maverick up, thunder brother

ii.

Sometimes, people telling me they care about me or that they’re going to miss me is… strange. Like, I don’t think they’re lying, but I sincerely do not understand why they would feel that way. What are you missing? Your life will be literally no different without me in it. What are you talking about?

iii.

A conversation I’m seeing pop up a lot today surrounds the idea of “LARPING” loserdom—in so many words, because the internet has made it so easy to compare yourself to others, and because the economy has trapped many young people out of the normal milestones for adulthood, completely “normie” people—perhaps just a little less charismatic than they’d like to be—have started thinking of themselves as complete losers, goblins and ghouls.

“Why do normie women love to present themselves as ostracized freaks?” “Is the male loneliness epidemic REAL loneliness or LARP?” “Loneliness is just a revealed preference.”

Anything less than 100% perfect conformity of the Platonic ideal of A Perfect, Protestant WASP American must mean you’re a defective copy, and signaling loudly to others that you know it is the most instinctive way to pre-empt the predators before their teeth find shelter inside your throat.

iv.

Of course, anyone familiar with my work on eating disorders has probably already heard this quote from Kelsey Osgood:

Broken down: the goal is to be seen and thus be affirmed. Beneath this self-indulgent exposure is a desire to believe in one’s ability to affect another. See me. Hear me. Buy me. Prove me to myself. […] Desperation lives in the request to be looked at, in the baring of a sick body, in the public confession made by megaphone. Deep down there is a plea to be recognized and kept alive, if only in the digital archives. […] By responding to her cheap confession, our culture is confirming fears […] that reverberate off the walls of treatment centers far and wide: that “normal” or “good” is the worst thing you can be. Meaningless. Stable. Boring. The nonromantic kind of gossamer. Nothing.

A man whose YouTube thumbnails present him as a bog-troll with a crop of curly red hair makes the good point that you don’t ever hear from the REAL losers. Unless you go looking, you truly don’t know how deep the rabbit hole of neurodivergence and childhood bullying and disability goes.

I’d add one caveat: when they are found, they’re much more likely these days to be turned into lolcows and bullied towards suicide or federal prison. If they think your alcoholism is funny, they’ll doordash vodka right to your door.

v.

When I was tutoring fourth graders, I had to explain to one of them that they should never, ever joke about wanting to kill themselves at school—you never know who is listening, who is forced by law to take you at your word, even when it’s said in the same playful tone you use to tell me about your favorite object show.

Even my own voice a whisper as I told them that a friend of mine had once been handcuffed by police and sectioned for 48 hours, all because her RA had misunderstood her. Understand?

His eyes were so wide as he nodded.

vi.

I remember one post responding to Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside back when it came out: how it wasn’t that emotionally affecting because the contrast of suicidal ideation and jokes was just a simulation of scrolling on Tumblr.

vii.

Didn’t I write a better version of this essay already? I had a whole segment dedicated to the idea that sometimes you have to either man up or kill yourself, meaning if you aren’t going to actually do it, you might as well put in the effort to make your life better. The most annoyingly useful advice anyone has ever given me outside of My Little Pony.

viii.

I might as well admit here that the most positive attention I ever got on Tumblr was when an ill-worded post convinced people I was going to kill myself. And I’ll also admit here that most I ever talked to some of my mutuals was when I was trying to talk them down, too.

ix.

I’m looking through old submissions, stories I tried to write during the Great Post-Grad Depression. One flash contained my undergrad students not understanding David Foster Wallace while I pretended that I did:

Regardless, many of them also didn’t seem to fully grasp what he meant when he said that television audiences “receive unconscious reinforcement of the thesis that the most significant feature of persons is watchableness,” but I didn’t catch that until later, which is on me.

x.

Of course, this conversation risks presupposing that people are exaggerating feeling like shit. “The percentage of U.S. adults who report currently having or being treated for depression has exceeded 18% in both 2024 and 2025, up about eight percentage points since the initial measurement in 2015. The current rate of 18.3% measured so far in 2025 projects to an estimated 47.8 million Americans suffering from depression.”

Another: “Gun violence deaths in the United States decreased from 2023 to 2024, but suicides involving firearms have reached a record high, according to new analysis.”

More accurate to say it feels like LARP because the people who are depressed because their young adulthood isn’t as it was promised are using the language of people who have felt cursed by God since age 12.

xi.

This is the part of suicidal ideation you have to learn yourself: once your brain has decided that’s its preferred shape for stressful thoughts, anything can now take that shape. Sometimes it comes in my voice, I, me, myself. Other times, it presents itself as a distant authority coming down from on high. You. You are. You will never be.

Yes, I could definitely kill myself rather than learn to drive. That would technically solve my problem. When I was in high school, I would argue with my brain about it: you know and I know I’m not getting out of this bed, why can’t we just go to fucking sleep?

A practical approach I’ve taken to my intrusive thoughts is to reply to them with “But anyway.” Or revising “I should kill myself” to “I gotta get out of here,” which is honestly closer to my actual intent, anyway. The first approach was inspired by my Buddhism professor and all the books she made me read about meditating in inhumane conditions. The message was: you don’t have to attach a narrative to any of your thoughts. And what could I say back? Do I know more about things being easier to say than practice than the person in federal prison?

xii.

Another excerpt:

I’d waited and worried while you were off helping your father and uncle clean up. You came back and washed your hands for ten minutes. You came back and said you could still smell it. You grabbed my hand and were still looking up at the ceiling when you made me promise I’d always tell you everything.

The feedback on my rejection: I really enjoyed reading this piece and I love the premise, but unfortunately I think its ambition exceeds the container of flash. Made longer with more details fleshed out, particularly the character development, I'd enjoy taking another look at it.

All of which is true, by the way. Man, I really have written this better before.

xiii.

Sometimes I still go back and re-listen to the My Little Pony fan songs I loved in high school—like the one where human Twilight sleeps weeks of her life away to stay in the dream where she actually has friends. The song ends up reminding the listener that “you have to build the life that you’re gonna wanna live in, even if it’s not so easy all the time.”

I never truly learn my lesson, do I?

xiv.