Everyday, I feel like giving up, everyday,it's a little more. 

I get up and put on my mask. I smile in the miror, trying to get it to look as real as I can, I succeed.

I am good at this, no one suspects a thing. I laugh on cue at the jokes I don't underestand, I sing along to the songs I no longer enjoy, I eat the crap they place before me. 

I am proud they don't know. I don't have to listen to their pitiful comments, their "We care for you", or their "Why can't you just be happy". The one that takes the cake however is "You aren't yourself anymore" and variations thereof; they don't understand. That smiling person before them, the one that will crack jokes, sometimes st my own expense, that isn't me. I have never been myself. In fact, if I tried, I wouldn't even have them around.

Isn't that sad? Isn't it terrible that I am the worse offender in this situation. I fake feelings I don't have. I pretend excitement, joy, surprise. When I get angry, I dont express it facially or verbally. no. I wait until I get home, and punch myself, I throw myself against the walls, screaming at the person staring back at me in the mirror for being so stupid, so stubborn and difficult. That person standing there is a dumb bitch. She can't even be happy. Look at her moronic face, looking for answers in places that don't exist. Don't I feel bad for her? Even now, she's searching, searching to find a reason for these words, a reason behind these thoughts. Yet, all she finds herself doing is seeking attention in the realms of the internet. 

This is wildly inappropriate.

Last night I couldn't sleep and after a while I remembered you, remembered all of you. Remembered burning it all for some stupid reason. So here's what I recall:

I wrote a thinly veiled open love letter to Swap. Massively embarrassing afterwards.

I read Anathem because my parents snail-mailed it to Shanghai. Almost immediately wrote a glowing review. It's really the best thing Neal Stephenson's ever written. I did a review of Haibane Renmei, which also happens to be the best thing Yoshitoshi ABe has ever done.

I played with a troll, ushd-something-or-other, name completely ungooglable.

I went to a few nodermeets. Columbus. Somewhere in New Jersey. Columbus again. Illinois, a couple of times. Indiana, where I ended up, probably for good. Lost a thing everyone can only lose once.

I dreamed about an internet encyclopedia of mathematics that wasn't hegemonic, disgusting, or useless. It didn't get off the ground. Nine years ago I didn't understand just how much work it was to make anything that isn't crap. John Baez has done markedly better with n-Category Cafe and the Azimuth Project.

What a stupid thing to have done. I'll never know what I was really like in undergrad. How awful and idiotic and self-absorbed. (Naturally still all three of these things.)

As time went on I kept feeling like I had less and less to say, until retroactively it felt like everything I wrote hadn't had any value at all.

Sorry. I was stupid.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.