24march

For a long time I've been aware of the fact that being homeschooled and functionally raising myself on the internet had had its repercussions, that it had made me different from the average person, but as time goes on I become more and more aware of the scope of how it has affected me.

A few weeks ago I made a brief tumblr post for an audience of myself about how I didn't feel like a human being, but rather words on a screen. In that moment I think I wrote it because I had been on the computer all day and had briefly lost my sense of self, but in the midst of writing something else in my journal today, I realised this feeling is more pervasive than I had really given much thought to. I was writing about how, today, I was talking to my brother about something, and instead of replying to what I said, he made a comment about how I talk like an alien. He mimicked what I had just been saying, how I had been saying it: I put the word 'the' somewhere it wasn't supposed to be, I constantly paused my speech in random places… it wasn't particularly pronounced, because it was my brother and I know he wasn't saying it maliciously, but still I felt a sudden self-consciousness, which only grew when I couldn't produce a proper response and just stammered something out in an even less coherent way.

Until I was nine years old, I was homeschooled. The only company I ever had in reality was my mother, my brother, and my father, the times he was home and not at work. My other relatives were very far, multiple hour drives away from where we lived, and I only saw them a few times a year for a short period of time; I didn't participate in any activities with other children, like sports or instruments or art. At that age, I was also not particularly interested in my brother, who was just a few months short of three years younger than me. On top of it all, my mother, the parent who was always home, never made any particular effort to actually raise me. Until I had access to a computer, it was just me and books, and when I gained access to one, which is functionally where my memories begin, it was just me, books, and the words and images on a computer screen: reality had little to do with me.

Most of my time on the internet was spent interacting with other people. My access was more or less unlimited. I was very active on a forum for roleplaying the book series Warrior Cats, and outside of that I often played online multiplayer games like Club Penguin and Transformice. Theoretically, I was aware of the fact that all of the people I spent my time talking to were other people, human beings like me, that they had lives they participated in on the other side of the screen; in reality those lives were as unreal to me as my own outside of the computer. High school classes, after-school activities, real life obligations: none of it had anything to do with me. It was fiction just like the obligations of my warrior cat OCs were. My life amounted to nothing more than words on a page and word on a screen. I learned about what being a 'person' in 'society' was supposed to be not through experiencing it myself, but through the limited view I got from others online. I didn't learn normal societal rules. Instead I was exposed to questionable porn websites through fake links that other people would share on the offbrand private servers I frequented, and learned some different rules than usual.

When I started school at nine years old, although I began to interact with more people in real life, my online life remained as active as ever, and it continued to be the most important part of my life. I remember that when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, in my first two years of school, I said that I wanted to be a web designer. I don't think I consciously learned that human beings are more complicated than words until I was in sixth grade, had the simple realisation that my friends did not actually like me, and suddenly understood that people aren't that honest or straightforward—that there's more to being a human being than I had thought. The shaky foundation of knowledge I held vanished beneath me, and suddenly I was at a loss as to how I was supposed to be a person. Thus my path began to developing social anxiety, and nowadays although I can passably interact with people, I'm constantly confounded by what rules I am supposed to be following, what it is I can and can't say, what it is I can and can't think, what is and isn't funny, what I should or shouldn't do… I no longer have an idea of what it means to be a human being, or a person.

Logically, of course, I know I inhabit the body of a human being. That I am a human being. The hands I see are mine, and the face in the mirror is mine, and they're all me. Yet my body feels less like me, and more like an avatar; the same as a profile picture on social media, or a player character in a game. It represents me, and is what other people see as 'me', but although I can customise it, it's never really going to be 'me'. I'm not something else in the body of a human being; not an animal, or a figure like a vampire, or anything like that. It's something more like, I'm a half-formed concept that got forgotten about and never picked up again. My personality is lacking, my interests are lacking, my hobbies are lacking, and it's because I'm not a real person, but just some words on a screen. I constantly forget to be thirsty; I only know to be hungry because it's what people complain about being the most. I pick up traits based on what human beings are supposed to be like and I enact them to mimic human beings so I can get by with my human body in human society. Of course, I'm not very good at it.







I always wanted to find some set of words to describe the exact way that I'm wrong. A simple set of words that I could use to tell other people, this is who I am. What I am. Why I am. In high school I was interested in things like personality tests such as the MBTI or enneagram, but I was constantly frustrated by them because I didn't fit exactly with what they described. I thought, this isn't really me. At the same time, I constantly searched for some psychiatric diagnosis that would explain why I am how I am. I already knew I had things like 'depression' and 'anxiety', but that wasn't enough. In April 2023, at eighteen, I was diagnosed with autism. It still wasn't enough. Even if I knew that you don't have to fit every box to be given a diagnosis for something, it still felt like something was missing. Where was the word that would justify and explain my existence as a human being? Back then, I read things like, 'autistic people may feel like they are a robot, or be described as robotic by others', and thought, that isn't me—even if I constantly wonder if my parents really gave birth to me, if I'm not something that looks like a human but is just slightly different, I know I'm a human being because of my body. I still know that now. But now I hate the idea that someone might read these lines of text that more or less describe the same symptom, read my diagnosis, and think, yes, it's all explained by that one word: autism. Suddenly the thought of being explained by a single word is sickening, instead of comforting. I continue to search for reasons for my existence, and though I can logic out many reasons and causes for the way I am, there's never really going to be any words for it. I'm never going to understand. Neither will anyone else. One key component of human beings is that they need a reason for everything. If they don't understand it, judgment is passed. I am always subject to judgment. I once passed on this judgment too. Now I write words, the essence of who I am, on a screen and hope that in the absence of a title or phrase to justify myself, these long explanations will. Even more than reaching others, I want my words to reach myself. Yet I continue to find them all lacking, even repulsive, and instead of finding understanding within myself, I keep on searching for it in the words of others: "Until then, Wujing had thought he was seeking the meaning of the world, not his own happiness. This was, however, an utter misconception. The truth was that he was, in an unusual manner, most tenaciously seeking his own happiness…" and "I began to feel that anything and everything was a lie. Politics, business, art, science: all seemed just a mottled layer of enamel covering over this life in all its horror…"