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theartoflivingalways · 4 years

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i’ve been awake for over 24 hours

I haven’t been on tumblr in years. i stopped using it after high school, but I don’t know why. but now I’m back tonight, because I needed someone to talk to, but I have no one to listen. i have friends, i have family, i have a boyfriend. i have a therapist. but no matter what: i feel so unheard, so unseen, and so ignored by everyone in my life that i literally feel like i have no one to truly turn to. for anything. so, here i am. hope i get a warm welcome!!!

here’s the thing: i’m NOT a depressed person. i’m not sad, i don’t have any major mental health issues apart from anxiety and some adhd. and before you take that the wrong way, please don’t. i just got my master’s degree in social work and i’ll be starting my new job as a therapist in a couple of weeks.

but, i’m also NOT a happy person. tbh, i can’t really describe my overall ~mood~ or whatever you wanna call it. i kinda just wake up and survive the day, every day. i take it one day at a time ... kinda like what AA says to do; but no, before you ask or the thought crosses your mind, i’m not an addict. at least not a alcohol/other drugs addict ??? sorry

maybe this is why there’s no one to listen when i need them to. i fucking ramble about literally nothing before getting to the point.

it’s weird that i’m writing right now (ok, typing???). i haven’t done this since i was little. it feels good to do this, to have some sort of outlet when you feel so fucking unseen and unheard by every. single. person. around you.

so i haven’t slept in over 24 hours. it’s my own fault for sure and i have adderall to thank for that (yes i’m prescribed). i decided to start a blog again because i’m sitting here, still wide awake in my apartment, alone, while my boyfriend is sound asleep in my bedroom.

so what’s my fucking problem??? why do i want someone to talk to?? i don’t know honestly. i just feel like lately all i do is listen to others, help others, give myself completely to others. and in return, i get nothing. nothing even close to what i give, or to what i’m capable of giving. which is sad. not for me particularly (maybe?), but for others, yes, i think so.

i’m not saying that i expect anything in return for helping others, because i don’t. i didn’t enter the field of social work for the fucking money. and i know a lot of fucked up shit is going on in the world right now, and in no way do i want to minimize ANY of that. i’m just feeling a little lost and lonely, so i’m hoping this is a new outlet for me to sort out those feelings.

the last couple of hours, i’ve had a LONG string of thoughts. if you read through, you’ll eventually found out how they started. but one of the things i’ve been wrestling with in my mind is the type of person i am.

you see, it’s difficult to be “that” person for others your whole life, especially all the fucking time. if you’re anything like me, you know what i mean by that. and if you aren’t anything like me, well, first of all congrats!!!!, and secondly, i’ll explain what i mean.

when you’re “that” person for others, like myself, it’s easy for other people to walk all over you. take advantage of you, take you for granted, expect you to ALWAYS be there no matter the cost. and of course, why wouldn’t they? you’re always there to help. you’re ALWAYS there to offer support, guidance, and advice. you’re nurturing. you listen. you’re a fucking irreplaceable, loyal to death friend. if you’re VERY much like me, you’re also the one person in your family who isn’t a total fuck up (at least not publicly?)

you’re also nonjudgmental, and you were blessed with the curse of being empathic towards others at all times. empathy of course is beautiful and a very good thing to have in this life, but do you know how hard it is to feel for every single person around you.. and not have anyone feel for you???? damn

also, you never let anyone down!! ever. you’re reliable, dependable, trustworthy to the point where it’s almost sketchy because like??? who can be that way to everyone else at all times? you guessed it- people like me and people like u!! (if this is even semi-relatable, i’m sorry)

but people like us, like you, like me, tend to do this thing where we keep the same shitty fucking toxic people around that have hurt us, continue to hurt us both indirectly and directly, and who have let us down time and time again, because we continue clinging on to the fucking useless hope that “someday they’ll change”. someday, they’ll realize how fucking important you are to them and how shitty their lives are, and would be, without you in it.

you- we - also live by honesty and truthfulness, and assume others just live by this as well. but then you’re proved wrong over and over and over again, yet you never fucking learn your lesson because you are STILL hopeful that somewhere, somehow, deep down, other people DO stand by the morals you try so hard to stand by in life. most of the time, though, you’re completely avoiding the reality of other people and their experiences and who they really are, only to try to fit your own narrative of how you see things and how you think things should be.

if this sounds anything like you... i’m sorry. i know it all too well.

i grew up as the “golden child” in my family. not just my immediate family. my entire fucking family. the pressure to be perfect has lead me to develop debilitating anxiety in my 20′s, and it is what it is, but like, why the fuck couldn’t i have anxiety in high school like a normal teenager? why now?

