NOTHING FELT
NORMAL ANYMORE.NOTHING FELT
NORMAL
ANYMORE.

NORMAL

I don’t know exactly when normal stopped feeling normal.

Maybe that’s because nothing happened all at once.

There wasn’t one giant event that suddenly made everything obvious.

It was smaller than that.

And somehow, that made it worse.

Most days, I didn’t want to leave my house.

Some days, I was afraid to be inside it.

That’s what the beginning of this actually felt like.

Chaos.

Not because I understood what was happening.

Because I didn’t.

I didn’t know who.

I didn’t know why.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for.

Every waking moment seemed to produce another question.

And the biggest one was probably the simplest:

Why would anybody be doing this to me?

I’d spent the last few years being quiet.

My circle was tiny.

I barely had friends.

There wasn’t some obvious person from my past I could point to and say:

There. That’s who would do this.

I wasn’t publicly fighting with anybody.

I wasn’t exposing anybody.

I wasn’t trying to interfere with anybody else’s life.

I was trying to raise my son.

Make money.

Build something.

Move forward.

Again.

And yet somehow, nothing around me felt normal anymore.

When I say nothing, I mean nothing.

Walking my dogs.

Going to the dog park.

Going to the gym.

Going downstairs to pick up a package.

Taking out the garbage.

Trying to work.

Trying to relax.

Being home.

Leaving home.

Whatever normal even means...

I wanted it back.

TECHNOLOGY

Technology wasn’t something I eventually started wondering about.

It was one of the first things I noticed.

Even before I moved, something about my phone, internet and devices didn’t feel right to me.

At first, I didn’t understand what I was noticing.

I definitely didn’t understand how it could be happening.

But technology was where a lot of my questions started.

I had already been talking to a friend about my phone and internet before the move.

After I moved, it became harder to ignore.

So I started trying to isolate the problem myself.

I unplugged my Wi-Fi.

I changed devices.

I sold devices.

Brand-new iPhones.

MacBooks.

At one point, I even got a temporary new phone number just to see if that changed anything.

I was basically running my own increasingly desperate troubleshooting experiment.

New device.

New number.

No Wi-Fi.

Different connection.

Does anything change?

I wasn’t doing this because I enjoyed making my own life incredibly inconvenient.

I was trying to understand what I was experiencing.

Eventually, I went even further.

I studied cybersecurity and took an exam.

Not because I suddenly wanted a career in cybersecurity.

I wanted enough basic knowledge to understand what was technically possible and what wasn’t.

That’s how much this was affecting me.

I wanted to use my phone without questioning it.

I wanted to sit down at a computer and work.

I wanted technology to become boring again.

MY CAR

Then there was my car.

The tires kept getting nails in them.

Not once.

Not twice.

There were periods when it felt like it was happening multiple times a month.

One tire became so flat that I had to have the car towed.

Then there were smaller things.

At one point, the lettering identifying the model of my vehicle was just...

gone.

And then there was the pamphlet.

During the period when I was frantically selling and replacing devices, I came out of the mall and walked back to my car.

There was a pair of shoes outside beside it.

Was this a threat?

Then I got inside.

There was a pamphlet inside my car that I hadn’t put there.

From what I remember, it was religious and mentioned something about depression.

I didn’t know who put it there.

I didn’t know how it got inside.

I didn’t know whether the shoes outside had anything to do with it.

I just knew the pamphlet wasn’t mine.

Could I tell you who was responsible for any of these things?

No.

Could I tell you why they happened?

No.

I could tell you that they happened.

And by then, every unexplained thing was landing inside a brain already carrying everything else.

OUTSIDE

Outside wasn’t better.

I rarely felt completely alone.

People would sometimes say things that seemed strangely connected to something I had previously talked about.

Sometimes I’d encounter people who strongly reminded me of people I knew or had known.

Then there were people actually from my life.

Family.

Friends.

People I hadn’t seen in years.

Even people I knew only casually.

Sometimes I came away from those interactions feeling like they knew things about my past that I didn’t remember telling them.

And eventually I started wondering:

What have you already heard about me?

There was one moment I remember particularly clearly.

I looked outside my building and saw a man standing in a parking lot in broad daylight.

