You delete the rejection email from Meajin and open up YouTube and watch https://youtu.be/FavUpD_IjVY . It doesn’t really make you feel better. You just keep thinking YouTubes the reason you’re not a better writer. But you look at the related videos and watch the sheep one, and the cat one and the one with fingers and then you’re reminded of David Firth because he does shit like this too, so you see what he’s been up to lately. https://youtu.be/0XDhz5kanYk . What Terry Gilliam would have made if he had been forced to animate with his intestines wrapped around his neck. You wish you were brave enough and fucked up enough to write something like that. But it is vaguely inspiring. You think that if you really put in some effort to reading serious literature and perfecting the craft then you could write whatever you wanted. Maybe read something by Conrad, or Faulkner, or Joyce. Is it normal to masturbate to this? That was a good comment. What was it that the editors didn’t like? You wrote every day. But it never felt like enough. It always felt like something was missing. Something was fake. You know you used to have it, but you lost it somewhere, when you started to get scared. You used to listen to music when you wrote, you used to be angry. https://youtu.be/eqZyjduLy14 . It doesn’t do much for you now. That passage from The Tell-tale Heart just seems pretentious and you’re tempted to agree with Tekmatic’s comment that ‘this is absolutely horrible "music"’. You’re dull to it all now. You think maybe you missed a journal, maybe the thing you wrote almost a year ago just needs someone to believe in it. http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-literary-magazines. But you didn’t miss one. You’re girlfriends almost back from work. When she gets home you’ll watch that stupid anime. When she gets in the door she can tell immediately that something’s wrong. You tell her. She says it’ll happen, just give it time. You watch the anime. Then you tell her about how you’re not motivated. You start to cry. She comforts you, then she goes to the bathroom, and you watch this https://youtu.be/HAPBunVnXuA . You start thinking you should start going back to the gym. Writing took up too much time, you stopped doing everything else you should’ve been doing. You watch Fight Club again, because Brad Pitts what you want to look like. It gets you pumped for the gym. Then you find this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8s2dZ9uh0E. This is your new goal. Tomorrow you’re going to go running up the stairs of your apartment, fourteen flights, five times. Then you’ll have buckwheat for breakfast, no sugar and then four eggs. Go to the gym, don’t give a shit about anyone else there. Buy a whole bunch of frozen chicken breasts from Coles, and some skim milk because you don’t trust that protein powder shit. It makes you feel like you’re doing it differently from everyone else. You’re doing it the right way. But you find you’re too insecure at the gym. So you start using your dad’s weights in your room. You listen to https://youtu.be/x9xfo0MY-r8 and make it full screen on your laptop because Yolandis sexy as fuck. It starts off well. You’re fucking angry with yourself. Are you a pussy? This is your last chance not to be a complete fuck up. So you kill it with the weights. Then https://youtu.be/vkKCVCZe474. You feel good for the afternoon. You think about writing, but you feel too good for that. Maybe you’ll do some uni work. You start doing the reading. But then you start writing out a timetable for the next month, Day One: pushups, incline dumbbell press, dumbbell/machine flys, dips, benchpress. 8-10 reps for muscle building. You line it all out with a ruler. You haven’t lined anything out since primary school. You stick it up on your wall with sticky tape. You don’t care if the paint comes off. This is more important. So you start feeling better. You copy/paste the url from the 8 minute ab video into http://www.youtube-mp3.org/ so you can listen to it on your iPhone whenever. Then you’re girlfriend comes around. She asks if you’ve been working out because you still have a pump in your biceps. (https://youtu.be/PPVBYI4N3Js ).  You say that you have. You have sex. By day three you’re doing pretty good, thinking how you’ve wasted so much time not doing this. But it hasn’t fixed all your problems. And you’re still skinny as fuck. But you don’t feel as bad wasting time on the internet, you’ve had a productive day. It takes about two weeks for you to drop a day doing weights or running. It’s because of uni assignments. You’ve left it late. But you’ll start up your weight routine again straight after you finish. While you procrastinate you become certain that 9/11 was an inside job https://youtu.be/hgrunnLcG9Q . Then you start looking into Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and you think that it would be cool to be a hacker, although you’re not exactly sure what that would entail. But it seems important. You search up “hacker” on google. A whole bunch of Matrix images with that green number streams. Then you read about hacking on Wikipedia and come across this page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28hobbyist%29 and this line “Dartmouth College musician Larry Polansky states: "Technology and art are inextricably related. Many musicians, video artists, graphic artists, and even poets who work with technology—whether designing it or using it—consider themselves to be part of the 'hacker community.” Poets. You try looking up Hacker poetry but get this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Hacker instead.  What does it even mean to be a hacker poet? You find this http://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/nelson_game.html which is strange and you can’t be bothered reading the little pop ups. But maybe there’s something in all of this. Maybe this is what you’ll do from now on. You will start to exist on the internet. Start creating yourself. But how to be different. You find this http://stanford.edu/~mkagen/codepoetryslam/#1.1_bacot but you still don’t get it. You don’t know anything about coding or perl. But you know what a hypertext is. So you find out about hypertext fiction. You read Sunshine 69 but you think its shit, the interface and writing is horrible, but you realise it was made in the internet’s early days. But you like the idea. There’s something to all this. You stumble across something called the Proteus effect, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus_effect . This is it. This is what you want to do. Reinvent yourself. You want to belong to the internet. You want to take it to the extreme. So you start creating yourself again. Nothing is yours. First you need a name. http://www.mess.be/inickgenwuname.php . Then you need to look like someone, or something. You type your new name into here http://www.avatar-generator.com/ .  One of the images is of someone’s face. You don’t know who. It’ll do though. You’re not the one making decisions. You crop the face. Then add your new name as the text. This is someone like you, but not you. You will be different. There is a lot to be learnt from this new you. But there is more. You type your last name into Google and click the first link. You’re not sure how this relates to you directly. But you will. But where to be you? Where to express yourself? https://tablo.io/ . Make an account. Write your story.