so yeah my anxiety’s pretty bad. it’s pretty bad tonight, which is why i turned here. to tumblr. to try to write out my thoughts. which, by the way, i’m sorry, because this is an absolute fucking mess and makes no sense. if you are reading this, though, thank you. thank you for listening when no one else seems to.

anyway. growing up with the pressure of being *perfect* has a cost. at least for me it did: 1) anxiety of course, and 2) perfectionist tendencies. these have literally- LITERALLY - ruined my entire college and graduate school experience. perfectionism combined with anxiety is a recipe for fucking disaster, and i’ve been cooking it for years.

i am deliberately writing this without proper punctuation/grammer/whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit, not capitalizing my letters etc., because i want to not have to be so perfect all the time on here, if this is something i’m going to stick to. i know that sounds silly but it’s actually been very difficult for me to write in all lower-caps and i’m very worried that no one will even read this and HEAR ME because of my literacy negligence (i have no idea if that’s even a real thing or if it even has meaning but it sounded right)

do u want to know why i decided to write this though, truly? what lead to me feeling like i’m “spiraling” - apart from no sleep in over 24 hours now? well, get ready to laugh, because i truly think i’m pathetic and going crazy.

i went to dinner tonight with my boyfriend and his fam. our waitress was a girl i used to know years ago in high school. my boyfriend knew her too. in fact, he knew her VeRY well. for the sake of my anxious overthinking, i don’t feel like going too much into the details of *that* situation, so thanks in advance for understanding.

anyway. this corny bitch made a joke about the current political environment. i won’t say what exactly, because i’d really like to keep my identity as concealed as absolutely possible on here. but long story short, no one really laughed - every one just kinda smiled awkwardly. but you know who did laugh? my boyfriend :)

TO ME, it seemed intentional. she wasn’t fucking funny, for one. she made a bad - no, a very bad- joke. like one of those corny dad jokes. not even a dad joke actually. a step-dad joke, except your step-dad is a loser that you hate, who treats ur mom/dad bad, has no sense of humor or a horrible sense of humor and idk, just fucking sucks you know ???

sorry that got kinda dark and it was unnecessary but do u know what i mean??? and no, that was literally not relevant to me or my family system/structure in any way. just kinda came to me, ya know? ...writing works in mysterious ways man

alright so if you don’t agree, that’s fine. i already told you to get ready to laugh, because i am well aware of how insane i fucking sound. but you know what makes anxiety & perfectionism 100x harder to cope with? insecurities. and i’m FULL of them.

so anyway. we left dinner. him & i were driving home. i will admit that i did have some wine at dinner, and i wasn’t drunk but i definitely was feeling cocky enough to stir the pot with him. so, i casually said, “hey... didn’t you date _____?” *insert annoying waitress’s name who i knew once upon a time*

i said it very calmly. very coooool. v collected and nice. he said “no? i’ve never even talked to or hungout with that girl”.

i wish u could see my face as i’m writing this right now bc i cannnot. like i gave u a choice.... the opportunity. tHE SIMPLE opportunity - a chance - to be fucking honest................................

this dude. straight up. lied to my face. about this fucking girl. ???????

YEARS AGO, they most certainly did talk. a lot. in fact, my crAZy ass searched their names on facebook to find their old little love notes to each other that they posted on each others’ walls. which were very cringey but nothing that made me feel jealous or insecure (for once). after all, they were from years ago- i’m talking 5+ - so likeeee.... why would he lie (:

oh and they definitely did hang out because.... i remember clearly.... a PICTURE OF THE two of them *together* *hangin* (prob bangin too) (sorry) years ago in this now-waitress’s bedroom. i believe it was a ~webcam photo~ that they took on the new mac computer her parents prob bought her. so this photo is now NO WHERE to be found. and believe me, i looked. no, i LURKED. i went to the beginnnning of her instagram posts and deep into her uploaded facebook pictures. ok, not ‘deep’, i literally got to the first pic she ever posted on FB just to try to find this damn picture. and it took me for. fucking. ever. because this bitch has prolly posted a million pictures in the last 5+ years like who does that???

but i swear to fucking whatever the fuck that this picture exists. i have fucking seen it. i’d describe it in perfect detail right now as if i saw it today, but, once again, i’m concealin my identity, yo, so i can’t do all that. v sorry

anywho. this dude - who i call my boyfriend (and yes i love him very very much and our past is absolutely fucked but that’s a whole other story for a very different time) - had the nerve, the audacity, to tell me to my face, that he “definitely doesn’t have a picture with her” because “they’ve never hung out or talked before” ... ?!??????

