Hello Dear Readers,
This is Maya, here to close you out of the Season finale of the Twin Cities Arc, Chapters 26-32, years 2014-2020. Fin and RIP.
I normally don’t put personal blogs on my site like this, but preparing to leave the city that made me a writer is a special occasion, don’t you think?
Minneapolis/Saint Paul are the cities where I came out as queer and the cities where I started therapy necessary to do some of my favorite writing. Any retrospective of how I’ve changed—especially as a writer—would have to cover my growth as a queer neurodivergent person working to heal from trauma. I also believe that any discussion of past growth should also include areas of future.
I won’t list all my achievements here because it’s basically everything on my Writing page. There are also some personal achievements, like meeting both sides of my family for the first time and learning to feel secure in my Blackness.
Right now though, I want to talk about queerness and divergence via a past-minded and a future-minded piece: My Life as A Female Incel (included below) and Why I’m Never Queer In My Bio (coming next week). Part 1 begins below.
Farewell Prologue: My Life as A Female Incel
(1100 words, 5 minutes)
As is clear from most of my work and artist statements, I grew up homeschooled, in multiple cities, fairly isolated, and with zero friends outside of my 6 siblings who I lovingly troll everyday. So naturally, I became an anime otaku. Naturally, I would joke about being a NEET or hikikomori. Naturally, shows like Princess Jellyfish, Bocchi Hitori's Lonesome [__] Life, and No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys' Fault I’m Not Popular! were created to commiserate, console me, and inspire me to seek change.
Otakudom was full of social rejects, so I felt at home watching anime, reading manga, and obstinately refusing to participate in any community where I might make online friends because my anxiety was just that bad. Sometimes I’m sad for missing out on being a Tumblr or LiveJournal teen. Maybe if fanfiction were not so focused on sex and romance, I would have looked down on it and could have even found a home there.
In any case, my wiser siblings learned to human by dipping their toes in public school and/or entering 4-year colleges, where they would be only as new and bewildered as any other freshman. Not this dork. I was homeschooled through high school in order to maximize my writing time. I then began busing from my parent’s house to a community college for two years, too focused on this epic contemporary fantasy series I was writing to figure out socialization.
My teenage reasoning was that I hated to be as poor as we were, so creating this book that would make me Rich and Famous was actually my highest priority in life.
There were, sadly, still other humans at the community college. One time a man I’d never met before confessed his love to me and I was so bewildered that I anxiously agreed to meet with him and then anxiously stood him up. Another time, a hippy-looking dude offered me a hug because he’d noticed I was always alone.
When it came time to transfer to my preferred liberal arts college, I was getting As in almost everything but personhood. I still ran home right after class to write tomes that I showed nobody. I developed a crush on Kafka, because we were similar breeds of daydreamer.
But after I graduated into a recession, I realized that it wasn’t what I knew but who I knew. I knew nobody. There I was, an unemployed Boomerang Millennial in a world where 70% of all jobs are filled by word-of-mouth. I belatedly read How To Win Friends and Influence People, joined the Social Skills subreddit and followed sites like Succeed Socially. I stopped using my full name in professional spaces, now introducing myself as Maya instead of the unwieldy (but still intuitive) Sumayyah.
I knew what an incel was before the media did, probably before most people did. I was personally neutral about my “celibacy,” more concerned with being behind in life in generally. Still, I understood incels and their ilk more than many people would. I mean, look at who I was sharing space with on that subreddit.
I knew that there was an overlap between socially-awkward men, lonely men, and Pick-Up Artists. I did not know where socially-awkward femmes were supposed to go. I saw that people like us sought rules for being human, steps and achievements that were logical, reliable, and gamified enough that we could follow them to clear success.
Romantic relationships were often viewed in socially-unskilled spaces as a Holy Grail, the crowning achievement. If I could only get laid, everything else would fall into place, I saw peers claiming. I did think I was missing something by being a virgin late-bloomer with no dating experience. I did want to get married someday. But I moved to the Twin Cities with the assumption that If I could only build a friend group, everything else would fall into place.
(I was mostly right in that.)
This is the person I was before my current set of friends. This is the awkward demigirl who moved cross-country and alone to a city where she knew nobody in order to learn independence, become a writer, build a nonprofit career, and make friends. Mashallah, I was able to do all those things but I am still the pale genderless being in this video, using more of my processing power than most do when replying to a text, turning on my camera for a Zoom, or rushing to keep an appointment with a friend.
Every now and then, my current friendships make me lonely because I feel they only know the New & Improved Maya. Sometimes I’m told things like Your social skills are fine. Don’t worry about it! when I am earnestly seeking advice on how to do something new to me. Or sometimes, I am praised or encouraged to be something more like a Strong Black Woman even though I’ve never identified that way.
My inner HikkiNEET Sumayyah feels generally ignored and unseen. I am proud of her because I am proud of my growth, but I’m not sure how to communicate that she is something like my core self, someone you need to understand to understand me. My former partner/current confidant seems the most accepting of my HikkiNEET self, because he’s been in similar places. Rather than stop being insecure and love yourself more so you can become a more tolerable you, his approach to me is more like sometimes you’re annoying, but that too is you so I accept it.
I often dream of somehow extracting his patience and understanding and ladling it into the brains of my friends. At the least, I want enough of this Compassion Extract to offer my next partner.
But sometimes, I open up and realize that a friend understands me like that after all. Sometimes, they even read personal blogs like this (I hope) and realize how to treat me.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the things I’ve struggled with all the more because of my Work-In-Progress social skills, and how those struggles show up in my writing. I have a piece out about struggling with homelessness in the past and in the Twin Cities and another about dealing with CPS and the mental health system. Both take place partly during my years here in the Twin Cities but most colleagues at the time were unaware that I faced them.
I worry that a friend will discover my writing and feel betrayed: Why do you write that you’re lonely if you have me? Why didn’t you tell me about this when it happened? It’s your fault you suffer if you can’t ask for help. I guess we’re not friends after all. Don’t write about my hometown if you’re going to say negative things.
Heck, I had a bad dream about it yesterday morning: a community leader got pissed at me for learning about my life through a Facebook announcement instead of a personal text, and started to give me the cold shoulder. They encouraged their our mutual friends to ostracize me as well, insulted by my awkwardness.
My greatest fear is to be punished by a crowd for my imperfections.
Thankfully, my therapist was a boss. I’ve been telling myself that good friends are worth it, that people can meet me where I am in terms of communication style. Two of the most valuable things I learned from social anxiety therapy are that 1) I need to accept myself even while still learning and making mistakes, and that 2) there is no rulebook for how to be a good human. The unwritten rules can always be ignored.
You’ll do your best, I’ll do my best, and maybe we’ll jibe in our efforts to be good people. That’s all there is.
Oh, but in case the title raised the question for you: I did indeed lose my virginity in the Twin Cities. It was actually one of the smaller milestones I’ve experienced. My first time riding a scooter with the confidant mentioned above was a far greater deal to me.
So yeah. I guess I’m not an incel anymore. But honestly, I never was.