Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
“Who would want to date a weirdo like you?”
That’s what she said, before sniggering behind her hands with her girl friends.
It was during rehat (recess), and I was a 13-year-old Form 1 student who had just mustered the courage to ask a girl to be my Valentine.
Like most boys, I was clueless about dating, and I didn’t know how else to show what I strongly felt — a fascination with the opposite gender — except by writing a card, buying some flowers, and giving them to the cutest girl I knew in class.
To be honest, I was mentally prepared for some kind of rejection. Something like, “Let’s be friends,” or, “Sorry, but thank you”. If it was polite, at least I‘d still feel like my self-worth was intact.
But it was the way she said the word “weirdo” that stuck with me, long after I’d forgotten the name of the girl who rejected me.
“Weirdo”. There was a sense that I was unlovable, a creep — not just a random guy who was rejected, but someone not quite normal. (Years later, when I discovered the lyrics to Radiohead’s Creep, it hit me in a very uncomfortable way because it was exactly how I’d felt.)
It was just a casual remark, I hear you thinking. Girls say that all the time. They weren’t really trying to be mean. And yeah, I get it. Children can be casually cruel without a second thought.
But as a kid who considered himself short, ugly, nerdy, and weak, it cut deep. It became who I secretly felt I was. A creep. And that was where all my problems started.
In my first year of university, I took the Red Pill
As the years went by, I kept my head down, studied like a maniac, and passed college with flying colours in the sciences: bio, chem, and physics. I also got an A* in add maths.
All through secondary school, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I had lots of crushes, but all unrequited. I just kept silent and admired them from afar. What was the point in approaching them? They would just reject me and call me names the moment I opened my mouth.
When I got into university, I thought things would change. I’d get a new haircut. I’d change my wardrobe. I’d work out. And finally, finally, I would get myself a girlfriend.
I did all of those things. Or, at least, I tried.
But deep down, I still looked like a clown. I would try to approach girls in uni, but they wouldn’t give me a second glance.
I watched as they strolled by in their high heels, swinging their Gucci handbags as they talked about vapid things like who’s the hottest guy in High School Musical and how many guys they’d slept with, probably.
And they ALWAYS went for the douchebag jocks
Gym bros, frat bros, dudes who wore sunglasses indoors and expensive yet foul-smelling cologne.
Dudes who would ‘accidentally’ knock into me in the corridors or make jokes about how I looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Loud, snobbish, always laughing at their dumb jokes or at other people, skipping classes and going racing in their dad’s Mercedes and BMWs.
They knew nothing about my existence. The pain and suffering I felt for being excluded and picked on.
They didn’t know how it was like to be ostracised for looking different, talking different, or having better grades than everyone else. If I died in front of them, they would just walk all over me.
Sometimes I wished I could destroy their fake smiles and their fake laughter
Blow up their cars, or cut up their too-perfect faces with a sharp little pocket knife. I wanted to show everyone just how, when the tables were turned, they weren’t special. They weren’t untouchable.
My blade would show them that in reality, they would bleed just like everyone else.
I bought a switchblade and kept it hidden on my body whenever I went to class. I was just itching for someone to try me. To test me.
I thought to myself that I would raise my blade in self-defence, swish-slash.
A bully’s neck is severed. If they questioned me, I would simply say that I was afraid for my life.
We called ourselves Incels, meaning, Involuntary Celibate.
I joined online communities like R/incel, and then r/braincel when the former got banned by Reddit. My Youtube feed was full of PUA (pick up artists) videos, all teaching me how to be a confident alpha male.
From them, I discovered that people accept misogyny when it’s coming from someone good-looking or successful. But they look down on a community that dares to call things out as they are.
Beauty is skin deep, everyone is faking it, and nobody cares about men who don’t fit in.
I couldn’t understand how feminists or members of the LGBT community always played the victim when they were the ones being celebrated in movies, TV shows, given platforms to speak, and even infiltrated our videogames.
The hypocrisy was astounding. Apa lagi pompuan mau?
I became quite well-known on these messageboards. I won’t repeat what I wrote there, but suffice to say they were things I’d never admit to anyone in public or private.
I won’t tell you what name I went by. You’ll have to take my word for it.
How I got out of being an incel
This happened slowly.
It started when I read about Elliot Rodgers in the news for the first time and felt sick to my stomach.
While it was sickening what he did, I couldn’t avoid agreeing with everything he said. I actually read his entire manifesto. I understood why he did what he did.
Plus, he was half-Malaysian. That made me feel twice as uneasy, being Malaysian myself.
“But I’m not like Elliot Rodgers. I would never hurt a woman.” I thought.
More and more news appeared on my feed about people who were copycats of Elliot, like Alex Minassian who killed 10 people with a van in Toronto.
After uni ended, I left the message boards and focused on family. I didn’t have many friends by now, but I was rethinking what it meant to be an incel.
I noticed something. A lot of us were projecting our self-loathing towards others.
“She’s pretty, I’m ugly, so she will reject/hate me because I’m not handsome”. But it was me who was rejecting myself for not being handsome. That self-rejection was showing in my face, my hands, my body, everything.
I realised I had a long way to go before I could ever be normal again.
I’ve been with women I never thought would be interested in me.
As time passed, I realised that there’s more to relationships than simple surface-level attraction. I came to this conclusion from seeing so many ugly dudes with hot women.
The turning point came when I landed a date with a girl from uni.
When she first met another dude and I, she thought the other dude was hotter. But after getting to know both of us within an evening, she decided to go out with me because of how I made her feel.
I realised that different people look for different things in their partners. Looks don’t always matter.
“How I make people feel.” That’s a huge shift in mindset from “How do I make myself look cool?”
Do I creep people out? Do I ask uncomfortable questions? Do I overstep boundaries? Do I seem disinterested in what people have to say?
Once I realised that connecting with people is more about “How do I make them feel?”, a new world of possibilities opened up before me.
I discovered that laughter is a great way to make people feel at ease
It feels clinical and almost psychopathic to discuss it in such terms, but employing humor to lower a person’s barrier is key to establishing rapport.
Some people are naturally funny, while others have to learn it and hone it.
I’m the latter, even if it feels otherwise on the surface. What I did was practice being funny, over and over again, until I figured out what made people laugh.
To be fair, I do love a good joke. It’s not like I’m pretending to be funny just to be liked. I don’t memorise scripts from stand-up routines just to wow people at parties.
I realised that I genuinely love making people laugh. So channeling that feeling, I could start forming genuine connections with people.
In retrospect, it took stepping out of that self-loathing to arrive at where I am now.
Only when I rid myself of that toxicity did a new door materialise: Real Relationships.
For more stories like this, read: I Was Stalked By Men In Public – Women Share Their Scariest Experiences in Malaysia and My Ex-Boyfriend Tried to Guilt Trip His Way Into My Pants.
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