obv i sent him screenshots of the dirt i dug up on facebook from 5+ years ago (i.e., the old posts between them in case ya forgot during my rambling) bc like, caught ya in a lie sir. red handed.

i might be late on mentioning this part, but here’s the fucking kicker (and i’ve never used that phrase and i don’t know why i said that but ok?): TODAY, for the first time in MONTHS, literally!!!, bc of the virus and the quarantine and all that, i got ready today for dinner with his family. like actually got ready. i spent HOURS doing my make up. i don’t even remember the last time i did my make up, ok. i dressed in a really cute outfit. i felt fucking very good about myself. i thought for sure when he’d come pick me up to go to dinner he’d at least say something. at least acknowledge it. he has literally only seen me in raw form for too many days now. like, complete bare face and sweat pants basically every day since march.

but. did he even look at me twice?!!? no. did he mention anything about how i looked? how it was drastically different from my everyday attire the last couple months? did he take 2 seconds out of his day to say something corny or flirty to me? even just, “you look beautiful”??? honestly i would’ve even appreciated, “you look beautiful, for once” ???

did u guess the correct answer? well if u didn’t, it’s N O.

but u know who he did look at twice.

our waitress at dinner.

i think i wrote enough for one night. if u think this is my anxiety/perfectionism/insecurities combination spiraling out of control after being tamed incessantly for 20+ years, PLZ TELL ME.

but also, if you have a fucking brain, you’d know that:

1) this is definitely NOT the first time i’ve responded to something like this the way i did, and

2) i really just needed to ramble on and vent about all the shit that’s been going through my mind the last 2 1/2 hours, so there’s that.

have a good night get some sleep!!! thank u for ur time.

#why #me #cantsleep #upfor24hours #adderall #waitress #insecure #perfect #anxiety #sorry #helpme #help #needsleep #dontwanttotho #goodnight #getsomerest #ily #thanku

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ghiacciowife · 7 years

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Kura_Kura22

So I literally just said I’m not much of a writer but here’s this I guess. I’ve been working on it for a few months and it’s finally finished so...yeah.

I’ve always been a huge ROLBOX fan. Well, if I’m being perfectly honest with you, “fan” is quite an understatement. You see, I bought an annual subscription of OBC the moment I turned eleven years old, which is also the year it came out. OBC stands for Outrageous Builders’ Club and is the highest tier on the Builders’ Club list, if you didn’t already know. My parents have been paying $129.95 to fuel my addiction for eleven years now.

It was just another run-of-the-mill day, I was pwning n00bz on a Call of Duty remake “place”. I’d been at the top of the charts since it had began, I was absolutely unbeatable. Every girl avatar I ran into called me “hawt xPP”, I kept up with EVERY trend, and it showed. You could say I was a “22 year old loser who needs to get a job”, but you aren’t as dedicated to this game as I am. You’re just yearning to get a taste of what I feel on a daily basis.

I eventually quit the Call of Duty game, and go hunting for a new game to play. Preferably, one where I wouldn’t get so much pussy I’d drown. Around that point I received a friend request, from a user merely named “Kura_Kura22”. I clicked the profile, trying to see if I knew the user. She had a female player model, evident by the hair pulled into a bun and default outfit, and was around 16 years old from her birth date. I checked her join date, just to see if she really was someone I wanted to add. It was the current date.

“Just another n00b to pwn.” I chuckled to myself, accepting it with my only intent to be to fuck with her. Shortly after, she sent me a message. I scoffed and opened it up, expecting yet another love confession from a stupid teenager. My eyebrows furrow as my eyes scan the message on my screen. Merely one sentence.

“Come to my place, it’ll be fun!”

I erupt into laughter, this bitch just joined today and she’s already trying to make shit. I humor her, clicking her creations tab to see what hot pile of shit she’s created. She created one place, titled “Kurasaki’s fun fun playland!!”, the picture was a My Little Pony fan character. I chuckled, she sure didn’t behave like a sixteen year old girl. I click “play”, expecting to be greeted by bright colors and childish characters. That’s usually how these sorts of “places” go.

After a few minutes I load in. The place seems to have spawned me in the middle of a forest, the cheap leaf graphics on the trees swaying gently. I widened my eyes, internally applauding this teenage girl for using custom models and textures despite just joining today. Maybe she’s someone else I had added years ago and she just lost her password, I have no idea. I rarely interact with any of my friends anyways.

Everything seemed normal for a little while, just a regular forest with a nice dirt path to explore. But then, Kura_Kura22’s username was added to the leaderboard, and I felt my blood run ice cold. Her avatar had changed, it looked exactly like mine. I knew she couldn’t have purchased my entire outfit, some items were no longer for sale! I saw a message in the chat appear.

