A slow, long jailbreak from a kind of social cage.

 In the early years of my adolescence, I too may have been on the side of the very people I now mercilessly criticize, even though there had always been a point inside me that never truly accepted it. For example, on social media applications, only a single world confronted me: sports, politics, astrology, anime, and so on. Those who stepped outside such trend topics were so few, and even if they existed, they were so hard to find that my mind, then only just beginning to get to know the world, naively consumed them. Although I was never a phone addict—neither using social media excessively nor walking with my head buried in it—a certain amount of these mainstream subjects was still able to give me pleasure. I was never fully convinced by them all, but I let them seduce me enough to shape my fantasies, my body image, and even my sense of self. Thus, I had come to dislike my body and had even felt the intense desire to become a woman, because sexuality was everywhere. Yet all of this was merely the result of being excessively engaged with the world, and of this engagement continuing unconsciously and uncontrollably. Now I see those whose ages haven’t even reached double digits spending from morning till evening with empty popular culture videos, writing to someone with a single click, or using emojis as love and thereby dehumanizing the other side by reducing them to a digital profile. Little children—even the girls—call each other with the slang “man” by default, and they call this “friendship.” Perhaps this process, which begins at age seven, continues until age seventeen when the person gets assimilated into the mainstream teenage culture, precisely because there is no obstacle in the way, because it is lived in a “free” world, and thus what emerges is a hollow, reactive, lustful, and aggressive—whether towards oneself or towards others—adolescent with tons of friends that chain them to the world but no inner life. I was able to liquidate this world because I did not have a group of friends, the very people who pull one back into this hell. I was entirely alone, and thus, by producing my own thoughts on my own, I gradually detached from this hallucination. When, years later, I abandoned this world forever, I no longer felt even the slightest interest in politics, no longer felt the pressure of “success,” no longer considered famous people as authorities, no longer thought in cultural terms, no longer found fans of anything inspiring, and no longer felt disgust for my biological sex.