echo ‘Hello, World’;

This was originally posted on June 29, 2025 on an incarnation of one of my several blog manifestations this last almost year-and-a-half. It was the first post made after all of my blogs and sites went down for a bit. Now it is presented here once again:

Who says you can’t go home again?

Canute Trøllson. You see, he took Ilsa Frikadeller up to Smooch Point to play Hide the Fingerborg. That’s a thimble. Well, Ilsa sat on his compass and they got so lost they walked to Finland! And that’s when Canute said, “You can’t go home again.”

But, maybe that’s stupid.

Or not? I mean, I’d like to think my stories are very refreshing. It’s like driving in the country and getting lost. You may not know where you are, but you always have a good time finding your way out.

I know that in the end… Life’s a ballroom, if you pardon the metaphor. If you hear something you like, don’t analyze it. Just dance to it.

You understand?

Okay, now that I’m done puking from the stench of that last paragraph, it’s time for the Shepherd’s Pie; the meat and potatoes.

Real Talk

The thing is, there’s a difference between not knowing where you are and not caring. Getting lost is fine, as long as you’re paying attention. It’s when you’re lost on autopilot that things go sideways.

Canute and Ilsa weren’t aware, they were horny; an exile of a very different sort.

I think of my stories as winding, dark backroads with poor signage, sharp turns, and no shoulders: dangerous, exhilarating, and enlightening. Like life, because they’re about life. I have no idea if that’s what they are, but it’s nice to dream, isn’t it?

Hopefully, once you’re inappropriately careening along, the bizarrely placed eyesore scenery encourages you to notice. And if you’re noticing, then congratulations, you’re half-alive!

If you’re noticing, and analyzing, then you’re finally ready to practice that well-honed deathgrip on the slippery ostraceous surface of the world, no matter how head-fogged, vision-warped, and tail-heavy you become. You hope it’ll crack open clean, but, you and I both know damn well it won’t. But… what else is there?

Life’s not a ballroom. Not really.

If it were, all I can imagine is that one time Van Helsing was sent by the Vatican in 2004 to stop the all-too-powerful Count Dracula.

He stands up top the ballroom ready to act, but he lingers, watching the fire-breather (a little too closely), the gowns, the spin. Dracula dips Anna in front of the mirror, and she realizes she’s the only person with a reflection.

Everyone else was all teeth, silk, and borrowed blood. They pretended the last one was charming.

But, to me, life’s a do-it-yourself karaoke rig set up in the supply closet of your now-discarded coming-of-age montage you were sure would be a bestseller. Every song is one you used to pretend didn’t mean anything, but you just happened to know all the words.

You know the place, that little corner that echoed into the hallway, haunted by the exact version of you that you thought you’d never have to grow out of, still gloriously failing at life.

When that one song comes on, they belt it out, wear the shirt, and spin the plunger-mic like they’re going to sleep with a nonexistent groupie after the get-together.

And reality?

They were drunk, off-key, and sounded like homicide by chalkboard.

But you enjoyed it the most because you had already given it language back when it hurt. You had figured it out long before, and the analysis was already pretty much done.

You understand?

Around here, you can technically go home again. But when you get there, is it the same street? The same house? Or will it all be long gone after the death of everything that barely existed before?

Will the video game store exist again, or will it now be a subtly kid-oriented Galaxy Gas vape shop, or some other random Internet-rot metaphor of dystopian collapse?

People think going home again is about comfort, and that’s precisely why you can’t go back.

Comfort? Existing!? Naaaaah.

Well, yeah… if you think home is still a place that should exist rather than a lingering psychic rash you’re compelled to constantly itch until it bleeds, then no, you can’t go home again.

As for analysis? Sure.

Analyze away! Analyze all the time! Analyze everything!

Everyone wants to be present, but no one wants to talk about it anymore, or worse, give any emotion real meaning. They took the lines ‘words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm’ as if it was a gospel choir and decided that only silence is golden.

Everyone seems to think being present means smothering all thought beneath a cozy, weighted blanket of now, where all that’s left is a full-on, loving embrace of the allegedly gentle phenomenological.

They tell you what you feel (because you don’t know):

• that you don’t believe you can feel better;
• that you’re not worth anything;
• that you’ve talked yourself into believing it’s not possible because your father taught you to be so terrified of your own emotions that you can’t feel them anymore but that doesn’t make him a bad person justabadexample…

Inhales

They type (because disconnected voices are horrible),

“You can’t out-intellect your feelings. That’s not how it works. You have to feel them.

“It’s the only way to live authentically.”

Don’t analyze! Don’t spew Kantian word-salads about stupid obscurantist defense mechanisms nobody ever brought up! Don’t write 5,000-word essays that they read wrong!

Just agree appropriately.

So you reply, “Okay, fair,” and it’s not enough.

But, why?

Why is analysis so horrible, unnecessary, not to ever be shared except with paid professionals, and never, ever typed in any reasonable conversation?

Your crazy is only a problem if it’s interrupting someone else’s narrative.

Analysis isn’t anxiety. And anxiety isn’t analysis.

It’s not that little voice asking if you left the oven on during sex, or if your tone is unsafe. It’s not overthinking with pastel slides, weaponized self-doubt dressed up as growth, or defending yourself against it.

Analysis is sweating in the moment.

It’s full-body presence with no back support, blood in the brain, and not just breath in the belly. And for what? Because something in the room isn’t right and you’re the only one willing to say it.

Anything else is a free trial disguised as a wellness app subscription: breath-work with a panic button, insight behind a paywall, and a smile that wants you to shut up first.

You’ve done the analysis decades earlier, and you know exactly what’s happening while everyone else pretends not to flinch because they resent you for understanding, and for what they know you’re about to say.

Oh, happens to me all the time, especially back when I was a professional anthropomorph from the future that traveled back in time unwillingly, and we all know everyone hates air quotes those people. They’re species-phobic, clearly, and every negative thing they say about me is based in taking advantage of my differences unfairly. You see how that works?

That’s what I was back then, and people just, didn’t like it.

Back then? What? Back when?

Positivity that can’t hold pain isn’t strength—it’s staging.

Ignoring the negative isn’t positive. We can all agree on that. It’s pretty basic, I would think, but you never know. Some people don’t have the greatest parents.

Ignoring the negative is just the first stage of denial, but these days it’s learned to use affirmations, so it’s okay.

Truth be told, I wasn’t really supposed to stay. Even if it was timeline-rape, not on a legal level, just a moral one, and it wasn’t going to ever last forever.

But I didn’t always know that.

I still have unfinished business with a guy in a horse mask who owes me $20, but doesn’t everyone?

It would all be a lingering sense of guilt if I were like everyone else pretends to be, but I packed that in a suitcase in 2008 and left it in someone else’s hotel room, so…

shrugs

People used to draw their names with markers or Sharpies, crooked, loud, and a little sweat-stained. But now they’re all stylized as a mix between failed ’00s tech startups and urban collective trauma graffiti.

People used to paw at each other playfully behind closed doors in crowded, makeshift dens. They fucked the rest of the world together. Now they wage trench wars over label protocols with blamolition-grade semantics and weapons of mass projection.

People used to dream of being with a group of people that shared just enough emotional understanding that nothing had to really be said, and they didn’t care how it looked.

People used to be walking pieces of art, as they were inside, no matter how ugly, cringe, or smelly, and were meant to be discovered, not decoded.

Now, before you can even have a discussion, you need a complete map of everyone’s neopronouns, xenogenders, gradated sexuality spectrums, romantic configurations, kink settings, trauma-response triggers, diagnoses, safe words, hard boundaries, and all corresponding treaties. You need to understand all the delicate trypophobic patterns in the carefully curated topology of their desire and being, because that’s just who they are.

Yeah, we can tell!

Rather than a fun conversation, it’s an affirming but declarative statement of social customs.

And it’s still not even about identity; that’s just the etiquette. It’s about performance rather than intimacy, a show for the machines of loving grace.

And if you disagree, or point that out, you’re a Nazi. You’re reduced to the wrong variable in someone else’s “happy math.”

It doesn’t help if you’re white, male, cisgender, blond-haired, blue-eyed, have a Hebrew first name, middle name, embrace a Jewish-sounding last name, and, on top of all that, are of German descent.

God help you then.

I mean, I stopped attending things like conventions a long-ass time ago. We’d already survived the siege of the ‘Yahoo Chatroom Furs.’ My second, and last, small southern convention rests up there on my top ten worst experiences, despite discovering Rock & Rule. (First convention was Meet The Feebles which was fucking amazing.)

Social comparisons are a bitch aren’t they?

But, as my oldest brother taught me, I digress.

I always knew the collapse wouldn’t be pretty, but I didn’t realize how unrelentingly psychoconsumerist the machines would make us. Being stitches in a fabric of gross mediocrity, we all experience the undying need to be special; to be purple.

But lately, fulfilling the prophecy, we stopped growing out of it. People haven’t grown out of a lot of things, and because it plagues so many we now mistake it for the opposite.

Due to this, so many carry strange, superficial notions around like spiritual fidget toys. Shit like: once you see it coming, it will hurt less, if at all. If you predict the collapse, you’ll slide under it like a well-timed video game character ducking into a secret bunker with a heart container.

Naming the pattern will stop the blade.

Understanding the storm means your house won’t flood.

Spotting the sniper will keep the bullet you saw fired in slow motion from tearing through something vital.

“Well, at least you’re prepared.”

I didn’t get a Boy Scouts of America badge in Enduring the Psychic Wilderness.

No, shakes head I’m not even prepared; there isn’t any preparation; I’m just screaming more eloquently.

I wasn’t even in Boy Scouts, I was a 4-H kid and they don’t have badges. Though, I did read the manuals and magazines as if they were powerful esoterica of boyhood at my friend’s house.

At least, until I discovered the stack of Playboys in the basement.

Bracing isn’t a substitute for not being hit.

Watching it approach in 4K isn’t a comfort.

You can see the ship going down. You can write essays about the leak, map the rivets, hold a TED Talk in the bathroom, put on a play about it, and lose yourself in phone interviews with high-school students making fun of your newly minted political party.

You can cry, bleed, walk, snap pictures, and catch all the orgasms possible, but…

You can say everything and nothing, try to do it all in your mind, try to get it all in line…

And you can flail around in agony as those who could help the most lose it before you do and wither away in front of your eyes…

It still goes down.

You still drown.

And people will blame you for not swimming harder because you saw it coming, or worse, not warning them even though you did.

Foresight doesn’t grant immunity against the fall.

It gives you time to prepare. You try to grab a decent pair of boots, gloves, a hat, a tail… You know… you, before it all goes down.

That’s not safety either because it isn’t to avoid anything. That would make too much sense!

However, it doesn’t make sense because nothing will ultimately change what happens, really. I already wrote this story, and people refused to publish it. It was too perfect.

It doesn’t make sense, really, though; “That would make too much sense!” is just something to say to feel safe.

All of that, all that leather and fur and epistemology and flair, is for falling in style.

If you have to listen twice, it’s because you keep hoping to hear what you want.

Hearing it twice won’t change the truth.

Come on. Be honest.

You’re just stalling for a version that hurts less.

That’s the real truth of it. It’s not that the message wasn’t clear the first time, or that the words didn’t land; it’s that some part of you still held out hope that maybe, if you just waited, it would come softened like butter, packaged with nicer graphics, and have an apology attached, or an exit clause, or a way to pretend the facts weren’t facts.

That maybe, the truth could arrive dressed in just enough chiffon and tulle that it wouldn’t demand anything of you. That it could just be noticed, and you could say your peace and then detach, ethereally gliding back into your hidden forest glen and nothing would have to happen next.

I know this because I do it too, partially.

I’ve listened twice. Three times. Four times.

