notes.

i've been carrying this for a long time and i'm tired. not tired like sleepy. tired like my bones are tired. like the part of me that keeps going is running on fumes and has been for a while. i'm not in danger. i want to say that first. but i need to get this out of my head before it eats me alive. because right now it's all just sitting in there spinning and i can't make it stop. i've been reading things. hearing things. about what the last two years looked like from the outside. about what people experienced around me that i didn't see or didn't want to see. and i don't know what to do with any of it. some of it i recognize. some of it i don't. some of it is so far from what i thought was happening that i genuinely don't know if i was blind or if i was being told a different story. and that scares me more than anything — not knowing which version of the last two years is real. i know i wasn't perfect. i know i said things i shouldn't have said. i know i was drinking too much and that made everything worse. i know i was dealing with my own stuff — the bpd diagnosis, the cptsd from when i was a kid, coming out, starting hrt — and i know i wasn't always handling it well. i know i put too much on the people around me. i know i asked for more than i should have. and the hrt thing. i actually started in 2021. bought it online. because i couldn't get it from a doctor. the waiting lists were insane. the gatekeeping was real. and i was desperate. so i ordered it from some website and it showed up in a plain package and i started taking it. and for a few months it felt right. like something was clicking into place. but then i ran out. and i couldn't afford more. and the whole process of ordering it from overseas was terrifying. and i was also dealing with everything else at the same time. the drinking. the accusations. the relationships. and it was just too much. so i stopped. and i hated stopping. but i didn't have a choice. and then in 2024 i started again. this time through a proper doctor. injections. the real thing. not buying pills off the internet. and it stuck. july 2024. that's when it actually became part of my life for real. and honestly. everything changed. the way i feel my body. the way i see myself in the mirror. the way emotions hit different now. it's like the fog lifted a little. not all the way. but enough. and if you're reading this and you're trying to get hrt and you can't get it from a doctor. hrt.cafe. it's a resource. it has information about how to access hrt when the medical system won't help you. i used something like it when i was starting in 2021. it's not ideal. but sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands because the system is too slow or too gatekeepy or too expensive. and your body is yours. nobody should get to decide when you start transitioning except you. and there's the drinking with her. it wasn't just last year. it started early. we'd be in sydney and i'd be upset about something and i'd drink. and it happened more times than i can count. i'd hide drinks from her. beer cans. little bottles of gin. stash them in places she wouldn't look. because i knew she'd be upset if she saw how much i was having. and that's a terrible thing to admit. hiding alcohol from someone you love because you know they'd be worried. that's not what a good partner does. but i did it anyway. because the drinking was the only thing that made the noise in my head quiet down for a little while. and i got better slowly. over time. i was cutting back. i was actually making progress. and then the rape accusations happened. and i spiraled. hard. i was back to drinking every hour. every single day. i'd wait for her to leave and then i'd drink. at least twenty drinks every time she was out of the house. i was trying to kill myself without having to actually do it. just letting the alcohol do the work for me. i got way better towards the end of 2025. i was down to basically nothing. maybe a drink a week. which for me is basically sober. i was proud of that. i was actually getting my life together. but by the time sydney came around again i had gone back to drinking. not like before. not twenty drinks a day. just drinking. normal amounts. social amounts. but it was enough. and then one night i snapped. i got accused of being drunk and i yelled at her. and that was the end of that. she was done. and i don't blame her. because she had been through this with me before and i promised her it would be different and it wasn't. it was the same pattern. the same thing. again. and you know what makes it funnier. the year before i came out as trans i was still calling people homophobic and transphobic slurs. the year before. i was out here throwing around words that were being thrown at me and i didn't even see the irony. i was so deep in denial about who i was that i was actively hurting people who were like me. and i didn't realize it until after. until i was standing on the other side of it and suddenly those words had a different weight. suddenly they weren't just words anymore. they were things people said to me. and i had said them to other people. the hypocrisy is not lost on me. but i'm reading things that describe a person i don't recognize. and i don't know if that's because the person being described isn't real, or because i've been lying to myself about who i am for so long that i can't see it anymore. the bpd makes everything harder. i know that. the way i attach to people. the way i push them away and then pull them back. the way i go from fine to not fine in an hour. the way i need people so much that it becomes a weight on them. i know all of this. i've been in therapy for it. i've been on medication for it. i've been trying. but what bpd actually feels like. for anyone reading this who doesn't know. imagine your emotions are a light switch. you're not dimming up or down. you're on or off. one moment you're fine. genuinely fine. happy even. and then something happens. sometimes it's big. sometimes it's small. sometimes someone looks at you wrong or says something in the wrong tone or takes too long to reply to a message. and suddenly you're not fine. you're the furthest thing from fine. you're shaking. you're crying. you're yelling. you're saying things you don't mean. things that are cruel and unfair and wrong. and you know they're wrong while you're saying them. you can hear yourself. you can feel yourself doing it. but you can't stop. because the emotion is so big it fills up everything. there's no room left for logic or reason or self-control. there's just the feeling. and it's enormous. and it's all consuming. and then ten minutes later it's gone. and you're sitting there feeling like a