“You like, yes?”

I pondered the question, despite how simple it was. There was no way this girl was from the United States, her broken English and childish attitude were a dead giveaway. I decide against being a sarcastic asshat, thinking that maybe she just wants a friend.

“Yeah, you look great. Is English your first language?”

Kura_Kura22 spun in her place, as if trying to demonstrate her absolute joy at my response. She walked right up to me, then backwards once more, and just as soon as she had appeared, she vanished. I stared at my screen in confusion.

I wandered around her place a little longer, before Kura_Kura22 rejoined, hunted me down again, and asked how she looked. She now was wearing my best friend’s outfit, perfecting every detail. I approved it again, using her full username. She stared at me for a second, before sending a response.

“My name is Kurasaki T., please refer using that.”

I’m gonna be honest, I was internally applauding her use of American dialect to merely give me her family name’s initial. My fingers run across my keyboard at a speed of 110 wpm, phrasing my reply with no error.

“Alright, nice to meet you Kurasaki. Just call me Kidd.”

“But, you are Dan Belle?”

This freaked me the fuck out. No one on ROBLOX knew my real name, NO ONE. Not even my closest friends. Everyone shortened my username, KiddyKip030, to “Kidd” to get my attention, and I didn’t mind it. I felt that it kept me more secure than having people call me “Dan”.

“How do you know my name? I haven’t told anyone what it is, not even my closest friends.”

I was so worried about how Kurasaki knew my name that I didn’t see my webcam switch on, focusing instead on the chat box, waiting for whatever hellish response she could have. However, I did see her character’s typical ROBLOX smile be replaced with my face. I watched in horror as my face melted off her character, leaving a skull with eyeballs in it. I leaned over into the trash can by my desk and vomited into it, unable to withstand the hyper realistic gore. I closed ROBLOX and never returned to the site, too terrified by the imagery I was just shown.

Later on, I googled her name, and what I read shocked me. Kurasaki Tanaka was a fifteen year old Japanese girl who set her own home ablaze last year in an act of murder-suicide after flunking her finals. However, the spookiest thing of this all is that some people are going to take this piece of absolute fucking garbage seriously because I wanted to be ironic and use a more advanced dialect on my first ever trollpasta.

#trollpasta #creepypasta #roblox #hi why did i write this #hi why did i spend months editing and revising it until i thought it was perfect

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nostalgicpirate · 7 years

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The Long Story

There was a time in my childhood when concerns about sexuality, gender, and other such matters were all but absent. I flowed from day to day, each an epoch in itself, not wanting an explanation of the world, but simply living it. Then came the pivotal moment, an event so traumatic as to be the catalyst of every negative event in my life from that point forward, or so it seems.

I remember little of my life before the divorce, before foster care, before meeting my abuser. My earliest memories are locked away, kept from me by the passage of time and my minds own selfish insistence on me persisting. But I wont talk about those events in much detail now, only the affects to that cause.

I found myself living with another family, kept apart from all my siblings but my sister Allison, and with new parents and new brothers. I remember Brain the most frequently when I think of the themes I will contain within this exercise. Brain was an effeminate teenage boy who was one of the birth children of my foster parents, his voice was high and giddy, and he had a kind of energy that I had not experienced before. He crossed his legs at the knees, he was concerned with his physical appearance in a way that somehow seemed taboo, in fact, all of his predilections seemed somehow against the grain, much to the chagrin of his, and now my, parents. I didn't know what “gay” meant, but I heard the word for the first time then. Too young to concern myself with things like sexuality, I thought it just meant the way he behaved, his voice, his mannerisms. Attraction, I didn't understand, WAS a part of it, but I couldn't conceive of such things. I did know that his parents and siblings found it amusing and somehow damning as if his “different-ness” somehow made him ridiculous. I remember trying to take on Brains behaviors and was met with the same ridicule as he was, but they simply thought I was mocking him and thought little of it.

Even as a child I liked to grow my hair long, and at that age it was a blonde so intense it was almost white. They called me cotton-top as an endearment because of it. I was slight of build, my face was lean and thin, and I was short for my age. Consequentially I was often mistaken for a small girl, something that I think bothered my mother more than me. It bothered me then, but not enough to stop me and my sister from braiding each others hair.