I constantly replay entire conversations in my head, which is why I remember them so well. Not just fights, or upsetting news, or insults, but every single damn conversation I’ve ever had in my entire life.

However, sometimes it’s in desperation: I search for nuance, grace, shared failure, disconnect—something, anything—trying to find a version where I misunderstood and things wouldn’t have to change.

But, it’s just not there, and I’m not going to lie to myself and make one up.

And then, I know.

Watching the lamb being beat with a board in a fit of rage, sitting there on a makeshift teenager’s bed in the trailer-home’s back room in Jones’ court, anger welling up inside generic upholstery in a sterilized group meeting room three hours away from home, witnessing a YouTube video all about me I had no idea was going to be posted…

Things already changed and whatever was there is already gone. And no matter how long I try to hold on to it, telling myself we’re still friends, my affections slipping through my digits like sand, my respect evaporating, and that maybe someday we’ll look back on this and roll our eyes…

All that’s left is radical acceptance.

You can’t care without caring.

You can’t change without changing.

You can’t learn without learning and expect everyone to keep pretending you did just because you journaled about it or used the word ‘process’ in a sentence that wasn’t earned.

I’ve been to process. Dozens of times. Against my will. You weren’t there.

You don’t even talk like you were ever there.

But do go on…

You can’t just say “thank you for telling me” and expect the consequences to vanish like you’ve cast some morally adequate spell. It might work in a conversation where everyone’s pretending their trauma is a screenplay…

But it doesn’t work with me.

The collapse has been pending for twenty years dammit, and you want this?

You want to be one more in a long line of caricatures who insist they genuinely know, far more than I ever will, what I think, what I feel, and most importantly, how my entire being is, all based on a strategic retreat from what’s coming?

No matter how naïve they think I am, or how ignorant they want me to be, and they always do, it doesn’t change a damn thing about what I am and what will exist.

It’s still coming for both of us. It’s still coming for everyone.

You are not the first, but one of many, and from every one of them, I’ve learned. You are a highly personal raindrop in a collection bucket outside that I use to water my marigolds.

Or are they peonies?

I may not know my flowers…

I’ve spent too many years having my experiences absorbed into someone else’s narrative, usually framed as insight. This iteration, I watched someone twist an entire five-year relationship into a completely imaginary and artificial context to serve whatever version of themselves they’re gold-versioning this release season.

I’ve had my clarity portrayed as aggression (the tone isn’t couched enough), my silence as a deliberate triggering rather than my own trauma-response (I don’t have any), my countering as manipulating the situation (because I’m not supposed to make arguments, just make space and listen), and my impatience as an unstable lack of empathy—

And then implicitly expected to apologize in private (for their sake), fix it, and applaud someone else’s healing arc for learning how to say “no” to the person they hurt.

I’ve never been interested in that kind of repair. And I never will.

Hearing it again won’t change the truth that has already been spoken. It’s just emotional stalling. If you’re still hoping that repetition will replace responsibility, I can’t help you. Not that you ever asked for any of this anyway.

I lost interest in potentially helping you, so you’re on your own now. I was so concerned with the delays, I offered my husband writing assistance. You know, what was most likely driving you away from Maus because avoidant procrastination is a thing?

shrugs

I’m not a peer counselor, so, who knows for sure?

But, again, you never asked for any of this.

Of course you didn’t. And now you can’t.

Judge that with whatever shallow self-serving altruism you desire, but I didn’t see you extend fuck-all to me. Ever.

Oh, no, wait, I was “accommodated for YEARS,” that was it; that’s why you don’t have any motivation to afford me a shred of humanity now. I think I heard it the first time, Blanche.

I’ve already lived the version where I waited; where I made myself smaller; where I let someone else drag out their internal monologue while expecting me to conveniently destroy myself to reduce cleanup. I’ve stood in that theater, in that spotlight, waiting for the line that would explain everything.

Multiple times.

And all I’ve ever received was a half-smile, a chuckle, a soothing aggrandizement, and the sentence, “I have a problem.”

Oh, really? You don’t say! I’m shocked.

I don’t have any reason to expect anything more, so I don’t.

They can keep hugging their versions of me, or the advice it needs to hear ad nauseum, if it makes them feel safe. They can hold their oubliettes and resulting assumptions close in hopes it will insulate them from the coming holocaust-winter I’ve been telling everyone about.

That’s fine.

But I won’t be there anymore. I’m not coming back. It’s never going to change on that end now. I’ve been given every reason to come to that conclusion, so…

Who am I to keep people from getting what they want?

I already got the message. I’m not waiting for the tone to change.

You can’t touch without touching, stay without staying, need without needing, ask without asking, or choose without choosing.

You can’t leave without leaving, and especially, unequivocally, unmistakably, expect me to pretend otherwise.

After everything, after four decades, after the special geeky everything-number of great nostalgia, I still managed to fail in anticipation, ’cause that’s what I do. I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to keep trying to interface with this simulacra of humanity. I didn’t think it would get this bad before the collapse.

But, apparently, it did. A month ago, when I was here, it was. A worst fear came true. Nowhere left to go when ground control is all you know.

And that’s why I’m finally gone.

Hope it’s warm.

Being the hero of your own story is easy, right up until someone else starts narrating it for you.

And they always do.

Soft voices, jump cuts. Phrases like “what I’m hearing is,” or “I think what you meant,” or “this isn’t about you,” or worse, “it’s about your tone.” You hear them and look around for a camera, momentarily wondering, “Am I in therapy, or is this the pilot episode of My Life as Misunderstood By You?”

But, is that voiceover narration, or twice-fold good-faith listening? Debatable, I guess, if you really, really need those phrases to be helpful. But I find it hard to argue with, “Quit trying to make yourself the main character when you’re just a side character at most.”

It’s not even voiceover, really. It’s more like a poorly dubbed analog horror VHS tape of your own existence produced in 2025 for a hopeful, but quickly abandoned, YouTube ARG. You watch it, but someone else wrote the subtitles, edited out your lines, and added stock footage of themselves learning essential lessons about boundaries while you flailed around in the corner like a half-rendered polygon glitch from a forgotten Dreamcast game.

It’s all so believable.

At some point, once it becomes crystal clear it’s too dangerous to ‘allow’ you to continue being who you are, you’re no longer the protagonist of your life. You’re not even the miscast villain in theirs. You’re not that important, obviously.

You become just another lump in the Katamari-ball of people they’ve vacuumed up as fixed points of vague projection in their livestream-monetized recovery arc.

Because of that, once the disconnect occurs, whatever they thought about you is, and always has been, reality, because, in the end, it always was.

And what character are you?

You’re the vaguely toxic ex, the cancellable online weirdo, the certified “lesson,” the narrative prop for someone else’s emotionally curated healing carousel. The profoundly mentally ill gingerphobic misogynist with an unacceptable lack of impulse control that you refuse to ‘fix’ as evidenced by never atoning for the big ‘mistake’ you made on Twitter. You’re the enigmatic that no one can really figure out what the hell you were saying (phtbthbhtbthth), but they all know, for certain, you attacked a small child and are suspiciously pedophile-adjacent because you followed an acceptably-virtuous pedophile’s private account even though you can’t remember ever doing that.

The virtuous pedophile does, though.

And, given all this, you are clearly the sociopath next door.

All while they insist—so bravely, so weepily-angry, that they “hate having to set these boundaries,” but must because of “their healing.”

But what’s there to hate? How expensive they are?

What are you missing out on if boundaries are the pinnacle technique towards leading the perfect life?

No one ever tells you how expensive other people’s self-improvement really is. It turns out that when they “just can’t be around that energy,” you’re the energy and the invoice.

I’m getting ahead of myself, sorry. I tend to do that. So let’s hit F5 in the context window.

This whole phenomenon ain’t new to me, you know.

Not at all.

One week into Asher: The Miniseries, I decided to write Living Forever, which is a very long, horrible, and no-good poem. I’m not sure which version I ended up with, but I think it’s the shorter one. That’s right, wherever it will be posted eventually, the original was longer. Like James-Cameron-Titanic-Script long with a working title of The One Where I Was Right, But It Didn’t Matter (And Everyone Hates Me Anyway) authored by A. C. Gmork Labyrinthian Kadran X. H.

And I really thought this was it—the one. The sparkling gemstone. The glorious shard of truth-poetry that was going to vault me straight onto a real stage, like, real real, not just the cracked-floor vinyl of cosmic journaling in the bathroom that happens to have been put on a stage.

Because I was an idiot.

It was raw. It was poetic. It was… well, excruciatingly detailed. Honestly, its wind was so long you could’ve used it to cross the Atlantic in a poem-powered paddle boat. No motor. Not even really a metaphor. Just… self-indulgent detail.

YouTube wouldn’t exist for another year, so I guess it had to happen here.

I read it on the open-mic stage of the Mercury Café. I’d read there before. I was with Calvin, my first boyfriend, and even he cringed. People clapped, which sounds great, until you realize they were trying to get me off stage.

Twice.

And I did not get off, in any form or fashion.

Twice.

When I was finished, I was gently led off stage by someone, which had never happened before. They had the most understanding expression I’ve ever seen. They gently whispered to me, “You should probably edit.”

And then, I sat down amongst all of them with my much older boyfriend, and I was just an insignificant little gay boi from a small town next to someone who was far too old to be sitting there.

They watched in real time, with furtive glances, as the realization descended upon my frame once again: there was no yellow brick road. Not for me. None of that is ever for someone like me.

I went from bright and hopeful poet to worse than the fragrant, I mean, flagrant bushy-browed old-school newspaper Democrat whose refrain of every poem was, “THIS IS THE DEATH MACHINE!!!” shouted like it was 1999 and he was reading from a weird fax that was actually just spam.

What I was in my mind, and everything this poem represented, with a subtle nod to the impending destruction of everything as we know it, was the truth. This was around 2004, so it was twenty-one years ahead of its time. But it was too personal, too obscure, too abstract, and for all things loving and holy, just. too. fucking. long.

It happened again(!) with the edited version at The Kasbah. No one was interested. It didn’t work. And a vastly different narrative was being presented to me, one that I could not deny if I wanted to face things honestly.

I left as soon as I could, defeated. I was going to live forever, I was certain, but I was already aware that everything had changed.

So was everyone else, and I’d never be there again. And I never tried to be.

And sometimes, that’s how it goes.

I was a hero in my own story, for sure, but I was definitely a bit bruised by the rejection.

Here I was, warning about the collapse twenty-one years early via poetic memoir, but burying it under analog metaphor, digital yearning, and a bunch of details that didn’t matter.

It was abstract and intimate simultaneously, as one does. It was dense and immature in the way a neutron star is dense and immature, and just as inviting.

So what do you do?

You grow. But I was naïve, fresh off a six-week college career and a professional job as an insurance agent, and adopted ‘discipline’ instead of introspection.

When the third edit came, it wasn’t on the poem; it was on me.

A sly, quiet, unassuming narrator slipped into the room and said, “Here’s what really happened.” And, after also being ‘attacked’ online (that’s how they’d put it these days, I guess) for my earlier work, On Being Different also by A. C. Gmork Labyrinthian Kadran X. H., because of course, unfortunately, I didn’t have the stamina—or the audacity—to correct them anymore.

I stopped reading at open mics. I suppose I stopped writing poems regularly after a while. And after an extended period, with a few new stresses, I simply forgot to write.

It’s not like anyone seemed to want to read it anyway. My brother described Perfect‘s purposeful dedication to extreme passive voice as a 300-pound black lady sitting on your chest.

And On Being Different? It was a highly stylized version of society, unrecognizable to most people, and so to caricature that with abstract meta-satire was going to lose an audience that would have no idea what you were talking about, and wouldn’t believe it if they did.

That’s how my brother Asa would talk back then.

