| — | Good Will Hunting (1997) |
*Unemployed^
Let’s go through the list, shall we?
- Stalking Cat was a computer programmer before he passed away earlier this year. He was Native American and trying to become closer to his totem animal. Through this, he helped pioneer all types of body modification and holds several Guinness Book Records.
- Erik Sprague, aka Lizard Man, was a former PhD candidate. He has a bachelor’s in philosophy and is a performance artist: both through international side shows and as a music festival host.
- Maria Jose Cristerna aka “La Mujer Vampiro” (Vampire Woman) is the mother of four children and a fuckin’ lawyer. She started her transformation after getting out of an abusive marriage, and has talked out against domestic violence.
- Rick Genest aka Rico The Zombie is a fucking international model, has more sponsorships than any of us could ever hope, and was featured in Lady Gaga’s Born This Way video. Not bad for a 27-year old former homeless punk, I’d say.
I’m willing to bet you haven’t accomplished nearly as much as any one of these people. They’re not only heavily tattooed, but they’re also impressive as all hell in the “employed” department. But don’t worry about it—feel free to keep trying to make yourself feel better about your average life, average body, and average accomplishments.Successful, employed, intelligent, body mod legends.It is super awesome that they are all very successful and whatnot but can we talk about how regardless of employment status you should ALWAYS respect someone for doing whatever they want with their body?
Employment isn’t everything jfc
how does one tell a boy that one likes him
I am a boy and have a foolproof plan for this:
- text them and start playing one of those 20q games
- if they start being a dodgy fella drop em
- if they ask “You like anyone?”
reply Yeah, you.- If they give you a negative reply sayin they dont like you back then just correct yourself to “*Yeah, you?”
dude that is genius
slow clappin’ it out.
Last year, I spent six months participating in what I was told was a psychological experiment. I found an ad in my local paper looking for imaginative people looking to make good money, and since it was the only ad that week that I was remotely qualified for, I gave them a call and we arranged an interview.
They told me that all I would have to do is stay in a room, alone, with sensors attached to my head to read my brain activity, and while I was there I would visualize a double of myself. They called it my “tulpa.”
It seemed easy enough, and I agreed to do it as soon as they told me how much I would be paid. The next day, I began. They brought me to a simple room and gave me a bed, then attached sensors to my head and hooked them into a little black box on the table beside me. They talked me through the process of visualizing my double again, and explained that if I got bored or restless, instead of moving around, I should visualize my double moving around, or try to interact with him, and so on. The idea was to keep him with me the entire time I was in the room.
I had trouble with it for the first few days. It was more controlled than any sort of daydreaming I’d done before. I’d imagine my double for a few minutes, then grow distracted. By the fourth day, however, I could manage to keep him “present” for the entire six hours. They told me I was doing very well.
The second week, they gave me a different room with wall-mounted speakers. They told me they wanted to see if I could still keep the tulpa with me in spite of distracting stimuli. The music was discordant, ugly, unsettling, and it made the process a little more difficult, but I managed nonetheless. The next week, they played even more unsettling music, punctuated with shrieks, feedback loops, what sounded like an old school modem dialing up and guttural voices speaking some foreign language. I just laughed it off; I was a pro by then.
After about a month, I started to get bored. To liven things up, I started interacting with my doppelganger. we’d have conversations, play rock-paper-scissors, I’d imagine him juggling or break dancing, or whatever caught my fancy. I asked the researchers if my foolishness would adversely affect their study, but they encouraged me.
So, we played and communicated, and that was fun for a while…and then it got a little strange. I was telling him about my first date one day and he corrected me. I’d said my date was wearing a yellow top, and he told me it was a green one. I thought about it for a second and realized he was right. It creeped me out, and after my shift that day I talked to the researchers about it. “You’re using the thought-form to access your subconscious,” they explained. “You knew on some level that you were wrong, and you subconscious corrected yourself.”
What had been creepy was suddenly cool. I was talking to my subconscious! It took some practice, but I found that I could question my tulpa and access all sorts of memories. I could make it quote whole pages of books I’d read once, years before, or things I was taught and immediately forgot in high school. It was awesome.
That was around the time I started “calling up” my double outside of the research center. Not often, at first, but I was so used to imagining him by now that it almost seemed odd not to see him. So, whenever I was bored, I’d visualize my double. Eventually, I started doing it almost all the time. It was amusing to take him along like an invisible friend. I imagined him when I was hanging out with friends, or visiting my mom; I even brought him along on a date once. I didn’t need to speak aloud to him, so I was able to carry out conversations with him and no one was the wiser.
I know that sounds strange, but it was fun. Not only was he a walking repository of everything I knew and everything I had forgotten, he also seemed more in touch with me than I did at times. He had an uncanny grasp of the minutiae of body language that I didn’t even realize I was picking up on. For example, I thought the date I brought him along on was going badly, but he pointed out how she was laughing a little too hard at my jokes and leaning towards me as I spoke, and a bunch of other subtle clues I wasn’t consciously picking up on. I listened and let’s just say that the date went very well.
