### **Morning Pages** Read about happiness expert saying NutraSweet social interaction is not going to nourish you. Like social media. Also, delight, notice when you get joy. Savor happiness as it comes, as much as you can because of hedonic adaptation. What I’m delighting at the moment, small things. Vico’s “haha” IG story. Stanley’s smiling eyes while he’s eating spicy food in his FB story. The delusional idiot in me thinking Vico is reading me just because he put all caps in his latest post. And because he posted “reforms” working because he’s just perfectly synchronous with Enola Holmes’s love interest. I read about the type of girl he likes. “Matalino and easygoing.” Well, two things I’m working on, but I’m definitely not like this. He is looking for someone who is like him. Also, happiness key: dopamine that you earn (Huberman). This is why writing with AI feels so hollow and emasculating. I wish I could preserve the feeling of completing CW 198 lit review. Farm fresh brain juice! Maybe it’s why guys who’ve had to struggle to earn a girl’s affection feel happier. They feel like they accomplished something. And I gave it all too early and made it so unpleasant too. If I could dream about my story published in Clarkesworld in 2018, and have it actually happen 6 years later, then I might one day hear those sweet words, “I love you” first. I might one day be asked out for real and be pursued for real by a person so sure about their decision. I might get picked and become someone’s priority. I might become family to someone else, their person, their confidante, their soulmate. It just seems right now I’m perpetually pathetic because literally no one I want is giving me attention. It is so fucking hard to get attention. Some people just naturally have gravity to them and they don’t even have to do anything. They don’t have to put effort because they were born to be attractive. They get all the time, the care, the concern, the fulfillment of promises, the dream. Sometimes it’s not that bad, but it certainly feels like it. It’s as bad as I make it to be. If a person looked at me from a 4D perspective without knowing my thoughts, I’m just a procrastinating graduating student from UP trying to meet deadlines and stalking people I want. I am naturally great at sitting with my grief and magnifying it. I cannot imagine someone like my sister having this existential grief. She has so much free space in her mind to fulfil those Maslow higher levels. Meanwhile, I’ve got years trying to struggle through basic needs that have become synonymous to my system as food. Or even breathing. A list of synchronicities. Is this supposed to make me react? Maybe he is just testing if I would kill myself if he’s with a new person. Maybe all this time he’s just hoping I get over him. Maybe he’s just answering me by telling me why he stopped talking to me. Maybe he read my draft and is trying to scare me by saying I sold my soul to Satan. 1. “magnetic rose” 2. “actress enters fantasy and reality meld” 3. infantilized African movie and its relation to syncretic concept 4. cobbler and thief = me and my new shoes and possibly if he is reading me it’s Bluesky guy “nameless” 5. Faust 6. Brain Grain (non-violent and intelligent) and Professor Screweyes and New York 7. Felidae = cats I would never 100% know if they are reading me, but this is too heavy, 7 movies at once being too related to what I’m writing here. He has had to find those movies somehow. It can’t be possible that I’m just seeing things with no evidence or relation to reality. If I really try hard to think, I just don’t understand how I could have met him in 2023 unless they were actively monitoring me already. Or maybe he suddenly got an invite in their groupchat or network or deep web link about me after some time we met and he has actually been in on it and is just lying to my face. Everything about it is turning my stomach. If I remember correctly, Mike actually intended to come across you in CAL and do the lip thing you did to him on April 12. So they were telling each other about my movements. Everything I did was being monitored and I’m just in denial. Just re-read our old messages. Well, I can definitely say that I laid my heart bare for him, as in I just became so vulnerable and practically it’s a giant bid for something, affirmation, reassurance, care, concern. But no. Nothing. He decided to abandon me in July. It’s been three months. He has not posted anything on IG. Maybe he quit his job since his page is no longer there. I have no idea what’s going on in his life. Maybe he’s in a dark place too. I don’t understand why he just decided to add those movies on Letterboxd. I wish he would at least let me know something. Maybe he’s testing the waters. I literally can’t message him first because he hasn’t at least “seen” my last message or is pretending not to see it. I just feel like it’s so fucked up for him to abandon me once in 2023, came back, then abandoned me again. No explanation, just a ghost who dips in and out as he pleases. The most effective way to deal with him is to probably ignore him. If he’s done this to me in 2023, and then 2025, then what could happen if I suddenly displease him in some nebulous way that he doesn’t communicate? This is just becoming clear to me now and yet I still can’t help but feel heartbroken and yearning. The way I