Not birthday day. Birthday month. The whole of July was treated as a personal holiday where I was both the host and the guest of honor. I have celebrated my birthday the way some people celebrate Christmas — with advance notice, a general atmosphere of festivity, and the quiet understanding that the people around me would be participating whether they planned to or not.

I liked it. I genuinely liked it.

I want to be clear about this before I say what comes next. I am not someone who has always hated birthdays. I am not a person who finds the whole thing performative and exhausting in principle. For most of my life, I was the other kind of person entirely. The one who leaned in.

This year, something happened.

A lot of things, actually.

I lost things this year.

I’m not going to list them here because some losses don’t belong in a list. They belong in the kind of quiet you carry around with you, the weight you’re still in the middle of, the grief that hasn’t finished yet and keeps reminding you of that fact at inconvenient hours.

What I will say is that when you lose things — real things, significant things — you don’t just lose the things themselves. You lose the version of yourself that existed in relation to them. And I haven’t fully found her replacement yet. I’m not sure I’m done looking. I’m not sure I’m ready to stop grieving the one I had before.

Which means right now, at the end of June, with July approaching the way it always does — confident, expecting to be celebrated — I am standing here looking at this birthday and thinking:

Celebrate what, exactly?

I don’t mean that the way it sounds. Or maybe I do. I mean it the way you mean something when you’re being honest with yourself at a slightly uncomfortable hour, and there’s no one around to soften it for you.

I am not proud of where I am right now. I don’t feel like a version of myself worth throwing a party for. The things I lost took something with them when they left, and what’s here in their place is still figuring out what it is, and I don’t want to put a candle on that and ask people to clap.

Here is what makes it worse:

I have a reputation.

Years of birthday month have established, in the minds of the people who know me, that I am someone who receives celebration well. Who shows up to the dinner, glad that everyone came. Who is, in July specifically, the most available version of herself — open, warm, present, grateful.

People love that version of me.

And this year, I am going to have to explain that I don’t know where she went.

Or — and this is more likely — I won’t explain anything. I’ll find her and put her on. I’ll smile at the right moments, be grateful in the right register, and perform the joy that everyone is expecting because they have based their expectations on every previous July they’ve known me.

And the whole time, underneath it, there will be this:

A quiet sadness with no clear explanation. A grief still in progress. A version of myself I’m not finished mourning yet, being asked to celebrate the version that came after.

I don’t know how to do that, honestly.

I don’t know if I can do it at all.

What I actually want is for July to pass like a regular month.

For the day to come and go like a Tuesday. Unremarked. Uncelebrated. For the people who love me to love me in some way that doesn’t require me to perform okayness I don’t fully have yet. For the calendar to just move on. The way it does for every other day that isn’t dressed up as a thing.

I know this is a lot to ask.

I know it will not happen.

I know someone will plan something, and I will go, and it will be fine, and everyone will think I had a good time, and maybe a part of me will even mean it.

But another part of me will be sitting very still inside all of it, waiting for August.

Just waiting for it to be over.

Waiting to go back to the quiet, where I can keep grieving what I lost at my own pace, without a birthday standing in the middle of it, asking me to feel something else.

I don’t have a resolution to offer.

I don’t have a lesson with a ribbon on it. I’m not going to end this by deciding to choose joy or reframe what this year meant or find the growth in the grief. Maybe later. Maybe August. Maybe next July, when I’ve had more time, and the losses have settled into something I know how to carry instead of something I keep tripping over.

For now, I just have this:

July is coming.

I am, for the first time in my life, asking it not to.

Not because I’ve given up. Not because I want sympathy or for anyone to tiptoe around me. But because I’m still in the middle of something, and a birthday is the worst possible time to be in the middle of something. It shows up and demands a verdict on a year that hasn’t finished being prosecuted yet. It wants you to stand up and say: here’s what I learned, here’s who I am, here’s what I’m grateful for.

And I’m standing here with my hands empty, going: I don’t know yet. I don’t know yet. Can you come back later?

It won’t.

It never does.

So July will arrive, and I will still be here, mid-grief, mid-figuring-it-out, not particularly proud of the version of myself I’m bringing to this birthday. And people will celebrate me. And I will let them. And I will smile the right amount.

And I will be waiting, the whole time, for it to be over.

— Juju

Buy me a snack here if this found you somewhere in the middle of something, too. I’ll use it to make it to August.

Ben grew up in a family where every problem was solved immediately.

Broken chair? Fix it.

Leaking faucet? Fix it.

Someone mentions they’re tired?

“Go take a nap.”

Someone says they’re stressed?

“Quit your job.”

His family believed advice was the highest form of love. Why would you listen to a problem if you already knew the solution?

So when Ben entered society, people kept getting upset with him.

His girlfriend once said, “Work has been exhausting lately.”

Ben replied, “Then stop volunteering for extra projects.”

She stared at him.

“What?”

“I wasn’t asking for a solution.”

“Then why did you tell me?”

Apparently, that was the wrong answer.

Later, a friend complained about gaining weight. Ben spent twenty minutes explaining meal prep. The friend got offended.

A coworker said he was having relationship issues. Ben made a PowerPoint with charts. The coworker never spoke to him again.

Ben was baffled.

People kept bringing him problems and then getting angry when he solved them. It was like calling a plumber and being furious about plumbing.

Then one day, he visited his parents.

At dinner, his mother sighed.

“I’m getting older.”

Ben’s father immediately replied.

“Start exercising.”

His mother rolled her eyes.

A few minutes later, his father complained.

“My back hurts.”

His mother answered.

“Stretch more.”

Then his sister joined in.

“My apartment is freezing.”

His father said, “Buy thicker curtains.”

His brother said, “I hate my boss.”

His mother said, “Find a new job.”

Nobody got offended. Nobody argued. Everyone nodded and continued eating.

For the first time, Ben realized something.

His family wasn’t having conversations. They were running a live customer support center.

A week later, his girlfriend came home looking exhausted.

“I had the worst day.”

Ben opened his mouth.

Then stopped. This was his chance.

He remembered what society had been trying to teach him. So he sat beside her and listened. For twenty minutes, she explained everything. He nodded, made sympathetic noises and didn’t offer a single solution.

When she finished, she smiled.

“Thank you.”

Ben felt proud. Finally, He understood. He was learning how normal people communicated.

Then she added:

“So what do you think I should do?”

Ben nearly fell off the couch. Because after spending thirty years believing society was wrong, he discovered society had been bluffing the entire time.

Everybody wanted advice.

They just wanted to complain first.

I know how that sounds. That’s exactly what a pessimist would say. But hear me out, because there is a meaningful difference between someone who thinks everything will go wrong and someone who has simply done the math and is telling you, calmly, what the math says. One of those people is being irrational. The other one is me. And I am being punished for it.

This is a post about what happens to you when you are consistently, demonstrably, inconveniently correct about things. Spoiler: it is not a promotion. It is not a trophy. It is more work, carries no credit, and you'll be in the front row watching others react to outcomes you predicted out loud, in writing, with timestamps.

You’re welcome, by the way.

Let me walk you through the career trajectory of someone who Gets Things Right.

Stage 1: You deliver.

Great. People notice. You get assigned more things to deliver. Nobody asks if you want more things. That’s not part of the process.

Stage 2: You become the benchmark.

This is where it gets fun. Your output — the thing you produced by working yourself into a corner and emerging with something decent — is now The Standard. Other people’s work gets measured against it. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes in rooms you’re not in. You find out when someone tells you, as a compliment, that your name came up in a meeting as an example of how to do it.

Cool. And my raise is where, exactly?

Stage 3: You make one mistake.

This is the stage nobody warns you about. Because the mistake — any mistake, small, medium, a completely normal human error — lands differently when you are The Benchmark. The person who hasn’t delivered since March gets a “don’t worry about it.” You get concerned. You get people checking in with a specific energy that suggests they are quietly revising their understanding of reality. You get the whole thing.

The bar you set is now a weapon pointed at you. Congratulations.

Stage 4: nobody checks on you.

Because you’re fine. Obviously, you’re fine. You’re always fine. You said “I’m fine” that one time, and it has been logged, filed, and cited as precedent ever since. The people who visibly struggle have people in their corners, structures built around them, someone asking how they’re doing on a Tuesday for no reason. You have the assumption that you’ve already handled it.

And you have to be clear. But not because it was easy. Because you handled it at 11 pm alone while the rest of the world was asleep, then showed up the next morning looking fine, which everyone took as confirmation that you were fine, completing the cycle.

This is also not only a work problem, which is the thing I’ve had to sit with lately.

I go to therapy. I do the work. Not because someone told me to — because I know myself well enough to know what I need and I go get it. So when I tell someone close to me that I can’t carry a particular thing in a relationship, I don’t mean “I haven’t thought about it.” I mean, I have thought about it, brought it to a professional, turned it over seventeen times, and concluded that this specific thing is outside what I can hold right now. That’s not a feeling. That’s a finding.

And here’s the thing about going to therapy long enough and consistently enough — you stop being a mystery to yourself. Not in a fixed, healed, finished kind of way. In a I know exactly which part of me is breaking and why kind of way. I know what works for me and what doesn’t. I know the difference between discomfort I can grow through and a wall I will run into at full speed and not come out of okay. I have years of evidence. I have patterns. I have a whole internal documentation system that most people don’t bother to build because it’s uncomfortable to look at yourself that closely.

So when I tell you something isn’t working — I am not guessing. I am reporting.

What usually happens: I get left in the dark while everyone tries to figure out what to do about a problem I already diagnosed, and they’re not sure I was serious about.

When I tell my family I can’t carry on anymore, I mean I cannot carry on anymore. Not “I need a pep talk.” Not “reassure me and I’ll be fine.” I mean the thing I said. I know what I can take. I know what I’ll struggle to take. I know what I need more preparation for, and I know what is, right now, genuinely not possible. I have been aware of my own interior since I was old enough to pay attention to it. It is the one thing I am never wrong about.

And yet.

The response I get most often — at work, at home, everywhere — is: have you considered being more optimistic?

I’m sorry. I want to make sure I understood that correctly. You’re telling me — the person who correctly identified the problem, correctly assessed her own limits, correctly predicted the outcome, and is now standing in front of you having been correct about all of it — that the issue was my attitude?

That’s fascinating. That’s genuinely one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever heard.

Here’s what I’ve figured out about why this happens.

People don’t know what to do with a solvable problem that they can’t solve. When the person who usually solves things says, “I can’t solve this one,” the options are: believe her and figure out another solution, or decide she’s being dramatic and wait for her to solve it anyway. Option two requires less effort and has historically paid off, so. You see the logic.

The optimism note isn’t really about optimism. It’s about comfort. My accurate assessment makes people uncomfortable, because if I’m right — and I am, I’m always right, that’s the whole premise of this post — then there is a real problem that requires real action. “Be more positive” is a way of making the problem go away without doing anything about it.

It’s very creative. I’ll give them that.

I’m not asking to be rescued. I’m not even asking for much.

