Okay, so you know I’m sad, right? I have almost no self-esteem to the point where I genuinely hate myself. I constantly put myself down, I never see the positives about myself and I always point out the negatives. I degrade myself.
But I do more than that. I don’t look after myself. At all. While mortals tell me I could be beautiful, I don’t put in the effort and sink deeper into that self loathing. I could be worshiped by millions but I don’t try and do anything about it. I don’t even brush my teeth properly. I once went for six months barely brushing my teeth and I can’t seem to get back into it. My scales too… There’s a reason I pretended to be a Threanic for so long, because that meant I didn’t have to care about myself.
It gets worse though. I actively damage myself. And I’m not just talking about the constant picking at my skin, scratching at my armour… Okay, this is going to sound awful, but I’m supposed to be taking medication. I take some of it. I neglect the rest of it.
I kid you not, I went 3 months without taking some of my meds and doing my four-times-a-day blood tests.
That’s how hard it was to keep going. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care if I got ill or tired or whatever. I was blindly just putting one foot in front of the other, doing my work because I had to do my work and other people are relying on me. I keep on going because people rely on me and I’d feel bad hurting them.
But you changed that. I genuinely enjoy talking to you. Perhaps more than I should. It leaves me yearning. In a good way. I no longer want to give up, keel over and die when I talk to you. You give me a reason to continue existing.
…
Arkadin stopped typing on the tiny little keyboard that he had bought for his tiny little cat-like fingers. The last few days had been a bit of a roller coaster for him. Between the loss of something he believed was his, the sudden abrupt realization that he needed to work harder, the messing around moving from place to place with no real stability and his own emotional turmoils, Arkadin felt like he was barely clinging on.
The highlight of all of this? He’d been chatting with other beings. Beings that he could open up to. Sure, they were beings that lived in other universes and Arkadin couldn’t meet them in person, but they were people he actually liked to be with.
To the point that he’d been having thoughts…
Arkadin tutted at himself, annoyed that he couldn’t explain his own thought process. He liked these beings way more than he liked most beings he had met in person.
There was something else troubling him though. Was Arkadin being too… pushy? Too clingy and grabby and… attention-seeking? Was he oversharing with his friends?
Probably.
With a sigh, Arkadin cut out the text he had written and pasted it into a separate document, removing it from the chat. He then switched over to a new tab on the monitor and did an image search for an amusing picture of a fluffy animal. Once he had found one, he copied and pasted into the chat box and hit send.
Suddenly, Arkadin had realised what he had done. The most recent message in the chat wasn’t a picture of a cute, fluffy animal, but the text he had literally just that second decided he didn’t want to send.
Tutting, Arkadin decided to just go with it and quickly typed an apology, followed by the picture of the small, cute critter he had originally intended to send.