Insomnia

I used to be a far worse insomniac than I am now. I still get bouts of it pretty hard sometimes but I've learned to mitigate it by trying to sleep on something that keeps my mind away from all the problems of reality. Usually for me that's sleeping after furry porn or writing some fanfiction (whether sfw or not). I think I've mentioned before that I've been sleeping with extra pillows or a rolled up blanket or anything beside me for the last few years as well just to mitigate the feeling of loneliness with the comfort of feeling something next to me in bed. I still personally think getting custom made anime pillows is a waste of time purely because if you're trying to sleep the lights are out and your eyes should probably be closed anyways so there's 0 point to wasting money on a pillowcase when you're gonna be doing theater of the mind anyways. So yes those measures have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes me to fall asleep from a 2+ hour ordeal to around 20-30 minutes on a good night (purely counting time from laptop shutdown to best guess of how long I'm laying in bed with eyes closed hoping to just kinda pass out).

When my insomnia gets bad though, it tends to be more like 4+ hours of restlessness often continuing past dawn. Usually what spurs those on is getting lured into a train of thought that takes me back to reality, more specifically to my past and all the incredibly stupid decisions I've made in life that I regret and will probably never manage to erase from my mind until death (because the amygdala is just a cool part of the brain that does this with the things you want to erase most). I've mentioned bits and pieces of my past before, some I've mentioned on this blog and others I've mentioned to a handful of people in the RS3 discord. I still absolutely never want to bring up the major ones I avoid talking about mostly because nearly all of these happened when I was literally too fucking retarded to know better but also a lot of them involve specifically illegal and/or creepy acts that I've been a part of or had done to me as a child by other children. Now that I have your attention I am gonna clarify that all of these were "resolved" to some degree by adults and I don't think anything would have warranted a trip to juvenile hall especially considering the ages involved but we're talking if involved parties were maybe 5 years older there'd probably have at least been a police report for one of these and it'd go from being a really shitty awkward peer pressure scenario to something way more nefarious and deeply troubling. I'm not even gonna pretend that I've had a rough life, by most standards I haven't and all of my problems have pretty much been magnified by my own ineptitude and poor decision making so it's not like I was put into really dire situations but more that I've taken bad situations and made them so much worse for myself whether through pure obliviousness or just poor decision making.

Let me get the big one off my chest, 4th grade I was still in catholic school (the thing I refuse to talk about because my overall experience there was bad and got to a point where even the teachers there were doing everything in their power to exclude me from their cult). I barely hung out with anyone in that school at all (oh man I could preface this with my parents literally never let me invite friends over for my own birthday but my younger brother would always have huge parties with all his friends for his), but yeah I was kind of the gaming kid and like every other kid (outside of one) in my class was strict old style parenting no games only sports or low income with druggie parents. Probably a good reason in hindsight why I never had birthday parties but they'd all basically hang out in their own groups doing their own thing, and for the most part they all lived much closer to each other than I did to them so I was completely out of the loop with anything they'd talk about. One day a bunch of the jock kids decide to approach me with a weird question. I guess they'd noticed that I was kinda just looking around at other groups of kids and not actually engaging them so they decided to ask me what girl I liked in class. Oh boy a group of jocks pressuring the outcast for which girl he likes, I wonder what could possibly go wrong here. Let's just skip names and details for the sake of it but basically they dragged me over to girl and did the whole group circle thing around the two of us and pressured me into saying it in front of her which I mean she clearly wanted no part of this and honestly neither did I but I was too stupid to know that this wasn't just a normal thing that happens to everyone. So this is already awkward as fuck when they start chanting for us to kiss, at which point she's basically in tears and I'm like "dude are you guys sure this is ok?" because I was so fucking stupid that I literally thought they were some kind of authority figure on this. It was at that point that the circle closed on us and I was literally forced against her and ofc this is the part where the playground supervision shows up when it's already like 20 seconds too late to stop anything because fuck that fucking school holy shit those teachers all sucked the students were fucking shit devils disguised as proper young catholic boys and this in hindsight was also the moment I completely stopped believing in the whole church thing. The end result of this nightmare scenario was quite literally nothing, well I mean the girl's parents picked her up from school early, I just straight up recounted everything that happened and luckily enough for me the two witnesses who happened to be her friends (who I later found out also were the ones who literally fetched a teacher because those fuckers don't do their one fucking job) pretty much gave the same account. I served detention for one recess which is fair I mean I felt fucking terrible about the whole thing and still do to this day, and four of the jocks had their parents called and had to stay after school. You can probably see how this incident kinda ruined any chance of me having a normal life at this catholic school for the rest of my hellish time here (which thankfully was only until the end of 5th grade), but yeah I obviously couldn't hang with most of the boys in my class anymore cause I literally ratted them out and I also couldn't even bring myself to be within ten feet of that girl again which I can only hope she appreciated but I know deep down she probably was happiest when I transferred schools. I didn't even want to hang with her friends even though they seemed at least understanding of the whole thing.