I’m asking to be taken at my word.

That’s it. Not managed. Not handed a reframe like it’s a gift when it’s actually a dismissal. Not met with “have you tried looking on the bright side” when the bright side is not the relevant side right now. Just — taken at my word. By the people at work who benefit from my output. By the people at home who benefit from my stability. By anyone who has ever leaned on my accuracy and then looked confused when I applied it to myself.

I have done the internal work. I know the difference between a feeling and a finding. When I tell you something — about a project, about a relationship, about what I can and cannot carry right now — I am giving you information. Accurate, considered, hard-won information from someone who has spent years learning to read herself correctly.

Treat it like information.

The sky is blue. I know what I can carry. These facts live in the same category for me.

What I haven’t figured out yet is why the people who benefit most from my accuracy are also the most committed to not trusting it.

Maybe they’re optimists.

Hungkydory by Juju. You know where to find me.

This is not a clinical guide. This is a “I wish someone had told me this earlier” guide.

Let’s begin.

Therapy is not a place to be understood. It is a place to understand yourself.

This is the distinction that took me the longest to get and the one I see most people miss.

When you first start therapy, your instinct is to explain yourself. To tell the story. To present your case. To have this trained professional look at the evidence of your life and go: “Ah, yes. You make complete sense. The people around you were wrong, and here is your certificate.”

That is not what therapy is.

Your therapist is not a judge. They are not there to assign fault or validate your interpretation of events. They are there to help you see what you can’t see from inside your own head — which, if you are anything like me, is quite a lot.

The moment I started getting something real from therapy was the moment I stopped trying to make my therapist understand me and started genuinely trying to understand myself. Two different goals. Very different sessions.

You have to read. Actually read.

Your therapist will probably, at some point, recommend a book, a workbook, or an article. Read it. Don’t skim it. Don’t add it to your Goodreads and feel accomplished.

Read it, and then bring it back to the session and actually discuss it. Talk about your illness. Learn the vocabulary of what you’re carrying. Understand the mechanism, not just the feeling. There is something genuinely different that happens when you go from “I feel terrible and I don’t know why” to “I recognize this pattern and I understand what’s feeding it.” The second version gives you somewhere to stand.

You cannot work on something you haven’t taken the time to understand.

You have to do the homework. Even the embarrassing homework.

CBT gives you homework. Thought records. Behavioral experiments. Worksheets that feel vaguely like something you’d do in a personal development seminar you didn’t want to attend.

Do them.

I know. It’s a lot. You’re busy. You’ll do it later. You’ll think about it instead of writing it down.

But thinking about it instead of writing it down is exactly how you continue thinking the same things forever without anything shifting. The writing is the work. The writing is where you actually catch yourself in the act of the pattern — the catastrophizing, the all-or-nothing thinking, the way you have decided in advance how things are going to go.

You cannot think your way out of a pattern you haven’t made visible yet.

Write it down.

And then actually do what they tell you to do.

This sounds obvious. It is apparently not obvious.

Your therapist will at some point tell you to sleep eight hours. To move your body. To do the creative thing you keep saying you don’t have time for. To go outside. To eat something real.

These are not suggestions they make because they ran out of clinical things to say. They are part of the treatment.

I paint. My therapist knows I paint. There have been sessions where she essentially assigned me to paint something and then write down what I felt while doing it — not the painting itself, but the emotional data of the process. Did I feel relief? Resistance? Did I keep stopping? Did I lose track of time?

That information matters. It is not a fun activity recommendation. It is an observation tool.

The same goes for sleep, exercise, diet — the boring infrastructure stuff that everyone knows they should do and very few people do consistently. When I started actually tracking it, I realized how directly my Ruby volume correlated with how badly I’d slept that week, whether I’d been moving my body, and whether I’d been eating. The correlation is uncomfortable to admit because it means some of it is, in part, in my hands. Not all of it. Never all of it. But some of it.

Do the thing they tell you to do.

Now let’s talk about medication. Because movies lied to us.

If you’ve seen any film or show where a character starts medication, you know the scene: they take the pill, the lighting gets warmer, they smile at a butterfly, they are now fixed and functional.

That is not medication.

Medication is: this one made me nauseous for three weeks straight. This one took away my appetite so thoroughly that I had to set alarms to remind myself to eat. This one gave me brain fog so heavy that I would sit at my desk and genuinely not be able to locate a thought. This one did nothing at all, which almost felt worse because at least side effects are a response.

Finding the right medication — the right type, the right dose, the right combination — takes time, and it’s uncomfortable, and it requires you to develop a skill you didn’t ask to develop: learning to read your own body carefully enough to know whether what you’re feeling is a mood swing or a medication failure. Learning to differentiate “this is Ruby being loud” from “this is actually a chemical reaction that isn’t working and I need to call my doctor.”

That distinction matters enormously. Getting it wrong in either direction costs you.

I’ve had to learn to track myself like a project. How did I sleep? What did I eat? When did I take what? Is this feeling attached to anything external, or did it arrive from nowhere? Nowhere usually means medication needs reviewing.

Nobody tells you this part. The part where you become a careful, slightly obsessive chronicler of your own neurochemical weather patterns. It’s not glamorous. It’s also necessary.

The last thing, and nobody wants to say it out loud:

Mental healthcare is expensive.

Therapy is expensive. Psychiatry appointments are expensive. Medication is expensive. The good practitioners — the ones who actually have the capacity to do their jobs well and follow up properly — are expensive. The books cost money. The time costs money. If you have to miss work to attend appointments, that costs money, too.

This is not a personal failing. This is a systemic problem that exists independently of how much you want to get better.

I’m not going to pretend to have a solution to this. I don’t. What I will say is: if cost is the thing standing between you and proper care, that is a legitimate barrier, not an excuse, and it deserves to be named clearly rather than just silently dropped from the conversation.

And if cost is not the barrier — if you have access and are choosing not to use it properly — then please, use it properly.

Because therapy is a skill. It takes time to learn. It requires effort that is boring and slow, and doesn’t make good content.

But it’s the kind of work that, eventually, changes the actual life you’re living. Not just how you talk about it online.

You have to actually want to change.

I was wrong about myself in approximately forty-seven different directions.

I’m working on it.

— Juju 🖤

For those who are new here: Ruby is what I call my depression. Not because I think naming it makes it cute or manageable or a fun personality quirk. I named it because it helped me separate what I am from what I carry. Ruby is the tenant who never pays rent and rearranges my furniture at 2 AM. I am the person who lives in the apartment.

Ruby is loud, and I am tired, and I am also watching people perform a version of what I actually live — and I need to talk about it.

There is a very specific type of person who has appeared on my timeline in the last few years. They post things like: “My anxiety is so bad today lol” underneath a flawlessly lit selfie. They describe themselves as “neurodivergent” in their bio next to three other adjectives that are also personality aesthetics. They use “I’m so depressed” the way other people use “I’m so bored.” Casually. Decoratively. As punctuation.

And look. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have access to anyone’s medical history. Maybe some of these people are genuinely struggling and expressing it badly. That’s allowed. That’s human.

But some of them — and you know exactly who I mean — are not struggling. They are branding.

Mental illness has become an aesthetic. A way to seem deep. A shorthand for “I am sensitive and complicated, and you should find that interesting.” And the ecosystem around it — the TikToks, the infographics, the “this is your sign to rest” content — has made it so easy to self-diagnose, self-label, and self-present as someone who is going through something, without ever actually going through anything.

I know what going through something looks like.

It looks like Ruby is at 3 AM, making a convincing argument that nothing will ever get better. It looks like cancelling plans, not because I want a cozy night in, but because leaving the house requires negotiating with a part of my brain that has decided today is not safe. It looks like being in a room full of people who love me and feeling completely, inexplicably, unreachably alone.

It doesn’t look like a caption.

Here’s what bothers me most, and I want to be precise about this because I think it matters: it’s not just the aestheticization that’s the problem. It’s what it does to the actual work.

Because living with real mental illness — diagnosed, documented, medicated, therapized — requires actual work. And that work is boring and slow and deeply unsexy. You sit in a room with a professional and say uncomfortable things out loud. You identify patterns. You get assigned homework that feels embarrassing. You make small, incremental changes that nobody sees and that don’t make good content.

Therapy is not a vibe. It is a skill. You have to learn how to do it.

And here’s the thing I’ve noticed about the people who use mental illness as personality: when they go to therapy — if they go — they get very little out of it. Not because therapy doesn’t work. Because they don’t know how to do it, they go and talk and perform their sadness and leave feeling vaguely seen, and then nothing changes, and they tell everyone therapy isn’t for them.

Because they went to therapy expecting to be understood. Not to be changed.

That’s not therapy. That’s an audience.

I’m not saying this to be cruel. I’m saying this because the confusion between expressing struggle and doing the work is actually harming. It’s filling up spaces — online and in real life — with a performance of mental illness that makes it harder for people who are actually drowning to be taken seriously. It contributes to this ambient idea that mental health is a personality layer you add or remove depending on how you want to be perceived.

It is not.

Ruby doesn’t care how she photographs.

She doesn’t take days off because I have something fun planned. She doesn’t get quieter when my life looks good on paper. She is not a metaphor I reach for when I want to seem interesting. She is a condition I manage, imperfectly, every day, with actual tools and actual effort and actual professional help.

You are allowed to struggle. You are allowed to talk about it. You are allowed to not be okay.

But please, for the love of everything — stop wearing my illness as a costume while the rest of us are trying to live in it.

— Juju 🖤

Let me describe a person I have met approximately one thousand times.

They don’t collect anything. They don’t play anything. They have no investment — emotional, historical, or otherwise — in the thing they are about to queue for two hours. But they saw a Reel of someone looking incredibly cool doing the thing. The person in the Reel had the right tote bag, the right energy, the right lighting. The thing looked like the kind of thing people who have personality do.

And so now they’re here.

At Comifuro. At Brightspot. At the Pokémon event. At whatever gathering was, until very recently, a safe space for people who have been into the thing since before it was a content category.

They are here, and they are already disappointed.

Because here is the problem with arriving somewhere because of the aesthetic of it: reality does not perform for you. The card you wanted is sold out. The queue is not cinematic. The crowd is not curated. The artist alley smells like Jakarta in June, which is to say: aggressively. Nobody handed you a lifestyle when you walked through the doors.

And then — and this is the part that I find genuinely fascinating from a social behavior standpoint — they complain.

They complain that it’s too crowded. They complain that the merchandise is expensive. They complain that the community is gatekeeping (the community that has been here for years, attending the same event you just discovered last month, is suddenly expected to immediately integrate you and make you feel welcome while you’re also criticizing everything about them, but sure, continue). They complain that it’s not as fun as it looked in the video.

It’s not as fun as it looked in the video because the video was made for you to replicate. It was made by someone who has spent years building a relationship with the thing. The joy in that video is not available for purchase at the door.

You cannot buy the feeling. You have to earn it. That takes time.