see it, he has no problem breaking my heart at all. He doesn’t believe I deserve care. He is just pretending to be empathetic and caring. He quite literally is a fuckboy. I wish he wasn’t such an asshole. I wish he was everything I wished. Maybe he thinks me saying goodbye for now is a sign I’m not interested. Well, I don’t know why I said that. I was in a very dark place and I maybe hoped that he would step up and be there at my lowest. I guess not. Maybe I’m in agony because it’s giving me hope. I didn’t exactly miss him for a few weeks or maybe I just accepted it. But I miss him now. Maybe it’s like this to be abandoned. It’s amazing how I bounced back in September, except his actions on Letterboxd have me floating and wondering and antsy for some kind of movement from him now that he’s decided to get back to making me react or something. I spent the whole morning grieving. Without really crying. Just almost-crying through my nose. It’s 8:13AM and I’m tired. I have an interview at 2PM today. I have yet to study what I’m supposed to do. I also re-read my lit review and don’t quite believe I was able to be coherent. Seems like such hard work now. It’s just a different state of mind. I’d like to know how I won a Clarion West class. Thank you!!! Maybe there were only a few who signed up for the lottery. Even then, it’s still nice that if only two of us or three of us joined, I got picked. That’s got to be something. Seems even so hard to get picked by a guy who can’t make up his mind between me and maybe 2 other girls. TO DECEMBER ME: Am I going to make it? Am I going to MAKE IT!!! (please say yes). I will try to make it a yes. Yeah, just got flashbacks about how I got the faint feeling that he thinks I’m presumptuous. Like, who is this girl and why does she expect so much from me when I’ve barely even known her and never even met her yet. Not in real life, at least. Like, that could have been true in 2023. But he abandoned me and I thought I lost him forever, so when he came back in 2024 I think, I had so quickly let my guard down and gave him the benefit of the doubt because he’d said he wanted to give me space. I really thought he decided he was going to pursue me because he was the one who came back for me after abandoning me. So you see now? How I very much feel like Anora from that movie? I kept cluing him into my needs and sending him all kinds of bids for reassurance or “Define-the-relationship” and even sent him a nude and offered to buy him candy. Maybe I just did all of the work and fell in love with my own effort. He tuned me out a long time ago. I don’t know, he did say he hoped I’d find someone else who I could be happy with. Maybe he’s just telling the truth. Maybe he knows deep down how he’s not built for close monogamous relationships. Maybe we just catfished each other trying to pretend. But I wasn’t pretending anyway, I wanted to fuck him AND love him. There is a reason why he only put “women” and “friends” and not “long-term relationship.” He probably doesn’t know what he wants and is just waiting for the right girl to come and show him what he wants. Because he has no clue and is just in his self-discovery phase. God I wish I was it. Goddamn time passes so fast when you dread something happening, like my interview, which was 1% the complexity I expected. WTF? I should take advantage of this. On the one hand, wanting time to pass quickly because I want to know who won the contests I entered really makes the time seem slower. But also, the interview for tomorrow’s research proposal is really going to speed up my perception. 5:29PM. Figured out the coincidence is a lot worse than it is. I only told him about my “acting dream” that caused my parents to distrust me on June 12, 2024, the day he saw the Inside Out 2 movie with Alix Duplito. And now he’s added to his watchlist a movie about an actress that is also her favorite movie. The only thing really worse is that it’s like he’s wanting to see her because he wants to talk about me to her. He’s going to paint me the villain. He’s going to tell her “I used to know someone like that” in a harsh light like what he said about his friend liking TheraminTrees. And he probably thinks it’s fate. Because I’m so far away and the universe gave him Alix as a sign because she favorited that movie. Imagine that, someone so agnostic finally believing in sappy romantic stuff for a girl he wants to replace me with. When I am willing to be with him? He never actually even formally broke off with me or told me that the distance is why we can’t talk. He ghosted me. He doesn’t believe in labels and he prefers confusing and ambiguous and low-stakes relationships. He is probably not in relationships because he is incapable of it. 6:30PM UNIVERSE WHAT IS HAPPENING!!! I got a callback from script writer job I didn’t get a few weeks back and they say I have potential now! WTF THANK!! HEAVENS!!! Maybe luck really isn’t random. It’s just these pockets of possibility. BRUH!!!!! Clarkesworld cutie!!! 🤞 Romeo Forbes cutie!!! 🤞 Palanca cutie!!! 🤞 EduQuest cutie!!!🤞 Disaster Script Writer cutie!!! 🤞 Romance Story Developmental Writer cutie!!! 🤞 Anatomy of a Ghost cutie!!! 🤞 Adroit Journal cutie!!! 🤞 Dreams Divine cutie!!! 🤞 Apex cutie!!! 🤞 Augur cutie!!! 🤞 Not Quite Write cutie!!! 🤞 BRAINS cutie!!! 🤞 BEAUTY cutie!!! 🤞 SILLY GORGEOUS INSANE DREAM GUY cutie!!! 🤞