Successful_Dare_7230

I really don’t like my appearance, I really, really don’t—I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world, and I don’t think it’s great either, it’s mostly a distraction, time-consuming and largely pointless, I’ve got to figure some kind of solution out if I want to make a life for myself. Instead, I spent my night last night wallowing inside the grisly Reddit underbelly of cosmetic surgery discourse, well discourse is not the right word, I don’t care about Clavicular, he’s too disturbing to bring into my current reality, but more like questions and answers, if the answer had little to do with the question, innocents sharing their insecurities and faceless users spewing vitriol and medical misinformation, I don’t know Reddit like that but seems considerably worse than Substack, perfect environment to sustain my menstrual self-hatred and keep me from doing the things I actually want to be doing. Anyway, I’d look up my specific facial features, plugging that with things like “which surgery needed Reddit” and “is that ugly/bad Reddit” and “Give it to me straight—is it too late for me, Reddit?” and scrolling for hours, hours, telling myself this instinct was born from curiosity or possibly necessity, I really rather not get into specifics, it doesn’t matter anyway because neither were the truth. I came upon a post from a woman, mid-20s, her experiences, her description of her physical appearance, and honestly, her tone and timbre, well, maybe I’m getting a little crazy now, but really, everything, all of it sounded nearly identical to me and my problems and the way I talk about them. I downloaded the Reddit app so I could DM her, likely possible on the browser, I really am a Reddit novice, not to brag, I DMed her asking what she ever did, if she ever got surgery or what, I told her I’m struggling and the rest of my story, my story, as if hating the way you look is so interesting. I told her I just needed a friend, asking a Reddit user to be my friend, it doesn’t get much darker than this, it genuinely does not, I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t do the typing myself. I DMed her something long, I’m always longing to be understood by people I’ll never know, just in case, you know, the shining opportunity that they do want to know me presents itself one day, it was only after I sent the message did I realize she was last active four years ago, which, I’m sure in Reddit terms, means she is long, long dead. The only person who ever knew me died, to which I coped by searching “BLANK SURGERY costs Reddit” and “BLANK SURGERY recovery explained Reddit” and clicked, clicked, click. Found myself in somewhat unknown territory. I think it was about a youngish guy with soft features. I really can’t remember, I was mostly there for the comments anyway, why listen to what people are saying when you can listen to the listening, nonlistening really, I remember reading things like “You need BLANK surgery, alongside BLANK grafts, and yes, BLANK augmentation, too, and when that’s all said and done, definitely try BLANK milliliters of filler, that is, of course, if you’re still listening to me and haven’t killed yourself one thousand times over since the beginning of this sentence,” men pissing fricatives the Greeks didn’t even know, thirty billion happy arrows, it seems so easy to believe someone with thirty billion arrows doesn’t it, but I continue to scroll, I scroll to the bottom and I find a comment, I find the comment, finding what I had been looking for all along, not that I knew what I was searching for, but I knew there had to be an end, really is about the destination if you’re lost enough, something so obvious that it becomes unsaid, and that which becomes unsaid becomes a joke, but not to me, never to me, a pleb with a drachma to spare, Jesus spotted at your local 7/11, and me, a smile rushing, a single tear falling, because before us shines a tiny glimmer of fucking hope, of fucking empathy in this fucked up fucking world for one fucking second: