Princess Diaries ੈ♡₊˚•.

CW: Potential Needy Streamer Overload spoilers in the first paragraph. Just skip paragraph one and you won't miss out on anything.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I interact with the internet lately. I played the game Needy Steamer Overload back in early April, and without going into spoilers or contents of the actual game, a lot of the game’s messages have really stuck with me. I was 21 and actively on my road to recovery, but I can imagine the game would’ve affected me a lot more if I had the ability to play it when I was 16 (the age at which I consider my mental problems to be at their worst). Even as a 21 year old, I saw a lot of the “worst” parts of myself in Ame. As the player, it was incredibly difficult for me to watch Ame take small and meaningful steps towards her self healing while actively undermining those efforts by seeking out validation through popularity on the internet. It was the first time I was able to see my own mindset from an outside point of view. I’ve never wanted to be a popular streamer, but for a very long time I placed a lot of my inherent self worth and value on how much I was liked by others and how “popular” I was, regardless of in real life or the internet. As a result, I never really developed my own interests or identity until I more recently actively made an effort to. Arguably, the best endings for Ame are the ones where she curates how she uses the internet and actively chooses to take her life into her own hands. I want to do the same for myself. I’ve wanted to “get better” for a very long time, but I never actually took the steps necessary for myself to actually do it, and for me that also includes evaluating how I use the internet.

I have a very particular way that I enjoy expressing myself, and not many platforms lend themselves well to it. I particularly don’t really enjoy microblogging or reading other people’s microblogs. Less polished erratic thoughts are better suited in my personal diary or in group chats with my friends. I don’t really know how to explain this aspect of myself. I used to think that there was something very wrong with me for not having a life interesting enough to post or tweet about frequently. I’m not a very interesting person in terms of my day to day life. I eat two pieces of toast every morning with Philadelphia Cream Cheese (I alternate between chive and onion, garden vegetable, garlic and herb, and jalapeno cream cheese). I go to class and study different flavors of biological sciences. My outfits aren’t always cute enough to post, and I frequently rewear pieces (what is the point of purchasing something without the intent of wearing it more than once?). I’m not always engrossed in a fandom enough to consistently post about it. I’m not the type of person to enjoy having my messier incoherent thought blurts to be on the internet for anyone to see. And I’m realizing that it’s okay if I don’t use the internet in ways that it’s “popular” to be used these days. My life is not for other people’s consumption. My life is for me to live.

I could expand and theorize why I developed the mindset that I need to be easy to consume and digest by other people in the first place, but I think that’s better suited to its own blog post. That being said, ever since I moved to the United States when I was 8 years old, I’ve always felt an intense pressure to assimilate and fit in. I was unable to ever completely “fit in” as a brown immigrant on a visa in a wealthy white neighborhood, so I think I took to the internet to fill in the void of acceptance that I was never able to find in real life.

In the past, I lacked the insight that I have now about what aspects of the internet I like and dislike. I used to make quitting social media and “the internet” as a whole my eventual goal, but I don’t think that’s a tangible or necessary goal for myself anymore. I have a lot of niche identities that I’m unable to express in real life that I’m able to freely explore on the internet. My interests aren’t ones that are easy to connect with other people in person over, but I don’t exactly feel like myself when I give up these interests. I keep in contact with a lot of my friends through apps like Line and Discord, and many public figures that I’d like to keep up with post updates on their social media. I just don’t enjoy knowing what my friends are up to at every moment of the day. We as people were not made to be contactable any moment of the day on any platform. With this knowledge, I plan on reevaluating how I use the internet.

I don’t enjoy social media beyond using it to catch up on occasional news about topics I enjoy. I've had a private twitter account since about 2017 under the pretense of using it as a de facto diary to sort out my thoughts, but I realize that knowing people follow me there has made me filter my thoughts quite a bit. Although many of my followers on that account I’ve known since 2016, I don’t talk to many of them enough on a day to day basis enough for me to consider them truly friends. I can never NOT filter my thoughts there because I don’t want to be that annoying person on their tl. I feel like I need to be entertaining enough to be kept around when I don’t even like microblogging my life that much in the first place. As of writing this, I plan on sunsetting the use of that account. When I was younger, I was extremely uncomfortable with who I was as a person, and depended on other people’s validation to know that I “existed”. I don’t feel this way anymore. If I have thoughts that I need to blurt out, writing it for myself in my personal diary where only I will ever see it is enough for me to process whatever I’m feeling.