Here’s the thing about Comifuro that people who have never earned it don’t understand: that event is a homecoming. It is the annual event where people who have spent the rest of the year being niche in a city that doesn’t always make room for them get to be in one building where their specific, detailed, sometimes extremely obscure love for something is completely normal. People save money for months. They design booths. They spend weeks on cosplay. They are there because the thing they love is real, and it has a community, and that community has a place where it gathers.

And then FOMO culture found it.

And now it is also a content location. A checkpoint. A box to tick on the “I am a person with interesting hobbies” list.

Brightspot? Same story. What started as a market for independent local creatives — people making things with their hands, running small labels, showing work — has been absorbed into the aesthetic economy of Jakarta. Now people come not to buy but to be seen buying. They take photos of things. They don’t always buy the things. The photographers outnumber the purchasers at a ratio that should make every independent seller want to lie down.

The Pokémon events — look, I already wrote that whole letter. You know how I feel.

And while we are here: the coffee situation.

Because I have been holding this in, and I refuse to hold it anymore.

Jakarta’s specialty coffee scene — which is built by people who actually care about origin, roast profile, and extraction, people who treat a cup of coffee with the same seriousness that a winemaker treats a vintage — has also been discovered by the aesthetic economy.

Which means we now have people showing up to specialty coffee events, ordering a single-origin pour-over, taking a photo of it, taking one sip, and then complaining.

That’s too strong.

Too bitter.

“Why doesn’t it taste sweet?”

Because it is coffee. It is not an iced caramel situation. It was never marketed to you as an iced caramel situation. The person who made it spent years learning to make it taste exactly like this, and “exactly like this” is not the same as the brown sugar drink you get from the app with the bear logo.

You came to a specialty coffee event because someone on your timeline made it look like a personality. You ordered something you had no context for because it looked good in the photo. And now you are standing there, mildly betrayed by a beverage that did nothing wrong, leaving a Google review that says “too intense, not for everyone.”

It was for someone. Just not for you. And that is okay. But the coffee did not fail you. You arrived at the wrong party and blamed the host.

This is the FOMO problem in its purest form: the experience was never built around you. It was built by and for people who already love the thing. You cannot walk into someone else’s homecoming and be disappointed that it doesn’t feel like your homecoming.

Go back to your sweet drink. Genuinely, no judgment. But please stop leaving reviews.

Here’s what I want to say underneath all of this.

Because there is something real underneath all of this.

The people who come for the aesthetic and leave disappointed are not evil. They are just operating inside a city that has made FOMO its primary personality.

Jakarta has a very specific social energy around activities and hobbies. The question is never just “do you like this thing?” The question is always: “Does this thing make you look like the right kind of person?” Hobbies are social currency. Events are proof of life. The fear of missing out is so baked into how we move through this city that people will queue for two hours at something they have no context for because the alternative is being the person who wasn’t there.

That’s exhausting. I feel that. I am not immune to it.

But the cost of that FOMO is absorbed by the communities that built these spaces before they were attractive to everyone. They lose the intimacy. They lose the safety of being niche in the same place. They gain crowds who leave bad reviews on Google Maps because the thing they came for on a whim wasn’t exactly what they’d imagined.

I don’t have a clean solution. Jakarta is going to Jakarta. FOMO is going to FOMO.

I just want to say — on behalf of everyone who learned what these things were before they were aesthetics, who has been attending these events before they were sellouts, who genuinely, deeply, specifically loves the thing and still shows up even when the line is two hours and the venue is out of cold water:

We see you. The real ones.

The rest of you: please do your research before you complain about a community that was here before you arrived and will still be here after the content opportunity has passed.

Juju out. Again.

— Juju 🖤

I loved it enough to make my own card game inspired by it. I studied the mechanics. I admired the design philosophy. I sat with the artwork and thought about what made it work — the balance, the strategy, the way a well-designed card can feel like a tiny piece of art you can also play with. I took all of that admiration, and I built something from it. That is not something you do for a thing you casually like. That is something you do for a thing that genuinely moves you.

So when I tell you this community broke my excitement — understand what that means. This isn’t a casual fan shrugging and moving on. This is someone who loved the game enough to be shaped by it, walking away with nothing but disappointment and a very long list of grievances.

I just wanted to also participate in the thing I loved. To buy cards at a normal price, play the actual game, and be part of a community that shared that joy. Simple. Human. Reasonable.

Instead, I got an education in how a community can collectively agree to make something miserable and call it a culture.

So here we are.

Let’s Talk About the Scalpers, Shall We?

Because apparently, in our-Lord-Jesus year of 2026, buying a Pokémon card at its actual retail price is now a privilege reserved for people who either wake up at 3 am to camp an online drop, or know a guy who knows a guy who has “connections.”

In Indonesia? Oh, it’s even better. You don’t just get scalpers — you get scalpers who will look you in the eye (or DM you with zero shame) and charge you 3x the price for a booster pack, and then act like they’re doing you a favor by even responding. Like you should be grateful they’re willing to take your money at a 300% markup for a piece of cardboard.

I just wanted to buy a card. A normal card. At a normal price. From a normal store. Is that so radical? Is that too much to ask?

Apparently: yes.

The Influencer-Hype Machine is a Parasite, and I Will Die on This Hill

Here is what happens every single time a new set drops:

A wave of YouTubers and TikTokers tear open $500 worth of packs on camera, hit one (1) pull that looks exciting, and spend 15 minutes screaming about it. The algorithm amplifies it. The fandom loses its collective mind. And suddenly every card in that set — including the commons, including the ones nobody actually wants — gets “speculated” into the stratosphere before the ink is dry.

These people are not collectors. They are not players. They are hype merchants, and the product they are selling is artificial scarcity wrapped in nostalgia.

And the community? Eats it up. Every time. Without fail.

“Did you see the new pull rates?” “Did you see what that card is going for on the secondary market?” Nobody is asking: is this actually fun? Am I actually enjoying this? No. It’s all about the numbers. The market. The “investment.”

Since when did Pokémon become a stock portfolio?

The Gatekeeping is Breathtaking in Its Pettiness

God forbid you walk into this hobby as a newcomer just trying to figure things out.

You will be sorted, almost immediately, into one of two acceptable categories: the Serious Collector (who understands the market, has a PSA grading membership, and speaks fluent FOMO) or the Casual Who Doesn’t Really Get It (who will be subtly — or not so subtly — condescended to until they either conform or leave).

There is no room for someone who just thinks the art is beautiful. Who just wants to build a fun deck and play with friends. Who just wants to experience the thing that made them happy as a child, without being immediately handed a price guide and told to do their research.

The community has decided that enjoying Pokémon casually is somehow naïve. Embarrassing, even. Like you haven’t grown up enough to understand that the real game isn’t on the card — it’s in the market.

Cool. Sounds exhausting. I’ll pass.

And Then There’s the Sealed Product Gambling Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Opening packs is gambling. I know it. You know it. The companies absolutely know it.

The entire ecosystem has been engineered around the chase card — the one shiny, alt-art, full-art, hyper-rare card that is mathematically unlikely to appear in your pack but is just possible enough to keep you buying. One more pack. One more box. Maybe this time.

And instead of the community pushing back on this, instead of calling it what it is — a predatory loop designed to extract money from people using dopamine mechanics — there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to making this look fun and aspirational. Hit rates and pack odds were discussed with the enthusiasm of a casino floor manager. “Pull rates are bad this set but worth it for the chase!”

Worth it for who, exactly?

I Just Wanted to Play the Game

Here’s the part that actually hurts, underneath all this rage:

I tried to find joy in actually playing Pokémon TCG. Not investing. Not speculating. Not building a secondary market portfolio. Just playing the game, the way it was designed to be played, in a community of people who also just wanted to play.

In Indonesia, finding that space? Finding people who want to play casually, without it turning into a flex session or a market conversation or a quiet judgment of your deck’s monetary value? It is hard. It feels like the actual game — the game part of this card game — has become secondary to everything around it.

That’s not a community. That’s a market wearing a community’s skin.

So I’m Done

Not dramatically, not with a manifesto. Just quietly, the way you close a door when you realize the party stopped being fun three hours ago, and you just didn’t want to admit it.

I’m stepping away from Pokémon TCG. Not because the cards aren’t beautiful — they still are. Not because the game isn’t clever — it is. I know it’s clever. I loved it so much I built something from it. That love was real.

But the ecosystem around it has been so thoroughly colonized by scalpers, hype culture, predatory product design, and gatekeeping energy that there is no room left for someone like me. Someone who wanted to buy a card at a fair price. Someone who wanted to play a game for fun. Someone who wanted to participate in the thing she loved, not just watch it be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

I gave this community my admiration. I gave it my creativity. I gave it my money, my time, and my genuine excitement.

The community that could have welcomed me chose the market instead.

And that’s fine. I’ve got my own cards to design, watercolors to paint, and better things to love.

Juju out.

I used to have very fixed ideas about what love was supposed to look like.

Not fixed in an unrealistic, romantic-comedy way. I was not waiting for grand gestures or perfect meet-cutes or someone dramatically running through an airport holding a sign with my name on it. I journal. I do CBT. I named my depression Ruby and have spent an unreasonable amount of time analyzing patterns and trying to understand my own brain. I was not walking around wearing heart-shaped glasses and believing love would magically solve everything.

I just had a framework.

Over time, through observation and experience and all the slow work of separating what I actually needed from what I had been told I should want, I had arrived at a set of conclusions. I had built a little internal theory about relationships that felt sensible, mature, and realistic. Looking back now, I do not think the framework was wrong exactly. I think it was mostly correct.

It was just incomplete.

The problem with incomplete frameworks is that you do not know they are incomplete until reality introduces you to a variable you never planned for. And then, suddenly, the entire thing has to stretch to make room for information you did not know you were missing.

This is that post.

I used to believe that love should feel like consistency.

Not fireworks. Not electricity. Not that intense, charged feeling people always seem to describe first whenever they talk about falling in love. Somewhere along the way, I had made peace with the idea that the heart-racing, can’t-stop-thinking-about-you feeling probably was not going to be the foundation of anything I built with another person. I had quietly decided that the electric feeling was chaos wearing a romantic costume and that chaos was not what I was looking for.

What I wanted was reliability. Someone who showed up. Someone who did what they said and said what they meant. Someone who would be present in the small ways that matter much more than grand gestures, once enough time passes.

I believed this completely.

I still do, actually.

This part of the framework was right.

What I got wrong was what I thought consistency would feel like.

I thought consistency would feel neat and controlled. Predictable in the way a well-run production timeline is predictable, where everything happens exactly when it should. Functional. Reliable. Useful. I assumed excitement and stability sat on opposite ends of a scale, and choosing one meant giving up some part of the other.

I thought I was choosing the calm option.

I thought that was the trade.

What I had never considered was that consistency could feel like the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me.

Alongside the consistency belief, I also had a type. Yes, physically. But this one, what I’m talking about, is more like a general shape of a person I thought I was moving toward. Someone organized. Someone quiet. Someone who operated similarly to me. Someone who understood needing space and processing internally and disappearing into their own head sometimes.