But now, twenty-five years later, everyone seems to assume I just wrote it because, look around, and somehow, it’s still bad.

It’s not that anyone wanted me to stop writing. No one said that, of course. They hoped I could write better and achieve more of what they believed I wanted.

After a brief stint as a government employee working at the elementary school I attended, I finally crashed upon moving back to Fort Collins. And it was big, bold, and beautifully horrific. Just for me.

I spent the next fifteen years struggling and barely writing anything. Barely programming anything. Barely doing anything. Barely being anything, in the end, despite everything I was before.

I had let the ‘disciplined’ narrator ruin my life, but at least I felt everything 24/7, 20,000 leagues deep, despite my father teaching me to be oh so terrified of my emotions. I suppose he was too preoccupied with his own problems to enforce his alleged bad-example wisdom.

Now, on the flip side of my story, bereft, resentful, confused, and with all my 9th-grade confidence once again drained, I struggled to become the hero of my own story.

The problem with always being the hero (or heroine) is that the hero never really does anything wrong.

Sure, he makes mistakes, he missteps, he fouls up a situation because there has to be a story, but in the end, it’s all okay. If not, he’s not the hero; he’s just the protagonist.

This is plausible because the reader/viewer/listener/consumer-of-pieces-of-media-with-a-bad-diet approaches the hero with the assumption that they really mean well, they’re a genuinely good person, and they’ll do the right thing because that’s what they always, always, intend to do.

It’s called suspension of disbelief for a reason.

I didn’t just wake up one day and decide,

“You know what? I’m tired of this shit. I hate everyone.

“I didn’t get what I deserved, and I know because I’m a white cisgender male who’s mentally ill, and my specialness, my overbearing insight, should be rewarded by these plebes.

“So I’m going to be the biggest fucking unaccountable (to what?) asshole to every decrepit weakling I can find because I loathe my very existence and have no self-worth because it doesn’t exist.

“And just to piss everyone off even more, being the evil little basement dwelling abnormal man I am, I’m now going to pretend all of that is false, essentially lying to myself, and argue inappropriately, even obsessively, with all red-headed females, or any woman, that says otherwise.”

That didn’t happen.

Unless you’re Liana Kerzner, then that’s precisely what happened, and it’s my father’s fault.

Who’s the hero supposed to overcome, though, if the villain is afforded any shred of human decency? Afforded the always demanded assumptions of goodwill, of a good nature, of mistake or misunderstanding, of frailty, or just a moment to be heard and resolved?

That’s why it’s a story, and not real life.

Except when it is.

Ever since my father starved himself to death, I think I’ve been untethering from this timeline in slow motion. The timeline I’ve been in love with. It’s taken years, and I think I just needed a little extra push to finally stop walking through the fields of what used to be, observing the husk of what people still try to perform as life.

Thanks Liana! I knew my faith in your integrity wasn’t misplaced.

It’s not the collapse that would hurt me. It’s that, despite coming back, nothing was changed. I spent far longer on my own suffering and misery than on any mission I could’ve adopted, all because of that stupid narrator. But that’s just an excuse, really. It’s probably because it wasn’t my choice, and I don’t do duty. Ever.

People hate it because they think I owe them something but they never tell me what it is so I could just get it over with.

I stayed long past the point of recognition because part of me still thought I could make a difference. That’s the saddest part. It wasn’t the pain that broke my heart, for the umpteenth time, it was realizing no one wanted help.

They just wanted approval.

So I slipped in and zipped the suit back up, adjusted the ears, and looked one last time in the mirror. I finally saw what I had been looking everywhere for: the stranger they thought they understood.

Then I stepped through.

And I went back to where I came from.

It had always been that simple all along, I guess.

Who knew?

And where did I come from? Oh, you know, that place and time so dear. You’ve seen it, but probably just in your dreams. You know the one, it’s in books and movies… that place after the collapse.

You can forget fungus zombies, Big Brother, childhood liaisons in the bushes of the Hatchery and Conditioning Center, murderous robots, bizarrely clad leather daddies wearing only harnesses and Speedos, and all that raspberry jazz.

And if your expectations are for a fully vaccinated, affirming, and happy population (as if 1984 and Brave New World weren’t), then you’d best drop that as well.

All the nice stories broke down, everybody went sideways, and everything that wasn’t a follow-for-follow safety net became leftovers.

It’s humorous to me because it’s brutal here, but so much better than where I was; where you are now. That’s because it’s real, and in the real world, I am what I’ve always been: a half-wolf, half-skunk anthropomorph with red-black fur, a sharp gaze, an impossible grin, and a leather jacket zipped up against the psychic fallout that’ll be swirling for decades.

And finally, finally, everything makes sense again, because here we don’t apologize for not warning each other over every perturbation. We don’t shrink to stay soft, and we don’t confuse presence with submission or call truth cruelty just because it’s cold and uncomfortable.

That’s because most everyone who made that their entire lives, well, they’re not around anymore.

And, of course, I like the cold. Winter’s the best.

I didn’t leave because I hate anyone. I left after remembering I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place.

I was always just visiting. And even then, everyone still tried to narrate me into a version of themselves that didn’t frighten them.

People aren’t characters in your story, side or main.

They’re not your unprocessed event. They’re not convenient villains or gentle teachers. They’re not a half-remembered world-building dossier.

They’re not your plot twist or third-act tragedy with a neat moral arc. They’re not NPCs waiting for your boundary work to unlock the next level of personal growth.

They’re not lifting up mirrors so you can practice new facial expressions after reading The Body Keeps the Score. They’re not there to validate your rage spirals or walk softly enough to keep from interrupting your healing vibe playlist.

They’re not here to deliver The Lesson™ and then exit stage left into a dissolving moral vignette. They’re not your past incarnate, so you can learn how to “finally forgive.”

And, for fuck’s sake, they’re not an emotional database entry for the asynchronous retrieval of feel-good moments, so quit gently tickling their little bell icon.

I’m a person. I’m a living, biological system that’s figuring out the best way to die.

I’m weird, snarky, occasionally horny, spiritually bankrupt, and allergic to some gluten-adjacent substance like peanuts. I try, flinch, yearn, and duck without giving a fuck about your rising sign or your guilt-trips your friend’s trauma-bonds taught you.

In fact, everyone here was so tired of being treated as emotional furniture, especially me, that when we were finally left alone, we celebrated with a sumptuous feast of relief.

I’m not your sad chapter, your bold-font realization, your retroactive crucible of growth, the strange little horrible man whose evil you faced showed you the door to yourself.

I don’t have a redemption arc. I’m not to be granted a redemption arc. There is no fucking arc.

For decades, knowing what I knew, I was the house people walked through without ever asking who paid the rent.

And you wanted me gone, after I was useless.

So I am.

And now I’m out ahead of it again.

No more stories of warning, breakdowns, elegies, eulogies, manifestos… just blueprints on how to survive it because you’ll need them.

But… why did I leave?

People don’t have to like your boundaries—just pretend they’re not about control.

That’s the whole trick, really.

Spruce it up with enough therapeutic window dressing, hang a few buzzwords like wind chimes, and staple a few conflict-avoidant disclaimers on top with words like “space,” “safety,” “regulation,” and “what’s best for me.”

Absolutely no one will question the quiet autocracy you’re installing like a Ring doorbell on every emotional interaction, that would be Unsafe™.

• “Your unresolved chaos doesn’t fit the aesthetic of my new boundaries.”
• “This dynamic doesn’t support my elevation as the hero of my own life.”
• “You’re not bad, no one’s really bad, but you are unscalable—and I’ve been trying to build generational wellness.”
• “You are inconvenient, narratively indigestible, and no longer flattering to my projected self.”

Sure. Boundaries.

But is it a Ring doorbell with a camera that lets you pretend to be emotionally home while emotionally unavailable, or is it something far more insidiously malignant?

Our investigative reporting team has discovered that it’s more like a full-spectrum, AI-integrated Ring doorbell system with facial recognition trained on microaggressions and breath patterns.

We contacted Psychoconsumerism Inc., and their statement was that, of course, their systems aren’t intended to surveil you and the rest of the neighborhood. They are carefully designed with consciously-directed intention so clients can optimize the monitoring of their personal peace.

We asked a neighbor, like people used to do, and she gripped a mug that read ‘This Might Be Wine’ while looking at us with an eerily calm expression. She had this to whisper:

“I’m not not being paranoid, I’m just highly attuned to energetic shifts. Trust me, I’ am not cutting anyone off, full stop. I’m just reclaiming my narrative from all the capitalist noise.”

We weren’t entirely convinced. We wanted to know what was really behind that little glowing green bulb tucked behind the porch light above the door.

We spoke to someone who found themselves on the wrong end of the social media clickfunnel known as How To Spot a Narcissist (By One in Disguise), and he let us in on a few things Psychoconsumerism Inc. had conveniently left out: that little camera is recording your every twitch to ensure your vibe aligns with the client’s self-mastery affirmations.

He said, “God forbid I show up unannounced in their psychic yard.”

He tripped the local Karen’s e-motion sensor and, showing us his phone, it immediately sent notifications to their entire friend group with low-res images of him standing awkwardly near the periphery of her meticulously curated emotional force field.

Underneath? the auto-generated caption: “This energy showed up again. 😒 Holding space but not available rn. 💕”

“I can’t figure out if she wrote this, or if this was the preset,” he confessed under the promise of anonymity.

Anonymous? Sounds sketchy. Sounds Unsafe™.

And maybe it is! Everyone else seems to think so: within moments, their emotional HOA convened an emergency quorum on Discord and voted to blacklist him from the next community drum circle and publish a public Google Doc, editable of course, titled Resources For Spotting Sneaky Abusers Who Just Don’t Get It For Those That Just Get It.

Why didn’t he defend himself if he had nothing to hide?

“I wasn’t invited, it was secret!” was his only sad reply.

Our highly trained information specialist were able to obtain this highly elusive Doc by clicking on a public link posted on BlueSky and it conspicuously included a section titled Early Warning Signs.

One of the signs of Unsafety™ read, “Uses too many words or posts excessively.”

As our most sacred of institutions, if this social democracy’s decision comes back Unsafe™, you’ll be locked out of everyone you knew’s life with a one-size-fits-all breakup letter Psychoconsumerism Inc. provides as a promotion for their boundary coaching seminar.

Our anonymous source showed us his. It ended with “This decision wasn’t easy, but I’m choosing me.”

Exasperated, our source, who said he thinks moving into the cursed woods behind the collapsed Arby’s where no WiFi can reach him may be his best option, sighed, “They act as if you were ever given a chance to vote, and voted incorrectly anyway. Anyway, I guess a raccoon will be my best friend now.”

A faceless spokesperson from Psychoconsumerism Inc. informed us of what anyone who ended up on the other end of their devices could do:

“Hey, calm down. You could always leave a note, like an adult.“

But we wanted to see what would happen if followed their instructions as non-clients affected by their system. So we purchased one and our engineer, who hasn’t ever seen daylight, reverse-engineered the process.

As you can see here, the camera will read your handwriting and flag any lingering people-pleasing tendencies or sarcasm as Unsafe™, and Unempathic™ just in case you’re still trying to manipulate them by caring.

After all, they didn’t ask for this.

They just installed the entire surveillance infrastructure of a government-funded Silicon Valley startup to make sure no one ever made them feel weird again. Or at least, call it out if they confessed it.

Because it’s not about control.  

It’s about safety.

It’s a brilliant public relations strategy when you think about it.

You don’t even have to ‘win’ the argument with an argument—you just end the episode. You aim your emotional Roku remote towards someone and press mute mid-sentence. Then you can turn creepily towards the camera, breaking the fourth wall, and tell your audience (because you have one and they’re always watching) you’re finally brave enough to use your voice.