I wont go too much into detail of the events of my abuse in this piece, I've done that in other mediums, other pieces, and it doesn't need to be tread over again. There is such a thing as beating a dead horse, and that isn't the purpose of me writing now. Suffice to say I started my sexual experience as a human young, and with a much older man. Even after I left foster care, my mother would let me spend nearly ever weekend in his “care”, and not understanding at first that what he was doing to me was abnormal, I still loved him like a father. Years would go by in such a manner, even after my family moved from the suburbs of Richmond (where he lived) to the blue ridge mountains outside of the town of Crozet. As I aged I began to understand that most boys weren't like me, most boys didn't have this secret thing that occurred with their “fathers” when the lights when out and we were supposed to sleep. As I began to enter puberty the acts became pleasurable, but somehow all the more wrong. I liked it, what I felt when things happened, but I knew that it was wrong. The confusion of both enjoying and being horrified by what was happening to me will never leave me.

At a time when most boys were on the look out for girls, I didn't know what to think, how to behave. My friends sensed that I was stunted in this way, and one by one abandoned me, no longer wanting to spend time with me. I found myself attracted to girls, but also enthralled by the idea of boys. Going to school became horrible, I never knew where to look, or how to act, or how to speak. Through middle school I stopped socializing all together, into high-school I had no friends. My grades plummeted, I stopped taking care of myself physically, my long hair became matted and full of knots, my clothes I hardly washed.

Discovering the internet was an important turn for me, both the secret and at that time painfully slow world of pornography, and the mild degree of social interaction afforded by chat rooms. It was here I could express the apparent taboos I had acquired or had been born with without persecution, as my peers had already taken to treating me like a pariah and calling me “gay” or “faggot” at every turn. With slowly downloaded videos I found myself experiencing pleasurable acts separate from the abuse that had happened to me. This became important because my malefactor had disappeared from my life nearly overnight, and I didn't have him or his creative assortment of magazines to keep me company. At first it was men and women, then trans women (whose juxtaposition of genitals and apparent gender amazed and excited me) then in the chats I started talking to young men my age. I don't remember the first time I had cybersex with a boy, but I do know that it was always “by accident”. I found myself unable to chat in the main room of the chat rooms, the regulars had too closely knit a group of friends, and even in that digital environment I was too scared to do that. Instead I'd enter a private chat with all assortments of people, trying to find those that wanted to talk about things of a sexual nature a lot of the time, but also trying to form some kind of social connection, but my life was sorely lacking that at the time. Upon entering a private chat I'd rattle off the now infamous anagram “ASL” (age, sex, location), and SOMETIMES the person would be male and within my age group. Those that weren't immediately turned off by me being male as well would then SOMETIMES want to engage in sexual acts. Keep in mind that these things didn't happen with ONLY males, but with a wide variety of people. I always had my eye out with a trans person, something that was then a rare find in chat rooms due to stigma. The advent of the webcam took things up a notch, deep in the midnight hours I'd fine people to display my pleasure too, sometimes men, sometimes women. I began exploring my body in methods that were taboo among the “straight” led society I live in.

My first partner outside of the chat rooms was a young woman about my age, but only by happenstance, she pursued me, and if she hadn't it would have been many more years before I found someone. This is another period of my life I'm going to gloss over, because it isn't pertinent to what I'm trying to say in this piece. What I will say is that there was a person inside of me that hardly spoke, who I think started in those chat rooms, or maybe just opened its mouth for the first time, and Rebecca, my first love, was the first real person to experience that part of me.

Gender is a complex subject, or so I'm discovering. As I said earlier, I was often mistaken for a girl as a child, and there were girlish things that I enjoyed, but I always was keenly aware that that part of me wasn't welcome. Any deviation from standard male behavior was savagely mocked by peers and family alike. I found little ways of acting out, however, the length of my hair being one of them. To keep people from mocking me further, as soon as I began to grow facial hair I forsook shaving altogether and grew a long beard, an ability I thought at first a blessing. In high-school, having a beard meant people no longer took me for a girl, people mocked me less, people kept their distance.

It was probably that beard that attracted Rebecca in the first place, she used to refer to me as “goatman” as a loving endearment. However, in private moments together over the phone in the night I began to show a different side of myself, when speaking my voice would become light and go up a few octaves, almost a mimicry of Brains voice from my childhood, but even more so. It wasn't just my voice, it was my body language, my mannerisms, it was me, or some part of me, speaking out loud for the first time.

Realizing that who I was was fractured wouldn't come for many years, what I did know is that in those private moments, in that identity that I could only share with her, I was truly happy, maybe for the first time since I was a small child. It was, however, one of the reasons she eventually left me for another partner, and that hurt tied itself into the fear of sharing that part of myself, and it would be years before I had the courage to do so again.