In addition, I’ve always felt a weird pressure that in order to be a real fan of something, I have to be up to date on every single thing a creator or personality says or does on any platform. I don’t want to feed into this anymore. I’ve made an alternative twitter account where I don’t plan on tweeting anything myself, but only follow artists/musicians/authors/game devs etc. I want to keep up with. No friends or fan accounts. I chose twitter despite my general distaste for the platform because of the ability to turn off retweets on individual accounts, and how much people still use the platform to post quick updates. I want to know when artists I like post new art, or musicians release new music! I still plan on having social media accounts for my art and projects, but I don’t plan on ever scrolling the feeds of those accounts. I don’t want to spend my life scrolling feed after feed. My reasoning behind crossposting my creations on various social medias is for exposure reasons. I don’t expect to ever truly grow a following on any of them, but I like the ability of people being able to keep up with me on their preferred platform of choice if they so choose.

I have found that I feel most fulfilled with my internet usage when I am either a) Directly chatting with people on Discord whether it is 1-on-1, group chats, or servers or b) reading long-form content like blogs/articles or exploring people’s websites. I want to capitalize on this aspect of myself. Until I started a personal site myself, I foolishly thought that blogs and personal sites were dead, but I now realize that I couldn’t be more wrong. I want to spend my free time doing things on the internet that I enjoy! When I think back to when I was 7-11 years old with almost no negative feelings about the internet, most of my time was spent exploring websites, forums and reading blog posts (and watching magical girl anime split up into 3 parts on youtube…). I want to go back to this feeling. I’d rather let out my messier blurts in smaller spaces where I can actively grow relationships instead of just vaguely microblogging to the void. I want to change how I use the internet to discover smaller artists and game devs and be able to support their work. As a small artist and game dev myself, I know how meaningful even a passing comment can be. I want to use some of the time I’d normally use scrolling a feed to leave comments on pieces of work that I like. I want to use some of the time I’d normally use scrolling a feed to continue developing my own projects more. I want to use some of the time I’d normally use scrolling a feed to just be more mindful of my own life.

My inability to adapt my thoughts and creations into different media formats used to make me feel bad about myself, but I’ve come around to the idea that it’s not a personal flaw. It’s just how I am. These days the most important things to me are my mental and physical health, even more important to me than being seen as “following proper internet etiquette” fitting in or being popular with people. I want to live my life to the fullest, even if it’s not a life that’d be easily understood or admired by other people.

CW: Potential Barbie (2023) spoilers, Brief Suicide Attempt Ment (Not Graphic)

Last Halloween, my most recent ex and I dressed up as Barbie and Ken. We’d only been dating for about a year and a half at that point, and call me delusional but I had really thought that we were going to make it as a couple. When we first met, I was easily at the lowest point in my life I’ve ever been thus far. I was still recovering from the effects and memories of a recent suicide attempt in the middle of a global pandemic. I was attending the only college that I could afford, still living with my parents, and studying something I hated. I saw nothing good or worthy about myself, and as far as I was concerned, I was still alive and living life against my will. And yet my ex looked at me and said that she developed a crush on me the first time we spoke over the phone even though she had no idea what I looked like at the time.

She told me that she had a mini heart attack the first time that she saw what I looked like. At this point in life I was obsessed with becoming conventionally pretty, but simultaneously knowing that I’d never be seen as conventionally pretty because I’m brown. Growing up in a primarily white area, I was made to feel “other” basically my entire life. I had a few brief relationships while in high school, where I was always seen as the “masculine” one in the relationship. It made me feel more masculine than I actually am as a person. I’ve never had a strong internal sense of self, so I just always assumed that I was whatever other people perceived me as. I didn’t like who I was or what I looked like. But here my ex was telling me that she tried to go on dates with other people to get her mind off of me. And you know what? I liked her too. She was the reason why I realized that I was attracted to butches and mascs after deluding myself into believing that I wasn’t.

