Influencer

Yeah, I’ve had a bit to drink tonight, so what? You would too if you were me. I’m dumping this onto the internet, I don’t need to be completely sober to do that, do I? All I need to do is make this semi-coherent and say what I need to say. Anyways, what does it matter? Given what I do, a portion of the people who read this will likely be intoxicated too. It doesn’t matter if they haven’t had anything to drink recently, if they’re close enough to me, they’ll feel drunk. That’s just the nature of my ability. I can’t change it, I can’t stop it. I guess I should explain all of that before going any further into all this.

I’ve always had this ability that impacts my day-to-day life and the people who are close to me. You see, my emotional state affects those around me and influences them. If I’m feeling happy, the people around me are ecstatic. If I’m angry, everyone in my vicinity is furious. I can’t control it, and I can’t choose how the people around me feel. It’s all tied to my emotional state. It doesn’t matter what they’re thinking in that moment. If I’m feeling a certain way, they have to experience what I’m going through and respond in kind. To sum it up, I lead the march, everyone else just follows behind me.

I totally understand if you just rolled your eyes at reading those last few sentences due to me sounding self-centered. Even if you think what I just said is egocentric, it’s true. I just am unlucky enough to have evidence to support my drunken ramblings. I don’t want to be the center of this shit-show but I don’t have a choice in the matter. Also, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge. Everyone’s selfish. I know you probably just thought something along the lines of, “God, what a self-important, arrogant asshole. I would never say something like that.” That’s where you’re wrong.

You aren’t very different from me really. You took what I just said and compared it directly to yourself. You couldn’t read something without directly shifting it to yourself and giving your opinion on the matter. You took something personal that I said and tried to make it about you. You subconsciously thought you were the center of the world, but unfortunately, you’re not. I am, and I am so sorry for that.

There wasn’t a time where I didn’t feel like I was influencing those close to me. It didn’t matter how much I tried to hide it emotionally, those feelings would infiltrate and alter the people around me. I could go into a funeral in a good mood and within a few minutes, the people around me would be joking and laughing. Of course, it wasn’t a sudden shift. It was, almost always tied to some imperceptible change in their consciousness. They would go from mourning the loss of a father, husband, and friend to remembering a pleasant memory and reminiscing about it to smiling. It was never instantaneous, it was insidious and slow. They always thought it was their choice to think that way. I could leave minutes later and they’d still be fondly remembering the deceased and smiling. Once they were set on auto-pilot, they would continue along that trajectory until something was noticeable enough to snap them out of their reverie. It always feels like what I was doing to them and their emotional state was a product of their choices and well-being. They didn’t know they were being manipulated by me and my emotional state.

It wasn’t. It was always dependent on me.

While most would see this as a gift, being surrounded by people who felt the same way as you, I couldn’t. I didn’t feel like my younger brother, father, and mother were behind me and genuinely felt the same way I did. In fact, I didn’t feel like the people around me were bonded in any sense of camaraderie or like-mindedness. Instead, it felt like they were mindlessly following me and playing ‘yes man’ to my every whim. Sometimes it feels like I’m trapped in a permanent echo chamber of my own design. It’s difficult to adapt at first, but once you get used to that sentiment, life becomes tolerable. It’s an inevitability you have to accept and adapt to. Unfortunately it didn’t stay that way. I could have ignored this all as an unavoidable fact of my life and lived happily if it wasn’t for her. I could have been happy, if it wasn’t for Nina.

Everything started to go downhill with Nina. We met senior year in high school and hit it off. She had recently transferred to my high school following her dad changing jobs and I randomly bumped into her one day. We hit it off and were dating within a few weeks. We complemented each other perfectly. I was aware of my ability at that point. I told myself that this was different, she was different. She was someone who could love me for being me. Our relationship was real. I told myself that I was truly happy with her.

We broke up that summer.

Of course we weren’t actually happy. We were a bad match. It didn’t take a genius to see that, but I was blinded by love. Well, that’s not true. There was never any real sense of love in our relationship. She settled for me because I was something comfortable, I was someone she could cling to when she fell out of touch with her friends after the move. Pretending to love the other gave us both an outlet for something we didn’t know we were missing. We both weren’t capable of loving each other. We were unable to give each other what we couldn’t give ourselves. I don’t know what precipitated the breakup, all I remember was that argument, vindictive and violent.