Eventually I graduated high-school, namely because I transferred to an alternate school with open minded staff and a smaller student body. I found myself then on the verge of life but with two major problems having been recently discovered. I was disabled, physically, and mentally. I had what the doctors at the time suspected was a form of schizophrenia (they didn't know about my sexual abuse, however) and what would later be determined to be a severe form of PTSD. I also had a debilitating spinal deformity known as Scheuermann's Kyphosis. Kept apart from society by the crippling social anxiety from the PTSD and the very literally crippling kyphosis, I started the process of getting disability, and with a few years moved in with my brother with my “own” income.

The years with my brother stagnated me, kept me locked in place worse than anything I could have done with my twenties. I was forced to devote every ounce of time an energy to him and had no room for socializing (even if I were able) or self reflection. It was only when I cut ties with him that I began to, once more, explore myself, but before that, before moving out even, I met someone who changed my life.

In the twilight of my youth, just before the move, I met a woman named colleen in an online chatroom. She was fierce, and strong, and very openly bisexual. She saw through the many layers of psychosis and trauma that made up my brittle damaged mind and didn't turn away, didn't find me wanting. It wasn't attraction I had for her, it was fellowship I sought from her. I told her everything, all the details of what I've transcribed here, all the little secrets I'd kept from my family and friends, and she didn't think me gross or damaged, but encouraged me to explore myself. The years with my brother were bitter for our friendship, as she lived a few hundred miles away, and we were both too scared to meet, but also due to the isolation forced upon me by him. When I finally got away from him, when I finally cut ties, she was there to support me emotionally like few others could.

I had few friends after that, Mr. Richards ( a mutual friend of my brother who stopped talking to him in favor of me) was one of them, Rebecca (who remained my friend even after our tumultuous relationship) was another. Colleen was the unspoken third, the bearer of all my secrets, the one person I could confide anything and everything with.

She was the first person I came out to, spoke with in depth about my sexuality and my gender and all the glorious weirdness that is me. Years later I would in turn tell my other friends, and eventually (and weirdly last) my therapist, who should have known all along.

Finding terms for the parts of me that didn't make sense was a big deal for me, I wanted an explanation, a clean cut reason for the malfunctions I found within myself. Gender, it turns out, isn't that simple. I wasn't trans, as I first though, because there WAS in fact a part of me that very keenly wanted to remain male, and I wasn't entirely cis, because there were times when “Binks” the name I gave the effeminate voiced female portion of my mind and gender would speak up and make herself known. The closest explanation I've found is the term Genderfluid, wherein my gender identity is in a constant state of flux from male to female and back again. Understanding my sexuality came first, however. I was deeply afraid of men, it would seem, and apart from musings online and in chat, I was terrified of being... well, different, being gay. I had associated homosexuality with those terrible early moments of my sexuality with my abuser, even at times thought that he had “turned” me gay somehow.

I still struggle with who it is I am, and how I want to be with, but its getting clearer ever day, and with that clarity I have hope. I haven't had much luck with relationships, but I have a DEEP desire to be loved, and to love others. “Others” in this case being virtually any consenting adult. My attractions range all across the board, so much that I've found that the closet term to describing me is “Pansexual” or: not using gender or gender identity to chose a partner. The affect of this is that I'm attracted to basically everyone to varying degrees, though its more of a weird hierarchy of attractions, with cis and trans women at the top, and trans and cis men at the bottom. I don't know if that is “right” for being pan, but its the way it is for me, so maybe being right in this case doesn't matter as long as I'm true to myself.

One day, it'll all make sense, and maybe even I'll be brave enough to share my secrets with the family I know and sometimes even love.

#sexuality pansexual genderidenity genderfluid writer poet

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computerguideworld-blog · 5 years

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The filmmakers behind Searching know why youre skeptical about computer screen movies

New Post has been published on https://computerguideto.com/must-see/the-filmmakers-behind-searching-know-why-youre-skeptical-about-computer-screen-movies/

The filmmakers behind Searching know why youre skeptical about computer screen movies

If you’re not sure about watching a whole movie where your point-of-view is limited to computer and smartphone screens, you’re not alone — “Searching” filmmakers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian told me they had very similar reservations.

Chaganty said that when the pair was first approached by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs (the production company behind the “Unfriended” movies), the idea was to contribute a segment to an anthology of short films set on computer screens. That’s when they came up with the basic plot of “Searching” — after a teenaged girl goes missing, her father (played by John Cho) goes through the laptop she left behind in an effort to find her.

But then the studio proposed turning the idea into a feature film, with Chaganty directing, Ohanian producing and the two of them writing the screenplay.

“It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity,” Chaganty recalled. “But in that instant, I said no.”

It seemed to him that they’d come up with a way to make the format more than a gimmick —but as a short film. He worried that extending it into a feature might “stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick.”