By the time I’d been at the research center for four months he was with me constantly. The researchers approached me one day after my shift and asked me if I’d stopped visualizing him. I denied it and they seemed pleased. I silently asked my double if he knew what prompted that, but he just shrugged it off. So did I.
I withdrew a little from the world at that point. I was having trouble relating to people. It seemed to me that they were so confused and unsure of themselves, while I had a manifestation of myself to confer with. It made socializing awkward. Nobody else seemed aware of the reasons behind their actions, why some things made them mad and others made them laugh. They didn’t know what moved them…but I did, or at least I could ask myself and get an answer
A friend confronted me one evening. He pounded at the door until I answered it and came in fuming and swearing up a storm. “You haven’t answered when I called you in fucking weeks, you dick!” he yelled. “What’s your fucking problem?”
I was about to apologize to him and probably would have offered to hit the bars with him that night, but my tulpa grew suddenly furious. “Hit him,” it said, and before I knew what I was doing, I had. I heard his nose break. He fell to the floor and came up swinging, and we beat each other up and down my apartment. I was more furious than I have ever been, and I was not merciful. I knocked him to the ground and gave him two savage kicks to the ribs, and that was when he fled, hunched over and sobbing.
The police were by a few minutes later, but I told them that he had been the instigator and since he wasn’t around to refute me, they let me off with a warning. My tulpa was grinning the entire time. We spent the night crowing about my victory and sneering over how badly I’d beaten my friend.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when I was checking out my black eye and cut lip in the mirror, that I remembered what had set me o ff. My double was the one who’d grown furious, not me. I’d been feeling guilty and a little ashamed, but he’d goaded me into a vicious fight with a concerned friend. He was present, of course, and knew my thoughts. “You don’t need him any more. You don’t need anyone else,” he told me; I felt my skin crawl.
I explained all this to the researchers who employed me, but they just laughed it off. “You can’t be scared of something that you’re imagining,” one told me. My double stood beside him and nodded his head, then smirked at me.
I tried to take their words to heart, but over the next few days I found myself growing more and more anxious around my tulpa, and it seemed that he was changing. He looked taller and more menacing. His eyes twinkled with mischief, and I saw malice in his constant smile. No job was worth losing my mind over, I decided. If he was out of control, I’d put him down. I was so used to him at that point that visualizing him was an automatic process, so I started trying my damnedest to not visualize him. It took a few days, but it started to work somewhat. I could get rid of him for hours at a time, but every time he came back, he seemed worse. His skin seemed ashen, his teeth more pointed. He hissed and gibbered and threatened and swore. The discordant music I’d been listening to for months seemed to accompany him everywhere. Even when I was at home; I’d relax and slip up, no longer concentrating on no seeing him, and there he’d be, and that howling noise with him.
I was still visiting the research center and spending my next six hours there. I needed the money, and I thought they weren’t away that I was now not actively visualizing my tulpa. I was wrong. After my shift one day, about five and a half months in, two impressive men grabbed me and restrained me, and someone in a lab coat jabbed a hypodermic needle into me.
I woke up from my stupor back in the room, strapped into the bed, music blaring, with my doppelganger standing over me, cackling. He hardly looked human any more. His features were twisted. His eyes were sunken in their sockets and filmed over like a corpse’s. He was much taller than me, but hunched over. His hands were twisted, and his fingernails were like talons. He was, in short, fucking terrifying. I tried to will him away, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. He giggled and tapped the IV in my arm. I thrashed in my restraints as best I could, but could hardly move at all.
“They’re pumping you full of the good shit, I think. How’s the mind? All fuzzy?” He leaned closer and closer as he spoke. I gagged; his breath smelled like spoiled meat. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t banish him.
The next few weeks were terrible. Every so often, someone in a doctor’s coat would come in and inject me with something or force-feed me a pill. They kept me dizzy and unfocused, and sometimes left me hallucinating or delusional. My thought-form was still present, constantly mocking. He interacted with, or perhaps caused, my delusions. I hallucinated that my mother was there, scolding me, and then he cut her throat and her blood showered me. It was so real that I could taste it.
The doctors never spoke to me. I begged at times, screamed, hurled invectives, demanded answers. They never spoke to me. They may have talked to my tulpa, my personal monster. I’m not sure. I was so doped and confused that it may have just been more delusion, but I remember them talking with him. I grew convinced that he was the real one and that I was the thought-form. He encouraged that line of thought at times, but mocked me at others.