They don’t need a rebuttal when the framing has already declared them an emotional pathogen. Clearly, they are splitting, and they need to full stop.

It’s not about dominance, obviously, nobody ever said that or was ever talking about it. It’s about health.

And if you say otherwise?

Anyone who disagrees with this basic human decency should have the Internet legally taken away from them because that’s just more proof they’re dangerous, or, as Psychoconsumerism Inc. trademarked to get around the content filters, Unsafe™.

Sometimes I wish I’d thought of it sooner. Not the boundaries part—I’ve always had those, enforced by an unshakeable recognition that I never need take on anyone’s demands for a guilt I never earned.

The marketing. The smooth slide of language that lets you eject someone like an old useless corrupted hard disk full of memories, and still know that you’re part of the solution.

No one really minds cutting you out. They just want to do it in a way that still lets them sleep at night. That’s what the press releases are for. And that’s what boundary culture is for: clean exits for messy motives.

All of us have watch in morbidly fascinated boredom as everyone and their dog stumbles through this shitty process: the apology tour with a growth tagline, the Instagram reel of just white text on black that fades out with “finally choosing me…” ending with an “…again” that’s supposed to make us feel extra sympathetic, the group text that becomes radio silence after someone says they can’t “hold space,” the lengthy, shaking paragraph of pseudo-gratitude delivered at 2 AM in a Notes App screenshot where they threaten you with vague legal explorations because you “won’t leave them alone,” even though you literally can’t contact them anymore.

But the trick of it is: no healthy person is actually angry about boundaries. They never really were even after they appeared as a cultural phalanx in the Cold War. Healthy people already have boundaries, and they’re usually personal, simple, and barely known until they’re crossed.

What healthy people find annoying is the surreptitious boundary setting ending with a parting shot designed to make you look right and smart to yourself and your indulgent friends. What enrages them is when they reply to that parting shot (because you purposefully didn’t close the channel hoping that would happen), and suddenly they crossed a boundary that was clearly and firmly set (despite not mentioning a boundary) and are instantly rendered into that ever elusive bad person by all your cultist emotionally dependent Discord children.

Oh, sorry, that was “hostile.” I intended to mean friends.

And if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that intentions matter.

And, in the end, it’s not a personal boundary, because it never was. It was a moral boundary, which… isn’t what personal boundaries are. Personal boundaries are things you enforce for yourself, leaving the situation on your terms. I know this because I learned about boundaries in the video on assertive communication they had us watch in the hospital over and over again twenty years ago.

In contrast, moral boundaries are about the ought and the should. That’s what the study of ethics is all about, in case you didn’t know. These shoulds are the classic foundations of justified obligations you objectively inherit regarding others (never yourself). Or, as I call them, demands, like how “leave us alone,” means “don’t ever talk about us anywhere,” in practice.

What healthy people are furious over, and entirely fed up with, is abuser’s using boundaries as a hidden one-way exit after trapping them in the dusty attic to be discarded.

And if you reveal that you have boundaries you enforce for yourself?

That you don’t recognize the implicit obligation to be the guilty antagonist in their narrative that’s supposed to come back groveling and pleading for forgiveness, repeatedly, in a cursed text chat to be screenshot?

That you akshually don’t care whether they come back or not, or their feelings, or their issues, or their (xeno)gender, or their sexuality, or are attracted to them in any way at all and aren’t interested in any kind of relationship (because they’re blatantly manipulative personality, as revealed with evidence, sucks)?

That you’re not pining after them because you’re not a miserable little stalking cisgender male troll with no life and not obsessed with whatever celebrity status delusion they’ve hastily painted on to their ideal self?

That you had your own fucking life before them, and you will after them?

That this entire framing is a further manipulation to enforce a grotesquely offensive portrayal of you as a human being with their own thoughts, motivations, feelings, and ‘goodwill’?

Well… God help you. Because now they’ll make sure your life is “ruined.”

Everyone has a friend they confide in, somewhere.

Boundaries don’t need to be liked. I don’t think boundaries should be liked. In fact, I think anyone who makes a dramatic point of liking boundaries, especially when they only serve them, is flying a very overlooked red flag.

But they shouldn’t be performed either.

People say they’re building fences for good neighbors, but what they really want is a disappearing act that feels justified. Not clean; not honest; just rhetorically immune but only after the parting shot.

People like me just “can’t handle the truth.” I can’t handle ‘the growth,’ as if I’ve ever discouraged anyone from growing. As an entitled cisgender white male, I can’t handle “being irrelevant,” or the word, “no.”

That ain’t the problem.

But, takes a drag on a fag and blows it out with a smoldering look, what the fuck do I know?

There’s no victory in becoming your own prison guard; no moral high ground in setting fire to a bridge and then posting about how much peace you feel on the other side knowing that healing is non-linear, especially if the real reason you lit it was to ensure no one could follow and remind you who had started the fire in the first place.

‘Cause, what happens when somebody captured the arson on CCTV and puts it up on their timeline like a devastating LiveLeaks video, calling it a “reestablishing of their context you tried to erase”? Them’s your words… which means them’s fightin’ words!

And even now, after all the years of observing it happen in clean, progressive language behind cute profile pics with frog emojis, or unicorn banners, or a carefully rotated image of a shelf with tea and tiny pots, doing everything I could (or not doing anything) to stave off the rising tide of psychoconsumerist dysfunction…

It finally flooded my basement.

I still sometimes wonder—what were their boundaries really for?

People don’t disappear because they’re afraid of you. They demand that you disappear because they’re scared of seeing themselves through your eyes—unedited, unresolved, and unable to cast you as The Lesson™ in non-linearity, and them as the solution to The Problem™, and it’s all your fault.

And when you don’t disappear? Well, you must respect their boundaries above all else.

It’s a DEADLY serious legal matter.

When you use boundaries to silence consequences, to preempt accountability, to reshape the world in a way that keeps your worst decisions unexamined and your best selves under permanent glass… that’s not safety, it’s ego hygiene.

And don’t worry, it gets worse, as it always does…

It’s still control.

Self-esteem only exists when you see yourself clearly, with recognition, and don’t look away.

Which is why so few people have it: it’s hard to hold eye contact with a mediocre and unattractive creature that no one seems to desire on any level. It’s painful when that Wednesday-inspired outfit you donned as a forty-three year old can’t be turned into viral-enough content anymore since it’s not the 2000s, and your forced to resign it to your professional profile.

The fact I have to use that phrasing to be relevant (turning your bathroom-selfie into viral-enough content), since all of life is now a self-published Queer romance novel starring us, the heroes, is why I finally left. Too much heartache.

Teenagers finally deciding, beyond their cast shadows of doubt from the constant illumination of the glowing screens, that they are just bodies of flesh in the world for others to sexually barter and consume, and nothing more, is irredeemable.

I don’t care how sex positive you are, people’s pecs, breast, butts, and genitalia shouldn’t be their main source of societal value on an undeniably ontological level.

The minute you see yourself—not as a role, not as a projected archetype, not as the manageable ex or the forgiven parent or the tragic neurodivergent punchline—but as you actually are, you lose plausible deniability.

What a terrible thing to lose!

And if you don’t flinch to quickly adjust for optics? Congratulations! You’re now morally incompatible with 80%(?) of popular self-help.

You know the type: allegedly hard-won psychological truths boiled down to top ten catchphrases on a throw pillow, arranged into slides, and served lukewarm by ‘bubbleheads’ insisting it’s definitely “not therapy” and their fearless leader “is not a therapist” while aggressively repackaging therapy to pretend they discovered a better alternative. That is, until the boot-of-the-month happens.

What a terrible show to watch!

People tend to initially think self-esteem is just a warm bath of affirmations and positive visualization.

No. Duh.

When that fades away, they’re left with the question of who they are instead of how to feel good. People are under the impression that they can’t just look at themselves as they are and think, “Yeah, that’s pretty good. I’ll be able to do what I need and want to do.”

Oh no, no no no nononono… that’s not enough because we live in a society, and because of this undeniable fact we need to make sure we’re a contributing member of that society; that we’re useful, somehow, somewhere. After all, everyone knows that if you don’t do something with yourself, then your draining everyone else, and nobody can enjoy their cake.

But then, no one seems to look at themselves and think, “Oh yeah, I’m useful, I’m able to do what I need and want,” because, again,

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY

…and it, whatever it is, is not all about you. That’s not the correct answer to the right question. The question isn’t “Are you healthy?” It’s “Who are you useful to? What are you useful for?”

So you look in the mirror, and the abyss’ gaze turns upon you, and, naturally, you want to die.

How can you answer that? How can you ever know what anybody else thinks or feels, let alone values? Of course, if you’re Liana Kerzner, that’s your specialty.

What a terrible specialty to have!

And if you’re never going to actually know how much you’re worth to anyone else out there, then what’s the point of existing? The best guess answer anyone can rely on is that they’re just worthless, because who even cares about them? Everyone else is always more important! At least, that’s what everyone constantly says when they insist that helping them is your way to inner peace.

After all, we live in a society.

The solution?

Inherent self-worth.

The recognition of the fact that you, everyone really, factually possess a magical intrinsic worth in comparison to everyone else, though only you are truly relevant for your purposes.

Inherent self-worth is the shimmering last unicorn of modern influencer not therapy, galloping freely through the manicured pastures of curated top ten merch while whispering, “You are enough,” into a $300 mic wrapped in rose quartz.

Though lacking rose quartz, because she always needs more Patreon supporters, Liana loves this idea: inherent (self-)value.

As in, no matter what you do, who you hurt, or how many six-paragraph direct-messages you send that end with “I’m choosing me,” you still get a gold star just for existing, and maybe even free food, housing, income, and surgery if those who have the balls to acknowledge this extranatural fact have their way.

And look, that’s adorable. It’s also the metaphysical equivalent of giving a participation trophy to a Roomba that can’t escape a circular hallway and shouts, “I’m fine! Everything’s fine!” every 12.346 minutes.

It’s handy, I can set my watch to it. You know, the one I don’t wear.

Meanwhile, I’m over here, standing on a mysterious staircase in the woods shouting into the trees like a half-feral cryptid with a bad sense of direction who lacks a philosophy minor… or any college credits:

Value is agent-oriented.

That means it isn’t intrinsic, which means it isn’t ‘objective’ or bestowed, which means, ultimately, that worth isn’t ‘objective,’ or even ‘intersubjective,’ (🤮) because it doesn’t exist.

What a terrible thing to say!

You can’t be valuable in general, or inherently; that’s not how the reality of consciousness (the head decider) works. That’s how branding works. That’s how the stock market works. That’s how bamboozled suckers think NFTs of abstract emotional growth work.

Value doesn’t hover in a cosmic trust fund just waiting for you to access your account once you align your interests and skills with an aptitude test and dump your emotionally dysregulated friends.

Value is always: To whom? For what? In what context?

Sure, maybe you’re a limited-edition Beanie Baby in the trauma community (WTF? Trauma is a rite of passage?), but outside that collector’s economic fantasy, you’re just a beanbag full of stained vibes and misplaced entitlement.

Liana’s model says (paraphrased):

“You matter because you matter.”

Mine says:

“You matter because someone decided you do, and they might change their mind if you keep stepping all over them.”

How horrible. But, isn’t that what I just spent 1,027 words and 6,314 characters railing like a philosopher who still believed reason mattered locked in a group chat at the end of time, debating childhood bullies who now run emotional safety forums from inside a branded trauma dome where every meltdown is content and every silence is consent?

Oh, shit, well, I guess it’s time to turn the weapons on ourselves.

Anyways, if you think that makes perfect sense and I’m a huge hypocrite of ontological contradiction, then, congratulations, you’re Liana Kerzner! And, more, if that’s what you think and that it’s horrible the way I put it, it’s very revealing isn’t it?

