Estimated reading time: 23 minutes
Doctor’s Note: Today’s column includes talk about self-harm.
Hello there. I’ve been reading your blog on and off for quite a while but I think I finally want to try reaching out. I’m just a lurker by nature, but someone suggested I post my problems somewhere for feedback because I’ve been going through a lot and I’m honestly looking for any outside perspective here to get out of my own head about any of the things I’m about to mention, since some of them involve things I’ve never heard anybody talk about. I’m struggling with a lot of questions and evaluating whether or not I can do anything about any of it. I feel like I should start off with some background though, so I’ll get right into it. I feel like I should preface all of this by saying I don’t hate women or anything like that. I’m not mad at or blaming anyone except myself.
As of right now, I am 27 years old. Growing up I was never that popular with girls. I made friends just fine with anyone but when it came to girls, if I liked someone, escalation was always a big issue, whether they would have liked me or not. The idea scares me even now. I never saw myself as desirable. My biggest hobbies were and still are things people dismiss as at best completely lame, and at worst, creepy guy hobbies like gaming, anime/cartoons, building model kits, etc. I do other things like drawing, 3D art, some reading and such, but generally what I like are things that average people seem to find repulsive. I like some more socially acceptable things too, it’s just that I’m not as passionate or knowledgeable about any of it, admittedly. It makes putting myself out there feel useless, especially these days when people might shame you over anything. It doesn’t help that even though I do treat everyone with respect, I still couldn’t help but internalize all of the most toxic gender war discourse I’ve been looking at over the years ever since being a teen on tumblr and. Not that I was upset at valid criticism, I just felt like I was still inherently bad for belonging to the same group of people and that nothing I could do would be good enough. I started digesting these things at 15, so I didn’t really know how to take it. I had good female friends who would vouch for me and everything, but I still took it all in and it resulted in me feeling less than human compared to women, which I know sounds really weird, but it happened, and even though I know I shouldn’t feel that way, I still do in some measure to this day. That’s the best way I can put it. I also ended up getting into redpill when I was in college, but it didn’t make me really angry or misogynistic. It just made me extremely depressed and as time went on, suicidal, due to how miserable it all sounded to me. I now understand it’s bullshit, but I’m still stuck trying to recover from the damage it did to me.
I only ever had one “real” relationship in high school. She confessed to me and luckily, I felt the same way, but she broke up with me not too long after gradually putting distance between us. I was devastated and never found out why. I assume I did something wrong but I genuinely can’t figure it out no matter how hard I thought about it over the years. That made me overly cautious going forward, though. I seriously can’t tell if someone likes me unless they straight up say so, which is rare, and understandably so. It doesn’t help that I don’t really find myself attracted to or able to connect with most girls. I can’t pursue anything with just anyone and sadly it would seem the kinds of people I feel most comfortable with are those I meet through my hobbies, who in my experience, honestly seem to be overwhelmingly lesbian or at least have been taken long term. I would go through a cycle for years that made me feel like I was losing my mind where I’d always meet someone I thought was really cool, develop feelings for them, and then find out they’re in a relationship or something already, and then start feeling guilty and nasty and distance myself. I couldn’t even make it to the part where I’d ask and get rejected. The more this would happen, the more insecure and honestly paranoid I’d get. I also would always feel guilty for not being mature enough to just put up with it. People have also made fun of me when I opened up about this specific thing in the past too. A few people through the years have called me an incel and made “Love Quest” jokes at my expense, which highly upsets me to this day, even if I don’t show it.
All of this sort of peaked around the time I turned 20 and met someone I felt really compatible with. For a few months we talked almost every day, but like usual, I found out pretty quick that she was in a long term relationship. I tried to just put up with my discomfort, hoping I’d just stop feeling it since I was in the wrong anyway, but it just got worse and worse. It was the start of my depression getting so bad that I’d go physically numb when triggered. Sometimes the effects lasted up to a full day. I had always had a self harm habit at that point, but that was when it escalated into cutting, due to said numbness. Of course I never said this to anyone at the time except my best friends and my mom after thing got way too bad for me to handle alone (seriously without them, things would be so much worse). When I finally couldn’t take it anymore, I told that girl how I felt about her just to get it off my chest and hopefully feel better, but the opposite happened. I felt absolutely pathetic and low in that moment. Self-harm became a regular thing for me until relatively recently after that. I’ve stopped, though. Haven’t done such a thing in a full year now. I’m also in therapy which has been slow, but good. I didn’t really want to talk about that part, but I feel like I had to so I could hopefully convey how badly these things have hurt me.