Someone who would fit neatly into the life I had already built.

Someone who looked a lot like me.

Then the person who actually showed up was... not that.

They did not arrive pre-fitted to the shape of my life. They were not already fluent in my language or instinctively aware of how I worked or automatically equipped with the handbook explaining Ruby and thyroid issues, and card games with broken rules and the strange little world of Hungkydory.

And here is the thing I did not expect:

I wanted to teach them.

Not in a condescending way. Not in a let me explain myself because you’re not getting it kind of way. I mean, I wanted to show them the map. I wanted to explain the terrain and point at things and say, “This part matters,” and “This is why I react this way,” and “Here, let me tell you how this works.”

Because suddenly explaining myself did not feel exhausting.

It felt meaningful.

I think part of me had accidentally turned compatibility into efficiency. I thought the right relationship would require the least translation, the least friction, the least explaining. I assumed that if two people were truly right for each other, they would simply understand each other automatically.

But people are not software integrations.

Nobody arrives pre-configured for you.

Maybe compatibility is not finding someone who already speaks your language. Maybe sometimes compatibility is finding someone who keeps looking at you and saying, teach me another word.

That realization hit me harder than I expected because I had spent years assuming the right person would require the least effort. I thought love was supposed to be easy in the sense of effortless.

Instead, I found something different.

The right person does not necessarily make you want to do less work. The right person makes you want to do the work. Not because you have to, not because you are dragging the relationship uphill, but because sharing yourself with them feels like giving someone something they genuinely want to hold.

And apparently that changes everything.

Because I was right about some things.

I was right that consistency matters. I was right that showing up matters. I was right that reliability is a foundation and not some consolation prize you settle for after excitement disappears.

I was just wrong about what consistency looked like once it arrived.

I was wrong that stable meant flat. Wrong that the right person would be a quieter version of me. Wrong that the absence of chaos meant the absence of aliveness.

The framework had to expand.

It did.

Because it turns out I was never wrong about what I wanted.

I was just wrong about what it would look like when it finally arrived.

And honestly, I am glad I did not meet the person on my checklist.

I am glad I met the person who made me rewrite it.

— Juju 🖤

This is apparently what happens when you become an adult.

Nobody tells you this, but at some point, your parents start handing you objects from your own childhood like they’re transferring quest items.

“Here are your baby clothes.”

“Here are your school certificates.”

“Here is a drawing you made of a horse at age six.”

It was not a horse. I had labeled it. It said DOG.

I spent an entire Saturday on the floor sorting through photos. Birthday parties, School events, Christmases, Vacation trips, Tiny versions of me with terrible haircuts. Then, around photo number fifty, I noticed him.

A man standing in the background. Just behind us at a beach. Middle-aged maybe. Blue shirt. Smiling at the camera.

I frowned for a second and moved on.

Because random people end up in pictures all the time. Then I found him again.

Different photo.

Different year.

School carnival, this time further back, this time near a popcorn stand. Same blue shirt. Same smile.

I sat up a little.

Found another one. And another. And another.

Different places. Different years. Always there. Always looking at the camera.

I went cold. I brought the stack to my mom.

“Who’s this?”

She looked down.

“Who?”

“This guy.”

She stared.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

I pointed directly at him.

She frowned.

“Juju, that’s just some person.”

“No, Mom, he’s in all of these.”

“He is?”

I spread them out. All twenty-three photos. Twenty-three different moments. Twenty-three appearances.

Mom went quiet. Then she laughed nervously.

“Oh, that’s weird.”

Not the response I wanted.

Because there are two categories of weird :

There’s, haha, weird.

Then there’s closing all the windows weird.

This was category two.

That night I called my brother. I sent him pictures. Five minutes later, he replied:

“What guy?”

I stared at my phone.

“The guy in blue.”

Typing bubble.

“Are you messing with me?”

I felt my stomach drop. I zoomed in. The man was still there, clear as day.

I started scrolling through more photos, faster now.

He is on my birthday, at the beach, at the zoo, at the School. He is there on Christmas.

There he was. Always smiling. Always looking directly at the camera.

Then I noticed something worse.

In the earlier photos, he was far away. Very far. Tiny in the background. But as years passed, He got closer.

Beach photo: maybe fifty feet away.

School photo: thirty.

Birthday party: fifteen.

Family barbecue: ten.

High school graduation:

Five.

My hands started shaking. I dumped the whole box onto the floor. Hundreds of photos. I looked through all of them. And suddenly I understood why my heart was beating so hard, because the newest photo was from my college graduation. And he wasn’t in the background anymore.

He was standing right beside me. One arm around my shoulder. Smiling, as he belonged there, like he’d always belonged there.

I don’t remember him. Nobody does.

Yesterday I drove back to my mother’s house. I needed to show someone in person. I needed someone to tell me I was losing my mind. I spread the photos out on her dining table.

“Mom. Look.”

She looked down. Went pale immediately. Actually pale. Not confused. Not uncertain. My mom was scared.

I said, “You can see him?”

She looked at me very slowly.

Then she whispered:

“...Juju.”

I said, “What?”

And she said:

“Why are you standing next to a stranger?”

Because in every photo, I was looking directly at him. Not the camera. Him. Like I knew him. Like I had known him my entire life.

This morning I checked the mirror while brushing my teeth. I don’t know why.

I just did. And for a second, behind me, I thought I saw someone wearing blue.

And smiling.

I received my first letter when I was nineteen.

It arrived on a Tuesday, badly folded, my name written in handwriting that felt painfully familiar. I assumed it was from a friend doing something dramatic because I used to surround myself with people who thought mystery was a personality trait.

Inside was one sentence.

“Do not date Adrian.”

No explanation. Just that.

At nineteen, I laughed so hard I almost spilled coffee on it. The funny thing is, I did not know any Adrian. So I threw it away.

Three years later, I met Adrian. And because the universe apparently enjoys commitment to a bit, he was exactly my type. You know that specific type? The one where your friends look at him, look at you, and immediately say, “Oh no.”

That type.

I remembered the letter. Not immediately. Not on our first date. Not on our second. Not until month four, when I was cleaning my apartment, did I find the folded paper hiding inside an old book.

“Do not date Adrian.”

For a full minute, I just stared. Then I laughed again because what was I supposed to do? End a perfectly normal relationship because mystery stationery said so? So I ignored it again.

Adrian and I dated for two years. Then he cheated on me.

And I hate admitting this because it makes the universe look smug, but my first thought wasn’t heartbreak.

It was:

You absolute little—

_____

The next letter arrived two weeks later.

“I told you.”

At that point, I had questions, such as:

Who keeps delivering these?

Why do they know things?

And why is future me such an annoying person?

The letters kept coming after that.

“Take the job.”

“Call Mom tonight.”

“Do not buy the green couch.”

Small things. Strange things. Always right. Always in my handwriting.

Years passed. I stopped being surprised. Stopped asking where they came from. I trusted them completely.

Then last week I received another one. I opened it expecting grocery-list-level life advice.

Instead, it said:

“Do not tell anyone about the letters.”

I frowned. Because I had already told someone.

Yesterday, it was my daughter. She had asked why I always looked at the mail before opening it.

So I told her everything.

And she went quiet, really quiet.

Then she looked at me and said:

“Mom.”

“That’s weird.”

Because I have seen my own handwriting my entire life. And she was right. I looked down at the letter again. For the first time in twenty years. For the first time. I actually looked. They weren’t written in my handwriting.

They were written in hers.

I have too many things going on.

Not too many things in the way, unlike when everyone sometimes has too many things going on — the regular human experience of a full schedule, competing demands, and not enough hours in the day. That's a lot, which is normal and manageable, mostly a calendar issue.

I mean too many things in the specific, particular, very Juju way of having started approximately seven creative projects simultaneously, each existing in a different stage of incompleteness, each requiring a different kind of energy, and each genuinely important to me, which means none of them can simply be moved into a folder labeled deal with later because apparently I have never once looked at a meaningful thing and thought, actually I could care less about this.

All of them currently live in my head at the same time, like passengers who suddenly realized this is their stop and are now standing directly behind me with increasing urgency.

This is the post about that.

The Inventory

Let me document what is currently living in my head. For accountability, for transparency, and for the deeply human instinct of believing that if I organize the chaos into paragraphs, it technically stops being chaos.

The card game has printed cards now. It has been playtested. It has broken rules that I am in the process of fixing. It also needs illustrations that only I can draw because I designed the entire thing around my own art style and accidentally made myself the main bottleneck in the production pipeline.

The cards are sitting on my desk right now with the specific patience of something that knows it will eventually get done and is willing to wait, but would still appreciate an update on the timeline.

The card game is probably the most demanding thing on this list because it requires more than time. It needs a specific kind of creative energy — the kind that cannot be forced and cannot be scheduled and arrives whenever it wants, like a freelance employee with unclear availability. Recently, it has been appearing in approximately fifteen-minute increments between post-production deadlines, Hungkydory posts, and the general administrative experience of being alive.

Then there is Hungkydory, which I love and am apparently deeply committed to because I have written thirty-six posts in a relatively short amount of time, which is either impressive or concerning, depending entirely on who is evaluating the situation.

I also took three days off because Ruby got loud about my writing quality. Then I came back because this is what I do.

Hungkydory is technically the thing on this list that is most under control. It is also the thing that requires me to have thoughts, organize the thoughts, make the thoughts entertaining, and then willingly release them into the world for strangers to read. This is not effortless, even when it looks effortless.

Ask Ruby. Ruby has opinions. Ruby always has opinions. Ruby would have opinions during a hostage negotiation.

The zine exists now. The first edition exists in physical reality. People have it. Some of those people have even read it. I have stood in front of strangers while they held a folded piece of paper containing my thoughts and feelings and opened it directly in front of me, which was simultaneously terrifying and one of the best creative experiences I have had in a while.

The second edition is already forming somewhere in my brain, but in the way things form before they become real — visible enough to know it exists, not solid enough to touch yet. It is there, somewhere in the distance, quietly becoming itself while also making me nervous because second attempts always make me nervous. The first one went okay, and now there is the horrifying possibility of expectations.

Work is also here. Post-production for advertising. Deadlines that do not care about card games or zines or Hungkydory posts or my emotional state in general.

The timeline does not have feelings. The export does not care about my personal journey. The client who wants it to “pop more” at 11 pm appears to have entered a psychological space where time itself has become conceptual.

Work is always happening. It is the non-negotiable thing on the list that everything else has to fit around. Work is also still, annoyingly, the thing I love. Even while listing it as a source of overwhelm, I have to admit the work itself is good.

The work just doesn’t leave a lot of room.

I am also present in my actual life, which feels strange to write because obviously I am present in my actual life, but I think when I make lists like this, I accidentally count only the things that produce visible outcomes. The projects. The deadlines. The things with folders and files and exported versions.