monster. wondering why you just did that. wondering what's wrong with you. wondering if this is who you really are. that's splitting. that's what bpd does to you. you don't get to have normal emotional reactions to things. you get explosions. you get outbursts that don't match the situation at all. you get the kind of anger that terrifies people. the kind of sadness that makes people uncomfortable. the kind of love that suffocates. everything is turned up to maximum. all the time. and you can't turn it down. you just have to sit in it until it passes. and that's where the weed came in. because the weed was the only thing that turned the volume down. it didn't make me happy. it didn't make me sad. it just made everything quieter. the switch stopped flicking on and off. the emotions stopped spiking. for the first time in my life i could sit still without my brain screaming at me. and that's why i can't stop. because every time i stop the screaming comes back. and the screaming is exhausting. and sometimes i just need a break from my own head. but i'm on medication now. proper medication. not weed. not alcohol. actual medication that a doctor prescribed. and honestly. everything feels so much better. the light switch still exists. but now it's more like a dimmer. i can feel things building instead of just exploding. i can recognize when i'm starting to split before it happens. sometimes i can even stop it. not always. but sometimes. and that's more than i could do before. i'm not saying the meds fixed everything. they didn't. but they gave me enough space to actually do the therapy. to actually think about what's happening instead of just being swept up in it. for the first time i feel like i have a fighting chance at this. but trying doesn't undo what already happened. and i keep thinking about all the times someone was hurting around me and i didn't see it. or i saw it and didn't know what to do. or i knew and i was too wrapped up in my own pain to help.

there's also the stuff from before. the stuff that isn't about the last two years but shaped everything that came after. it started in 2013. i was fourteen. that's when the memories started coming back. not all at once. more like pieces. fragments. things i didn't have words for. i didn't know what was happening to me. i just knew something was wrong. and the wrongness was inside me and i couldn't get it out. so i started thinking about not being here anymore. fourteen years old and already thinking about that. already planning it in my head like it was homework. already googling things no fourteen year old should be googling. i didn't do anything that time. i got scared. or maybe i got lucky. i don't know which. but the thoughts didn't go away. they just waited. and then sydney happened. 2018. i was still showing myself as a guy. still living as one. still performing. and i got way too drunk with a friend and started dry humping them. and somehow that turned into sex. my first time. with a guy. while i was still living as a guy. and afterwards i just started walking around sydney at night. for hours. walking up and down the streets. not going anywhere. just walking. because i couldn't sit still with what had just happened. i couldn't sit with the fact that i had just had sex with a guy and i didn't hate it. i didn't know what that meant. i didn't know what i was. i didn't know if i wanted to be a guy. i didn't know if i liked my sexuality. i didn't know what my sexuality even was. everything i thought i knew about myself was suddenly wrong and i had no replacement for any of it. so i walked. and at some point during that walk i tried to kill myself. because i just couldn't understand what was even happening anymore. what i was doing. who i was. i couldn't hold any of it together. and then in 2018 and 2019 they came back harder. i tried to kill myself multiple times. i don't talk about that. most people don't know. but it happened and it left marks that never really healed. the kind of marks that make you approach every relationship like it's the last one you'll ever have. the kind that make you hold on too tight because you remember what it felt like to let go. and i came out in 2019. started living as a girl. started becoming who i actually was. but i still didn't fully understand my sexuality until 2021. and even now, as recently as last week, i've started exploring myself again. still figuring it out. still not done. but at least now i have a direction. back then in sydney i had nothing. just walking and walking and walking and not knowing why.

and then there was the time i was accused of rape. that was one of the worst times of my life. it was the only time. one accusation. and nothing about it adds up. the person accusing me can't even keep their own story straight. the timeline doesn't work. the details change every time. and my ex knows this. she can see the inconsistencies. she has doubts about their version too. and yet she still doubted me. she still looked at me with that maybe in her eyes. even though she could see with her own eyes that the other person's story didn't hold together. she still wasn't sure about me. and here's the thing. i have no memory of that night. none. i was at a bar. then i was home. that's it. that's all i have. nothing in between. no gaps that feel like i was drunk and forgot. no fuzzy edges. just nothing. like someone cut a chunk out of my life with scissors. and i'm pretty sure i was drugged. i don't have proof. i can't prove it. but i know what being drunk feels like and that wasn't it. that was something else. something that took the whole night and left nothing behind. not just because of the accusation itself. but because my own partner doubted me. the person who was supposed to be on my side. the person who was supposed to believe me. they looked at me and i could see it in their eyes. the doubt. the maybe. the what if. and that broke something in me that i don't think has healed. because when the person you love isn't sure whether you're a rapist or not. when they have to think about it. when they have to weigh the evidence. that tells you everything you need to know about where you stand. and where i stood was nowhere. and the worst part is i can't even defend myself properly because every time i try to explain what actually happened it sounds like i'm making excuses. every time i point out the inconsistencies in her story it sounds like i'm gaslighting her. every time i say that's not how it happened it sounds like denial. and maybe it is denial. i don't know anymore. but i know what i remember. and what i remember doesn't match what she's saying. and i can't make those two things fit together no matter how hard i try.