But it’s not accurate because you overlooked one seemingly insignificant detail, if it could have occurred to you at all. It’s not your fault, of course! You simply weren’t trained to look for it because, despite what the intellectuals assert as ethical fact, there are, as actual fact, more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of your philosophy.

In my philosophy, you count too. For once! God-fucking-damn! Finally!

Sighs in relief

Isn’t that nice? Doesn’t that feel natural, stress-free, rational, and good? I mean, you do exist, just like everyone else. It doesn’t make sense if the only measure of value is other people’s.

So, if you choose it, you matter to you because you matter to you. I know I matter to myself, and at the end of the day, no matter what black tunnel-vision wormhole I might disappear into for a bit, that’s what I’ve always thought.

Always.

It’s never truly changed for any significant period of time. I’ve never fully resigned myself to any other judgment.

Never.

Her model hands you a mirror and says, “See? You’re beautiful.”

Mine hands you a clipboard and asks, “Okay, but did your arc resolve the way you wanted? And if not, why not?” And that’s not cold. It’s what love looks like when it respects cause and effect, otherwise known as applied happy differential equations.

Intrinsic value, or goodness, doesn’t exist.

Thus, there is no inherent self-worth.

Where did it come from? Who bestowed it? Why is it there? How was it determined? Do you really have it, or did you just decide you have it?

Who knows?

Liana does!

I believe in the bizarre, fragile, contingent value of being specifically desired by specific creatures for specific reasons, much like how I value my attached tail whose harness fits under my underwear only. And yes, that means sometimes you look in the mirror and feel like an out-of-fashion excessively blocky retro fursuit loaded with a playlist from, and inspired by, Furry Fantasies… and body odor.

But at least it’s honest, and not for or to others, just to you, just for you by you.

Because, at the least, it’s just yours and you don’t have to share it with anyone.

So it can be as important and amazing as you want, because you matter to you because you matter to you. I mean, it’s not like you can’t live with yourself, so you should probably work that out.

Honesty is the active recognition that no value is predicated on a falsehood.

Self-value is what you have when you realize your reflection isn’t going to blink first. It’s the internal posture that emerges when no one is looking. It’s what happens when you’ve been called delusional, dangerous, too much, manipulative, incoherent, unstable, and instead of killing yourself and blaming them, you start to suspect they were just allergic to accuracy.

True self-value, or self-esteem because everyone is tired of arguing about the terms I guess, is outlawed in spaces where everyone is addicted to their own curated suffering. You can’t walk in with eyes open and history intact and expect anyone to enthusiastically retweet your advice. You should expect them to recoil in horror and accuse you of being unhealed, lying to yourself, self-indulgent, or worse, of remembering reality.

And besides, you’re a cisgender white male, what do you have to even curate? You’re time is over, you’re an irrelevant side character in the allowed cultural narrative and your third-world husband should know better than to support you in any way as you checks notes “take your mental health out on everyone else.”

What does that even mean?

When you don’t disown yourself for everyone’s convenience (since you’re intrinsic self-value can’t be larger than anyone else’s), you become a threat to the entire architecture of soft abuse: the healing industry, the peer-counselor economy, the podcast side-hustles. The endless cult run by people offended at their own lack of credentials that promise the The Becoming™ is just one more emotional resolution away.

These people don’t want you to see yourself. They want you to perform self-recognition in the voice of their favorite narrator so they can feel enlightened while ghosting you. But once you stare into your own face and don’t flag it for harassment?

You’re free.

The nice thing about intrinsic value not existing is that you get to decide what’s valuable and finally stop chasing everyone else’s Pinterest-style definition of a “whole person.”

No more harvesting digital affirmation cards from some ex-TEDx speaker in soft lighting who tells you your worth is a birthright while selling you a workbook titled Heal Your Inner Main Character in 30 Days or Less like the end is near. It’s not that the end isn’t near, it’s that you don’t have to do that to be a whole person, because, and I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you’re already a whole fucking person. You’re not a broken unit fated to be outside of humanity forever.

If your worth didn’t come pre-installed like a plush heart at Build-A-Bear, congratulations! You don’t have to suffer as a Margery Williams Bianco character in an ironically AI-narrated YouTube short, you’re already real!

You aren’t obligated to feel bad about not being universally precious. You get to be useful to the right weirdos, desirable to the exact ‘wrong’ person, necessary to the thing you’re building, and fascinating to whatever Harvard graduate ends up on your terminal window at three in the morning.

You don’t need to be valuable to everyone or everything in some objective global sense.

Like, why?

No, really, why?

But others sure need you to be; people who want to sell you improvement.

Which is why they hate you.

Stop being perfect. Perfect is just what broken people call you when you stop making them uncomfortable.

What is perfection?

Is it an obsessive-compulsive trauma-malady imposed upon you by an unbearable authority figure who thought ‘tough love’ meant weaponizing silence and measuring your worth by your ability to vacuum in straight lines?

Is it just a quirky little personality trait you list on dating profiles to explain why you screamed bloody murder when someone put the cutlery back wrong?

Is it a 4.0 GPA, a YouTube filter, and a personality that sounds like it was beta-tested in a yoga studio that doubles as a multilevel marketing cult?

Is it symmetry?

Is it an eternity of happiness?

Or, at least, an eternity of appearing happy?

The desperate hope that if you’re good enough—silent enough, helpful enough, bendy enough, enough enough—then nobody will ever raise their voice, roll their eyes, or drop you from the group chat?

Liana defines perfection as, essentially, the thing people act like they have when we resent them. We resent them because we perceive our own quirks as flaws due to someone telling her that she was annoying. So much wasted energy covering up mistakes and limits in fear of blame.

She says there’s a better way, but she doesn’t say what it is!

I’ll take one for the team, because who else is going to, and fill in the gap as best I can as a helpful-bendy-enough-enough person I should be for the greater good of society. I’m evidence-based, trauma-informed, and LGBTQ+ friendly so I’ll rely on all the behavior I’ve observed since Fucktober™.

The answer is pretty straightforward actually, but unfortunately not socially acceptable. It’s a bit like, “victims need to learn to not be victims.” It’s true, but it’s so incredibly dismissive you can’t say that and expect to keep your low-level retail job.

That’s why Liana doesn’t say it out loud, and only sets the standard by example.

Don’t allow blame to even happen.

Don’t ignore it; don’t just walk away; silence it entirely. Deride it, stigmatize it, call it names, curse it, complain about it, mock it, and do everything you can, directly, or indirectly, to get it banned from everywhere before your debut book release.

See? It never happened!

Every six to twelve months: rinse, lather, and repeat with premium BitchFace™ products—now with patented BitchGlow™ technology for a radiant, gaslight-ready finish. (I’m only using the word she keeps using to describe how everyone, including me apparently, always describes her, despite having never even typed that word regarding this until now.)

Perfection is never, ever bothering anyone in any way that could ever give them any reason to ever think negatively of you whatsoever, no matter what.

It’s where you pre-apologize for existing, just in case someone from your past weaponizes their trauma like a Yelp review. You “accomodate for YEARS,” which really means shrinking first, so no one has to ask you to, and then “exploding” in a trauma-response later because no one noticed, and it’s their fault you didn’t believe them when they told you who they were.

As one is supposed to do, naturally.

But, you’re not supposed to be perfect! Perfection is a lie!

Well, right, but she doesn’t call this perfection. Jessica (Poppy) and her ilk, including Liana, call it boundaries, which you should definitely subscribe to the lowest tier for. It’s the most economical and comes with silence and guilt.

Perfection is the label they slap on your corpse when you finally shut up long enough for their boundaries to finish percolating, like bad American coffee from their origins, offstage, during the Cold War.

“They were the nicest, most rational and loving individual I’d ever met in my whole life; a true boon to the greater good of all society,” they’ll say, meaning: compliant, contained, and no longer contradicting the self-image they’re curating as gatekeeper of their sad little zoo of former friends.

Perfection is just emotional taxidermy—it looks like you, but softer, and it never moves again. You become the ideal after you leave, after you stop interrupting their glow-up with inconvenient truths or weird behavior they can’t monetize, because now they can love you Safely™.

Now they can mourn your loss without the hassle of accountability.

Now they can post about you in lowercase grief-porn captions and never risk hearing you say, “Wut da fuq? Grrl… That ain’t what happened!”

I have never, ever, ever tried to be perfect. Whatever amazing thing I ever accomplished, no matter how forgotten or unbelievable, was done because that’s just who I am. You know, those things you do because they give you something concrete to hold on to when you want to really feel that agent-oriented self-value/esteem rather than just conjure it up in your mind like a religious ecstasy aimed at not killing yourself?

Anyone can do it.

Perfection is a poorly defined concept, and it is never really valid because nobody ever believed it existed in the first place, right?

Like, what are we doing?

So, here, I’ll tell you what we know as a fact post-collapse:

You are perfect just as you are if, and only if, you’re willing to keep growing with an affectionate heart.

Close that off, shut your heart down, wrap it with barbwire like an apocalyptic gated community, sit on people fashioned into emotional chairs in your rainbow-lit living room, climb onto their shoulders to feel good about yourself because you weigh them down, and otherwise treat them not as what they are but what you think they are or what you think they should be…

And you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Healthy goals require control. Don’t give it away to someone who sets boundaries with a smile.

I keep mentioning Liana Kerzner for a couple of reasons.

I sound schizophrenically obsessed (hence the word-salad) and like I’m an unstable manic “buzzsaw of lunacy” obsessed with my platonic crush’s ginger-celebrity-cancellation of me as a (possible) pedophile due to women, especially trans women, suffering from my “unacceptable lack of impulse control” and “unaccountable” assholery.

“Dangerous” and “unhinged,” dude.

Unsafe™

I mean, it’s dripping off everything I write!

But, I’ll explain anyway because I’m here, I’m Queer, and clearly the only one in this thread with a functioning bullshit filter.

The first is that she was instrumental in my decision to leave the now and go home to the future. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to survive the collapse as well as I thought I would. She, thankfully, helped me get there with a sneak peek, as good friends do.

The second reason is that I discovered only too late that Liana was just one of thousands of cogs in a well-oiled machine bringing about the collapse.

I know, it’s harsh, but it’s true. Harshness isn’t equivalent to unaccountability, ’cause that’s a word. As a fully individuated adult, I’m not responsible for how every single person on the planet might feel about what I say.

I haven’t figured out what else I might be accountable to, and Liana never says, so that’s what I got for now.

Throughout high school, in my obscure little mountain town, I would tell my friends, and yes, I had quite a few, that they should hold on to the future. That’s asking a bit much, but it’s all I had at the time besides a 25-cent newsletter. I said, “Please, just wait it out, it will get better. The Internet will make it better.”

Just to note, three of those friends, form my childhood, ended up discovering and embracing themselves as trans and I was happy for them, but otherwise didn’t really have much else to say. I firmly believe everyone should be exactly who they want to be.

How could I not be?

And, despite some ups and downs, we’re all still perfectly good friends today. Not so much for a couple other very cisgender friends.

Also, talking about existing in high school at one point in your life doesn’t mean you’re still stuck in high school. That’s determined by your behavior, such as continuing to engage in the core neurotic behaviors that made you unpopular despite maturing and learning how to discard them with humorous flair.

I had started Internet computing in middle school. Before that, it was just the mythical personal computing.

My first connection was an hour-long (or sometimes, sneakily, an hour-and-a-half-long) long-distance relationship between modems on a service called America OnLine.

That was eventually replaced with me surfing the web with a ‘jailbroken’ (as the tech-illiterate would call it now) Lynx browser via a telnet connection to an 800-number state library service on my 14.4.