But I am also a daughter, a sister, and a girlfriend. I exist inside relationships that require time and attention, and showing up in ways that do not create completed tasks I can point at afterward and say, there, done.

There is no notification that appears saying Congratulations. You have successfully fulfilled your emotional responsibilities for the week. Achievement unlocked: Emotionally Available Human Being.

Instead, there are conversations and random messages in the middle of the day. There is remembering something someone casually mentioned three weeks ago and asking about it later. There is listening when someone sounds tired. There is being mentally present when my brain is already running twelve tabs in the background, and three of them have somehow started auto-playing audio, and I cannot identify the source.

And I care about these things too. Deeply. Which means they live in my head alongside everything else, quietly and constantly.

Because apparently my brain looked at creative chaos and thought, You know what this situation needs? Human attachment.

The card game illustrations are coming. The second zine is forming. Hungkydory continues. If you want to support the chaos, go here keeps the lights on and Ruby slightly quieter. 💜

— Juju 🖤

Actually, “trend” is too soft a word. This thing has evolved into a full ecosystem. A cultural event. A recurring social ritual performed by exhausted people with WiFi and unresolved feelings about modern dating.

You’ve seen it.

A woman posts:
“Date cancelled 💅 staying home with my comfort show instead.”

And the energy of the post is not disappointment. It is a relief. Victory, even. The cancellation is framed like she escaped something. Like she narrowly avoided having to sit across from a man explaining cryptocurrency over truffle fries.

And honestly? Sometimes that probably is what happened.

Now, before anyone starts preparing a TED Talk in my comments section, let me clarify something:

Cancelling a date is fine.

You do not owe anyone a date simply because plans were made. You are allowed to wake up and realize you would rather stay home and reorganize your skincare shelf than go hear a stranger say “I’m brutally honest” like it’s a personality trait.

That part is normal.

The interesting part is the posting.

Because we have now reached a point where cancelling the date is not enough. The cancellation must also become content.

And this trend has developed genres.

There’s the soft version:
“Date cancelled, staying home with tea and my cats.”

Fine. Cozy. Harmless. The emotional equivalent of returning a sweater to the rack.

But then there’s the aggressive version.

“Date cancelled, he was short.”
“Date cancelled, he uses a motorcycle.”
“Date cancelled, he still plays Mobile Legends seriously.”
“Date cancelled, his jeans were skinny and not in an intentional way.”

At some point, the trend quietly stopped being about cancelling the date and became a public Yelp review of the man.

Three stars. Good morning texts. Concerning transportation choices.

And what fascinates me is the audience participation aspect of it. Because the comments immediately become:
“You did the right thing, girl.”
“The motorcycle part is a red flag.”
“Short men are exhausting.”

Which is incredible because ten minutes ago, none of us even knew this man existed, and now he’s being publicly evaluated like a failed restaurant opening.

Meanwhile, when men do the trend, the energy is usually weirdly lighter.

Men will post things like:
“Date cancelled, she wanted AYCE.”
“Date cancelled, she asked me what my five-year plan was.”
“Date cancelled, her coffee order had seven modifications and fear in it.”

The male version feels less like character assassination and more like a customer service complaint filed politely at 2 PM.

This is NOT me saying women are evil and men are innocent victims because I unfortunately still possess internet access and therefore understand nuance.

I just think there’s a tonal difference worth noticing.

Some of these posts are not just celebrating freedom from an unwanted date. They are performing humiliation for entertainment. The cancellation itself isn’t the full event. The man also has to become content.

And honestly? I think THAT is why some men react so intensely to the trend.

Not because a woman cancelled.
Because the cancellation became public theater.

Now. The men are responding.

Some men see these posts and move on like emotionally stable adults. Beautiful behavior. Love that for them.

Other men respond like the post personally arrived at their house, kicked down the door, and insulted their bloodline.

“This is why women are undateable.”
“Modern women are cooked.”
“Enjoy dying alone with your cats.”

Sir.

The woman in the TikTok was talking about ONE man. A specific man. A man she personally did not want to have sushi with.

You were not in the story.

You inserted yourself into the narrative like a Marvel post-credit scene and somehow left offended.

Which tells me the real issue underneath this trend is not actually the cancelled dates.

It’s exhaustion.

Everyone is tired.

Women are tired of awkward dates, emotionally unavailable men, inconsistent effort, weird vibes, and having to pretend “what music do you listen to?” is still a thrilling conversation in the year 2026.

Men are tired of ghosting, mixed signals, escalating expectations, expensive first dates that feel like job interviews, and developing feelings for someone who responds once every nine business days.

Nobody is having fun anymore.

Dating turned romance into admin work.

Modern dating now feels less like:
“Maybe I’ll meet someone wonderful.”

And more like:
“Unfortunately, I must update my emotional spreadsheets again.”

So when women celebrate cancelled dates online, I don’t actually think they’re celebrating disappointing men specifically.

I think they’re celebrating being temporarily freed from the process.

And when men react emotionally to those posts, I don’t think they’re reacting to THAT woman specifically.

I think they’re reacting to accumulated rejection, loneliness, insecurity, and the horrifying realization that romantic interest now comes with public review sections.

Two exhausted groups of people.
Both defensive.
Both are trying to turn disappointment into humor.
Both are accidentally making each other worse.

Which, now that I think about it, is also a decent summary of modern dating itself.

Personally, I’ve been on both sides.

I have cancelled dates before. I did not post about it because it genuinely did not occur to me that cancelling plans was content creation.

I have also BEEN cancelled on, which is objectively less fun.

There is a uniquely humbling experience in getting a “hey, sorry something came up” text while already mentally preparing your outfit. Character development arrives quickly in those moments.

But neither side is a personality.

The woman posting “date cancelled 💅” is not automatically cruel.
The man who got cancelled is not automatically a victim.
The men screaming in the comments like rejected Victorian poets are not helping.
And the women treating basic human traits like criminal offenses are maybe doing a little too much.

Everyone wants a connection.

Nobody wants the process anymore.

Date cancelled.
Discourse created.
Gender war resumed.
TikTok slideshow incoming with sad SZA audio and screenshots in 3… 2… 1…

Typical.

💅

If Hungkydory makes your social media discourse more bearable, you can buy me a snack here.

I will use it to continue observing internet behavior from my couch like a deeply underqualified anthropologist.

— Juju

If you noticed I was gone — thank you for noticing. If you didn’t notice, that's completely fine and very valid, and I am not going to think about it.

I want to tell you what actually happened because Hungkydory has always been the place where I tell you what actually happened. That’s the whole deal. The notes app is full of feelings that became a blog. We don’t do vague here.

So, three days. Here’s the truth.

The Official Version

The official version is: I was meeting new people and experiencing new things, and I needed the time to be present for that rather than writing about being present for that.

This is true. This happened. New people arrived in my life over the past few days in the way that new people sometimes arrive — unexpectedly, all at once, with the specific energy of experiences that haven’t finished happening yet and therefore can’t be written about properly—the kind of things that need to be lived first and processed later.

I was living them. I will write about them eventually. This is not that post.

The Real Version

The real version, which exists alongside the official version and is equally true, is this:

I got frustrated with my writing.

Not in a productive, let-me-improve kind of way. In a Ruby kind of way. The specific, insidious, very convincing Ruby voice that showed up one afternoon and said: " You know this isn’t actually good, right. You know people are being polite. You know the gap between what you’re trying to do and what you’re actually doing is visible to everyone except you.

And I made the mistake of listening for longer than I should have.

This is embarrassing to admit on a blog that is literally about naming the thing and processing it. I know. The irony is not lost on me. I have a whole post about Ruby and how she’s not the truth and how naming her creates distance. I wrote that post. I published that post. And then Ruby showed up about the post, and I believed her anyway.

This is what Ruby does. She is not fair. She does not take days off on account of you having recently written something very insightful about how she operates. She reads the post and then uses it against you. She is extremely committed to her bit.

What I Actually Did With The Three Days

I did not journal extensively about the frustration. I did not sit with it and trace it back to its root in the way my therapist would probably approve of.

I put the laptop down. I went and met people. I let new things happen. I ate good food. I played Darkest Days for longer than I should have. I let the feeling exist without writing about it, which is actually quite hard for someone whose primary coping mechanism is writing about things.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that — not dramatically, not in a single moment of clarity — the Ruby voice got quieter. Not gone. Never gone. Just quieter.

The way it always does eventually. The way I know it will, and still forget every single time it gets loud.

Why I’m Telling You This

Because Hungkydory is 30 posts old. And I want to be honest about what 30 posts actually looks like from the inside.

It does not look like confident, consistent creation. It does not look like someone who has figured it out and is now executing the plan. It looks like this — like someone who writes things she means, posts them, feels proud briefly, and then has days where Ruby convinces her none of it is good, and she needs to put the laptop down and go be a person for a while.

The not-good-enough feeling does not go away when you publish things. It finds new things to attach to. The posts become evidence for it rather than against it. This is not logical. Ruby is not interested in logic.

But I came back. I am here. I wrote this. And writing this, honestly, to you — the people who noticed I was gone, or who are reading this without having noticed, both equally valid — feels like the right next thing.

The new experiences will become posts eventually. Ruby will be loud again eventually. The laptop will get put down again eventually.

And then I’ll come back. Because this is what Hungkydory is. Not a perfect consistent output machine. Just Juju, figuring it out in public, occasionally needing three days off.

That was the three days. Now we’re back.

— Juju 🖤

Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that Hathaway Noa came down to Earth with permission to stay, specifically for mental health treatment.

He had a diagnosis. He had a treatment plan. He had, specifically, Kilia — who reminded him to take his medication. Not a vague medical support structure. An actual person, in his life, saying: Hathaway. Your meds. Take them. The kind of reminder that only exists when someone who loves you has noticed that you need it.

And then he became a terrorist.

Now. I am not saying the medication is what stood between Hathaway Noa and leading a violent anti-Federation insurgency. The political corruption, the trauma — these are also contributing factors. The man had a lot going on.

But I am saying: Hathaway Noa, who came to Earth specifically to treat his depression, ended up piloting a prototype Gundam to assassinate Federation officials. And I cannot watch that story unfold without thinking about what happens to a person — any person — when the mental health support they’re supposed to be receiving gets quietly deprioritized behind everything else that feels more urgent.

I have some personal experience with this.

The Ghost Of Quess Paraya, Which Is Not Just Guilt

The way Quess Paraya appears to Hathaway throughout the film — the more I watched, the more I understood it as something specific.

Not just guilt. Not just grief. The way she appears to him at the wrong moments, demanding things, distorting his perception of what’s real and what isn’t — that’s not just trauma. That’s what untreated psychosis looks like from the inside. The thing that isn’t there but feels more real than everything that is. The voice that makes sense of the wrong things and makes the right things impossible. The presence that justifies the unjustifiable and makes the lethal decision feel like the logical one.

I know what that looks like because I have been in the worst part of depression. Bad enough that it became psychosis. Bad enough that the line between what was real and what my brain was producing got genuinely, terrifyingly blurry.