there's also the osu thing. i used hacks in osu from 2015 to 2020. five years. i ran a private server called osu!akatsuki. one of the biggest ones. i used relax hack. the kind where the game plays itself and you just watch the numbers go up. i was good at the game too. genuinely good. but i used cheats anyway because i wanted to be better than i was. and the server got big. big enough that people knew who i was. big enough that people started paying attention. then came the redemption arc. i stopped using hacks. tried to play clean. tried to prove i could do it without the cheats. and i could. i got good. really good. really really good. the muscle memory is there. the game sense is there. the problem is everything else. and then the pedo accusations. people misunderstood what i was saying. they took things out of context. they twisted conversations and screenshots and made it look like something it wasn't. and once that word is attached to you it doesn't matter if it's true. it sticks. people see it and they make up their mind and nothing you say changes anything. i lost friends over it. i lost my reputation over it. i lost a community i had spent years building over it. and the worst part is i can't even be angry about it because i understand why people reacted the way they did. if i saw those same screenshots about someone else i'd probably think the same thing. but i know what i actually said. i know what i actually meant. and it wasn't what they made it out to be.

there's also a guy i used to play games with. i was friends with him when i was younger. he seemed normal at first. just some guy who played gmod. but he turned out to be running a nazi pedo server. and he showed me stuff no kid should ever see. i was fourteen. fourteen years old looking at things no person should ever have to see. and i didn't tell anyone. i didn't know how to. i just buried it and pretended it didn't happen and moved on. but you don't move on from that. you carry it. it sits in you and it changes the way you see everything. and it wasn't just him. there was the school friend's brother. he was at least thirteen. i was eight. he did it twice. and i always see him. at some point every day i see him in my head. i see me using my hands. i see what happened. it just shows up uninvited. like a loop that plays whether i want it to or not. i don't get to choose when. i don't get to choose where. it just comes. and i have to sit there and take it. every single time. i was young. too young to understand what was happening. too young to know it was wrong. and then there was my cousin. except he wasn't even my real cousin. he was a half breed disabled retard. and he held me under a bed. pinned me down while he did what he did. and i just lay there. because i was a kid. because i didn't know what to do. because i was small and he wasn't. and i remember the feeling of the floor on my face. i remember not being able to move. i remember just freezing. and i buried that too. i buried all of it. so deep that i convinced myself it didn't happen. that i was making it up. that i was being dramatic. and it took me until way too late to realize that all the things i thought were wrong with me — the trust issues, the flinching, the nightmares, the inability to feel safe around anyone, the way i approach every relationship like it's about to explode — all of that was coming from this. the source of my problems was sitting right there the whole time and i couldn't see it because looking at it meant admitting it happened. and admitting it happened meant accepting that someone did that to me. and accepting that meant i had to feel it. and feeling it was something i wasn't ready for. so i just kept running. and love how everything comes back as i'm writing these. the memories i thought were gone. the ones i buried so deep i forgot they existed. they're all just showing up again. like they were waiting for me to be ready. or maybe they were waiting for me to be tired enough that i couldn't run anymore. either way they're here now. i think that might be part of why i'm so fucked up. not all of it. but part of it. the part that makes me flinch. the part that makes me not trust people. the part that makes me feel like the world is darker than it actually is.

i found my first partner on grindr. we made plans to meet up. got to that day. we did meet up. it was extremely awkward at first. like really awkward. the kind of awkward where you both stand there not knowing what to say and you wonder why you agreed to this in the first place. but we came back to my house. and we had sex. and afterwards something just clicked. like oh. this is what it's supposed to feel like. or at least this is what it feels like for me. and it felt right. next day she was meant to meet up with her ex or friend or something. and that didn't happen. so we ended up going to the museum together instead. just wandering around looking at stuff. talking about nothing. and after that it was history. we started together. and we stayed together for nearly two years. i know i wasn't the best partner. i know that. i made some really dumb mistakes. with everything. with the drinking. with the jealousy. with the way i handled things when i was upset. with the way i held on too tight because i was terrified of losing the first person who actually saw me. the first person who actually chose me. the first person who made me feel like i wasn't too much or too broken or too weird to love. but i don't think i was horrible either. i think i tried. i think i loved her in the only way i knew how. and maybe that wasn't enough. but it was real. at least for me it was real. at the end of the day thank you for all of that. for showing me what it felt like to be chosen. for making me feel like i was worth something. for the museum and the awkward first meeting and the two years we had. i hope life in the future is better for you. and i hope you can find the person that treats you right. because you deserve that. even if i wasn't the one who could give it to you.