I spiraled downwards after that. I said a lot of things I’m not proud of, I did a lot of things I regret. I went out, got drunk, and generally made an ass of myself. I got into arguments at home when my parents realized I’d broken into their liquor cabinet. I heard people whispering behind my back when I dragged myself into school, groggy and hung-over. I bad-mouthed Nina every chance I got to anyone that would listen. I texted her some really awful things before she blocked me. I was angry. I set her as the cause for everything wrong that had happened in my life up to that point. Talking to my friends was difficult after all the he said, she said and dirty laundry we aired out about each other. I couldn’t trust other girls because Nina was so fake. It’s all bullshit of course, but I couldn’t stop thinking like that. I wanted to blame anyone other than myself.

I was so blinded by my anger that I didn’t even realize what I had become. I was so lost in drinking, starting rumors, and generally being a walking dumpster fire that I didn’t even see what was happening to everyone around me. My mom went to live with her parents after a particularly nasty argument with her husband about how to ‘deal’ with me. She left while we were at school and never came back to pick up any of her stuff. My dad started working overtime at his job and staying out late. When he was home, he spent most of the time watching tv and pretending like everything was alright. I think it hit my brother hardest of all. He locked himself up in his room, and blasted music to keep the rest of us at a distance. When we did see him, he was goggle-eyed from staring at his computer screen all day and he typically had a look like a fox that was about to chew off its foot to escape from a trap. I think avoidance was the easiest and safest option for him. He could isolate himself and build this wall between us and him and imagine that life was going to get better.

We stayed like that for months before I went to college out of state. Looking back on it, I think that was the best choice for me. The distance gave me some time to be reflective and break the cycle. I realized what I was doing and I cut back on my drinking and built up a circle of close friends who supported me. I don’t know if I was influencing them, all I know is that they helped pull me out of a dark place. I even thought about going on a few dates, but that never did happen. I think I was still angry at Nina and how everything ended. I managed to pass my first round of exams and went home during break.

I wish I stayed away. I could have been so happy if I did.

The house had changed so much in only four months. My mom was always the caretaker and cleaner. With her gone, dust began to accumulate on the cabinets and counters and every corner of the house smelled musty. The counters looked like a filing cabinet had vomited on them. There was a layer of paperwork, junk mail, and bills yellowing on the dining room table that covered every inch of the water-stained wood. The first night home, I spotted a cockroach scurrying over a piece of moldering bread that someone had kicked under the counter rather than picking it up. The roach got a few feet before getting into a fight with another cockroach before both skittered off into the darkness.

My brother’s room was probably the worst out of everything. I almost dry-heaved the instant I walked in to greet him. Everything smelled like sour sweat, foul week-old farts, and rancid semen. He blasted the area with Axe body spray to try and cover up the smell, but that just ended up giving everything an overpowering acrid stench with a strong undercurrent of the sickening scent. His face was buried in an iPad and he barely looked up to talk to me. I could only handle a few minutes of one word answers before the stench became so overpowering that I had to leave the room.

I spent the first few days of winter break trying to tidy up the house, but nothing I did seemed to make a dent in the overall mess. I’d sweep the floors only to find crumbs scattered over it the next day. I eventually stopped after I cleared and sorted all the paperwork off the dining room table only to find my dad throwing the recently collected mail on it the next day to repeat the cycle. I decided that I wasn’t going to waste my time on it if it was going to go to shit immediately after I left. I resigned myself to living with the mess for the next few weeks. I managed to live there for a few days before I saw how bad everything had become.

It all started when I overheard my brother talking to someone on a voice chat. It was late at night and I was sneaking out of the house to have a smoke (a habit I picked up in college). I had it tucked behind my ear and a cheap plastic zippo lighter grasped in my hand. I was doing my best to keep quiet and not wake up my dad. I was walking by my brother’s room when I heard a snippet of his conversation with someone:

“They’re all fucking cunts anyways.”

I stopped outside his room for a moment, but the chat had quieted down enough to make it all incomprehensible. I waited for a few seconds to see if I couldn’t hear him say anything else, but the conversation had hit a lull. I decided to mind my own business and slipped outside to smoke. It wasn’t very good, the dime I bought was mostly seeds and didn’t really do much to take the edge off of things. As I was sneaking back to my room, I saw my brother’s door was open and decided to take a quick peek.