I am not in that place anymore. I want to be very clear about that. I am stable. I am medicated. Ruby is loud sometimes, but she is not Quess Paraya. There is a significant difference between a named inner critic and a full departure from reality, and I have experienced both. I can tell you with complete certainty that the medication is what stands between them.

This is why Hathaway not taking his medication isn’t just a character detail. It’s the whole story. Because the Quess that follows him around making impossible demands, distorting his judgment, making him see enemies where there are none, and justifications where there shouldn’t be — that is what happens when psychosis goes unmanaged. It doesn’t just make you sad. It makes you see things that aren’t there. It makes you do things that don’t make sense in the battle, on the timeline, in the relationship, in the life. It makes the lethal decision feel like the logical one.

The medication is not optional. The medication is what keeps Quess Paraya from making the decisions.

The Part Where I Talk About Myself

I have stopped my medication before.

Not dramatically. Not because I decided I didn’t need it anymore, or because I had a revelation about natural remedies, or because I watched a YouTube video that convinced me I’d healed. I stopped because life got busy, and the prescription ran out, and I told myself I’d get it renewed next week, and next week became next month, which became longer than I want to admit.

And then Ruby got very loud.

And the depression that had been quietly managed — not gone, never gone, just held at a manageable volume — started doing what depression does when you remove the thing that was keeping it at a manageable volume. It escalated. It found the gaps. It made the small things enormous and the enormous things paralyzing, and the things I used to be able to do with reasonable effort suddenly required everything I had and sometimes more than I had.

This is what stopping your medication actually looks like.

Not a dramatic collapse. Not a single visible moment where everything falls apart. Just a slow, quiet, accumulating shift in what’s possible. Like the lights dimming so gradually you almost don’t notice until you’re trying to read in near-darkness and wondering why everything feels so hard.

I noticed. Eventually. And I got back on it.

But the period between stopping and getting back on it is not a period I recommend visiting.

Why People Stop Their Medication

Let me list the reasons people stop their mental health medication, because I have heard them all, and I have personally used several of them.

I feel better, so I probably don’t need it anymore. This is the cruelest trick depression plays. The medication is working, therefore you feel better, therefore you conclude you don’t need the medication, therefore you stop it, therefore it stops working, therefore you feel worse. The logic is perfectly circular and perfectly wrong. You feel better because of the medication. Removing the cause of the improvement does not maintain the improvement.

The side effects are annoying. This one, I have genuine sympathy for. Side effects are real, and they matter, and if your medication is making your life significantly worse in some ways while making it better in others, that is a conversation to have with your doctor. Not a reason to quietly stop and tell nobody.

I don’t want to be dependent on it. Oh interesting. Do you say this about blood pressure medication? Insulin? The thing that keeps your thyroid functioning — and yes, I have a thyroid condition, I know this one personally too. Mental health medication is medication. It treats a condition. The condition exists whether or not you’re treating it.

I forgot. This is me. This is the one that got me. Life is busy. The reminder system fails. The prescription runs out at an inconvenient moment. And then somehow it’s six weeks later, and you’re wondering why everything feels like moving furniture uphill.

What Hathaway Noa And I Have In Common

I am not comparing my experience of quietly stopping my medication and having a difficult few months to Hathaway Noa leading a terrorist organization that resulted in significant casualties.

I want to be very clear about that.

What I am saying is that Hathaway Noa is a character who came to Earth specifically to get help for his mental health — and had Kilia right there, reminding him, looking out for him — and that help still got crowded out by everything else. By the trauma he was carrying. By the political cause he believed in. By the urgent things that felt more important than the ongoing, unsexy, non-dramatic work of managing a mental health condition consistently over time.

The urgent things always feel more important than the ongoing maintenance. That’s the nature of urgency. It commands attention. Mental health maintenance is quiet and consistent, and it doesn’t announce itself, and it doesn’t feel dramatic, and it is somehow always the first thing to get deprioritized when everything else gets loud.

And then everything else gets louder because the thing you deprioritized was actually load-bearing.

And if you’re really unlucky — if the thing you’re managing is serious enough — Quess Paraya shows up.

And she starts making the decisions.

The Unsexy Truth About Mental Health Medication

Taking your medication is not a breakthrough moment. It is not a healing arc. It does not make for good storytelling.

It is a Tuesday morning thing. A put-it-in-your-calendar-so-you-don’t-forget thing. A get-the-prescription-renewed-before-it-runs-out thing. A tell-your-doctor-when-something-isn’t-working thing.

It is mundane. It is ongoing. It has no satisfying conclusion because the conclusion is just: you keep taking it, and your brain continues to function at a level that allows you to be a person in the world.

This is not nothing. This is actually everything.

Hathaway Noa came to Earth for his depression. He had Kilia reminding him. He had every reason to stay on the treatment plan. And the untreated psychosis that followed — the Quess that never left, the decisions that didn’t make sense in the battle — that is what the absence of treatment actually costs.

Different scale. Same principle.

The treatment plan exists for a reason.

Stay on your medication.

A Note Before I Go

If you are someone who has been quietly not refilling your prescription — for any of the reasons above, or for reasons I haven’t listed, or for no reason you can articulate clearly — I am not here to judge you. I have been you. I understand how it happens.

I am just here to say: the medication is part of the thing that keeps the lights on. And the lights going dim is harder to notice from the inside than you’d think.

Ruby is quieter when the prescription is filled. I have checked this. It is consistent data.

Take care of yourself. Get the refill. Your Gundam can wait.

— Juju 🖤

What The Zine Actually Is

Okay, so here is the part where I admit something that is either very on-brand or slightly unhinged, depending on how you look at it. The zine is Hungkydory. Specifically, the first post. Why I Started Hungkydory. The one about the post producer with too many feelings in her notes app, who one day decided to stop keeping them to herself. That one. Printed. Physical. Foldable. Passable to another human being. With my hand-drawn illustrations alongside it, because I am constitutionally incapable of making anything simple, and a blank page in my vicinity is basically a personal challenge.

I made it digitally, laid it out carefully, printed it, folded it into the specific origami of a properly assembled zine, held it in my hands, and then stood in my apartment having what I can only describe as a moment. A whole moment. Uninvited. Unscheduled. Just me and the zine and approximately three minutes of staring at it in a way that was probably visible from space.

The Difference Between Digital And Physical

Hungkydory lives on a screen. You’re reading it on a screen right now. It exists in the digital space, a Substack, a URL, something you access and scroll and close, and it goes wherever internet things go when you’re not actively consuming them. Probably somewhere next to my unfinished Procreate canvases and the card game rules that still don’t work.

The physical version cannot be closed and forgotten in a browser tab. You have to do something with it. Hold it. Fold it. Put it in your bag. Leave it somewhere. Give it to someone. It takes up space in the physical world in a way that a URL simply does not. And holding my own words, actual words I wrote about why I started this whole project in a format I could physically hand to another person, felt completely different from hitting publish and watching the notification count go up. Hitting publish feels like sending something out into the void and hoping for the best. Handing someone a zine feels like handing them a piece of yourself directly and then having to just stand there while they decide what to do with it. One of these is significantly more terrifying than the other, and I am now fully committed to doing both.

The Handing Out Part, Which I Was Not Prepared For

I handed it to people I know. I handed it to strangers. Both were their own specific flavors of terrifying.

Handing it to people I know is terrifying because they know me. They know that Substack Juju and real-life Juju have a significant gap between them. They are going to read these words and then look at me, the quiet, reserved, would-very-much-like-to-go-home-now version of me, and connect the two. In real time. While I am standing there pretending to be casual about the whole thing. I am not casual about the whole thing.

Handing it to strangers is terrifying in a completely different way because they have zero context. They don’t know me. They don’t know Hungkydory. They just accepted a piece of paper from someone they don’t know, and now they’re going to unfold it and find my feelings in there, and I have no control over any of what happens next. Both situations require you to do the same thing, which is: hand the thing over and then be a person while the other person looks at it. This sounds simple. It is not simple. My hands were slightly unsteady during several of the handovers. Growth is nonlinear. We have established this.

The Worst Moment Specifically

There was a moment with one of the strangers where they opened it and started reading right there. In front of me. While I was still physically present in the same space. I had to just. Stand there. Being a person. While another person read my words. Out loud in their head. In front of me.

I did not know what to do with my face. I did not know what to do with my hands. I did not know where to look. I considered pretending I had received an urgent phone call. I considered asking if they had seen my phone. I considered simply walking away and starting a new life somewhere else, where nobody had ever heard of Hungkydory. I did none of these things. I stood there. I survived.

They looked up when they finished and said something nice, and I said something like ” haha yeah,” which is the kind of devastating comeback you produce when you are a person who writes very confidently and then runs out of vocabulary in real-time conversation. It was fine. It was better than fine, actually. But the thirty seconds of standing there while they read were some of the longest thirty seconds of my recent life, and I say this as someone who has presented work to clients who wanted it to pop more at 11pm on a Friday.

Why A Zine Specifically

I could have just sent people the link. Told them the Substack existed. Done a normal person thing. But there is something about a zine, the format, the history of it, the fact that it gets to someone because you physically walked up to them and put it in their hands, that felt right for Hungkydory. No algorithm. No optimization. No impressions or reach, or engagement metrics. Just a piece of paper changing hands between two people in the same physical space. Here. I made this. I thought you might want to read it. That’s it. That’s the whole distribution strategy. Very scalable. Very measurable. Definitely not a system that requires me to physically approach people and give them things while my hands do the shaking thing. I regret nothing.

What’s Next

I don’t know how many more I’ll make or what I’ll put in the next one. What I do know is that Hungkydory started as a notes app full of feelings. Then it became a Substack. Then it became a zine. Then it became something I handed to a stranger whose face I watched while they read my feelings in real time, while I stood there trying to decide where to put my eyes. If this is the trajectory I am on, then by next year, I will be printing Hungkydory on a billboard and standing underneath it with my hands shaking, waiting for commuters to read about Ruby. Honestly? I’d do it.

Juju 😬

If you want a zine, find me. I’ll have one. Hands may or may not be steady during transfer. No guarantees.

That post was about the gap between the two versions. This post is about the quiet version specifically. About what it’s been like to be her. About the world’s relationship with her, which has been more complicated than her relationship with herself. Because here is the thing. I have always been okay with being quiet. The world has not always been okay with it. And that difference between being at peace with yourself and navigating a world that isn’t at peace with what you are is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and finally have words for.

What The World Does With Quiet People

The world has a lot of opinions about quiet people. I have collected them over the years like receipts. The world says: You’re so quiet. Usually delivered as an observation that is somehow also a verdict. Not ” you’re so tall” energy, which is just a neutral description. More like ”you’re so quiet” energy, which contains within it the implication that this is a thing being done to the room, a withholding, a failure to participate fully in the social contract.

The world says: Are you okay?

Because quiet reads, to a world that defaults to noise, as something being wrong. Quiet must mean sad. Quiet must mean angry. It cannot simply mean quiet. It cannot simply mean I am here, I am processing, I am fine in a way that doesn’t require sound to prove it. The world says: you should talk more. You’re so funny when you open up. All of which are well-meaning and all of which contain the same buried assumption that the quiet version is the lesser version. That the loud version is the real version, and the quiet one is just what happens before she warms up. I have been told to warm up my entire life. I was warm the whole time. I just express warmth differently.

The Specific Ways It Shows Up

Being quiet in a noisy industry is its own particular experience. Post production is not a quiet industry. It is a fast-talking, always-in-the-room, opinions-delivered-at-pace kind of industry. The culture rewards people who fill space confidently. Who has the take ready? Who can read a brief and respond immediately with energy and certainty. Who performs competence loudly enough that nobody questions whether it’s real.

I perform competence quietly. It is still competent. The work is still good. The deadlines still get met. The revision notes still get addressed at midnight. But quiet competence doesn’t announce itself the way loud competence does, and so there have been rooms where I was underestimated because I didn’t perform loudly enough. Those rooms are frustrating. Not because the underestimation damaged me, I know what I can do, the work is the evidence, and the evidence accumulates over time, regardless of how loud you were while producing it. But frustrating because the assumption that quiet equals less is so persistent. So automatic. So completely disconnected from whether it’s actually true. It is not true. I want to say that clearly. Quiet is not less. It is just differently distributed.

What Quiet Actually Is, From The Inside

People who are not quiet often seem to imagine that being quiet means nothing is happening. That the silence is empty. The quiet person is simply waiting for the conversation to end so they can go home. From the inside, it does not look like this. From the inside, there is a constant, active, genuinely interesting process happening. Observation. Pattern recognition. The accumulation of small details that form a picture of what’s actually going on in a room, in a conversation, in a relationship. The careful choosing of words, not because there aren’t many to choose from but because there are too many and selecting the right ones takes time and the right ones matter more than the many.

Quiet is not the absence. Quiet is selection. I notice things other people don’t notice because I’m not busy filling the silence. I remember things other people don’t remember because I was listening instead of preparing my next contribution. I understand situations more fully than I often let on because I’ve been taking them in for longer than anyone realized. The observations that never make it out of my head in real time end up here. On Hungkydory. In writing. Where they finally get to exist fully and properly and with the right words in the right order. Substack Juju is not a different person. She is the same person with time to choose the words.

What Helped

Several things. Working together slowly, over the years, in no particular order. Therapy helped. Having a space where the quiet was not only acceptable but actively useful, where thinking before speaking was valued rather than flagged, gave me evidence that the world’s relationship with my quietness was not an objective truth. It was a preference. And preference can be questioned.

Writing helped. Hungkydory specifically. Finding that the version of me that lives internally, the one with the observations and the opinions and the four-minute-later thoughts, could exist externally. That she was interesting. That people wanted to read what she had to say. That the quiet person and the person with things worth saying were the same, just in different mediums.

Getting older helped. The specific gift of aging is that you run out of energy to perform for people who don’t appreciate what they’re getting. The quiet stops feeling like something to apologize for and starts feeling like something to protect. Your time and your energy are finite. Spending them trying to be louder for rooms that prefer loud is a bad investment. You start making different choices about which rooms to be in.

And caring less helped. Not caring less about the people I love, I care about them a lot. The Devotion card has the highest stats; this is documented. But caring less about the verdict of the world on my quietness. The ” you’re so quiet” observations that used to land somewhere tender. The invitations to warm up that I used to take as direction. At some point, I heard them and thought: I know. I’m quiet. I’ve always been quiet. I’ve been warm the whole time. If you can’t tell, that’s about your perception, not my temperature.”),

The Thing I Want To Say To Anyone Who Recognizes This

If you are quiet and the world has been having a problem with that, I want you to know that the world’s problem with your quietness is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It is evidence that the world defaults to noise. That silence makes people uncomfortable. That presence that doesn’t perform itself loudly tends to get underestimated until the work makes the underestimation impossible to sustain.

Your quietness is not a lesser version of what you could be if you were louder. It is its own thing. With its own strengths. With its own way of being in the world that is not deficient, not a waiting room, not a warm-up act for the person you’d be if you just opened up more. The quiet version is the actual version. She notices things. She remembers things. She is having a very interesting time internally, even when nothing appears to be happening externally. She will eventually say something, probably four minutes after the moment, and it will be worth the wait. She is okay. She has always been okay. The world is catching up.

Juju 👽

To every quiet person who has been told to warm up: you were warm the whole time. They just weren’t paying the right kind of attention.

Ingenuity Studios is closing.

If you’re in the industry, you already know. If you’re not familiar, Ingenuity Studios was a VFX post-production company that has been running since 2004. Twenty years of work. Feature films. Episodic television. Music videos for BTS, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Billie Eilish. The kind of work that you’ve seen without knowing you’ve seen it, which is the specific fate of good post-production, invisible when it’s working, only noticed when it isn’t. Closing.

I sat with this for a while. Not because I worked there, I didn’t. But because every time a company like this closes, the people in this industry look at the news and feel something complicated. Something that is partly grief for a studio and partly recognition of a larger pattern and partly the specific, uncomfortable awareness that the ground everyone is standing on is shifting in ways that nobody has a clean answer for.

This is a post about being in post-production. About what it does to you over time. About the signs that you have been in it long enough that it has become part of how you’re built. It starts here. With a studio that has made twenty years of things you’ve seen and will not make more of them. And then it gets funnier. Because that’s what we do. We make it through the serious part, and then we go back to the timeline, and we keep working.

You cannot Watch Anything Without Doing The Thing

The thing being: noticing. Constantly. Involuntarily. Without being able to turn it off. You watch a film, and you are simultaneously watching the film and watching the edit, feeling where the cuts are, clocking when a transition didn’t quite work, noticing the color grade in the exterior scenes versus the interior scenes, catching the composite that isn’t quite sitting right in the background of a shot nobody else in the room has noticed.

You watch a YouTube video your partner shows you, and you say,” The audio sync is slightly off,” and they look at you, and you realize you have done this before and it has not been well received, and you do it anyway because you physically cannot not notice. This is not a skill anymore. It is a condition.

Your Relationship With Time Is Permanently Damaged

Normal people experience time as: morning, afternoon, evening, night.

Post-production people experience time as: before the deadline and after the deadline. How many hours until delivery? Whether it is technically still Friday if you haven’t slept yet. Whether 3 am counts as the same day or the next day for a project that is due ”end of day.” I have genuinely lost track of what meal I was eating based on when I last slept rather than when the clock said. I have been in an export that ran so long I forgot what day it started on. Time is a social construct, and post-production has made me very aware of this.

You Have A Complicated Relationship With The Word ” Quick”

”Can you just quickly?”

No. I cannot quickly. Nothing in post-production is quick.

” Quickly” is a word used by people who do not understand what they’re asking for, and I have learned to translate it in real time. ” Quickly” means: I do not know how long this takes. ”Just quickly” means: I definitely do not know how long this takes. ”Just a quick amend” means: I have just described something that will take between forty-five minutes and the rest of your evening, and I want you to feel good about that. I am not a quick person anymore. I am a thorough person. I am a get-it-right person.

You Have Developed A Specific Relationship With Revision Notes

The stages of receiving revision notes, as experienced by a person who has been in post-production too long:

Stage one: reading the notes. This takes less time than you’d think because by now you have a system.

Stage two: translating the notes. ” Can you make it pop more?” means: I don’t know what I want, but I want it to be different. ” Something feels off” means: I cannot articulate what I want, but I want you to feel my discomfort. ” Almost there” means: I have not actually watched the full version yet. Stage three: doing the notes. This takes longer than they think. Stages four through six: the revision cycle continues until delivery. Delivery is the best stage. Delivery is the reason you do this.

You cannot Explain What You Do And You Have Accepted This

” So what do you do?”

” I’m in post production.”

”Oh, so you edit videos?”

And here is where it gets complicated. Because yes, technically. But also no, actually. Post production is editing, color and sound, graphics and finishing, and delivery and client management, revision management, timeline management, and the specific skill of making something that started as raw footage into the thing that ends up on a screen somewhere, being skipped after five seconds by someone who has no idea what went into it. But explaining all of that takes longer than the conversation wants to go, and so you say ”yes, basically, I edit videos,” and you die a little inside every time. This is the post-production tax. You pay it every time someone asks what you do.

The Names That Keep Disappearing

Here is the serious one. The one I kept coming back to while writing the funny ones. Ingenuity Studios is not the first. It won’t be the last. The industry has been losing companies quietly, steadily, one announcement at a time, and every time one goes, the people inside it scatter. Some land somewhere else. Some leave the industry entirely. Some start something new.

And the work they made the VFX on the show you binged last year, the grade on the commercial you saw a hundred times, the music video for the song that was everywhere, that work still exists. You’ve seen it. It’s in the world. But the place that made it is gone. Ingenuity Studios did work on BTS music videos. I want to note that specifically. The studio that helped make things that found their way to ARMY screens around the world, that lived in the playlist of a post producer in Jakarta who needed the music during the worst of the burnout, that studio is closing. The work remains. The studio doesn’t. This is the industry. This has always been the industry. We show up. We make the thing. The thing goes out into the world. We go back to the timeline.

The Checklist, If You Want To Know Where You Stand

You’ve been in post-production too long if:

You notice the audio sync in casual YouTube videos and say it out loud.

You have forgotten what ” end of day” means to a civilian.

You automatically multiply any time estimate you’re given by at least three.

You feel genuine pride watching something you worked on get skipped by someone on their phone.

You own an ergonomic chair that helped approximately fourteen percent.

You say,” I edit videos,” and die a little.

You received a revision note at 11 pm and did not consider not responding.

You know the specific quiet of a render running, and you find it somehow peaceful.

You are still here. Still showing up. Still making things. Even when the studios close. Even when the ground shifts. That’s the job. That’s always been the job.

Juju 👻

For everyone at Ingenuity Studios, twenty years of making things that mattered. Thank you for the work. It’s still out there.

The Setup

The conversation goes like this. Man must be a provider. Financial provider. The kind of man who covers expenses, demonstrates stability, earns enough that his partner doesn’t have to worry, and generally presents himself as someone who has his economic life together. This is the standard. This is the bar. Meet the bar or face a flag situation so severe that it requires its own flagpole.

Reasonable, right?

Financial responsibility matters. Stability matters. A person who takes their economic life seriously is a legitimate preference. And then someone in the replies said,” But men cheat all the time.”

Which okay. Yes. Some men cheat. This is true. This is documented.

And then someone else said:

” So do women.”

Which is also true. Also documented. And then both sides went quiet because this is the part of the discourse where everyone realizes they have accidentally made an argument that applies equally to themselves, and nobody knows how to proceed. I find this deeply funny.

The Cheating Argument, Which Is Actually More Complicated Than It Sounds

The ” men cheat” reply is not random. I owe it more credit than I initially gave it. Here is what it’s actually saying, once you untangle it:

Women tried meeting men in the middle. Not the AYCE version of meeting in the middle, the actual version.