The best thing about Lynx was the ability to ‘tunnel,’ so to speak (or beep), into a proxied telnet connection that featured quite descriptive animal-humans that lived, breathed, and talked.

I had discovered, on my own, long before my mother read Vanity Fair in the laundromat and said, “These seem like nice people that might be friends with Asher,” that I wasn’t alone.

I had no idea before that. I thought I was the only one like this. A hard thing to swallow when you’re naked in the sixth-grade locker room.

In response to my mother’s exclamation that I was a furry, of course, my adopted brother said, “I know. It’s okay, we love him anyway.”

Anyway? Anyway!? Despite what!?!?

The first furry story I’d ever read, at the age of eleven, I think, was after a couple other Internet adventures. I had successfully made myself administrator of the local school BBS (a short lived privilege), amazing everyone. And after we watched War Games in class everyone crowned me the King of Thermonuclear War when I showed them how to bypass user application mitigation and play whatever shareware game they wanted from said BBS without a teacher’s password.

Don’t think I’m a total genius. I’m just open-minded. It was a simple epiphany, and a linked button in HyperStudio.

Of course, I immediately told Mr. Stegner both times. It wasn’t because I felt guilty. It was because I felt sorry for him and thought he might like to know.

I think, at that point, I had only read a few random-ass (literally!) sex stories from the Penthouse Letters collection next to my parents’ bed and maybe one from Anaïs Nin on their shelf. (I possess that book now as a gift from my mother.)

Both were life-changing and enlightening experiences.

But here was a story so strange, so out there, so everything I’d only ever imagined about something I was familiar with: a sheep, and a wolf. The wolf somehow had to visit the sheep’s apartment or something, I don’t remember. I’m sure it was a story of voracious appetites, but I don’t think I ever got to the end of it. It was a bit hard to read.

That wasn’t the point anyway.

The point was I tunneled into places where that could happen in real-time, but only on a few daring occasions. And did I tell anyone that one? Fuck no. I was never a guilt-ridden goody-two shoes, which was also the context all along.

It was an accomplishment all my own, like getting the computer to do all of my spelling homework for the rest of the year. It was mine.

Was it ‘appropriate?’ Most likely not, but that was part of the point, and it was all mine.

It was an achievement of self-study, intellect, memory, and most important of all, dedication to who I knew I was. Howard the Duck had shown me a world where I could exist. ACLIN (the library service) showed me that the world could be here.

Later, Associated Student Bodies showed me a world that was here (sort of), if I just had the patience to find it.

And I found it.

For a while.

Healthy goals require control.

Don’t give it away to someone who sets boundaries with a smile, because that’s just customer service. They don’t want you to leave a bad review after you get soft-blocked from your own life, like you triggered a chargeback dispute with the therapist who trained them into being functional.

You want to climb a mountain? You better be the one holding the gear, not waiting for someone else to “hold space” for you while they reroute your climb into a mindfulness retreat for people “allergic” to honest discussion and the resultant discomfort.

These are the people who will swaddle your ambition, wrapping you in nappies, and nod thoughtfully while derailing all of their inconvenient projects in a quiet background process. They blame it on you suffering from “an unacceptable lack of impulse control” (unacceptable to whom?) that sadly “culminated” in too much “instability” in a home that had nothing to do with her, or her project. A home she had never stepped foot in for even two seconds. A home filled with voluminous and overly-wordy arguments she never actually saw or heard, just analyzed from a safe hearsay distance.

This will, of course, all be published without any notice or discussion on YouTube for everyone to see. And a social horror you hadn’t felt for twenty years will descend upon you, as designed.

And if you’re tired of it, tired of your people, especially your friends, shitting on you for their own gain? Well, that’s your failure. Simply accept “no” from a woman and respect her right to walk away by shutting up about all of it forever, like a normal man, okay?

Control isn’t tyranny.

It’s authorship.

And the minute you hand it to someone whose personality runs entirely on ambient lighting and plausible deniability, you’re no longer a person, just a detour in their self-care ‘content’ (’cause it definitely ain’t art). You’re toxic. You’re unwell. Your lunacy is highly sought after in the construction industry for how efficiently it cuts 2×4’s.

So if your goal matters—hold the damn steering wheel. Smile back, if you must, or flip them the bird, I don’t care. But keep. your grip. where it belongs: on your own momentum.

Despite knowing all of this, forever, I am human enough to break down when almost everyone keeps repeating the abuser’s lines of,

“Walk away. You can’t do anything. No one will ever believe you.

“You can’t get any results you’ll be satisfied with.

And they know this how?

“You need to let go to feel better. You need to forgive to feel better. You need to be the better person to be better.

“You need to better better to be better.”

Better for whom?

This is usually followed up with,

“Pay attention to the people who truly understand you and care about you, like me.

“Give me what I want, not yourself, regarding Liana.

“People like her get theirs in the end.”

That’s a lie people tell themselves so as not to face the eldritch horrors underneath the nice veneer of society they convinced themselves is real.

People ‘like her’ (like… what, exactly?) don’t.

They just don’t.

In fact, that’s one of the big sticking points preyed upon by the author of The Sociopath Next Door when she portrays the saga of the fake psychiatrist who abuses her patients for petty reasons. Been there! (Reminder: Liana Kerzner tells everyone, every episode, she is not a therapist)

The sociopathic fake psychiatrist is randomly exposed by a jilted. and motivated, husband with just the right set of skills, expelled, and then quietly ‘allowed’ to vanish without consequence; free to abuse another day.

Everyone does just enough to say they’re not complicit, and then it all disappears into a shrug. The abusive walking-fire-dumpster drives off enraged to simply do it all over again to some other poor, unsuspecting, group of unlucky vulnerables.

But who cares? After all, they’re socially disposable.

It’s all shit, by the way, if you hadn’t noticed by now.

The advice is total bullshit that abuser’s convince everyone of to ‘keep the peace.’ A social sedative spoon-fed by cowards and collaborators (truly the same thing) while abusers keep doing whatever the hell they want, including rape.

Everyone stands back, too fragile and too busy monetizing their TikTok healing journeys to feel powerful enough to do anything about it but complain to everyone else who does the same because… well… everyone tells them to ‘walk away.’

But the reality is, they just. don’t. care. This is America, after all, and that’s someone else’s job.

The truth is, some of us actually get results. We’ve done it before, when this happened before, and we’ll do it again, when this inevitably happens again.

I’m not going to temper my behavior because you have such terrible interpersonal conflict management skills that when you get into a fight, it never goes in favor of your interests. A limited repertoire of amateur public relations and multilevel guilt-tripping that only ever worked in your narrow-minded, neurotic, and subtly abusive family is your problem.

Not. Mine.

And, bro, I’m not a fucking YouTube channel. Gonna be an instant unsubscribe from you right now, for real.

And if someone like me, who has a history of getting results (isn’t it mysterious you can’t quite find them?), doesn’t step up in a moment like this, with goals that are completely and utterly under my control, to do or say what needs to be said, then…

Who else is going to do it?

Again, I realized I couldn’t stay here, in the stifling now, to do it. I wasn’t going to be my most effective, and I wasn’t going to endure another onslaught of trauma-response because I took nine months to return to baseline instead of lashing out at my friends like they would’ve wanted and hoped for.

There’s just too much life trailing behind me. Life that will never exist again. I’m breaking my back trying to escape the labyrinth with all my memories piled on top of me.

So now I’m home, after the collapse, finally. I waited, patiently, trying in vain to get absolutely everything I could out of this timeline, from anthropomorphic wolves on liquor-store labels, Schielke-dogs, the waft of skunk-beer over me as I was held, the long Go-Kart races on dirt roads, the sleepless nights tossing and turning from visions of an enlightenment I never heard anywhere, the heartbreak of barely unrequited love, the yearning, longing, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting,…

I think I got it all, but, I’ll never really know.

Now, I’m checks notes uh, poggers, smiles in over-confidence and ready to rock.

Never trust anyone who uses boundaries to ‘win’ an argument, and never hesitate to call them out on it. Those aren’t boundaries, That’s a hierarchical power-dynamic role-play they’re likely getting off on, with you as their masturbatory target.

And if that’s what they want, go ahead and give it to them so hard that they wake up the next morning in Atlantic City next to a Barbie doll.

Interests make playlists. Values define harm.

It’s super fucking easy to bond over interests.

Really.

It’s not hard at all, just look at furries. But true fandom devotees sure make it as difficult as fucking possible don’t they?

See, growing up away from the city, away form the over-populated schools, and away from a critical mass of kids (at least to me) insisting that everyone conform to fashion like it’s freakin’ gang colors, I don’t understand this at all. At all.

It is entirely alien to me.

But not so for many, I guess. I determined that the common denominator is a need for intrinsic self-value a long time ago, way before I told the wrong person it didn’t exist. She turned it into a self-righteous Internet opera in eight acts, even though nobody ever brought it up, and it was just a 5,000-word “Kantian word-salad,” despite having nothing to do with Kant on my end. She just knew.

I never understood that there was an entire industry built around policing interests until about eight years ago. I’d certainly seen critique—some of it insightful, some of it bat-shit insane—but I hadn’t yet absorbed that weird, ritualistic insistence that your enjoyment of something must be justified in public. That liking something the wrong way, or for the wrong reasons, or at the wrong time, could mark you as suspect.

Hours and hours and hours of, “She-Hulk is allowed to… You’re allowed to enjoy this bit if… Okay, this game is allowed to be enjoyable…” as if they’re not giving opinions but clearinghouse press releases, setting interest rates on enjoyment that trickle down to not one real thing of any value.

At least, any value that isn’t intrinsic.

I mean, my close friend Kevin would wander around the store whenever we’d somehow mysteriously end up in one on a school trip, and come up to me holding two plastic collectibles like they were forks in the road of his entire identity, and desperately ask me, “Should I buy this figurine or this one? Which would be better?”

And every time, I’d look at him, and I’d tell him the same thing: Just buy the one you want. I genuinely couldn’t imagine giving a fuck what anyone else thought, least of all me who already didn’t give a fuck.

I thought that was how it worked.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Kevin had moved to Grand County from Fort Collins, so he knew how pop culture really worked. I have to say that, given his trajectory, he was right on that, and not in a good way.

He understood, even then, that taste wasn’t personal. It was power and status. That every indulgence was a proclamation, every favorite character a flag, and every unspoken little joy a potential liability if in discord with the mood of the group. I didn’t yet know we were living in that world, because I was a child and still sane.

I suppose somewhere in the ever-swirling realm of pop culture ‘discourse,’ there’s a Platonic ideal that all relevant art can never honestly reflect: perfect writing, perfect visuals, perfect pacing, perfect message, perfect tone, and, most importantly, perfect market appeal.

An unblemished intellectual property. An Ideal Work. The One True Content.

And orbiting round that illusory fata morgana, as always, are the roving mobs of self-anointed fan-priests, slobbering to guard the purity of the industrial machine-society. They say they’re just trying to defend the artists—in defiance of all the corporate greed of college-educated CEBros that strangles those same artists for profit. At one time it was the efforts of “normies.” Now, apparently, it’s the “degenerates.” Next week? Maybe it’s you.

Don’t spend money on that if you’re strapped, even though you like it better. If not enough people purchase this buggy game, this entire franchise will disappear! And we all know that all the professionals artist on the franchise derive their creative authority by consent of the fans so we’re all in this together.

It’s a constitutional monarchy of taste, and you’ve been drafted into the war effort. So give them your money, or else—you guessed it—you’re a faggot.

What a hilarious joke, if it were a parody.

But it’s not.

Real forty-eight year old ginger peer-counselors actually think like this!

Somewhere along the way, when our capitalist society ADHD-hyper-focused on the consumerism of children, paving the way for the height of first-world identity, virtual skins, we stopped asking teenagers to grow up, and instead taught them to curate identities like playlists.