He bowed toward me.

Not a casual head nod.

A traditional Korean bow.

Because of my cultural background and the contexts in which I associated that gesture, I interpreted it as threatening.

I can’t tell you what that man intended.

I can tell you what went through my head:

What the fuck is happening?

And eventually all of these interactions led to another question.

WHAT VERSION OF ME HAD ARRIVED BEFORE I DID?

I didn’t have an answer.

I just knew I was starting to feel like I was walking into rooms where an introduction had already happened without me.

THE LIST GOES ON

And this is where I could keep going.

Seriously.

The list goes on and on.

There were the smaller things.

Noise, for example.

If there was a floor above wherever I was staying, there would be banging.

Running.

Heavy things dropping.

Sometimes it seemed to follow wherever I was in the unit.

Bedroom.

Living room.

Wherever I happened to be trying to work or relax.

I experienced similar patterns in different places I stayed, and eventually I became convinced the disruption was deliberate.

But imagine trying to explain that to somebody.

Someone upstairs keeps making noise.

Okay.

People have shitty neighbours.

That’s the problem.

Some incidents sound so insignificant written down that I almost feel ridiculous mentioning them.

And then there were things that weren’t small at all.

My dog was hit by a speeding car in a quiet residential neighbourhood.

She died.

I’m not going to tell you that I know why that happened.

I don’t.

I don’t need to assign a motive to explain what losing her did to me.

I was already exhausted.

Already confused.

Already struggling to understand why ordinary life suddenly felt so difficult.

And then I lost my dog.

Some things don’t need another explanation to hurt.

They just hurt.

I could probably fill this entire file with individual incidents.

I’m not going to.

Some matter later.

Some still don’t have explanations.

Because eventually, the individual incidents stop being the point.

A noise.

A tire.

A stranger.

A device.

Something inside your car.

Someone saying something that feels a little too specific.

Individually, almost everything can have another explanation.

And I spent a lot of time giving things exactly that.

Another explanation.

Then another.

Then another.

Because I wanted to believe there was one.

But you don’t live through an accumulation one incident at a time.

You live all of it at once.

Every new thing arrives carrying every unexplained thing that came before it.

Eventually, I started anticipating the next thing before anything had even happened.

That’s when seemingly small things became psychologically exhausting.

Most days, I didn’t want to leave home.

Other days, I was afraid to be there.

Your home is supposed to be where you retreat when the outside world becomes too much.

Where exactly are you supposed to retreat to when neither place feels like a retreat?

PEACE, NOT CLARITY

Eventually, I started contacting people I thought might possibly know what was happening.

They didn’t.

Some told me I should contact the authorities if things were getting that bad.

I didn’t.

I kept thinking:

What exactly am I supposed to tell them?

Someone upstairs is making noise?

I keep getting nails in my tires?

Something appeared inside my car?

My devices don’t feel private?

People keep saying things that seem too specific?

I could already hear how it sounded.

I imagined somebody creating a file, deciding I sounded insane and moving on.

Maybe I was right about that.

Maybe I wasn’t.

But that’s what I believed at the time.

And I didn’t want to spend my life trying to convince people that something was wrong.

That’s something I want to make very clear.

I wasn’t asking for answers.

I wasn’t asking to understand every person.

Every connection.

Every strange interaction.

Every motive.

I didn’t need clarity.

I wanted peace.

I wanted whatever was happening to stop.

So I tried ignoring it.

I tried explaining things away.

I changed devices.

I moved.

I focused on my son.

I focused on family.

I focused on getting my life back to feeling normal.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Every time I thought:

Fine. I’m moving on.

something else seemed to pull my attention back.

Looking back, I came to believe that at least some of what I was experiencing was deliberate.

That conclusion came later.

This part of the story isn’t about proving that conclusion.

It’s about explaining what it was like before I had one.

Because if I had known exactly who was responsible for what and why, at least I would’ve had something concrete to deal with.

I didn’t.

I had questions.

All day.

Every day.

About things that individually sounded too small to explain why they were affecting me so much.

I tried very hard to ignore them.

I tried very hard to move on.

And for a long time, I would’ve happily accepted never understanding any of it if everything would simply stop.

It didn’t.