I have a few songs i listened to today (or perhaps not today at all), if you don't mind:
also the most goth thing you can do is watch kodocha xoxo
1/23/2026
This one might be shorter or longer, I have no idea. I got this idea from a person I met recently, and I thought it would be cute to title it Young Gothic. Even though this isn’t a true Gothic and is just me and my life, but, as they say, art imitates life, life imitates art…
Basically, I thought about my experiences as a child until now. I used to live in this smaller, pretty house that was near my grandmother and a town that loved me. I think fondly of it, but if I remained there I would have been nothing that I am today. We moved because of a very dramatic circumstance, to the house I’ve been in ever since. It’s a bigger house in certain ways, but the yard is huge and spacious. We lived right next to my other grandmother, who I, in retrospect, treated as secondary all these years. I traded a home that felt like a fun and giving sanctuary within trees for one defined by being a more rural house. It was safer, less stress for the family, and the obvious choice, but I was resentful for years and years. I don’t know what year it was we moved, but it had to be before 2011. At that time I would be… I’ll say seven or eight. I don’t want to or need to ask when we moved, and it’s a memory of the past that we only physically see when we go past the old house to visit my grandma from the old town. Now that I think of it, I think I used to know the way to her house by heart, but when she asked me to start helping her in her older age, I had to use my GPS. It’s funny, in a way.
Anyway, the next few years of my life, I lived a normal life. In the earlier grades in school, I think I was an average child, if not for my hyperactive tendencies. I was treated differently in school and was sort of loud, from what I was told of the time. I loved people, loved to hang out with girls (this was at the simpler time when elementary school girls weren’t imitating yet), and was just one with my peers. I bring this up because this was the last time I felt kinship of a sort. Third grade was when I physically felt different, then in fourth grade, we were all growing up. By fifth grade, I don’t remember much. The fifth through eighth grades of my life all sort of blended together, I got forced into a friend group where I had little in common, and then we never spoke again. I want to pause there, since I need to describe myself at this point in time.
My eighth grade self was deeply depressed, probably barely scraping through on hygiene levels, and never really cared about anyone else. The school was so small, and our classrooms were smaller, which meant you could hear every conversation. People spoke about me on occasion, making fun of me when I was in the same room. They made fun of me always smiling, so I never really smiled again, they made fun of me being alone, so they assumed I knew nothing that they knew. They made fun of our friends group, but we were most likely the last ones having any traditional, youthful fun. I can blame social media, since I grew up around the time it really became utterly mainstream, and the fact I didn’t have it. Again, like before, I don’t regret that, either. My ‘social media’ was Scratch and online forums and youtube videos shared amongst my irl and online friends, and I was very happy. And, before that, I played Roblox in 2014 and had a lot of fun being free and cringe in the chat.
But my peers, they didn’t have that kind of freedom, didn’t let themselves have it, and became a standard instead of themselves. It felt like a hell for me, but now I realize that I was able to preserve my Self in a very unique way, even if it was heavily damaged. It’s very easy, in that state, to become very sullen or apathetic, and it was easy enough for me to choose that frame of mind. I don’t think I could have started over with them without it being a spectacle, so I just banked on the narrative that it was all temporary. I would be out in a few years, so I just had to wait a few years and hang with my school friends.
I had a thought of trying to change in high school, but I really couldn’t. Now, I realize that, unlike my old environment, this one was my own fault. But at the same time, I also know that it was one stifling place for another. And even though I had a phone, I still wasn’t quite tapped into their radars, either. The first year, they had a lot of rejects, too, and we all sat at the same table. I didn’t like them very much, but they were safe and nerdy to me. When they went in the halls, people treated them like spectacles and obstacles, too. So I felt a very small connection to them. I also got a strange, non dysphoric, feeling that if I was born a man, I would never have been so alone. I never had any friends who were girls after that, but I always was so keenly aligned with men that it was insane. The good ones I met don’t expect anything from each other, they just exist to be stupid and have fun as a cope. It was interesting to me, although obviously much more complex if it were true. Maybe I’d be a man who wanted to be a girl to have an ultimate freedom to do soft and fluffy things, so who knows.
Anyway, like I said, I was depressed and alone for a long time. Those rejects, rightfully, left that school and probably went to a public school. My parents were thinking of me and my education by putting me in smaller, private schools with a very definite curriculum, but I don’t think I had the nerve to tell them I wasn’t happy. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happier in a public school, maybe something worse would have happened to me. I’ll never be able to know, I never had that experience, so I can’t even think about it. I think I turned out fine in the end, despite it all, so I won’t think about it.
I think it was the senior retreat that I began to change. I was on the verge of graduating, only one friend in my life by now (who I still am in contact today, although it’s very spotty and distant, like a good, lasting friendship will be), and very much in a different headspace. We were the class of 2023, very close and full of average, good people. I had gone through a lot in four years, and a lot of it was personal. In June, my grandmother, the one I pushed away in my early years only to come back to and be there for her in her sickness, had died. It meant the dissolving of a lot of past family rituals. In the past, my cousins and aunt would visit her and I would have a friend for a few weeks or holiday seasons. People would come to the house that I never even met just to visit her and my grandfather. Every time I tried something new or major, I could go next door and tell her. Everyone tells me I look just like her when I was younger, and I think that’s why my family pushes me so hard. Instead, when I learned to drive for my senior year, all I get is my mom crying in the car because she knew she would have wanted to see it.
I brought up my senior retreat, as that’s the only time I got to really think about it. I got this supreme sense that I wasted everything. I spent all our time of quiet reflection in the chapel by sobbing in the bathroom because of her. I have no idea why I decided to only grieve then, but that was the time. I had a realization, then, that other then my family, I don’t think anyone cared about me. I meant nothing to anyone other than being some pretty girl who didn’t mesh with anyone else. Was it really that hard to do? If so, why didn’t I even try?
I remembered a lot of things, and my favorite little memory is me overhearing another classmate getting Christmas gifts for another group of people in school; I understood that I wouldn’t mean that much to anyone if I kept going like I was, and yet, in senior year, it was far too late to change that without a spectacle.
I think at that point, what happened was that what was temporary stopped being so. And I wasn’t prepared for anything other than my reality. I kept thinking of death being the end for this stage of my life, not as a suicide, but as an abstract. Like the posts people make where they realize they won’t die before they hit adulthood. In a way, though, I did kill someone with how I was, I killed the little girl that I used to be. I can’t see us as the same person, and I don’t. I’m the one who killed her and buried her under my own traumatic weight. I struggle with the concept of fault today, and why I feel like a nonhuman entity for this exact reason. Maybe it’s the reason I feel so fluid in gender and my identity, and how I just let go and laugh at things now instead of letting everything rule over me. Because I lost the will to care anymore and have felt so horrible all those years.
A part of the reason I wrote this was to tap into my past, my fears, things that hurt me, that kind of thing. I wanted to clear it from my mind by finally letting it come to the surface so I can stop living in the past. So much of my life was wasted in the past, holding stupid thoughts and never dreaming, instead of in the present where it belonged. If it wasn’t the past, it was to an invisible, Rapture-esque future that could and should never come. Instead, what I really can say I learned was that I and only I can define who I am, what I’ll be doing, and who I want to be around. Even now it stings me that I had to wait so long to learn what I already subconsciously knew.
I think I want to be a good person to others, to serve them not in a subservient way, but in a way that we know where we both stand. I can’t even hold hatred or the thought of having enemies in my heart because I hold so much of this new found love and respect. I don’t want bitterness in my life any longer, not when I can actually do something about it.