Bad Ju Ju Month

Another day, another blog.

So a couple weeks ago I broke it off with somebody. I felt like I didn't like her.

We barely knew each other but I could tell we weren't compatible after seeing how she treated other people. I also started to feel like a purse – an accessory she can show off to the world to signal that she's "made it." She posted on threads and IG about how she used to be ugly... But look at her now! She paired the post with pictures of me. We also couldn't have a single deep conversation without her using ChatGPT to translate everything. When I broke it off with her, she sent me a giant one-sided letter; psycho-analyzing all of my negative traits, blaming me for everything, and telling me how much pain I caused her. The letter was written for a black and white world.

Of course getting that letter hurt. Of course, it shot me right in the skull with anxiety and panic. I think if you are hurt, the immature but common option is to bring people down with you. I thought, "I am so glad I dodged this bullet." I've been in really healthy relationships, and I've been in really toxic relationships where the girl weaponizes therapy-speak. I'd rather be with someone who recognizes that the world is not black and white.

I fell into a crazy depression for like two weeks – the only thing keeping me sane was an art installation I was working on. Then I did a stupid thing.

I've been contemplating on how I have been focusing on love ever since I got to Vietnam, and how much trouble it's put me through. I think this is a side of me that really really needs professional help, which I'll consider going back to eventually. This whole obsession with love has come to a climax when, in the pits of depression, I paid for 1 month of Bumble.

What a terrible, terrible path for my mental health. Let me tell you, it was pain. So much ghosting. If I was already depressed, this made me even more depressed.

Then... I finally found somebody who managed to talk to me for a week. We did a few phone calls but never met up. We added each other on IG so we could get more data about each other. Then she sent me a text telling me she spent all night reading all of my things and going through all of my website. The next call we get on, it was so bad. She droned for hours about herself. She called herself a "genius" which is something my narcissist mother has once called herself. She didn't ask me anything, as if she knew already everything about me. I feel like the content I post online only adds to my story, but bro, she did not know me. When the call ended I deleted my bumble account. The next day, I told her that I thought we were incompatible.

SHE BLEW THE FUCK UP and sent me this giant one-sided google slides that was very obviously written in ChatGPT. Shit that said, "That's not setting boundaries, that's emotional manipulation." And it makes no sense to me because we barely even know each other. We have no shared history, we've never even met in person. How did this person get so attached so quickly? She admitted to brainstorming with ChatGPT before sending me the slides, so is ChatGPT to blame for basically spewing therapy-speak at her without understanding the full context?

I've just been theorizing lately that dating apps are probably full of the most depressed, insecure, or plain crazy people. Yes there are normal people, if you find the energy to filter for them, but I think a majority of the people on the apps are not in a healthy mental state for a relationship. I mean, why was I on there again? Because I felt lonely and honestly a little desperate. The city reminds you of how lonely you are when you drive around and see couples hugging on motorbikes.

The ugliness that I am confronting is how much I am trying to force love to happen instead of letting it be a more natural process. Yes, love is very important, but I think whatever I am doing right now to find love is becoming so unhealthy for me. The happiest and most growing moments of my life were just two years ago when I switched focus away from love and onto myself.

I think this is what I am going to do now: I am focusing 100% back on my work. Heads down. Vietnamese language studies, my video-games, and installation work. If you've been looking at my IG stories and seeing how productive I've gotten, it's because I just deleted Bumble and stopped looking for dates.

On top of this bumble story, I've been dealing with mold in my room. The mold recently started blooming and growing all over my clothes. It was also slowly destroying my respiratory system and lowered my quality of sleep. My landlord has been fixing it, but it's been over a month. The timeline on the mold has been so un-exact that it's caused lots of stress for me. For the first few days I kept my bed and a few clothes in the moldy room, and slept in the other room in the apartment – which is super loud and bright in the morning.

The mold situation escalated and it looked like they needed to do several repairs of holes on the roof, repainting the roof walls with weathering paint, and re-painting my room. The landlord said it should just be until the end of the week... But then the week passed by and I made the assumption that it will take a month to fix everything. So I spent two whole days washing all my clothes, spraying things down, and moving my bed into my other room. My sleep quality is not good in this new room, at all. My room is getting so cluttered and messy and is filled in every corner with stuff. I also recently opened my winter clothes suitcase and it was filled with mold. I reckon that I need to wait 2 more days until this mold chapter finally closes.

At the exact same time as the mold situation, I also had to go to the eye hospital because I scratched my eyeball while volunteering to pick up trash. My left eye was super uncomfortable for a week and I had to take antibiotic ointments for my eye. But now it's healed. Last week the eye medicine (a sticky, thick gel) exploded in my backpack and covered the inside with hard-to-clean eye medicine.

This month has been so, so, tiring. I've been too sleepy and tired to go outside. I've been Grab-Eating everything. Meditating is so hard to do right now. But you know what? I'm a fighter and if I beat this month then I can get through anything. I've been resisting drugs, porn, and I've been replacing my normal social media consumption with Carl Sagan audio book and Youtube videos about emotional regulation.

I've recently been thinking about how much people assume about me that is completely wrong, even though I feel like I put so much of my genuine self out into the world. Maybe I’m not expressing enough of my negative opinions? Maybe I’m not offending enough people? I keep writing about astrology, but I genuinely hate when people talk about astrology to me and I get such an ick when people mention astrology. I've been returning to my roots and ingesting critical thinking skills and skeptic content. I also hate it when people are so polarized lately. The answers to most political things is never black and white. I voted for Kamala Harris but I also understand that the 50% of the population who voted for Donald Trump are also human and they have their own valid reasons for voting the way they did. Segmenting the world into an “us” vs. “them” problem is wrong. How much more offensive do I have to be?