And this is only one of many incidents I could recount from elementary school, granted this is easily the most disturbing and fucked up one. Most of the others involve fucked up things being done to me rather than me being too much of a child to understand literally anything and getting pressured into doing horrible things because of it.

The other one that I regret a lot was after I transferred and I don't even remember the full context for what led up to it but basically 8th grade I was fucking around with some of the 6th and 7th graders and just kinda being there on the peripheral as I normally am while they played tag or something with second graders. I don't know what I was thinking but I noticed my shoe was untied and for some stupid reason decided to stick my foot out and lean over to tie it rather than crouch down and ended up inadvertently tripping some random kid in the process. Kid was fine, a bit startled but otherwise fine but everyone flipped their shit because they thought I'd done it on purpose. I mean kid was fine I helped her up we move on right? Apparently wrong. I get told there will be a trial for it next recess, whatever the fuck that means. Apparently that means we'll have the kid with the best grades in his class decide how to punish you based on testimony. This apparently means no matter what I say or do I'm gonna get punished somehow over a random accident in which no one was hurt. No one was hurt, which meant the punishment wouldn't be physical. No, instead it'll be psychological because great I certainly don't have enough shit wrong with my head at this point in life. "Eat my gym sock" they said. "No." I reply. At this point I'm literally jumped by 7 people at once and force fed a gym sock because once again teachers don't exist on playgrounds because that'd make fucking sense. I'd say this continued but it didn't, literally the second sock is into mouth they're like "yep that's it we're cool now".

Fuck you Sheldon we're not cool. That's fucked up man.

Needless to say that was the last time I hung out with the 7th graders. At this point you might be starting to see where a lot of my social anxiety comes from when I literally can't trust my classmates after all the shit in catholic school and now I can't even trust kids a couple years younger than me to not punish me over a minor accident. Do you maybe see why I'm fucking terrified of anyone I know in real life learning anything about me beyond name, age, and sex? Do you maybe see why I want steer well clear of children? I mean the only thing you wouldn't see from this is why I'm such a fucking mess when it comes to my own sexual orientation cause I literally don't even know if I'm bisexual or asexual just based entirely on the fact that I don't think I'm ever gonna be comfortable enough with another human to even engage in sex (and there's a few small incidents I'm omitting for that). Maybe you see now why I latched onto furry porn so strongly as an escape from the reality tied to my own sexual needs.

I literally still to this day find myself unable to sleep at night sometimes whether it's from the non consensual mosh pit or the destruction of my oral health or one of dozens of other incidents that decided to pop into the front of my mind from literally the most difficult 5 year stretch of my life. Tonight is one of those nights and instead of immediately running away into my own fanfiction fantasies I decided to finally say fuck it and get at least some of it out and put it in a place where if anyone ever raises an eyebrow at me in discord I can just link them to this journal and they can respond with as many unsettled tom emoji's as they want.