‘
Another thing that I pray was a delusion: he could touch me. More than that, he could hurt me. He’d poke and prod at me if he felt I wasn’t paying enough attention to him. Once, he grabbed my testicles and squeezed until I told him I loved him. Another time, he slashed my forearm with one of his talons. I still have a scar; most days I can convince myself that I injured myself, and just hallucinated that he was responsible. Most days.Then, one day, while he was telling me a story about how he was going to gut everyone I loved, starting with my sister, he paused. A querulous look crossed his face, and he reached out and touched my head. Like mother used to when I was feverish. He stayed still for a long moment and then smiled. “All thoughts are creative,” he told me, then he walked out the door.
Three hours later, I was given an injection and passed out. I awoke unrestrained. Shaking, I made my way to the door and found it unlocked I walked out into the empty hallway and then ran. I stumbled more than once, but I made it down the stairs and out into the lot behind the building. There, I collapsed, weeping like a child. I knew I had to keep moving, but I couldn’t manage it.
I got home eventually; I don’t remember how. I locked the door and shoved a dresser against it, took a long shower, and slept for a day and a half. Nobody came for me in the night, and nobody came the next day or the one after that. I twas over. I’d spent a week locked in that room, but it had felt like a century. I’d withdrawn so much from my life beforehand that nobody had even known I was missing.
The police didn’t find anything. The research center was empty when they searched it. The paper trail fell apart. The names I’d given them were aliases. Even the money I’d received was apparently untraceable.
I recovered as much as one can. I don’t leave the house much, and I have panic attacks when I do. I cry a lot. I don’t sleep much, and my nightmares are terrible. It’s over, I tell myself. I survived. I used the concentration those bastards taught me to convince myself. It works, sometimes.
Not today, though. Three days ago, I got a phone call from my mother. There’s been a tragedy. My sister’s the latest victim in a spree of killings, the police say. The perpetrator mugs his victims, then guts them.
The funeral was this afternoon. It was as lovely a service as a funeral can be, I suppose. I was a little distracted, though. All I could hear was music coming from somewhere distant. It was discordant, unsettling stuff that sounds like feedback, shrieking, and a modem dialing up. I hear it still – a little louder now.
Oh my god…
…I…
…I’m generally not into creepypastas but holy shit…
………
Holy shit what the hell did I just read
the scary part is that this is an actual thing. you can actually have a tulpa. it is a theory that slenderman among other myths are tulpas or thoughtforms (something created by collective thoughts of one or more individuals).
it’s so terrifying to think of what your mind can create.
Holy tits…WHY IS THIS BACK
liTERALLY HORRIFIED JESUS CHRIST
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
1. There will be several days that you daydream about stepping in front of a city bus. Don’t. It will not be beautiful. It will not be brave. It will be selfish. It will be broken. Your mother will cry.
2. Don’t write for him. Write for you. Write for others like you. Write so the girl that thinks about stepping in front of public transportation doesn’t. Don’t be selfish.
3. When you will yourself to sleep and it doesn’t come- get up. It doesn’t matter that it’s 3 am. There will be other 3 am’s. Take a shower. Take two. Wash him out of your hair. Write a poem. Read the same book you’ve read 202 times again. The 203rd time might tell you something different. Don’t stay in bed- you will think about the bus again.
4. Don’t kiss him because he’s broken. Don’t kiss him because his laughter never reaches his eyes. Don’t try and fix him. Fix yourself first. Be selfish. He can’t save you.
5. Date yourself. Take yourself out to eat. Don’t share your popcorn at the movies with anyone. Stroll around an art museum alone. Fall in love with canvases. Fall in love with yourself.
6. Dress up and wear red lipstick and get drunk with your friends. They’re the ones that will pick you up. Don’t kiss him. Or him. Don’t fall asleep on strange couches with strange boys. When his hand slides up your dress walk away. Hit him. Don’t kiss him. He can’t save you.
7. Get another tattoo. Get five more. Get another hole in your ear. Don’t listen to your dad. You will still be able to get a job. Did you really want to be employed by someone like your father? Haven’t you had enough of judgmental old white men anyway? Get fuck you tattooed in tiny letters on your hip.
8. When you feel the yearning for a new city- start over. Take 200 bucks and a three suitcases. Work anywhere that will have you. Meet strange people and forget your name. Call yourself Ruby. No one will know the difference. Remember to call your mother. Don’t be selfish. Come home when you find yourself in the strangers and the small one bedroom apartment.
9. Don’t whisper evil things into your own ear. Other people are going to shout them at you. Be your own hero. Keep a sword on your key ring.
10. Don’t step in front of a city bus. It will not be beautiful. Live. Stay up all night with a boy that promises you everything and means it. Live. See shitty local bands with a friend. Wear a different band’s t-shirt. No one will care. Live. Have a baby girl with tiny fingers and tiny toes someday. Pour love into her until it’s overflowing. Live. Wake up. Staying in bed all day is not poetic.
Live. Live.
Live.
Do you hear that? It’s me. It’s your life. Wake up.
It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are.
A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening.
Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily.
You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth.
You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later.
Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage.
Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything.
I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it.
You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it.
Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today?
We shall see.
| — | (via ryannxp) |