After all that, I feel like I gave up and shut down. My mindset wasn’t at all the same anymore. I started distancing myself from my female friends, feeling like girls could never take me seriously again, or even care, since I felt they had every reason not to. I’d make a couple of new friends in the future, but the only reason we’re sort of close now is because they took more initiative than I could bring myself to, and I didn’t turn away their friendship. For the most part though, I started avoiding girls deliberately, because I was afraid of dealing with the same situation again of getting too attached and not being able to bear that disappointment. Honestly, I was scared I’d react worse and do something worse to myself.
About a year later though, a friend suggested going online and using anonymous sites to chat with girls. For me that was a big mistake. Over time I got really addicted to chatting sexually with women online, but every time I did it, I came out of it feeling absolutely disgusting. I hated that I was using a replacement like that, when what I really wanted was connection with someone I felt comfortable around. I felt like doing this stuff made me into one of the very sleazeballs women rightfully complain about, but it was the only outlet I had, even if I wasn’t feeling like myself and most of the time was just performing so I could get that sort of attention. Granted, I met some really nice people there and many times I was told by them that I deserved love but somehow it all felt so hard to believe. Over the years, especially after 2020, I’d start wasting more and more time on this as life circumstances made me more and more isolated and trying to go out of my way to find real connection felt more and more pointless. It was at its worst just the past 2 years. I was really upset and feeling more lonely than ever since I had friends who talked about their partners often and was dealing with having feelings for yet another woman I couldn’t even at least shoot my shot with. I was and kind of still am broken up about all of it.
All that brings me to where I am now. It feels to me like the dating pool is drying up for me, I missed whatever chances I may have had for a partner years ago, and that it might be impossible to find a partner I can really be myself around while so many others can. On top of that being depressing, sometimes I also feel like I’m going crazy because of it. I’m on some level convinced the right person for me simply doesn’t exist anymore, even if I know rationally that’s probably not true. I can’t escalate and the idea of telling someone I’m interested in them is scary for me because I still think “well that’s the last thing any girl wants to hear from me of all people”. I know these things may not be true, but they feel true, so I wonder if my situation is at all salvageable. I’m a poor guy with no “real” experience and finds attraction especially difficult to come across. I still live with my family because I don’t make enough at my loser job to move out all on my own, which I know is a turnoff. I can’t drive because I have real problems with my eyesight and don’t trust myself to drive because of it. I look average but I know for a fact I can use work. Sure women can vouch for my character but I really wonder if anybody can take me seriously enough for love, even if I did improve on all of those avenues. I also feel like anyone can do so much better, no matter how many times people I know tell me I’m highly intelligent and respectful of others, and would be a good partner despite everything. After all, I know nobody NEEDS me in the first place. Is there anywhere I can go from here at all or am I just gonna have to suck it up get used to being alone? Am I too stunted to be trying this at 27 with no actual experience? Am I asking for too much somehow? I really don’t get it, everything is so confusing. I’d like some input on anything I wrote about here, but of course, even just a read is more than enough for me. Apologies if this one is too long too.
Anyway, thanks either way. I appreciate everything you do.
Sincerely,
A Struggling Fool
OK, ASF, I want to be clear that what I’m about to say is not a judgment on you as a person, but a commentary on what you’re wrestling with and why:
I know I have certain phrases, lessons and mindsets that I bring up over and over in my columns – you have to love yourself, you are your own worst enemy, online isn’t the same as the real world, avoidance only makes fear worse, and so on. This is like what would happen if you took examples of almost all of them and compiled them into a single letter.
We’ll start with the most obvious: I know that I bust out the Ru Paul quote of “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love anyone else” pretty often, but you exemplify the reason why, right from the jump. In your second paragraph, you start by kicking yourself in the balls by going on about how your hobbies – watching anime, playing games and building model kits – are “at best completely lame and at worst, creepy guy hobbies”. That right there is the single biggest signifier of the problem you’re having: you’re not “running out of time”, your dating opportunities aren’t “drying up”, you’re not “too stunted”, you don’t like yourself. You are, quite literally, your own worst enemy. You feel like shit because you bully yourself constantly, for no real reason except that you feel like you’re supposed to. You frame this almost as though you’re doing penance for some horrible sin, but your “sins” are… just enjoying stuff. Enjoying stuff that, quite frankly, millions of people enjoy. Gaming and watching anime isn’t exactly “massive creeper alert hobbies”, considering that basically everyone is a gamer these days and anime is ubiquitous on every streaming service out there. Shit, Netflix just put three different anime series in the “we’re promoting the fuck out of this” carousel on my account.