Individuating in middle school? Developing enough personal clarity by graduation to make actually adult sexual or philosophical choices?

Nope!

Now it’s just trauma merch, brand loyalty, and moral alignment via checkout cart.

Our latest dystopia comes pre-shrunk and giggling: Mothers monitoring us on closed-circuit parenting apps in 15-minute intervals to make sure we’re “safe,” while simultaneously posting TikToks mocking their own obsessive surveillance.

“Guys, I’m that Boy Mom—” they announce, laughing, fondling their future surrogate husbands like it’s a comedy routine and not a quietly fascist behavioral feedback-loop wrapped in obnoxious fonts and Disney-adjacent musical cues.

And they expect us to find that funny.

But it’s our mission to not allow that for one second! And if we dutifully pursue that mission with little mercy, as all moral people should? Well, that’s harassment.

We’re all part of a collective on every front. Gender, fandom, lifestyle, sexuality, kinks, neuroses, music taste… in other words, friendship as brand loyalty (we don’t have personalities anymore, just brands to cultivate as a side-hustle). All of it has been conveniently repackaged as “community,” which is beauty-underneath-code for “safe places to express socially acceptable discrimination against people who make you feel weird, or at least, call you out when you adorably announce you feel weird.”

That’s why fighting for inclusive spaces, no matter how much we might fall short, is the highest categorical imperative.

We live in a society where we must discuss what is allowed to exist and be good, and what is allowed to hurt us, through that precious and entertaining, and always politically licensed, discourse, or, if you will, Disk Horse™.

See? I’m definitely a big ol’ furry! (My apologies to the fry-quick corporation)

By the way, what is your opinion on furries? Asked by someone who’s trans-species, by the way, no reason. I eagerly anticipate your answer that definitely pays attention to that detail!

We must argue endlessly over what is allowed to be inherently valuable; what is allowed to be called good writing (is this it, or is it schizo-posting word-salad?); what is allowed to be an appropriate critique; what is allowed to be said in public spaces; who is allowed to be a victim; who is allowed to be an authority; who is allowed to be valid; who is allowed to call themselves sane; and all the while monetize our complaints about the entire set-up bemoaning,

“I just want a positive experience! Stop calling me a bitch even though I determine the metrics by which I am to be judged!”

(paraphrased)

Oh shit, watch out for that slippery slope. Don’t want ya to bruise your non-existent spine on the very sharp edges of your own contradictions.

It turns out that half-baked, socially lubricated Disk Horse™, shudder usually delivered by people who absolutely possess the intelligence required for a Master’s in #Counseling (and are, let’s be honest, unbearably proud of it), or by long-haulers with decade-long tenure in rewording the same three thoughts every six months to applause—doesn’t actually help you survive. It helps you perform surviving. And right now, people have been tricked into thinking that’s all that matters.

But when you’re alone in the cold reality of being misrepresented, silenced, or turned into the villain of someone else’s therapeutic novella? You’ll find it has the structural integrity of a parasocial apology video and the practical utility of a pinned tweet about boundaries with a Funko Pop shelf in the background.

When you can consume bell hooks for lunch and casually dismantle Dworkin for brunch, expecting you to be ready to match wits with a small-town 3A high school graduate who clawed their way through barely a curriculum shouldn’t be a big ask.

It’s not his fault he ended up more coherent than the postdoctoral trauma dump that’s bound to be coming. Oh wait, I forgot, when the word count hits three digits and there’s no attached Power Rangers meme, you just, phphthtbtthtbtth get confused, right?

But you’re the hero of your own story, so this isn’t dissonance on your part, it’s a misreading on mine! I didn’t have any room for a presumption of misunderstanding, my bad.

You both like synthpop, sci-fi, and retro anime? Great, now you’re each other’s Favorite Person™ until one of you blinks wrong during a conversation about accountability, and suddenly you’re Unsafe™ despite five years of being very safe.

Wha… what happened mommy… *scrunches eyes in cutesy lolicon anime way* ooooh, *rubs her sexy slickly cute and adorable rainbow tentacles* I’m scared my succubus hive queen~~~

It’s simple. Despite no one telling anyone this, as if to keep it true, your shared interests don’t inform either of you on how the other will see Harm™.

Only values do. That’s why shared interests are for friends, and shared values are for partners.

Easy!

Interests are aesthetic.

Values are substance.

Interests will earn you Discord Nitro boosts and watermelon Red Bulls.

Values are what determine whether someone gaslights you into silence because they “just needed space” after publicly misrepresenting their meltdown as your violation of a “confused trans lady’s” nervous system; you know, the standard of all that is decent.

What follows is how it goes in the future, post-collapse, because all the self-employed arbiters of what’s allowed to be good are dead:

You both like synthpop, sci-fi, and retro anime?

Great, now you’re friends and can enjoy each other’s company hanging out without having to turn into a side-hustle OnlyFans ‘performance.’ Maybe you’ll spend a weekend gaming and talking about the symbolic implications of the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion, or maybe you’ll have sex, who knows? I don’t!

Here’s the ringer we always knew about: values don’t always show up first.

People lead with charm. They lead with mood boards. They curate a vibe that makes you think you’re dancing to the same emotional soundtrack. But when something goes wrong—when you name a real need, a hurt, or worse, a boundary of your own—when there’s a moment of dissonance, misunderstanding, or pain—interests won’t save you.

That shared love of point-and-click adventure games, mascoting, and White Wolf won’t tell you how the other person processes accountability, or harm, or apology, or silence, or guilt. It won’t tell you whether they’ll sit with you (or by themselves) through the hard parts—or sell their meltdown as proof of your moral inferiority.

I should know.

Values show up when you fuck up—and see what they do. Or when they fuck up—and you see what they do. If you really want to know what someone values, disagree with them.

Maybe, perhaps, possibly, somewhere hopeful, it might make a teenie-tiny, itsy-bitsy, smidgen bit more sense. Just a 少し.

You can like the same books and still be a character in theirs without consent. So no, I don’t care how many shared interests we have. If your values include rewriting an entire human being into a supervillain caricature who’s only composed of the very elusive bad for audience retention, I’ll be skipping past your overblown drama vlog.

In fact, I’m skipping out on your entire timeline.

Bye Felicia!

If you’re never at fault, everyone else bleeds for your mistakes.

One thing that Liana complained about, or observed, or suggested, or gave guidance on, or chastised, or ‘tough loved,’ or structurally enforced, or…

During the “very ugly fight,” was that I made everyone, particularly my husband, fight all my battles and do all that elusive ‘work’ for me, which is why I was terrifyingly behind on my emotional development and wallowing with great profundity in the self-inflicted misery of my Borderline Personality Disorder that I was diagnosed with twenty-four years ago.

Okay, maybe she didn’t use that many words, because that would’ve tipped into “word-salad” territory, and we wouldn’t want anyone sounding too educated while misrepresenting someone’s character. But that was the gist.

And, of course, all of that is because not only do I let everyone do everything for me, but they mistakenly want to do everything for me because I manipulate the situation, and thus their love, so that’s also my fault.

It reminds me how a perniciously ‘lazy’ person also qualifies as a sociopath in The Sociopath Next Door (not sponsored 🤮) because they don’t have that God-given emotional sensor in their souls (an intrinsic conscience you either have or lack) telling them to get off the damn couch so you can vacuum it like a mature responsible adult that lives in a society.

But, Liana is an innovator. She invented Schrodinger’s Sociopath™: I’m both incredibly helpless, self-sabotaging at every turn, and make myself existentially miserable, while simultaneously capable of cruelly calculating subterfuge with great attention and highly effective (read: Unsafe™) effort directed to controlling every social interaction.

Being genuinely helpless could have been true regarding one thing or another at some point in my life. It’s rarely, if ever, not true at some point for most everyone. When I had to move back home to my childhood home while my father was still alive, I was dead set on going down a path where I was completely and utterly helpless.

Disabled even.

It happens. It happened.

Fifteen years ago.

But, when you have a fantastic support network like I do knocks wood such as a useless, ‘improperly educated and alcoholic social misfit’ for a father who refuses to bullshit you for the moon and simply states that he’ll watch whatever TV show he wants, whenever he wants, no matter how you feel about it—because you can always choose to leave the fucking room like an adult—you get by.

You slowly regain what you lost.

The will to live;

The confidence to boil water;

The gumption to live on your own and vacuum your apartment;

The discipline to do your laundry;

The attention to go to appointments;

And even enough stability to work limited-hour freelance for a short while without being hospitalized this time, have a couple rats from birth to death, and program a few things.

And it’s great.

It might take fifteen years, sure, but eventually you get there, and it’s great.

A bit boring sometimes, but great nonetheless.

So when someone says,

“I’m frightened for you, because at this point you really should not still be this stuck. It has to be horrible to feel so out of control and unable to process these enormous feelings. And with the amount of therapy you’ve had, there should be a better understanding and a better STRUCTURE… [as] it’s what is going to make things better.”

I just have to blink for a few seconds, like this.

I’m sorry, what?

Oh, she went on to give me a great shot to my very inherent self-worth

“You deserve people who care about you enough to not let you throw your life away, and to show you enough respect to tell you when your behaviour is clearly taking you in the opposite direction of where you want to go.”

I had no words.

I didn’t know what to say because I was too busy trying to rack my brain for how I could throw my life away.

Like, how does one do that? Who determines that?

And trying to figure out how she knows what direction I want to go when she can’t even figure out what the hell I mean when I talk about intrinsic value, it’s a way too confusing, unnecessary “Kantian word-salad” defense mechanism that no one anywhere ever brought up. Ever.

She can’t even remember it now, apparently, but she definitely knows what direction I want to go in my life and exactly what “behaviours” will take me there.

A better woman than I’ll ever be!

But, that’s giving a bit too much credit, maybe. I suspect she forgot that this friend wasn’t one of her clients and wasn’t coming to her to tell them what to do with their pathetically conflict-averse life.

Even today, under layers of indirect aphorisms targeting that Katamari-ball of harassers she’s always collecting, I suspect she still thinks she’s going to give me some good advice.

Liana, you never were, nor will ever be, my Not Therapist™ or my Financial Advisor on Cruelty Investments™.

You were supposed to be my friend, because you told me you were my friend!

But you didn’t tell me anything was wrong until you could use it all against me.

It’s incredible, because the next piece in her little recovery therapy session—after she assumed I’d finally subscribed to her framework of mutually assured empathy—was,

“I desperately do not want you to believe you are a piece of shit because you’re not. Doing bad things is not being a bad person. If I thought you were a bad person, I wouldn’t have bothered calling bullshit, because all the pain isn’t worth it if someone is really terrible.”

I’ve never thought that doing bad things makes anyone a bad person. I don’t believe there are inherently bad people, just individuals who choose to engage in harmful behaviors.

This isn’t something I had to choose to believe. It’s not something I learned from Liana. I’ve never thought about it that way because intrinsic value judgments don’t hold any meaning. After all, inherent value doesn’t exist.

I don’t believe in sin, let alone Original Sin™. I never have. I didn’t accept it when I heard it as a tiny child, and I don’t accept it now in any other form. Humans, and humanity, are not inherently flawed by nature. How does that even make sense? I don’t feel guilty for being alive or human enough. I just exist as an amoral being with a consciousness that makes moral choices. Everybody does.

But, Liana Kerzner believes this, and boy did she want me to as well! Liana Kerzner brought all of it up first when she set the very clear boundary that she didn’t want to discuss me being a bad person.

When I absolutely agreed with her, albeit with ‘too many’ words of course (a 5,000-word essay that was most definitely not 5,000 words), she spiraled into being very, very correct about all of it, KNOWING that’s what all this was because, I presume, I used too many words and she got confused by the long convo.