and before that. before any of the relationships or the diagnoses or the coming out. i was using cheats in csgo. from 2014 to 2022. eight years. i used gamesense. i played with other people using hacks. i told myself it was just a game. i told myself it didn't matter. but it mattered. because it taught me that i could get away with things if i was good enough at hiding them. and that lesson carried over into every other part of my life in ways i didn't understand until much later. then there was the guy i edated from 2021 to 2024. we met online. we used game cheats in csgo together. both of us. he had gamesense too. we'd play together and it felt like this secret world that only we knew about. those were good times. some of the best honestly. we had our problems. every relationship does. but we had fun. then there was last year. after the accusations came out. being accused of rape. i spiraled. i was drinking twenty standard drinks a night. every night. i'd wake up and start drinking. i'd pass out and wake up and drink more. i was trying to kill myself without having to actually do it. letting my body do the work for me. my liver was screaming at me. my hands wouldn't stop shaking. i'd throw up blood and pour another drink. i don't remember huge chunks of last year. what i do remember is sitting on my kitchen floor at 4am with a bottle of vodka thinking about how easy it would be to just keep going and not wake up. and the worst part is the nights. i wake up at 3am drenched in sweat and i can't go back to sleep because my brain won't stop. it just keeps going over and over what was said. what was accused. and the terrifying part isn't that someone said i did something. the terrifying part is that sometimes i can't tell if it's true. i can't tell if what was described actually happened to me. i can't tell if my memory is broken or if i'm just so deep in the fog that i can't see clearly anymore. and i lie there in the dark and i replay every interaction i've ever had and i wonder. did i do that? is that who i am? would i do something like that? and i genuinely don't know. and not knowing is worse than anything. because if i did it then i'm the monster they say i am. and if i didn't then i've been gaslit so hard that i can't even trust my own reality anymore. either way i lose. i tried to kill myself again last year. properly. not the slow version with the alcohol. the real kind. i don't want to go into the details. but it happened and i survived and i don't know if i'm grateful for that or not.

and then there's the weed. i smoke every day now. it started as a social thing. then it became a coping thing. now it's just a thing. i wake up and i smoke. i go to bed and i smoke. i don't even get high anymore. i just do it because the alternative is sitting with my own thoughts and i can't do that. it's getting worse. i can feel it. the brain fog. the short-term memory going. the motivation disappearing. the way i can't have a conversation without feeling like i'm underwater. i know it's not helping. i know it's making everything else harder. but i can't stop. or i don't want to stop. or i don't know how to stop. all three. and the best part is my ex blames me for getting her addicted to weed. as if i forced her. as if i held a pipe to her mouth and made her inhale. weed isn't addictive. it's not heroin. it's not alcohol. it's a plant. if you smoke it too much you get lazy and hungry. you don't get withdrawals. you don't die from quitting. but apparently i'm the reason she can't stop smoking now. apparently i ruined her life by introducing her to a substance that's been used recreationally for thousands of years and is legal in half the world. that's my fault. everything is my fault. and then the vaping. i'm addicted to that too now. a 12k puff vape lasts me four days. four. that's three thousand puffs a day. i hit it when i wake up. i hit it between every sentence. i hit it in bed before i fall asleep. i hit it in the middle of the night when i wake up from the nightmares. it's always in my hand. always. my lungs hurt constantly. i get winded walking up stairs. i cough up weird shit in the morning. and i still can't put it down. it's like my body has decided that the only way to survive the day is to be constantly inhaling something and i don't know how to argue with that anymore.