(And frankly, the idea that enjoying anime is manchild cringe is just more sad nerd self-flagellation bullshit; Dr. Mrs. The NerdLove recently introduced my foreign-history/court intrigue-loving father-in-law to Apothecary Diaries.)
The fact that you feel like you have to qualify that “you like some socially acceptable things too”, and then take that qualifier back because “I’m not as passionate or knowledgable about any of it” is just another example of how much you’re beating yourself up based on this idea that you deserve it for some reason.
There’s more here – and I’ll get to it in a second, don’t you worry about that – but this alone is a prime illustration of the “if you don’t love yourself” concept. You have convinced yourself you are such a horrific, unlovable, unfuckable homunculus that you feel like you have to apologize for enjoying things that are incredibly mainstream while also apologizing for not being as into other “more acceptable” hobbies. It is this very mindset that is going to keep you from ever actually loving someone else or being loved, simply because you don’t believe you deserve it and that you wouldn’t be able to accept it or believe it from anyone else. You have created a shield around yourself to ward people away as though you were more toxic and radioactive than a Pripyat mushroom instead of just being a regular guy.
Everything following this is a litany of reasons explaining and justifying why you feel this way and why you’re supposedly awful and to be perfectly frank, I could predict every next sentence with 90% accuracy; I was only surprised how much of this was coming from Tumblr instead of Reddit or TikTok. But even so, the fact that the origin of all of this is Internet brain poisoning is the least surprising reveal since “Oops, turns out this wasn’t the Final Nightmare after all!” I am absolutely not shocked that your self-hate was reinforced by Tumblr, a site that’s infamous for relentless bullying, point-scoring and score-settling masquerading as social “justice”, all the while using therapy-speak and wildly misunderstood academic terms to explain why the latest target is ontologically evil and must be destroyed. You have subjected yourself to the judgement of people who wanted to recreate social hierarchies with themselves at the top because they desperately need to feel powerful and there’s no better way to get other people on board with bullying others than by framing it as righteousness, who never learned how to manage discontent or disliking something without making it about Being Better Than You. While you clearly were and are dealing with depression, you also were going through the angsty tween and teen “all these things about me are awful” stage while mainlining content from people who were all too eager to confirm that yes, You Are The Worst.
This isn’t to say that all the gender Discourse was wrong and should be disregarded, but a lot of it sure as shit needs to be seen through a lens of “some of this is being spread by people with all the enthusiasm of a college freshman who discovered veganism and Communism at the same time, and none of the experience.” You – through no fault of your own – were not in a position to recognize this or take it on board. Nor were you in a position to recognize that what you were doing was a form of self-harm, no different from the cutting you would do later, except one didn’t leave marks that you could see.
Now I do want to be clear: I fully understand how much Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha live their lives online because we as a society have systematically removed any other place for tweens and teens to just hang out and vibe in person. The lack of third spaces, the inability for kids to just go and be kids is a massive, massive problem and it leads to kids growing up in a digital panopticon and feeling like they have to perform their lives in a very specific way lest they be Judged. That’s not something you chose, ASF, I realize that. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very big part of why you feel the way you do about yourself. You are blaming yourself for existing, based on the sometimes-justified-sometimes-absolutely-not frustrations and complaints and judgement of people who never knew you existed in the first place, but were still willing to talk shit about you anyway. And at the same time, you never learned how to recognize that if they’re not describing you, they’re not talking about you, and you are free to disregard what people say about you if it doesn’t actually line up with who you are.
And that sense of being to blame for everything has followed you everywhere. It’s incredibly clear in your description of your “real” relationship, where you assume you must be to blame for it not working, instead of recognizing that you were in high-school and nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing in high-school. Sometimes people are just flakes and assholes and will seem like they feel one way one day and then do a 180 the next and there will be no reason for it other than they’re in the most chaotic period of their social development and all their hormones are raging out of control.
