Highschool was the worse

I would do a lot of things to be able to go to high school 10 years earlier. 

There are a lot of things I would sacrifice to be able to go to high school without the existence of instagram, tiktok, mobile smartphones. Having now taken the full step to not just delete the instagram app, which I did 4 months ago, but to also deactivate both my accounts, let me write about just how shit highschool was; and how long I have been lying to myself. 

I started my website and subsequently my blog in my senior year of high school. In my earliest blog posts, you can see the remnants of phony optimism in the words I typed. I say 'phony', because I still consider myself pretty optimistic, but in those posts I can clearly see me lying to myself in order to feel a little less of a loser. 

Yeah, high school was the worse. I was invisible. I wasn't even a background character. I was non-existent. To other people, I may have been just okay to be around in school, wanting to do anything outside of school with me was not even a consideration. And no matter what I did to at least become background character B, it just was never really my time to shine. High school is always portrayed as the best time of your life. Even before I was in high school, I already knew it was all bullshit, there was no high school musical, and I was fine with not having a flashy, eventful life. But what really hurt, was not having any of the mundane. There were no train rides chatting with a friend home. There were no detours to stop by a place instead of going straight home. There were no spontaneous hangouts, stopping by a friends house, or late night chats. No long text message conversations right after something happened, and no phone calls. At least for me. Normal highschool activities, I feel like I completely missed out on. 

I lied, actually, in my first year, there was train rides, detours, hangouts, and chats. For about 6 months in freshman year. I still had friends from people who went to the same middle school as me. And then I didn't. Calling it a falling out is too dramatic, but calling it drifting away is too understated. It wasn't a falling out because there wasn't some big fight that split everyone, and it wasn't a drift away because the group continued to be relatively close. It was just me. I don't know what started it, but one day you aren't invited to a hangout. Then, the group chats you're in go silent. Then, when you ask what they're doing they go silent. "The best years of my life" are words I thought of when I tried to invite one of those 'friends' to a christmas hangout, and he just starts walking away faster and faster. I never really celebrated my birthday. I hated that day. Opening my phone and seeing no notifications. In modern teenage culture, on someones birthday, people would post happy birthday wishes on their instagram stories, and tag the person. That person would then repost it. It was always a force of flaunting to me. "Look at how many friends I have, who want to wish me happy birthday!" 

I can't even blame them for not wanting to be friends with me anymore. I was awful to be around. Always angry, always negative, always insecure, and argued with everyone over stupid shit. I was not interesting in the slightest, I had zero hobbies or interests outside of studying and playing video games, and being on discord. I probably deserved it. 

To be split from that group was one thing, but I think I rather have just spent my entirety of high school alone than to know that for the next 3 years, they were laughing at me. Because of how insecure I felt about this, I tried to compensate in other ways to lie to myself that, I was doing ok. In the rare times I hung out, it was mainly to convince myself that "see! I'm doing normal high school things too! Like hanging out with friends!" Needless to say, I didn't enjoy those times. I did not like the people I was hanging out with. I tried clubs. Forced myself to stay in the godforsaken high school building for another 2 hours just to try to see if I would fit in. It was even worse because I knew it was bad, but I kept telling myself that it wasn't. I found myself within the fence of many groups. Not really particularly part of any of them, but just there so I could be less lonely during lunchtime. I didn't have that much fun because I had 0 connection with any of these people, but I pretended and adjusted to every single conversation, every single person, just to feel like absolute shit at the end of it because they would never reciprocate the effort I put in. Any efforts into hanging out was just "I'm busy." I never talked to them outside of the 45 minutes of a lunch period. Yeah, I ate lunch alone for most of high school. Actually, I didn't even eat lunch for the first half. I was far too insecure to take off my mask in freshman and sophomore year. That's how I dropped to 90 pounds. There was a retarded social media thing called "mask fishing" where people would say you looked way better with the mask on and ugly as fuck with it off. Insecure me, who was already insecure with my face since elementary school, started to get more and more pimples, and there was just nothing I could do about it. 

I'm still in a 6 year battle between me and my skin. I have some of the most painful and bad hormonal acne, face, chest and back acne, that I can't do anything about. I've been using tretinoin for my face and body for 2-3 years now, where it did help clear up the worse of my face, but my body is still left awful. Some of my old shirts have blood stains on the back because of my acne. The derm said it typically lasts up until 19-22. 