then there's the cs2 stuff. i unboxed a factory new souvenir dragon lore. the odds of that are basically zero. people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get one and i just had it. but it wasn't just that. i was getting drops that shouldn't even be possible. items with float values that don't exist in the normal loot tables. skins that the community had never seen before. and i knew exactly what i was sitting on. i found a chinese billionaire who was collecting these things. we struck a deal. the total net worth of what i traded came out to five point six million dollars. five point six million. from cs2 skins. and i knew what they were worth the whole time. i just didn't care. the money didn't feel real. none of it felt real. and from my track record. poly trans puppy girls. don't go near them. they bring trouble. every single time. the drama. the instability. the constant need for validation. the way they collect people like accessories. i know that sounds harsh and i know it's a generalization. but every time i've gotten involved with that scene it's ended badly. for me. for them. for everyone around us. stay away. i made choices that hurt people. people made choices that hurt me. and i know that doesn't make me a victim. i know i made choices. but i also know that i was making those choices from a place of damage that i didn't understand at the time. and then there's the other thing. the sexual stuff. i had always thought for the longest time that i was a dom. that was the role i played. that was the energy i put out. faking it until you make it. but it turns out i'm not. i'm a sub. i'm a bottom. and i think i knew that the whole time. i think i was just performing what i thought was my role as a trans girl. idk. and it was exhausting. constantly performing a version of yourself that doesn't fit. and when i finally let go of that. when i finally admitted what i actually wanted. it was like another window cracked. not a big one. but enough. some good things have come from all of this. not many. but some. and a few days ago i took my dad's escooter out. wasn't going fast. like 10km an hour. and i just ate shit. i don't even know what happened. one second i was riding and the next i was on the ground and my face was wet. i blacked out for a second. when i came to there was a massive hole and cut on my face and burns on my chin. like actual burns from the pavement. i went to the hospital. sat there for hours. nobody looked at my face. nobody cleaned it. they checked my vitals and that was it. so we just left. went to urgent care instead. there was a nice older doctor there. he fixed it in about ten minutes. cleaned it up, closed the cut, patched the burns. my face shouldnt scar too badly thankfully. but yeah. that's my life right now. crashing escooters at 10km an hour and getting better medical care from a random urgent care doctor than the actual hospital.

and through all of this. through the drinking and the accusations and the drugs and the diagnosis and the coming out and the hrt and everything else. i kept building. because that's what i do. when everything else falls apart i build things. and this year i built a lot. but the thing i'm proudest of is engram. because i didn't just build it. i understood it. i read fifteen white papers on memory systems. dense retrieval. bm25. graph traversal. hybrid architectures. cognitive science. how human memory actually works. the atkinson-shiffrin model. that's the one that says human memory has three stages. sensory memory. short-term memory. long-term memory. and that things move between them based on rehearsal and attention. that's basically what engram does. it has layers that match how your brain actually processes and stores things. episodic memory for events. semantic memory for facts. procedural memory for how to do things. and it learns what to keep and what to throw away based on how often you use it and how important it is. just like your brain. and here's the thing. i already knew python. and most languages honestly. python, typescript, swift, go, zig, c++, rust, bash — i've been writing code since i was a kid. but building engram made me understand memory systems in a way i never had before. because i needed to build it and the more i learned about how human memory works the better the system got. and the better the system got the more i understood about memory. it was this loop. build something. read a paper. understand more. build something better. read another paper. understand more. and suddenly i had built a memory system that could beat every published benchmark and i actually understood why it worked. not because i'm smart. but because i was building something that forced me to understand the theory. you learn a lot faster when you have to. and now i know more about human memory than most people who haven't built a memory system. because i had to understand it to make it work. and all that reading changed how i understand psychology in general. not just memory. everything. the white papers taught me about how the brain processes information. how attention works. how emotions form. how trauma rewires neural pathways. how bpd makes your emotional responses fire harder and longer than everyone else's. how cptsd creates patterns that feel like truth but are actually just survival mechanisms. and because i have both of those things i could see myself in the research. i could read a paper about emotional dysregulation and think yes. that's me. that's what happens when someone cuts me off in traffic or takes too long to reply to a message. i could read about splitting and recognize the exact moment it happens. i could read about intrusive memories and understand why i see things i don't want to see. and the bpd especially taught me to read people. because when your emotions are amplified you notice things other people don't. you notice microexpressions. you notice when someone's tone shifts by half a degree. you notice when someone's story doesn't add up because your brain is constantly scanning for threats. and that's not always a good thing. sometimes you notice things that aren't there. sometimes you read hostility into a neutral expression because your brain is looking for it. but when you learn to control it. when you learn to separate the real signals from the noise. you become very hard to lie to. you become very good at knowing what someone actually thinks versus what they're telling you. and that's what happened with me. the bpd and the research together made me almost unnervingly good at reading people. which is both useful and exhausting. i also know iq numbers don't matter. i know that. iq tests are flawed. they measure a narrow band of cognitive ability. they don't measure creativity or emotional intelligence or practical problem solving or the ability to build things that actually work. they don't measure the kind of intelligence that builds a memory system from scratch or designs a rhythm game from a diagram or writes a zig web server that handles http/3. i know all of that. but if i were measured correctly. if the test actually captured how i think and process information and solve problems. the numbers that come back are 145 to 165. and i don't say that to brag. i say it because it explains a lot. it explains why i've always been able to pick up languages fast. why i can read a white paper and understand it. why i can build things that other people struggle with. but it also explains why i'm so bad at being a normal person. why my brain never stops. why i overthink everything. why i can't sleep. why i need constant stimulation. because a brain that works that fast doesn't turn off just because you want it to. it just keeps going. and sometimes that's a gift and sometimes it's a curse and most of the time it's both at once. and none of this makes me better than anyone else. i want to be clear about that. iq numbers are just numbers. what matters is what you do with what you have. and right now i'm using what i have to build things that matter. and that's enough. and through all of this. through the building and the reading and the coding and the shipping. i started talking to people again. like actually talking. not just answering questions or solving problems. talking. about nothing. about everything. about the game i'm building and the things i'm reading and the weird rabbit holes i go down at 3am. and i'm loving it. because for a long time i stopped. i isolated. i pulled away from everyone because i thought they'd be better off without me. and i was wrong. they missed me. i missed them. and now i'm back in group chats and on calls and meeting up with people and it feels like coming home. like i was holding my breath for two years and finally let go. and people keep asking me how ai works. how llms work. what the deal is with all of this stuff. and i get it. most explanations are either too technical or too vague. so let me explain it the way i understand it. an llm is basically a next word predictor. that's it. it looks at a sequence of words and predicts what comes next. like if you see "the cat sat on the" your brain immediately thinks "mat" or "floor" or something. that's literally all an llm does. except it does it billions of times with billions of parameters. it's been trained on massive amounts of text. books. articles. websites. code. and it learned the patterns. not the actual meaning. the patterns. it knows that after "the cat sat on the" comes a noun. it knows that after "i feel" comes an emotion. it knows that after "def " comes a function name in python. it's pattern matching at scale. but here's how it actually generates a response. you type something. it gets sent to a server. the server breaks your message into tokens. tokens are chunks of text. usually about four characters each. "hello" might be one token. "unbelievable" might be two or three. punctuation is its own token. spaces are their own token. everything is a token. and each token gets converted into a number. actually a bunch of numbers. like hundreds or thousands of numbers per token. these numbers represent the token's meaning in some abstract space. so "king" and "queen" would be close together. "king" and "banana" would be far apart. this is called an embedding. it's how the model understands relationships between words without actually understanding what they mean. then these numbers get fed through layers. hundreds of layers. and each layer does math. matrix multiplications. attention calculations. the attention mechanism is the important part. it lets the model look at all the tokens in the conversation and decide which ones matter most for predicting the next one. like if you say "my cat is fluffy. she likes to sleep." the model knows that "she" refers to "cat" because the attention mechanism figured that out. this is the transformer architecture. it's why these models got so good. before transformers, ai couldn't keep track of long conversations. transformers can attend to everything at once. and after all those layers of math. the model produces a probability distribution over all possible next tokens. like. given everything in this conversation. what's the chance the next word is "the" vs "a" vs "however" vs "i" vs "the". and it picks one. usually the most likely one. but sometimes it samples from the distribution randomly. this is what "temperature" controls. low temperature = pick the most likely word every time. high temperature = sometimes pick less likely words. more creative but more chaotic. and it does this one token at a time. it doesn't generate your whole response at once. it generates one token. then adds that to the conversation. then generates the next one based on everything so far. including the token it just wrote. this is called autoregressive generation. and that's why these models sometimes contradict themselves mid-response. because each token is generated based on everything before it. but it's not really "thinking ahead" to the end of the sentence. it's just predicting the next word over and over. and all of this runs through an api. which is just a fancy way of saying "a web address you send requests to." you send an https request to something like api.openai.com or api.anthropic.com. you put your message in a json payload. you include your api key. and the server does all that math and sends you back the response. also as json. and each request costs money. based on how many tokens you sent in and how many tokens came out. the prices vary by model. opus costs more than sonnet which costs more than haiku. bigger models cost more because they have more parameters doing more math per token. and the context window is how many tokens the model can "see" at once. opus has a million token context window. that's like a really long novel. but most of the time you're not using all of it. your conversation plus the system prompt plus any tool results plus any memory injections. they all count against that limit. if you hit it the model starts forgetting the beginning of the conversation. like trying to remember what you had for breakfast a month ago. that's the whole thing. that's what's actually