Sometimes shit just happens, and the only thing you can do is shrug your shoulders and go “well that sucked,” instead of adding it to the list of “this is why you are The Worst”.
And a big reason why you need to be able to do that is because of all the ways you shit on yourself for the crime of wanting connection, but not knowing where to find it, how to ask for it, not being able to accept it, and being afraid to try. The way you describe “getting really addicted to chatting sexually with women online” is another example of how you shit on yourself over what is very clearly an attempt to find connection and intimacy with others. You were starved for connection and this was a way you found that you could use to try to meet that need. It may not have been the healthiest way you could’ve done so, but it didn’t make you some sleezeball. You were just a guy trying to find a connection, when you’re too scared to reach out. This was one whose barrier to entry was low enough that it didn’t trigger your avoidance. You weren’t “feeling like yourself” and that you were “performing” in those moments in part because that is exactly what you were doing: you tacitly giving yourself permission to “be” someone else because you felt that you couldn’t get what you needed as you. Performing a role let you pretend that you were someone who was allowed to be desired and to have his desires fulfilled, and so you were able to actually get at least some relief from those connections – as fleeting and fragile as they were.
Which leads to the fact that you are illustrating why trying to avoid the things that scare you or cause you anxiety only make things worse. The self-recrimination, self-flagellation and self-bullying you do created anxiety around not just rejection but feeling attraction and interest, and you pointedly started avoiding circumstances that would bring those anxieties to the fore. Your “addiction” to sexy anonymous chats was one form of avoidance. So too was your self-isolation. The idea that trying to find a “real” connection was pointless is precisely how avoidance only causes the anxiety to grow; you start by avoiding rejection and then you start to avoid things that could make rejection even a possibility, and then you start to avoid the things that make you even think about the things that could lead to the possibility of rejection. With every step, the world you allow yourself to live in gets smaller and smaller and smaller, while you close off more and more ways of meeting your needs. The way you insist that you’re “too late”, that “the right person doesn’t exist for you”, that you’re “asking for too much” are all just the current stage of your avoidance; it’s how you justify trying to escape your anxiety by trying to convince yourself that any sort of human connection and intimacy is a futile endeavor for you.
And here’s the thing: all of this is bullshit. All of it. Your anxiety and depression was lying to you, you had it reinforced by dunking your head into the Emotional Contagion Device while doomers and Puriteens were casting death magic, and you took it all in like a sponge, turning it from bullshit from randos to THE TRVTH, carved into stone tablets in Enochian.
Your situation isn’t salveagable, not because it’s somehow “too late” for you, but because your situation is fake. There’s nothing to salvage, because what you’re trying to salvage is bullshit. It’s years of emotional self-harm based off false, self-limiting beliefs, a house of garbage built on a foundation of emotional dysregulation. It’s not a fixer-upper, it’s a scraper; you need to scrape off all that shit and start fresh.
And yes, you absolutely can do this. It just takes a lot of work and it starts with a willingness to accept two fundamental truths:
- You have based your entire sense of self on mistaken beliefs about yourself
- Even if there is any truth to those self-limiting beliefs, you are fully able to grow, change and improve and leave that part of your life behind.
And when I say “accept”, I don’t mean “acknowledge that this is generally true”, but “let yourself recognize and believe this to your very bones”. Because I can already hear you doing the former, with the very pointedly unspoken “…except for me, I’m the exception to this.” If you want to stop feeling like it’s too late and that you can turn this all around, then you have to be as willing to believe those two truths just as deeply and as firmly about yourself as you have been willing to believe the worst about yourself.
The second step is to get help to unpack, understand and offload those negative and toxic beliefs about yourself, and to accept that help. You mention that you’re in therapy, which is great, but I get the feeling that you still have serious resistance to some of what your therapist tries to tell you. I also suspect that there’re therapeutic practices that might be more aligned with what you need to unlearn so much of what you’ve built up around yourself. CBT and DBT are probably a good starting point, but you might also want to look into medication to manage anxiety and depression.
