About Me
I suppose we can begin on a first-name-basis.
I'm Melanie. I'm from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Area, will graduate/graduated (depending on when you're reading this) high school in 2025, and as it stands, I'm an unsociable loser.
So how did it get like this?
It's truly a complicated situation. The phrase "It didn't always used to be like this" doesn't really work here, because at times it did, and at times it didn't. My hypothesis has been that this is due to some undiagnosed mental illness, but considering my experience with the psychiatric health system, I don't really think that debate will ever be resolved. The easiest way is to just tell the whole story.
It probably began in elementary school. Until the 5th grade, I was always the "target" kid. You know the one, the kid who just had a special place in the heart of every bully, and I certainly don't mean out of love. I spent most of my childhood being raised by the internet, as I didn't really have a social circle. I remember spending my days playing flash games, surfing the web, and watching YouTube videos.
When I was in the 4th grade, the bullying reached its peak. I had a teacher who was what I would call the "motivational type". That sounds like a nice thing, but he was more or so the type to constantly harass you over every small mistake you made, tell you your problems don't matter, and tell you you aren't good enough. This, combined with having nobody to talk to and being relentlessly bullied was enough for me to become suicidal for the first time in my life. Naturally, my parents turned to the school's counselor/social worker (I don't know what exactly her title was). Her response was: "You're faking it. Grow up.". I can't exactly say that I was surprised even back then at what she said, as I had already had a run-in with her before this.
One of my only friends during this period of my life was (and I apologize if my use of this word comes off as offensive) the "sped kid". He was diagnosed with Autism, something doctors and family have also suspected of me, and we got along very well for a while. I don't exactly know how she butted her head into this situation but I presume that the counselor was also responsible for his 504/IEP plan. She absolutely despised the idea of him and I being friends, and I'm not sure if she believed this herself or was just trying to scare me but she told me that if I stayed friends with him that I would "catch" his autism (as if it were contagious). Even 9-year-old me saw through that, since one of the things I was bullied for the most was my eczema, which people believed to be contagious (though I can see how they would be able to infer that). However, I was also rather meek back then and wasn't exactly willing to stand up for myself so I just blindly agreed and stopped talking to him.
Eventually, all of this got to a point where I ended up transferring schools, and after that I ended up interacting more with the neighborhood kids and formed a traditional social circle. Everything had changed after I transferred schools, however after the events of 4th grade, something split inside of me, I still took solace in the internet as if the lonely part of me still existed even if I had a social circle. Going into middle school, this became even worse because... well I'm certain you know why. Out of fear for what was to come, I distanced myself more from my friends and shut myself in more because my strategy to survive middle school was to just keep to myself and not draw any attention. I will admit that the bullying in middle school wasn't as bad, but whether this was due to me getting used to it, me giving up on trying to draw attention to myself and make friends and be an extrovert, or some kind of sociological change, your guess is as good as mine.
However, about a month into 6th grade, I moved halfway across the country to the east coast, where I would spend the next 6 years of my life. The way I saw it, this didn't really matter, since I began to view friends and socialization as a disposable commodity. Middle school in my new city up until 2020 was mostly the same as before. I had some friends, but the moment I was alone and in my room I felt like a completely different person. I believe this is really where "the split" began, as I became an otaku and buried myself in the internet whenever I was at home but still desperately tried to have a normal social life like everyone else I saw.
We all know what happened in 2020. I still remember the short timeframe between "Oh hey, there's this new virus going around China" to "2 weeks of no school?! Awesome!". There were a lot of mixed emotions back then that are still in the back of everyone's minds. I remember feeling divided about it, on one hand I could be myself now, but on the other I knew that social isolation wasn't going to be good for me, especially because I had a lot in the way of problems to bury. It's honestly really hard to explain what it was like for me back then, because every day just blended into the next to the point where I can remember it, but not what happened during it.
At the beginning of high school, I was offered one of two options: either continue to do online school, or go back to how things used to be. I decided that I would give socialization another chance, and for the first couple of years, everything went back to how it was in 5th grade; I had a defined social circle, I hung out with people, but there was still that "B Side" of me that just wanted to shut myself in my room and watch anime all day. I continued to live like this for 3 years before something snapped inside me. I don't exactly know/remember what triggered this but I completely snapped and cut off all of my friends and isolated myself socially and wound up transferring schools after junior year. As seems to be tradition with me transferring schools, I ended up moving all the way across the country, winding up here in Minnesota. This time I arrive with no intact social skills, crippling social anxiety, and the depressing reality that this may just as well be the fate that I am confined to.
We've finally reached the present day, and as of now I continue to only find solace in the internet. I don't really socialize IRL anymore, I don't have any friends, I don't talk to anyone, and I don't really leave my room much if I don't explicitly have to anymore.
So why did you create this website?
This website was made with many intentions, but the primary 3 being to document my life and its work, to serve as a creative outlet for me, and hopefully provide some form of solace to those in a situation like mine.
And if not any of those, to serve as an unplanned, unintentional human experiment to show you what social isolation and loneliness does to the human mind.
Contact information has been redacted for privacy reasons.