He had walked down the hall to go to the bathroom. He had left the bathroom door open and I could see he was too preoccupied likely pissing everywhere except the toilet bowl. He had left his laptop on his bed and it was facing the open door. My curiosity got the better of me and I looked at the screen. The Discord was called The Black Pill and it was a pretty dead chat. There were only two people on the voice channel and a few in the room itself. I got a peek at his username and that was enough for me to get out of there before he came back.

E_Rodger. His username was E_Rodger.

I spent the rest of the night trying to make sense of everything on Google. The more I learned, the worse it seemed. The pieces of the puzzle slowly slid into place: what I overheard him saying, the Discord channel’s name, and my brother’s handle. The Black Pill Discord was a channel set up for InCels. I don’t want to explain who Eliot Rodger was. Google it and InCel if you want to ruin your mood for the day. Suffice it to say, he’s a garbage person and my brother seemingly idolized him. My brother needed help in a bad way.

I spent the next few days trying to figure out what to do. I couldn’t just bumble into the topic without him knowing what I had seen: “Hey, the weather’s been pretty nice lately. You think it’s going to be sunny this weekend? How long have you hated women and idolized a campus shooter by the way?” I decided that my best course of action was to try and, for lack of a better term, socialize him and get him some RL friends. I put my plan into effect that weekend by taking him to a party that a bunch of my old high school friends were having after their first semester of college.

I figured that introducing him into another social circle was my best option. I thought that I could distract him from his problems by getting him out of his room and away from those people he was chatting with online. It didn’t take much convincing to get him to come with me to the party. I promised him that we’d have a few drinks, I’d smoke him out, and we’d hang out with some cool girls. Given that it was his first real party, he jumped at the opportunity to live a little. It didn’t go as I’d hoped.

The night started out fine enough. We went to the party and hot-boxed a room with some old friends. My brother didn’t really talk to anybody and I found myself hoping that he’d chill out enough to strike up a conversation. As we tried to relax, I noticed that he kept glancing over at a girl with short hair so I decided to play matchmaker and get them to chat. I managed to pull them both in a conversation about some movie before I slipped into a conversation with someone else and left them to hang out. After thirty minutes, I decided to go a little further and I stupidly organized a game of beer pong, pitting me and him against my friend and the girl my brother had been chatting with.

I still don’t know what happened. It seemed like one minute we were playing beer pong and everyone was having fun, then the next, I was dragging my brother out of the house. We were losing the game and drinking more than we should have, but we were enjoying ourselves. It was while we were joking around that the girl my brother was interested in got a text. My brother tried to bounce a shot and she said it wasn’t fair to do that while she was distracted texting her boyfriend.

The next thing I know, he’s thrown a half-full Silo cup at her and he’s venting vitriol at her. It was like some switch had been flipped and the quiet kid I knew was transformed into this raving lunatic. I can’t remember all the things he said due to how sudden his outburst was, but I do remember him calling her a bitch before shouting, “You’re nothing but a fucking Becky cock-tease!” as I pulled him out of the party before we got our asses kicked. As I pulled him out of the house, I remember he actually tried spitting on her as we passed to go out the front door.

We called an Uber and rode to a nearby park in silence. He was fuming and I was texting my friends to try and do damage control and maybe minimize the situation. Luckily things calmed down after we left and most people took that as a sign to call it a night. I kept glancing at my brother in-between messages to see if I couldn’t figure out what the hell happened. The few times we did make eye contact, my brother was practically shaking with rage. We got dropped off at a nearby park and walked home with the events of the past hour hanging over us like a storm. Just before we snuck back into the house, he tried to explain why he lost it:

”That’s how girls who string us along deserve to be treated. She was stringing me along the whole night. They can’t get away with doing that kind of stuff to nice guys. She was just like Mom, sticking around until things got tough and then bailing on us. Can you really act like they don’t deserve to be treated like that after what happened with you and Nina?”

That’s all he said. He didn’t apologize or try to explain himself further. Instead he quarantined himself in his room. I waited for him to come out so we could try to hash it out (maybe even literally), but he rarely has. He doesn’t come down for meals and he ducks into the bathroom when he’s certain I’m not around. I thought he’d snap out of it after a few days, but a week has passed since then and he’s showing no signs of calming down. He’s angry at me, that much I can tell, and he’s burying himself deeper into the toxic place as some sort of escapism.