The third step is to do a massive digital detox. Quite frankly, I suspect that what you really need is to go as offline as humanly possible, to the point of being one of those people who simply doesn’t “do” social media. You’ve spent over a decade wallowing in the Emotional Contagion Machine and you’re not in a position to recognize the people who are trying to manage their emotional dysregulation by yelling at other people, nor to not take the exhortations of the grievance-peddling slapdicks who want you to think you’re hopeless so they can sell you snake oil. But more importantly, you have lived so much of your life online that you have mistaken it for, well, real life. And while I know people bristle at the idea that the Internet – where he have to spend much of our time – isn’t “real life”, but the fact is that how people behave in person and respond in person is wildly different from the world that internet-poisoned posters insist on. Especially when they’re actually engaging in the real world and not putting on a performance for their livestream.
You need to engage with real people, in the real world, doing real things in real spaces. That means taking your hobbies and interests, recognizing that they don’t make you a creepy weirdo, and find ways of engaging with them with other people in the real world. That may mean boardgame nights at game stores. It may mean going to in-person anime clubs and conventions, signing up to participate in events and games or other get-togethers. It may even mean deciding that you’re going to pick up a new and different hobby just because you saw there was a lockpicking MeetUp every second Tuesday and that sounds interesting to you. The point is to simply start being around actual people and recognizing the sizable gulf between the world that you think exists and the world that does.
The point will also to be to finally break your isolation, and surround yourself with people who know you and care for you. You need to find yourself a community, be part of something bigger than yourself, and have connections with the world around you that will keep you grounded and in the now, instead of isolating yourself in your own head.
The fourth step, and one that will by necessity, tie into getting help, is that you’re going to need to start confronting your anxieties and fears and start breaking through all the walls and barriers you’ve erected. Your isolation was an attempt at protecting yourself from the fear of feeling fear, which itself was an attempt to protect you from your fear of judgement and rejection. As much as it’s going to suck, there is no other way out but through; you’re going to have to confront the things you fear by doing them. Yes, it means that you’re going to have to experience getting rejected. It means that you’re going to have to experience heartbreak. It means that you’re going to be hurt. But here’s the thing: doing this is going to teach you that these are not things to be afraid of. It’ll suck, sure… but it won’t suck nearly as badly as you think. Especially when you’re also detoxifying your brain and unlearning all the awful things you believe about yourself.
But like I said: this is something that needs to be done in conjunction with your therapy, because exposure therapy is not shit that should be done by amateurs, no matter how well-intended. You are definitely going to want the guidance of a mental health professional as you confront and overcome those anxieties because it runs the risk of causing serious harm. You’re especially going to have to deal with the emotions that these experiences will bring up, and without care and consideration, those will have a strong chance of causing you to regress.
The fifth step is possibly the hardest: you need to be the best friend you needed when you were 10, when you were 15 and today. You have to learn to love and care for yourself like you love and care for someone who means the most to you in the world. What you needed more than Tumblr was someone to hug you and say “dude, it’s all ok, you’re fine, let’s go take a hike in the woods and look at some cool mushrooms growing on trees.” It’s not too late for you to be that person for yourself. You need to learn to give yourself the grace, care, forgiveness and understanding that you have been withholding. You need to be willing to look at your real flaws – not the ones the screaming online masses told you that you had, but the actual flaws that are part of just being human – and forgive yourself for them and have compassion for yourself, even as you give yourself permission to improve.
You have spent a lifetime trying to hate yourself into being a different person, and it’s only made you miserable. Now it’s time to see if you’re a bad enough dude to love yourself and be happy.
In learning to love yourself, to accept yourself, to see the good in yourself, you will be learning to see and accept that others love you too, that others see the good in you, and to believe that maybe they’re right. When you can love yourself enough to accept yourself, to embrace who you are instead of curling into a ball and apologizing for existence, you will be able to start accepting the love and care of others. You will see that, far from there being nobody who could possibly be right for you, that you live in a world where love has been there the whole time, waiting for you. You have just made yourself so afraid, so closed off, that you couldn’t see it.
Yeah, I know, all of this is a lot. But sometimes it takes a lot. There’s no shame in needing to work on yourself, even to need a lot of work. There is only shame in not doing it, in choosing isolation and misery out of fear, even when you’re dying for connection.
But that’s the great thing about love: it’s never too late. There’s never a point where your window has closed. Nobody cares about how long you took to get there, they’re just so glad you’re there now. They’re waiting for you, my guy. It’s time you got up and joined them.
I promise you: it may be hard, but it will be worth it. You can do this.
All will be well.