We saw ourselves in Barbie and Ken. I was the princess that made demands and called the shots, and she was the dopey grubby rapscallion that begrudging went along with my schemes because she thought I was pretty. It started when she’d call me “Barbie” because of my affinity for pink, frills, and all of my various hobbies. According to her, I was always up to something and she was just happy to support all I do. Our costumes were literally made out of pieces in our closets, and we both somehow managed to wear corduroy on Halloween. It felt like we were always somehow opposites but complementary.

She saw masterpieces in me where I saw empty hallways. She saw me the way I wanted so badly to be seen by the world. Pretty, kind, and talented in so many different ways. Something that I really struggled with until more recently is allowing myself to be a multi dimensional person beyond how I was perceived by other people. I didn’t know who I was, so I allowed other people to define me. She was just the first person to define me the way that I wanted to be.

When she broke up with me, it was around our two year anniversary. She had been ignoring me for about a week straight before that. As happy as I found our relationship to be, it was ultimately inevitable. She was a lovely person, but ultimately incredibly unavailable. With everything she’d done for me in my eyes I was willing to be patient with her as she learned to express herself better. I believed she’d given me the ultimate gift of being seen for who I wanted to be seen as. I’d been everything in front of her: uncouth, angry, a mess: and she still saw me as her Barbie. But ultimately, she was the one who decided that she couldn’t be in a relationship anymore. She said she wanted to be less emotionally constipated, but where she was in life with finally digesting events from her childhood she just couldn’t be.

I felt an incredible sense of loss because I felt like I was losing the only person to see me the way I wanted to be seen. One of the hardest things about losing someone in your life is losing the version of yourself that you are with them, or the version of yourself that only they know. What happens to the memories that only we had that nobody else will ever know or understand? My ex has seen me at so many different stages of my life whether or not she realizes it. She has seen me as so many different versions of myself that nobody in my life right now would understand. Nobody in my life has ever known me so deeply. It was so scary to know that I was going to lose that. It weirdly felt like I was losing a part of myself. I’d been conditioned as a brown femme that my dating pool was small and that if I wanted a partner I had to settle, so the loss felt magnified. I felt like I was never going to find love like this again. And as corny as it sounds, where does all the love…go? All of the inside jokes, all the memories…where does it all go when you don’t talk to each other anymore?

I’ve been doing okay for the past few months, but something in the Barbie movie really stuck with me. I have a lot of criticisms of the movie, don’t get me wrong. It’s far from being a perfect movie. But it made me realize that I have an identity outside of how other people perceive me. Ken is still Ken regardless of whether Barbie acknowledges him that day or not. Barbie is Barbie because that’s just who she is. I’m still me regardless of if there’s someone out there that I believe sees my entirety. It’s an incredibly surface level movie, yet somehow this message wouldn’t have been as strong to me if it hadn’t been told through the characters of my childhood dolls. For this reason, I’ll always be a vehement defender of the Barbie movie, regardless of what conservatives have to say about it. I am still how I see myself regardless of what labels the world wants to put on me. I am everything I want to be: a scientist, an artist, a game dev, an immigration advocate. On top of that I’m kind, caring, and down to Earth. I am completely whole on my own and have always known this, but these days I actually feel it.

I started my post bacc for medical school about a month ago, and I've been doing okay. I was originally going to apply to medical school this cycle, but I ended up postponing my MCAT and will be applying next cycle instead. I’ve unintentionally been isolating myself since January because I needed time to recover from life in general. I kept finding it impossible to do the bare minimum of leaving my own home, nevermind trying to plan for my future. I thought that being in a school setting again after my covid-ridden undergrad experience would make me feel unwell again and send me spiraling into some of the bad habits that I had during undergrad, but honestly I haven’t. There’s something about returning to classes as an older adult with more life experience that makes it feel different. I feel bad for everyone in my life that I’ve been unintentionally ignoring, but for the first time in my life, I’ve found myself without any expectations I feel like I need to meet. It took me some time to adjust to this concept, but coming around to it was liberating.

A value instilled in me young was to make sure that I never “fell behind” in life. Make sure to make myself “palatable”, and that anything I do is valuable in whatever society I find myself in. Looking back, I’ve always unintentionally valued the opinions of other people more than my own. When I subconsciously felt like I had fallen behind, I just let myself stay behind because in my head there was no point in trying to catch up. I kept self-sabotaging my own joy and self-growth over and over again. It doesn’t help that a lot of my interests would be labeled “strange” while growing up in the Midwest, resulting in me getting ostracized by my peers more than I felt I already was. I genuinely thought that there was something inherently flawed and inhumane about myself until I was about 20 years old because I was not given the privilege of being inherently understood the way I perceived my peers who had “conventional interests” and to be. I was jealous that everyone else seemed to have received a manual on how to be human while my package had seemingly got lost in transit. It felt like no matter what I did or how well I did it’d never be enough, so I was more inclined to not even try.

