I’ve honestly masked so much I kind of forgot who I really am. When I’m alone, this does give me a lot of stress “do I actually like XYZ or do I just tell myself that I do?”, it even effects my QoL because I want to ‘go back’ to college and try to escape the reserve army of labor, but I have no idea what I want to do and I cannot trust myself to stick to something because I fear I’ll just get bored of it, or make the wrong decision and porky no longer sees it as an in-demand skill and boom. Back to square one. I wish I could give a better answer because now I’m not even sure what I am, generally what I want to do most days is quite literally absolutely nothing.

However, the closest answer I could give is…I hate to admit it…is a channer, and mostly done out of self-defense. Starting around middle school, my school district loved advertising the fact that autistic kids were autistic and went overboard, and I ended up getting a one-on-one aide despite not needing one, and I did end up working my ass off to show the school I didn’t need one, but the damage was done. People saw me as the “autistic kid”, and essentially treated me like the village idiot. I started adopting 4chan mannerisms because 4chan is stereotyped to be full of autistic people, but were somehow admired (Yes, this was also before I became radicalized). Eventually this also turned me into a cynic that I have not fully recovered from because I assume everyone is exactly just like people on 4chan, especially /pol/ are deep down. However, I am recovering from this and becoming more of a “normie” and unironically enjoying things 4chan told me I’m not allowed to like because it’s ‘soy’, ‘reddit’, or ‘cringe’.