Chaganty and Ohanian kept talking about the idea, though, and ultimately moved forward after coming up with an opening sequence — which is indeed the opening sequence of the finished film. It’s a seven-minute montage of footage stored on a desktop computer, which doubles as a compressed (and surprisingly emotional) history of the Kim family.

“In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story,” Chaganty said. “And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new … but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.”

“Searching” is in limited release this weekend, before opening more widely on Friday, August 31. You can read more about how Chaganty and Ohanian actually made the movie in the edited transcript below.

Director/writer Aneesh Chaganty and Debra Messing on the set of “Searching.”

TechCrunch: How much of this started with the format, and how much with the kidnapping plot?

Sev Ohanian: Honestly, it was almost neither of those things. Aneesh and I are writing partners — he directs, I produce, we met each other at USC film school. We had made a two-minute short film that takes place on the Google Glasses, if you remember those at all? It kind of blew up — it was called “Seeds” — and one of the results of that was he got hired by Google to come out here and start writing commercials for one or two years.

I’ve been an indie producer for a couple of years now and I had an opportunity to meet with Timur Bekmambetov’s company Bazelevs. He had just released “Unfriended,” it was super successful, and he asked me if there were any filmmakers I wanted to collaborate with. I immediately thought of Aneesh, of course.

Aneesh Chaganty: When I came in and we had the meeting together, they were like, “We want to follow-up ‘Unfriended’ but we don’t want to follow it up with a traditional feature, we want to follow it up with an anthology feature, basically comprised of a bunch of shorts, all of which take place on computer screens.”

Immediately to me, that was a lot more interesting than a feature film, because we had seen all the feature films that took place on screens and none of them were proof that this was a direction we should be going in. A short film, though, I knew we could make it into not a gimmick, which I think all the other films were. [Pauses.] Sort of rude, but whatever.

About a month and a half later, we ended up texting each other with the idea for “Searching” — first as a short film, that’s how it started out. Same plot. Basically, Dad breaks into his daughter’s laptop to look at clues to find her.

We thought in eight minutes it could be not a gimmick and really cool and engaging and get out before anyone got bored. And we sent a few pages back to the company and I happened to be in Los Angeles a few weeks later for a Google photo shoot and they called us into a board room. All of a sudden, it was Sev and myself in front of a big table of execs and financiers and all that stuff.

They basically told us, “Hey, we don’t want to make the short.” We go, “Well, that’s a bummer.” And they go, “We want to turn it into a feature. Sev and Aneesh, you guys can write it, we’ll pay you guys to write it, Sev, you can produce it, Aneesh, we’ll pay you to direct your first feature, and we’ll finance the whole thing. What do you guys say?”

It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity — but in that instant, I said no.

Ohanian: He said no!

Chaganty: On my left side, he was like kicking me, like, “What are you doing?” and everything like that. But in the moment, it felt like what we were being asked to do was take a concept that we had found to not be a gimmick and then stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick. And more than that, make a film not because ours had any artistic merit, but because another film was a hit. Not that ours deserved to exist.

And so for the right reasons I said no, and for the right reasons, Sev said, “We’ll be in touch.” And we left the room and we just kept talking about the enormity of the opportunity, obviously, and how that never happens, despite the parameters of what we were being asked to do. And we were like, “If we hit a wall, we hit a wall, but we should pay respect to this by talking.”

So for two months we just tried to figure out a way into the story and we couldn’t. Until one day, I was living in Williamsburg at the time, and I was texting Sev, and I was like, “Hey, I have a really random idea for an opening sequence.” And Sev goes, “I have an idea for an opening sequence.” And we get on the phone and we pitch each other the exact same opening scene. And to this day, that’s the opening sequence of the film, which is a standalone, very unique seven-minute montage that takes place over 16 years of a family’s life stored on their desktop computer.

In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story. And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new, but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.

Director/writer Aneesh Chaganty and John Cho on the set of “Searching.”

Ohanian: Our idea with the opening scene was, we wanted to create something that within five minutes, audiences would just forget that what they were watching was unfolding on screens and just get sucked into the story. Hopefully we did that.

Chaganty: So we put together a longer pitch, because immediately [after] that idea of the opening scene, we were like, “And I guess the next scene would be this, and the next scene would be this.” And we started plotting it out immediately. We had a structure very quickly.

We sent that structure back to the company, they bought in, they were like, “We’re paying you guys to do this.” I quit my job at Google, and I got on a flight, moved to L.A. and we made a movie.

TechCrunch: My understanding is that you had created a lot of what happens on the computer screen first, and then John and Debra [Messing] and the other actors were acting on webcams to a certain extent based on what you’d already created.