I needed to take 12 credit hours this summer to be a full time student. One of the classes that I chose was “Intro to Weightlifting”, because I wanted a lower stakes class to help balance out some of the harder classes I was taking this summer alongside continuing my MCAT pursuits. However, despite being an intro class, everyone who signed up for this class over the summer is experienced in weightlifting except for me. I’d be lying if I said it was embarrassing how pathetic I look doing my bicep curls with a 3 lb dumbbell while the student athlete next to me is doing them with a 40 lb dumbbell. Part of the reason why I felt okay enrolling in this course is because I thought that I’d be surrounded by other beginners like me just trying to become healthier. On the first day when I realized this wouldn’t be the case, I briefly toyed with the idea of dropping “Intro to Weightlifting” and finding some other easy 1 credit hour class to take online to spare myself the embarrassment. I ended up not going through with it. I wanted to learn how to weightlift, and I wasn’t exactly sure how many other opportunities in life I’d get to truly be in a learning environment where I’d be able to learn things like proper form with immediate feedback.

I’m glad that I didn’t drop the course, despite how embarrassed I feel everytime I end up panting after doing the lightest set available to me. Back when I did track and field in 9th and 10th grade of high school, I was technically supposed to go to conditioning once a week that consisted of a lot of weight lifting. I went only once, where one of the coaches basically followed me around the entire time to make sure that I was doing everything correctly. I know that she was only trying to help, but I was genuinely so mortified that I skipped every conditioning going forward. It’s genuinely really nice to learn the basics of weightlifting without that feeling of being judged by my peers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the powerlifters in class with me probably feel a little sorry for me everytime I try to do a set of anything, but I just don’t care anymore. I attribute this to age and life experience mostly, and not being in class with a bunch of people that’ve known me since middle school. One of the things during undergrad that weighed on me heavily was being in classes with a lot of people I’ve known since basically 11 years old. It felt like in some ways, college was high school 2.0 and I’d never be able to escape people’s past notions of what a loser I was. On the other hand, I’ll never talk to any of these people ever again after summer semester ends. So why do I care what they think of me?

Surprisingly, I find weightlifting to be meditative for me. I love the act of clearing my mind as I focus on a spot on the wall while doing reps. I hope to slowly make exercise a healthy coping mechanism for me. Up until the age of about 19, I struggled with my body image quite a bit. I needed my outsides to look and feel as sick as my insides, and to me it meant being as thin and sickly looking as possible. The only form of exercise I permitted myself to do was cardio, because I was terrified of weightlifting making my body look “bigger”. I was constantly stuck in cycles of starving myself and overexercising. It’s been quite a few years since then, and my mental state has improved quite a bit through a lot of self work. I don’t necessarily feel the urge to be as small and sickly looking as possible. In fact, I don’t want to be as small and sickly looking as possible. I want to have the energy to do the things I love without my stomach being in pain all of the time. If my body changes because of me being more active that's a completely different situation, but by no means is it a goal of mine at all. I finally feel mentally well enough to start exercising regularly again without only seeing becoming small as my only motivation. I want to take good care of my body so that I live a long and happy life! When I use exercise as a way to relieve stress and become stronger I feel a lot better. I’m excited to continue learning lots about my body, new exercises, and start hitting new personal records. I’m happy to slowly be discovering that the only person’s validation I need is my own.

Something that I’ve realized recently is that I struggle to put myself first. It doesn’t matter what form this takes: making sure my personality is easy to digest, making sure I’m hitting the milestones I’m “supposed” to hit in time. I’ll come back to this blog post with an amazingly written essay about the “how” and “why” I feel like I got to this point, but for now I’m using this space to make a promise for myself. I will treat myself the way that I would treat a friend. I will work on developing a personal sense of self that is not dependent on how others view me. I will work on identifying my own voice and interests. I will honor my life experiences. I will create a home within myself.