We’ve opened the Steam store page for my new visual novel. I’ll write about the details some other time. For now, go add it to your wishlist or whatever.
As a way of being, I run almost entirely on self-consciousness as fuel. Even my daily journal is basically me selling myself off in pieces. Every day, I zoom out on my ego and convert it into sentences. I’ve been doing that for six or seven years. Good job.
At that point, your own experiences start automatically turning into text inside your head. When you output them, you keep sorting things like: “What happened to me, how did I react, and what kind of result did that produce?” If I wanted to sound cool, I’d call it metacognition.
It’s also the work of assuming other people’s emotions and motives. Events have cause and effect. For example, if I write, “They got angry and I felt sad,” then I have to ask: why did they show anger in the first place? Of course I can’t read minds, so I infer—looking back through circumstantial evidence and the history of our communication. Only after that kind of calculation does the writing come out.
Well, I avoid naming other people as much as possible, so my diary basically doesn’t feature “others” at all. Trying to infer someone else’s inner life and play psychiatrist is the dumbest thing there is.
But when you spend seven years turning your own subjectivity into words—and on top of that, you keep a private journal separate from note, just for yourself—little by little, emotions and phenomena start getting recorded and stored as pure logic.
A page from my private journal, from April this year, when something someone did to me was so awful that I ended up with adjustment disorder and depression. Around here it’s bleak; the handwriting’s a mess. On the 21st I’m reflecting using the concepts of sin and punishment, and the next day a lot of people are checking in on me carefully.
After that, I gradually recover—until the point where I can see contradictions in “the pressure side’s” story and finally confront them with a lie I’m certain about. But right after you’ve been treated that badly, you’re obviously confused. Even so, you can see that I still insisted, “Isn’t this wrong?” There’s evidence I held my ground. Good job. I’m praising myself, even now.
The point is: by looking back a few days later like this, the movement of my emotions and thoughts becomes so clear you can practically hold it in your hands.
And if you can do that, then—speaking bluntly—you can also start inferring others, too.
Normally there isn’t an environment that drives someone so hard they end up with a worsening diagnosis. And if there truly was “no problem,” things could have been resolved quietly. So why did friction suddenly flare up toward me? In other words, there has to be a very specific panic happening somewhere. That’s what it suggests. Of course it’s still just deduction-game territory. But cause and effect always have a cause.
After living like that for years, you end up getting more and more tangled up, so halfway through I made a point of learning English. If the language changes, maybe you stop hardening in the same places. And it seems like it worked.
Unlike Japanese, where you can dodge responsibility with all kinds of modifiers and hurl it back as irony, the straight phrasing of English—or even a clean, simple joke—gives your language center a new kind of stimulation. The limits of language really were the limits of thought.
Then a lot of things start connecting. You become able to recognize your position relatively, at the scale of “the world.” Luckily, thanks to my own game, I have name recognition in the English-speaking and Chinese-speaking spheres, and through that I was able to look at “myself” from the outside. It’s hard for people to truly get absorbed in something unless it’s personal.
That trip—turning my attention toward “what is ‘nyalra’ to the English-speaking world, and to the Chinese-speaking world?”—was fun. The “others” inside my head expanded all at once. My understanding of what’s actually happening in this world, and of the causal chains behind it, widened.
At the same time, I learned in my bones just how easily internet reputation and impressions can flip. That was another interesting experience. The criticism and praise you’re drenched in every day vanish in a few days anyway. It solidified into an image: other people’s self-consciousness is like cars passing through the terminal called “nyalra.” Because they’re cars, emotions only pass through each other for a few hours at most. It’s the same across the ocean.
I started to see myself as one “station” that formed on the internet, and I soaked in that feeling of shedding a layer.
And each time, I depersonalize a little more.
Lately, it’s been like I got hit by an unavoidable natural disaster, and I’ve had even more to think about. Once it becomes a fight in the world of law, you need metacognition even more. Because the outcomes law delivers don’t allow you to drag in emotional arguments. “He said, she said” is useless, so you gather evidence, and you have to calmly write out—together with a lawyer—why the other party is violating the contract, why their statements qualify as falsehoods or contradictions.
As a result, the logic I’d happened to cultivate on purpose turned into a kind of final exam: a year-long comprehensive test of putting my experiences into language. Meanwhile, the other side lacked both evidence and logic; you could tell they were “panicking,” like they were back in April. Even reading their writing, you could see them escaping into emotional appeals and abstraction.
Legally, that’s extremely weak, and it gives me confidence by comparison. I mean, honestly, it’s like: don’t write lies that will get instantly overturned the moment evidence is submitted in court. That level.
Anyway, back to the main point: because I’ve gone through this whole process, everything that happens to me has started to feel like a story that I’ll later output as writing. You could call it self-intoxication. History isn’t decided by heroes—it’s decided by historians’ books. What gets passed down is what the one still standing recorded.
I organize the coherence of what happens to me twice, every day: once for public-facing note, and once for my private journal. If you do that for seven years, you’re bound to drift away from the world.
So I’ll try turning this strange sensation into a work.
No matter what I say, I’m nothing but a runaway locomotive fueled by my own self-consciousness. I have no idea what will happen. Even if you can understand cause and effect, the future is uncertain for everyone, and completely unexpected coincidences pile up on each other until they produce miracles and ruin.
No matter what happens from here on, I’ll probably keep converting it into writing and laying it down in lines.
Because that’s what I am.
Born on the autism spectrum—this is the mission God handed me.
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