Chaganty: The way that we like to describe this movie is, we sort of made an animated movie, then shot a live action film, and then put the live action film within the animated film and just kept refining it and refining it.

The reason we started with an animated movie was Sev’s idea, and basically coming from a movie called “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” It was made in a very similar way, in the sense that it was made before it was made.

Basically, what we realized was that in our film, there are two cameras. There’s all the footage that you’re seeing on this screen, and then there’s the way that you’re framing it, because the camera in our film is always moving around. We realized those two need to play with each other and also inform one another. We need to know what the final product is going to look like, before we even went to set.

So basically, seven weeks before we even hired the actors, we brought in the editors to the film and took them to a room about this big, with two iMac computers, and said, “Welcome home.” And literally just said, “Go.”

They started screen capturing the Internet, like doing text messages, voicemail, whatever, every single thing, zooming in, putting together a cut. And by the end of seven weeks, we had an hour-and-40-minute cut of the entire film, starring me playing every role — dad, daughter, brother, mother, father. You know, all of the friends, talking to myself. And we would understand how the camera was moving and everything, and how to make this movie.

We showed that cut to the crew the night before we started shooting and it was in that moment that they were like, “Oh, that’s the movie we’re making.” Because up until that point, this movie is impossible to talk about. Now we have a trailer, we have a poster, it’s all very easy to be like, “Oh, this is what we made.” But before that I’m saying, “We’re making a thriller, but it takes place on a computer screen, but it’s going to be really good.” And it’s really hard to sell people on that idea. So for them to finally see what we were thinking was very helpful.

And then on set, John’s character, who’s literally operating the computer in the movie, his eyeline — he needs to know exactly where every button is, where every cursor moves, where everything pops, where every video message comes in, he always needs to have a perfect eyeline in the film and know what’s happening. We literally needed to show him that temp video as he’s shooting, so he understands where what he’s shooting is actually being placed in the larger film.

Debra Messing and John Cho in “Searching.”

Ohanian: And the idea with that previz version of the movie was, we wanted the final version of the film to feel polished and cinematic and grab the audience’s attention. It’s a studio movie now with worldwide distribution, but it started off as an indie film. You’ve seen the movie: There’s aerial stuff, car stuff, crowd scenes, water, ravines. We shot it in 13 days.

And part of the idea of doing this version was that we wanted to spend every one of those days making them count as much as we can, and the final product would have consistency and good screen composition and mise en scene and all these amazing things. So it wouldn’t feel accidental, it would feel polished.

TechCrunch: When you were working with the actors, how much did they instinctively know what to do, and how much, given that this is not a format that exists already, did you have to train them for a different kind of acting?

Chaganty: I think every single person on the cast and the crew had to relearn aspects of the job to make this movie. Michelle [La, who plays the daughter Margot] actually says this, that it’s a lot easier for her to behave in front of a screen than it was for John. Maybe it’s a generational thing or whatever, but for us, all the rules visually are different. None of us have ever made another movie like this. I know for a fact, none of us are going to do this again. We’re on-set, we’re all learning together.

I really equate this whole movie with cast and crew holding each other’s hands, we all walk into a dark cave, every single person thinks the person to their right knows a little more than them, but nobody does. And I’m on the far right being like, “Uh, I don’t know … ” But jumping in, and at every point of this cave, in the pure darkness, realizing that there’s one person on this crew or cast who knew how to get to this next challenge.

TechCrunch: It sounds like you guys aren’t necessarily looking to make “Searching 2,” and in fact, I know you already have another project lined up.

Now that you’re at the end of the process, to what extent do you feel that okay, [computer screen movies are a genre] where other directors can come in and do interesting stuff? And to what extent to do you feel like this is probably something that you can make four or five films with, and at the end of it, the possibilities are exhausted?

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Chaganty: At the end of the day, I keep saying this, but I think that if you asked Christopher Nolan how many more backwards films are going to happen [after “Memento”], is he starting a subgenre with backwards films? I don’t think the answer would be yes.

We feel the same way about this movie. This, at the end of the day, is a gimmick. It’s a style of telling the story. We found a way, I think, to make it not that and tell the story first, but at the same time, a computer screen only has set imagery. It’s even more limiting than traditional found footage, because with traditional found footage you can set yourself in Singapore, or Hong Kong, or New York, or whatever. You’re always on a laptop screen with a computer screen film.

Maybe the lesson people will learn from us is something that I’ve learned: There is a way still to show technology accurately and honestly — because I don’t think Hollywood has done that yet — using screens and using traditional cinematic language when you’re showing screens. You can still combine that with a live action film, and in a way that feels consistent with your tone and style and genre of whatever larger piece you’re making.