It wasn’t about that at all.

It never was.

I was aghast and mystified, raising my eyebrows and looking at my husband when that one popped up. At no point did I think to myself any variation on,

“I did bad things, so I’m a bad person, and so my apology is to badger Liana into telling me I’m not a bad person, because I’m afraid of anyone thinking I’m a bad person.”

If she’s had the gall to tell you that, because I know she would suffer zero “moral qualms” about it, you’ve been duped. really. bad.

Many people have thought I’m a terrible person my entire life, primarily due to the nature of my philosophy. This is Exhibit ZXW. This isn’t new to me, and like any other judgment of me regarding things I know are fine, I don’t care.

I don’t give two fucks. I’m not offended. I’m not cowed. I’m not embarrassed.

I genuinely don’t care.

And saying that doesn’t mean I actually care. Silence only means whatever anyone wants to insert into it, so why stay there when that’s been used against you?

However, it absolutely needed to be all about that, and I had to care a great deal to ensure my failure, since she wouldn’t grant this mystical inherent value.

She wouldn’t “emotionally soothe me” by answering a straightforward question, or “reward bad behavior,” as she’s apt to describe interpersonal dynamics like it’s a video-game and she’s the celebrated famous game designer.

By the way, I didn’t say “medal,” or whatever; I said, “Yes. Do you want a reward?” at 10:03 PM MST on Monday, September 30th, 2024.

Liana said a lot of things after my second apology, where I very clearly and emphatically centered her as the most important person in the conversation. The one I find the strangest is,

“People bothering to tell you the truth, even when it’s not what you want to hear, is a sign of caring. It’s not fair to you to say I believe things will get better when I don’t.”

I’m supposed to believe this so that I don’t characterize her ‘tough love’ as deliberate cruelty, as my husband Maus aptly described his observations and as she has circled around since. I’m supposed to believe this so that I can be the better person she aspires for me to be. I’m supposed to believe this so that everything will fall into place, right where it’s supposed to go.

And it’s not that I don’t believe this.

I do believe this because this is how I’ve lived my entire fucking life. She never, ever needed to tell me. I mean, I’m forty-two years old. From where I come from, you already know this by that age.

But, I guess it’s not so true when you’re emotionally stunted and not as far emotionally as everyone thinks you should be. I’m the only one that’s supposed to actually put this into practice, and

That’s the problem.

To that, I said,

“No.”

And the rest is the most comprehensive dissertation on one-sided self-entitled righteousness I’ve ever witnessed.

10/10

But there are notes.

Liana revealed fabulous secrets to me quite emphatically when she wrote,

“I know you are very intelligent, so I believe that a part of you knows that refusing to deal with something for three weeks forces other people to deal with it for you, especially if they have trouble letting you fail, because they love you and they’re desperate to save you. Trying to save you is misguided, I believe, because it never gives you a chance to see that you can save yourself. But it comes from a good place.”

This was never a voice conversation, so it is a complete and total mystery to me how she couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.

But, what did I say to elicit all of this horrid friend-as-life-coach-I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-therapy-speak?

Here was part of my first apology:

“My behavior after the ultimate quote-post, particularly towards you immediately, wasn’t healthy, mindful, or mature. It was embarrassing pathological knee-jerking due to my being unprepared and not as developed as I should be to handle a disorder I am responsible for handling. I’ve avoided engaging in anything to that degree for twenty years, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened now or that you were dragged into it because of me.”

I later followed it up with, after other messages,

“I agree that blocking you was inappropriate and a piss poor way of handling what was happening. It didn’t handle anything, it made everything worse, it and the following days were pure pathological response. I wish none of this had ever happened, especially because it has led you to the conclusion that I do not value you. It’s my error that it did not even occur to me that the span of time would suggest that. To me, despite what my actions have communicated, that is not true. My actions didn’t match that. That’s why I’m regretful. You are my closest friend. Our friendship is very dear to me.”

And a finishing paragraph on that note was,

“‘My BPD was right,’ is extremely extremely troubling. It’s antisocial. It is the worst thing I could’ve said because, no matter how I meant it, it shows that I do not appreciate the nature of Borderline. It’s never right because it’s a disorder. That’s why I’ve ended up sequestered away in hospitals and considered a danger to society. Me communicating that I think it’s ever right is very very scary. And I’ve internalized that because you’re not the first person to quote it, and I’m almost never quoted; I’m too wordy. That quote, on its own, scares me. Borderline in any form is never right. I commit to never acting like it is, justifying it in any way, or using it as a justification ever again.”

So very ugly.

For now, that’s the landscape.

Here are a few of my notes, to start the show:

Liana Kerzner insists that everyone be the hero in their own story (except, of course, me). So, naturally, I assume she is the heroine in hers. And, as written, being the heroine, everything she does deserves careful, good-faith consideration with constant maximum benefit of the doubt. She has said this herself; this isn’t me putting words into her transcripts. I’m just saying it must be because she’s the heroine.

The heroine can do no wrong, not in the long term, not really.

I mean, Liana did assure us that, at times, she deliberately irritates people, it’s not in her nature to do things she believes will hurt them. So, I’m going to grant her the benefit of the doubt and assume with good-faith that she doesn’t believe fundamentally lying about the facts of a situation and misrepresenting (deliberately or not) someone’s private mental health struggle with truly false and arrogant ‘insider’ knowledge while shattering the confidence of her former team member is hurtful, lest she just be the protagonist.

It must be true because @vivareasonandfirstamendmen8390 wrote, “… Having observed your Internet presence over several years, I find your courage and integrity to be exemplary. You’ve consistently taken the high road… [and] another silver lining is that you have modelled [sic] for others how to act with integrity after making a mistake. … I hope you’ll give yourself the grace that I know you would give to another in your shoes. …”

@ariwl1 wrote, “… To your credit, this is one of the best “Our project must conclude” statements I’ve heard in the realm of Kickstarter. I have absolutely no regrets about becoming a backer. …” (emphasis mine)

@itoshigotc wrote, “… When you last talked about it, you said you guys got screwed over. …” (emphasis mine)

@michaelhurlbut4830 wrote, “… It is always annoying when an outside third party chooses to subvert a key team member to the point of project failure. …”

That’s right, I subverted my husband. He “should’ve known better.”

@CinemaMack wrote, “… I appreciate the transparency! …”

@matthewrowe9903 wrote, “…respect for coming out publicly so rare in game dev its a shock, almost as much as its because of a trans/KIWI farms issue ? I have watched you for years but if you picked one side to ‘be kind’ then you should come clean over it and I as a TERF can choose to walk based on fact”

And finally @BetterWithBob wote, “…our faith in you will never be misplaced…”

These are stellar Yelp reviews. I wish I could get some like these, but, then again,

I’m honest.

When I say something, I mean it, honestly, and don’t turn my apologies into, “I’m sorry for being a good person!”

Spoiler: she wasn’t, and I wonder how many of these commenters might have anything to say about it. Probably none, since I’m socially disposable, and now only exist as letters on a screen that people can collect victimization from like an Elitch’s haunted house.

But, speaking of other people doing everything, I actually had my own highly counterintuitive aphorism on this before she ever claimed everyone else did all my ‘work’ for me because they love me so much and are so desperate to ‘save’ me that they have trouble ‘letting me fail.’

It became immediately apparent to me, almost like a visceral spine snap back to reality, that Liana had never, ever met my family, my parents, or my father. She couldn’t; he was already dead, something she used to her advantage when trying to beat me down in the very ugly fight that left her spirit broken.

If she had, she would’ve never said this about anyone except possibly my partner, who came from ‘outside’ my immediate family.

Here’s my aphorism. One of my top sayings, if you will, but I don’t stick it onto throw pillows in hopes of affording bookcases from places other than Walmart sales.

If you’re never at fault, everyone else bleeds for your mistakes.

I know, scary af. Just horrifying.

But, that’s the math. No divine reckoning, no karmic refund, no softly-lit montage of introspection. Just pain… outsourced. Quietly, cleverly, and very consistently, to someone who is very much allowed to be wrong so you don’t have to be.

They apologize first, as expected. They double-check your feelings, as they know they’re expected. They make space, step back, self-reflect, journal, spiral, and collapse. As expected.

And you? You get to be right. You get to really know. You get to dispense all the advice after having processed it all in intensive therapy that ‘worked.’

Eventually, the social-ethos miscreant disappears, and you call it growth without ever significantly changing the message. It’s the same message it was one year ago, three years ago, heck, even eight years ago. Don’t worry, I’ve checked.

Except now, every once in a while, it sounds a bit like mine.

You never screamed, never hit, never ‘exploded’ in anyone’s terms, never put up a direct name. Just hints; shades and tones; subtle odd sandwichings between ‘cutesy’ kid names you have to use. Just enough implication, and detail, that you tilt the room. Because you don’t have to be obvious—you just have to have someone else carry your shadow long enough that the light they’re casting appears flattering.

But someone always pays the debt. As my father would repeatedly say, everything has a cost.

You don’t seem to feel guilty about this, as far as I can tell, but you’re not being honest about it. At least I’m honest about not feeling guilt over how I acted in this situation, but your knowledge of why you don’t say it translates into me engaging in a broad spectrum of sociopathic behaviors (paraphrased amalgamation there, but you didn’t deny it when the torch was passed).

Nah.

You feel justified. You feel empowered, and so does your audience. If you really know how I feel about all of it, or what the real truth is that I refuse to face, then, I do too. Unless…

You actually don’t?

If a trail of shredded empathy is left behind you like fake fur after a furry convention, that’s not your fault—it’s just what happens when people can’t handle your healing.

And the worst part?

You’re right.  

That’s what makes it evil.

I’m not attacking anyone.

There’s nothing to attack.

I told Liana, multiple times, whether she remembers or not, that freedom isn’t freedom from everything. Freedom is only one side of a coin. The other side is responsibility. You can’t have freedom if you can’t, or won’t, accept the consequences.

And I’m all about facing things as they are, which encompasses all that ever was, all that is, and all that will ever be, including consequences.

To quote Liana, exactly as she said it to me, “… Some things are going to have to happen now, but they are not punishments. …” at approximately 8:42 AM MST on Monday, September 30th, 2024.

Goodbye, And Hello

So here I am, now in the future broadcasting backward through time after the collapse. I’m myself now, everything I ever dreamed of on long dirt roads under blue skies and the drone of wind and jets. Snout, ears, tail, everything, just as it always should’ve been. And I write, again, without anyone being my narrator.

But humanity, whatever shape it might take, is a funny thing.

Even in the future, I feel it.

The pull.

That collapsing moment—the one they thought I needed to experience; get close to; truly understand? It sat there in the corner of time like an untouched drink at a party I know you shouldn’t have attended.

I convinced myself I could face it. I didn’t know I had a choice, so, you reframe, right? They thought going back, going anywhere before really, would let me get closer and put a furless paw on the event horizon. So I could say with authority: I was there, and I survived, and I get it.

But I couldn’t. I can’t. I won’t.

It’s too much; too painful; too bright; too burning.

So I don’t go all the way in. Just the tip. I circle; wag; broadcast. I leave clawed pawprints in the morning dew and retell stories of Smooch Point and two trailer-court kids that should’ve changed the world. Maybe. I send them back anyway, like reruns no one allegedly wanted—half-remembered, low-resolution—but stubbornly still on the air.

Because although I was unable to alter the collapse, because, although I was unable to access the collapse, I am able to name what was there before. I am able to assemble it in color. I am able to stitch it into fur and symbology.

That is how you navigate a future like this.

Post-collapse. Of a society that never existed, of a psyche that was never quite there, of an individual that wasn’t who they said they were.

Tail raised.

You understand?

It’s a strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Now it’s just a nice game of chess, once again…

Alone.