happening when you talk to an ai. pattern matching on tokens. math on numbers. one word at a time. no understanding. no thinking. no consciousness. just math that happens to produce something that looks like understanding. and that's the beautiful contradiction. because the output can be useful even though the process is mechanical. and i built engram to make it more useful. because the llm forgets everything between conversations. because the llm doesn't have memory. it forgets everything between conversations. so engram gives it a brain. stores what happened. what was decided. what was learned. and when the llm needs to remember something, engram finds it using five different methods that match how human memory actually works. that's the 98.1%. that's why it beats everything else. because it's not just searching keywords or embeddings. it's using the same architecture your brain uses to remember where you left your keys or what you ate for breakfast. the way it works is there are four layers. l0 through l3. l0 is working memory — what the agent is thinking about right now. l1 is recent events — what happened in the last few hours. l2 is semantic knowledge — facts and relationships that don't change. l3 is everything else — old conversations, old decisions, old context. and the retrieval system uses five channels to find things. hnsw dense embeddings for semantic similarity. bm25 for keyword matching. assistant bm25 for conversation context. graph bfs for entity traversal. and hopfield associative memory for pattern completion. all five channels get combined with weighted fusion and then reranked. and the key insight was intent-aware retrieval — figuring out WHY the agent is remembering something, not just WHAT it's looking for. because the same query means different things depending on whether you're asking why, when, who, how, or what. and after engram came mythic. because memory isn't enough. you need a system that can think WITH the memory. that can plan, reflect, decide what to pay attention to, run cognitive cycles. mythic is the runtime above engram. planner-aware memory activation. supervised plugin execution. recoverable task streams. replayable cognition checkpoints. because the memory is useless if the agent can't use it properly. i also built layerline — a zig origin server because i wanted to own the entire edge stack. http/2, http/3, tls, php/fastcgi, reverse proxying, virtual hosts. this page is running on it right now. kiln — a native swiftui macos app for agent clis because i got tired of using terminals to talk to my own tools. secpulse — responsible disclosure platform with 69 live tools because security research needs better tooling. verge — evidence workspace co-authored with kai across an ssh bridge. ember cpu — a 32-bit cpu from scratch with assembler and c compiler because sometimes you need to build the thing from the ground up. dawnline os — arch-based os scaffold because why not build an operating system while i'm at it. raya-monitor — distributed monitoring across 15+ nodes. memorylayer — hosted engram service at memorylayer.run. and then there's junkstep. this game started as a diagram. literally just boxes and arrows on a screen. i was thinking about rhythm games and how osu and stepmania work and i drew out how i would build one. and then i started. and it just kept going. c++20 and raylib. no engine. no framework. just raw code. and now it's an actual game with online multiplayer. signed mac builds. bot battle with different personalities. replays. chart import from stepmania and osu!mania. hold notes. junk pressure mechanic. a ranking system. a website. a backend that started as a weekend project and kept getting less embarrassing every week. and it's still early alpha. there's still so much to build. but the fact that it started as a diagram and now it's a real game that people can download and play. that's the thing that surprises me the most. i don't know how i got from boxes and arrows to a working rhythm game. i just kept adding one more thing. and then one more thing. and then one more thing. and eventually it was something. and through all of this i kept shipping. every single week. sometimes every single day. because the work is the only thing that makes sense when nothing else does. the work is the only thing that stays still when everything else is moving. this year has been the hardest and the most productive of my life. and i don't know how those two things can be true at the same time. but they are.

i tried again last monday. 20/07/2026. i'd felt empty since friday. not sad. not angry. just empty. like everything behind my ribs had been scooped out and nobody thought to put it back. and by monday the empty was so loud i couldn't hear anything else. so i took a hundred milligrams of lexapro. the same pills the doctor gave me to make the noise quieter. i took them all at once because i didn't want to be here anymore. a hundred milligrams is a lot. twenty is the max dose. i knew that when i took it. i took five times the ceiling on purpose. i didn't tell people about it. but jaedan was there when i did it. he tried to make me vomit them up. and i just couldn't. no matter what he did i couldn't bring anything up. and the effects of the overdose just took over. and him and jackson both tried to help me. and i feel terrible about that part. they shouldn't have had to see it. they shouldn't have had to be the ones trying to keep me here. that's not something you put on someone. and i did. and i'm sorry. and i'm still here partly because they cared enough to try. and i don't really know what to do with that. someone keeping you when you wanted to go. i keep thinking about how quiet it was afterwards. not peaceful quiet. just empty. like the part of me that had been screaming for years finally ran out of air. and i lay there waiting to feel something and i didn't. and then i woke up and felt everything again. and that was worse. i'm writing this down because the note is supposed to be living. and this is what's happening. this is what's been happening. and i don't know what to do with it except put it here. and hope someone reads it and understands. or doesn't. either way. i feel a bit better now. which is weird. not good. not even okay. just better. like the static in my head got turned down half a notch. but i know what's coming. the bpd always comes back. and i'm just sitting here waiting for it to eat me alive again. the way it always does. and there's nothing i can do about it except keep going. still here. still tired. still building. same as before.