High school was the worst. I hate smartphones. Every interaction was spent between the phone. Sometimes they'd get distracted as we talked and start scrolling. Get a notification and start texting. Instagram and tiktok made it hell. It was always about who's attractive, who's smart, this and that. I never had tiktok, and not having it felt like being 10 miles behind in a marathon I didn't want to run in. It interfered with everything. It changed everything. People didn't even have hobbies anymore. All they wanted to do was scroll.

Interestingly, the year after I graduated they banned smartphones in schools in my state. I was in support of it, but everyone else I knew complained. They need it. The ban is a good thing 

I wish I could restart highschool. Click play and restart as many times as I want to. In particular, choose a time, any time before smartphones. It ruined me. It changed everything. It changed how people talked, how people treated each others, how people viewed things. I wasted my high school years, having nothing and in denial about everything. I was never happy and hate myself so much. So many actions I wish I never did, so many words I wish I never/should've said. Hearing how my millennial cousins describe their time in school made me so envious. Is the grass really always greener on the other side if the grass on my side is dead and withered by famine, and the other side so luscious and gorgeous? 

In Taiwan

I'm in taiwan now, I'm gonna be here for around a month. A combination of study and here for my mom to take care of family things. I was gonna write this blog about how I am glad to be away from people and making my own server (very exciting!), but I think it's ok for me to air out just how absolutely stupid everyone, excluding my mother, is in my family on my mother's side. 

I like staying anonymous online, and while I would've been worried about the possibility of my family finding this blog, the chances of such are slim to none, and they don't understand english anyways. In my immediate family on my mother's side, my uncles and cousins are troubled and all have criminal records. In short this is because of the way they were raised. They were very spoiled and bailed out always by my grandfather, who paid to get them out of debt among other things. One of my uncles, who I actually know and love despite him being not very intelligent, died very recently. His death was very abrupt and very likely shaken his two sons, my cousins. This came very quickly after the death of my grandfather, who died also recently. 

But a really dangerous thing is that just two weeks ago, the other uncle (my mom's other brother) got out of jail. He went to jail for something really pathetic. Robbing a 7-11. My mom said in her own words, "Robbing for pennies! 7-11 at midnight doesn't even have any money!" After getting out of jail, he has to come back to the house my cousins live in, because there's no one else to take him in. I don't really know this uncle at all. I can't remember his face. I met him yesterday, I don't know him. Frankly, I don't trust him. We bought food from the night market, and my mom brought us to drop it off. When he looked at me and my sister, I think he was shaken up because of how much we had grown. He probably met us when we were babies. But then, my mom told us to leave and go back to our home (we live seperately in another home nearby.) I'd assume it's because they had some serious business to talk about. And today that was confirmed when my mom told me that he was basically saying useless stuff like "I am so poor" and "When I die no one will care about me" my mom straight up told him "Yes, no one will care about you, you should be grateful for having a home to come back to, and you're poor because you never worked a day in your life." This is true by the way, apparently he was a handsome young man and was able to trick a lot of girls into giving him money. Jerk. 

But yeah, to me the most frustrating part is that it seems like this uncle and even my cousins who now have jobs (both were unemployed with on and off jobs before this) don't understand the value of money and how money works. What do I mean by this? Well all of them basically have one of the biggest burdens alleviated from them, which is having a home to live in. They inherited the family home from my grandfather, so they don't need to pay rent or mortgage at all! But despite this, despite the fact they probably have a significantly higher take home pay than most other people in Taiwan, they spend so much money on stupid things, gamble it away, and just aren't aware of the real world. And they keep asking my mom for money too. To give my cousins credit and understanding, they had very rough upbringings. They did not have a mother, because she ran away, and their father (my uncle) was not a good father figure. My mom raised them herself. The oldest one is the one who has a bad criminal record, while the younger one doesn't have a record but has psychological problems. Even though we are cut from the same cloth, I've always been very wary about money: I hate spending money at all, and I always save. I barely touch my savings at all, I'm a very boring person. It makes me mad to no avail, I wish I could scream sense into them, but my mom has been doing so for the last 30 years, and it only took "The tree being cut from under them" for them to understand. She's a tough person, and it makes a lot of sense why she cares so much about me and my sisters education. Because of how none of her nephews and brothers finished high school let alone consider college. 

This is it for this blog, I just wanted to get this off my chest. Incoming blog about me creating my server and also my personal feelings about being in taiwan and stuff in general.