, hoping for anything to keep me going, but when the guy I'm seeing invites me to LA with his friends to the LA Athletic Club, my agoraphobia and dissociation catch up to me and I just... completely shatter inside. The entire affair is too much. From being out with his friends, seeing the homelessness right next to the luxury, the arbitrariness of it all, my tiny world spanning my 4 walls of my bedroom suddenly exploded into the entirety of LA (yeah, I was that sheltered)...
Too much. So I regrettably go running back to White Rabbit to try to catch myself, and the spiritual bullshit continues. Every day, she's "rewriting reality" or "mapping out the 4d" or whatever the fuck. She's convinced humans are going to develop fictive alters within 5 years. It's the most bizarre stuff, but I eat it up, because what other choice do I have? Yet day after day since quitting my job so brazenly, sure that I'd be able to either a) find another one ASAP and easily or b) never have to work again, magically, I'm spending every day literally in my bedroom, sat at a single chair, texting her (and no one else), for a long time actively lying to my parents about having some medical scribe job just to keep up appearances. (This is not new behavior, I'm not proud to admit.)
It's at this point that ctb becomes a real, tangible thought in my mind. And it just keeps growing. And growing. And I just keep pretending, and pretending. I eventually come clean to my parents about not having the job, and go back to my ABA job that thankfully takes me back. I pay my parents $600 in rent, and come January, the guy I'm seeing is the one I go to to cover it because I would otherwise have been kicked out and homeless (which I now feel I deserved to be). I'm not even with this guy anymore - he has no idea the extent of my fucking craziness, and I just ghosted him for two weeks because I've been so out of everything I didn't even have the decency to properly break up.
So we reach the present day. I owe my parents nearly $2,000. The expectation is that I'll move out and buy my own car soon, get a better job, a certificate, a license, something to make a way for myself. But honestly? Honestly? All I can think about, all the time, is ctb. It's fucking crazy, people. I don't even know if I could call it "feeling numb" - I just feel nothing. At all. I've kept telling lies, like if a kid cancels my 5-7 session I stay out until 7 at the local cemetery just to seem like I'm at work, or not have to be home. I feign all my interactions. I don't feel good, I don't feel bad.
I just can't comprehend living a life. I couldn't before this and I sure as fuck can't now, after the sheer chaos of believing such pure and total nonsense. That I'd transcended humanity, that I'd touched God somehow, that... I wouldn't have to exist as this, somehow, for the entire rest of my life. I hate, absolutely hate, the thought of traumatizing my family, especially when I seem completely fine, just kind of weird on the outside, but...
I can't. I already have my SN on the way when the DMC payment posts. I can't imagine anyone has ever been in my position before, so I can't expect anyone to be able to relate, just... I'm sorry? I guess? Every day my mind circles the fucking shitshow my life has been up until this point, how I've never once been anything close to "normal" or "on a normal trajectory." How I've lied and cheated just like my own biological father, who's been an alcohol addict since before I was born. In a way it's like a terrible vindication that I'm "just like him" or "following in his footsteps." Some part of me burns knowing that we both weren't made for this world, I guess.
Every single part of taking part in this world overwhelms and terrifies me. I guess I shielded myself so hard from the realities of the world; of violence, of death, of suffering, of war, of genocide, of even simple givens like the need to work to survive, to feed yourself, etc. that when I realized that they were real, and unavoidable, it broke me.
I'm sorry to my parents. To my younger sister. To Shayan, my very short-lived boyfriend who I wish hadn't ever run into me. To my extended family. I'm sorry to everyone, despite how fucking empty I feel.