Against my better judgement, I managed to track down an invite into The Black Pill Discord and lurk there under a pseudonym. Eventually one of the other people noticed I wasn’t talking and they booted me from chat, but I had enough time to read through the chat logs and learn about the type of person my brother had become. He’s so angry and violent. He brings up Isla Vista and Luby almost daily. He jokes about how he wants to beat their score. To be perfectly honest, I am simultaneously terrified for him, and of him. I’m petrified he’s going to hurt himself, or even worse, hurt a lot of people around him.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of ways to fix all of this, but there’s no easy solution. People don’t change easily. You can’t just flip a switch and transform someone’s identity. Your personality isn’t static, you can’t change who you are at the drop of a hat. Their habits become ingrained into their personality and altering it requires a massive amount of time and something else that I am afraid I don’t have.

My brother has been twisted by my thoughts. My anger at the way my relationship with Nina ended festered away in my brain and became something horrible. I transformed her into this monster who was to blame for all of our shortcomings, but that’s not true. We were the cause of our own unhappiness. I can type that out any way I want, but unfortunately there will always be that small part inside of me that still blames her for everything that happened. There’s this terrible side of me that feels the same way my brother does. Try as much as I want, I can’t change how I feel, even when I see what it’s doing to those around me.

I can’t even bring myself to type his name. I keep trying to pretend that I’m doing that because I don’t think he’s a danger to himself or other people and that I don’t want to get the authorities involved, but I know that’s not true. I saw the things he said and heard how he talked about them. There was almost this sense of reverence when he talked about the spree shootings. I don’t know if he’ll ever try to carry out those horrible things he said. I don’t know. He could be a ticking time bomb for all I know that’s going to explode any day now and shred all those around him to shit, or he could spend the rest of his life in that room, isolated from the world with only the pale glow of a computer screen to keep him company.

The truth is, neither of those outcomes are great ones, and as I type all of this, something has dawned on me. If I was able to do that to my brother after only a few weeks of self-loathing and misplaced anger, what does that mean for the other people around me? How many people have I influenced for the worse? How many times have I made someone’s life drastically worse just by knowing them?

Did my mental state drive my mother away? Did I make life so unbearable for her with my malignant distrust and misplaced anger that she had no option except to flee the family that she once loved? Did I turn my dad and brother against her like some sort of scapegoat for something she had no control over?

Are my friends even my friends or are they just reflections of myself, desperate for some form of connection even if it’s an empty and hollow one? Do they even listen to what I’m telling them, or are they just being blindly driven by my innate desire not to be so alone and are willing to put up a front?

The more I think about it, the worse it gets. How many people have I influenced over the years and what impact have I had on them? How many times have I pulled someone down into depression and blind anger? Then there’s the most terrible thought of all, did I do that to my ex-girlfriend? Did I corrupt someone close to me because I was unable to be an actual decent human being? Did I twist her mental state to reflect my own in some futile attempt to find someone who loves me when I couldn’t love who I was? Was she happy before she met me? Is she happy now, or is she like me?

I am poison.

There’s no other word for it. I can try to change who I am, but unless my emotional state is genuine, it won’t influence anything. My sentiments have to be real to impact the people around me. Look at what I did to my brother. I thought I had moved on from my bad relationship, but a small part of me refused to let go and that small part of me was enough to ruin someone’s life. I feel like there is nothing left of me, but a splintered skeleton and a wooden heart. I’m hollow inside. I’m going to keep pulling people down because I can’t bring myself to their level, I can’t make myself happy. I guess that’s why I’m drunk and trying to make sense of all of this. I’m trying to convince myself of what I need to do.

I can’t change who I am. There will always be this small part of me that’s petty, mean-spirited, and vindictive, and as long as that core exists, nothing I do will change anything. I’ll continue to weigh down the people who are close to me. I will bring ruin to them just by existing. Oh God. I just want to die. I’m going to keep hurting people. I just want to die. I’m going to keep pulling people down with me. I just want to die.

But I can’t do it. I’m a coward. The thought of dragging a razor across my wrists or sticking a gun unto my mouth scares the shit out of me. I can’t bring myself to do that. I don’t want to hurt anyone else, but I know that I will just by the sheer fact that I’m alive and influencing other people. I can’t be positive all of the time and I can’t pretend to be happy either. Something in me feels like it’s broken and I can’t help but break the people around me. I can’t fix myself and I can’t save them. I want to die, but I’m too afraid to face that. I am a chicken who’s unable to end it even though I know I’m going to hurt a lot of people just by existing and being me. I’m a coward, but the real question is, are they?

Oh God, I’m so sorry, I just want to die.