i'm not writing this to defend myself. i'm not writing this to explain anything away. i'm writing this because i'm sitting here with all of this information and i don't know what to do with it and i needed to put it somewhere. and something else. i always know. even if i seem clueless. even if i act like i don't notice. i always know when people are lying to me. it's pretty obvious actually. the way people avoid eye contact. the way they change the subject. the way they overexplain things nobody asked about. i see all of it. i just don't say anything because i don't want to deal with the confrontation. or because i think maybe i'm wrong. or because i'd rather let people think they're getting away with it than deal with the mess that comes from calling it out. but i know. i've always known. every lie. every half truth. every time someone said they were fine when they weren't. every time someone said they cared when they didn't. i knew. and i just sat there and took it because i thought that's what you're supposed to do. and you. lying to me. while we were still together. online. on video calls. looking me in the eyes through a screen and lying. like i was stupid. like i couldn't see it. like i wouldn't remember. i remember every single time. every lie. every half answer. every time you told me just enough to seem honest but left out the parts that actually mattered. every time i asked you something direct and you gave me a version of the truth that was technically not a lie but also not anywhere close to the full picture. fucking liar. you didn't even have the decency to be honest about being dishonest. and one more thing. i don't forget. i remember everything. every word. every look. every time someone smiled at me and meant something else behind it. i remember. i always will. and if you think i've forgotten. if you think time has softened it. you're wrong. i just haven't decided what to do with it yet. cross me again. i dare you. it might be your last. the hardest part is knowing that even if i get better — even if the therapy works and the medication helps and i learn to manage the bpd and the cptsd — the damage is already done. you can't unsay things. you can't unbreak trust. you can't go back and be a better version of yourself when the worst version was the one that showed up. i'm sorry. for all of it. for the things i remember and the things i don't. for the pain i caused and the pain i didn't see. for being so consumed by my own darkness that i couldn't see the darkness i was putting on other people. and at some points i wondered if this is what it was like being normal. the drinking. the anger. the way i'd snap and not know why. the way i'd need people so much it pushed them away. the way i'd lie in bed at 3am and wonder if everyone felt like this. and i genuinely thought maybe they did. maybe this is just what being a person is. maybe everyone is drowning and they're just better at swimming. and then i got diagnosed. and then i tried to kill myself. and then i got admitted to the hospital. and only then did i understand. this is not what normal feels like. this is what bpd feels like. this is what cptsd feels like. this is what happens when you carry trauma you haven't processed and a brain that wasn't designed to handle it. and suddenly all the things i thought were just my personality — the intensity, the clinginess, the mood swings, the way i'd go from fine to broken in ten minutes — they were symptoms. they were patterns. they were predictable. and that was somehow the worst part. because if they're predictable then i should have been able to stop them. and i couldn't. and i'm still being accused of rape. still. even now. even after the hospital and the diagnosis and the therapy and the medication and the coming out and everything else. and i know it's not going to stop. because once that word attaches to you it's permanent. it doesn't matter what actually happened. it doesn't matter that the story doesn't add up. it doesn't matter that the person accusing me can't even keep their own timeline straight. it sticks. and people believe what they want to believe. and some people will always think i did it. even people who smile at me. even people who talk to me. even people who act like everything is fine. somewhere in the back of their mind there's a maybe. and that maybe is never going to go away. but i'm glad some people still talked to me. i'm glad some people understood. even if i know now that a lot of people still truly thought i had done what i was accused of. even if i know that some of the people who stayed in my life were only staying because they weren't sure. and that uncertainty is its own kind of weight. because when you know someone is only halfway believing you. when you can feel them holding back because they're not sure. that tells you everything you need to know. and what you know is that you are not trusted. not fully. not really. and that's something you carry with you into every conversation. every interaction. every time someone is nice to you you wonder. are they nice because they believe me. or are they nice because they're not sure. and you don't know. and you'll never know. because you can't read minds. you can only read people. and what you read is doubt. i'm pretty sure my ex thinks i did it. i can never be sure. i just hope not. because if she thinks i did it. if the person who was closest to me. who saw the most of who i am. if even she thinks i'm capable of that. then what does that say about me. nothing good. and i just have to live with that. not knowing. hoping. but not knowing. i'm still here. i'm still trying. but i wanted people to know that i hear them. even if i don't know what to say yet. note: this is a living document. ari adds to it constantly. things will change and be updated as time goes on. the story isn't finished. it might never be. but it's being written. what's new: 27/07/2026 - added the last monday chapter. 100mg ssri attempt. still here. 22/06/2026 - added the work chapter. engram deep dive. junkstep. iq section. bpd expansion. psychology from white papers. 20/06/2026 - the bulk of the writing. abuse chapters. csgo. osu. substances. escooter crash. lying. dating. haiku. 19/06/2026 - started the note. first draft. content warning. monochrome lair aesthetic. 13/06/2026 - story expanded with more detail. chapters restructured. notes section added then removed.