The ”okay, I’ll contribute financially too, I’ll help with expenses, I’ll do the emotional labour, I’ll be patient while you figure out how to be a stable partner” version. The version that requires significant investment, significant effort, and significant willingness to build something together, rather than demanding a finished product. And then he cheated. Not a hypothetical he. A statistically significant, collectively experienced, personally documented he. The cheating happened after the effort. After the financial contribution. After the emotional labour. After the meeting in the middle.

So women looked at the arrangement and said: We tried that. We did the work. We met you in the middle. And you cheated. So we are done meeting anyone in the middle. From now on, the man provides. Full stop. No negotiation. We already gave the negotiation away, and it cost us everything, and we got cheated on at the end of it. This is not an illogical conclusion. This is actually a very logical conclusion based on a very painful dataset.

Here is my problem with it, though. Women also cheat. Not as a rebuttal. Not as a ” well, actually.” As a genuine observation about the inconsistency in the logic.

Because if the argument is ”men cheated when we met them in the middle, therefore men must be providers with no negotiation,” then the same logic should apply when women cheat. But it doesn’t work that way in this discourse. When men cheat, it becomes evidence that men as a category are untrustworthy, and therefore, the demands must increase. When women cheat, it is an individual incident. The standard only moves in one direction. I understand where this asymmetry comes from. Women have historically absorbed more of the consequences of broken relationship contracts. The asymmetry in the demands is partly a response to a historical asymmetry in the consequences.

But I also think: if we’re updating the standards based on cheating, we have to be honest that cheating is not a gendered skill. It is a human skill.

The Part Where The Robots Become Relevant

Let me tell you what AI is currently doing to the Indonesian job market. GoJek and Tokopedia use AI for customer insights. Banks like BCA and Mandiri have introduced AI for fraud detection and loan approvals. Even in manufacturing, smart robotics is cutting production costs by replacing manual labor. The jobs that are going first? Customer service, data entry, and even junior analyst roles. The jobs that historically provided the kind of reliable income that supported the provider ideal.

So here is the full picture as presented by Indonesian Threads in the year 2026: The man must be a provider. The robots are taking the provider jobs. The women want the provider. The robots do not care what the women want. The man is trying to be the provider while the robots are undermining his structural capacity to do so. The women are on Threads, setting standards for a labor market that is being actively automated. The man is on LinkedIn trying to figure out if he needs to learn Python. And in the replies: men cheat. So do women. And somehow this is relevant. This is the discourse. This is what we are working with.

The Women’s Demands, Which I Am Going To Address

I am a woman. I work. I earn my own money. I say this not to be virtuous about it but because it gives me standing to say what I am about to say.

Some of the demands circulating in this discourse are genuinely reasonable. Financial responsibility. Ambition. Someone who has a plan. These are legitimate preferences. I support these preferences.

And some of the demands are, and I say this with full love for my gender, a bit much. We want a provider, but we also want to split things equally. We want financial stability, but minimum wage is a red flag even as the economy makes stability harder to achieve. We want someone ambitious but also present. We want someone who earns, but also someone who doesn’t make money their entire personality. We want the AYCE date, but also the expensive restaurant. These things can coexist! Relationships are complicated! I am not saying they can’t coexist! I am saying that presenting all of them simultaneously on Threads as non-negotiable requirements without any acknowledgment of the economic context, the robots, the job market, the general chaos of being a financially responsible person in Jakarta in 2026 is a conversation happening slightly outside of reality.

What I Actually Think

Financial responsibility is not gendered. It is just a responsibility. Two people building something together is not a failure of any ideal; it is the arrangement that actually fits 2026. The provider expectation, the cheating tangent, the unreasonable demands, and the red flag inflation are all symptoms of the same thing. A set of relationship scripts written in a different economic moment is being performed in a completely different economic reality. And nobody has stopped to ask if the scripts need updating. The scripts need updating. The robots are not going to update them for us. The robots are busy taking the provider jobs. Someone has to have the actual conversation. About what a financial partnership looks like now. About what we actually need from each other versus what the scripts say we should want.

That conversation is harder than posting about cheating in a provider thread. It is also more useful. I am available to have it. On Substack. In writing. With appropriate processing time. Not in real time. Substack Juju is not available in real time. We have established this.

Juju 🤫

The provider discourse, the cheating tangent, and the robot automation conversation all need to be in the same room. I have now put them in the same room. You’re welcome. The room is chaotic, but at least it’s honest.

May And June In Indonesia, For Context

If you are not Indonesian or have not spent significant time here, let me explain what May and June look like from a holiday perspective. It is a lot. Eid al-Hajj. Waisak. Kenaikan Isa Al Masih. Hari Lahir Pancasila. The holidays stack. They arrive in sequence, sometimes overlapping, sometimes separated by just enough working days to make you feel like you’re catching your breath before the next one.

Which, for most people, is wonderful. Days off. Family gatherings. Celebration. Food. The specific warmth of a country that takes its commemorations seriously. For me, and I suspect for a lot of people who don’t talk about this, the holiday season is also the season of mandatory happiness. And mandatory happiness is Ruby’s absolute favorite terrain.

The Mandatory Happiness Problem

There is a version of you that the holiday season requires. Festive. Present. Engaged. Happy to be here, happy to be with people, happy to celebrate the thing being celebrated, happy in the specific and visible way that holidays ask you to be happy. You are expected to produce this version of yourself consistently across multiple holidays spanning multiple weeks with minimal recovery time between celebrations.

And if you are someone whose brain chemistry does not always cooperate if you are someone who has a Ruby, who has days where just existing takes more energy than it should, who sometimes needs a lot of quiet time to function and the holidays do not offer quiet time then the gap between who you’re supposed to be during the holidays and who you actually are on any given day can get very wide very fast.

Ruby loves this gap. Ruby moves into the gap and sets up furniture.

What Ruby Says During the Holiday Season, Specifically

Ruby has a regular roster of things she says. I know most of them by now. I have them categorized. I have discussed them with my therapist. I am working on catching and questioning. But during the holiday season, Ruby gets seasonal content. Limited edition Ruby thoughts that she only produces when everyone around me is visibly, audibly, publicly happy, and I am sitting with something quieter and more complicated.

Ruby says: " Everyone else is fine. Look at them. Why aren’t you fine? What is wrong with you that you cannot simply be happy during a happy time like a normal person?”

Ruby says, “ You are ruining this. Your quietness is a disruption. People can tell. Nobody is saying anything because they are being polite.”

Ruby says, “You don’t deserve the holiday. Look at the things you haven’t finished. Look at the card game with the rules that don’t work. Look at the Procreate canvases that are still unfinished. You should be doing something useful instead of sitting here pretending to be festive.”

Ruby is extremely productive during the holidays. She never takes a day off. Not even on public holidays. Not even on the ones specifically designated for rest and reflection. Ruby does not reflect. Ruby just keeps talking.

What I Actually Do During the Holiday Season

It depends on who wins.

”Some holiday days, Ruby wins. And when Ruby wins, it looks like this: I cancel. I stay home. I close the curtains metaphorically and sometimes literally. I do not answer messages with any particular urgency. I watch something that requires nothing from me. I wait for the day to pass the way you wait out bad weather, not fighting it, not engaging with it, just enduring it until it becomes the next day, which might be easier.

The isolation is not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just happens quietly, like most of the things Ruby does. On those days, the holiday happens somewhere else, and I watch it happen from a distance, and I tell myself I’ll show up next time, and Ruby says you probably won’t, and I say to Ruby that is not helpful, and Ruby says I know and keeps talking anyway.

And then there are the days I win. When I win, it looks like this: I show up. I get dressed like a person going somewhere. I walk into the room where the people are. And I perform Happy Juju. Happy Juju is not fake exactly. She is genuinely glad to see the people she loves. She laughs at the right moments. She always eats the food; the food is non-negotiable, Ruby does not get the rendang, and she stays for as long as she can sustain it. But she is performing. She is running on something that costs more than it looks like it does. She is showing up for the people she loves because they deserve to have her there, even on the days when being there requires everything she has.

Both versions of the holiday are real. Both are me. Neither is the wrong response. Some days I cancel and wait for tomorrow. Some days I show up and eat the rendang and come home and crash. Both count as surviving. Both count as trying. Ruby doesn’t get to decide which one I’m capable of. That part is still mine.

What I Want To Say To Anyone Who Recognizes This

If you are reading this during May or June in Indonesia and you are sitting with something quiet and complicated while everyone around you is being festive, you are not broken. You are not ruining anything. You are not failing at the holidays. A lot of people are performing. A lot of people have a Ruby that gets seasonal content. A lot of people are eating the food and showing up and doing the things while also carrying something that doesn’t have a public holiday named after it.

You don’t have to be happy on demand. You don’t have to feel what the calendar says you should feel. You just have to get through it, reasonably intact, and take care of yourself where you can. Ruby loves the holiday season. But she doesn’t get to have it. It’s mine. The rendang is mine. The day off is mine. The quiet moment in the corner of a gathering is mine. She can have the seasonal content. I’m keeping everything else.

Juju 🫶

If Ruby has been loud lately, you’re not alone. She’s loud for a lot of us right now. Eat something good. Rest when you can. The holidays will end, and so will this particular batch of seasonal content.

The place my brain went is: what if I actually met these people in real life? And once I went there, I could not stop. Every scene. Every character. Every plot development. My brain is running the same format on loop. She’s a 10 but. He’s a 10 but. They’re a 10 but. We are going to be here for a while. I have thoughts.

First, The Show, Because Context Matters

Tanzaburo Tojima has dreamt of becoming a Kamen Rider his whole life. But now that he’s 40 years old, he’s starting to think his dream may never come true, until he’s swept up in a series of crimes inspired by the infamous Shocker. The series takes place in a world where the Kamen Rider series exists as an in-universe TV show, but Shocker also exists in reality.

So to be clear: Kamen Rider is fiction in this world. It is a TV show. It is the thing Tojima watched as a child and fell completely, permanently, life-alteringly in love with. Shocker, the evil organization, is real. Actually happening. In the world. The universe gave this man both the dream and the reason to pursue it and then made the dream fictional and the threat terrifyingly real. And then watched what happened. What happened is: Tojima decided to become a Kamen Rider anyway. He is forty years old. He has zero hesitation about this.

And then my brain said: " Okay, but what if you met him?”

He’s A 10, but

He’s a 10, but he is forty years old and deadass serious about becoming a hero from a TV show. Not ironic, serious. Not nostalgic, serious. Actually, genuinely, in-the-present-tense serious. He wakes up every day, and the dream is still there, unchanged, fully intact, forty years deep and not even slightly tired.

UNHINGED.

You’d go on a first date with him, and he’d be charming and interesting and clearly a person of conviction and depth, and then at some point he’d tell you about the dream, and you’d think he was joking, and he would not be joking, and you would have to decide your life. The decision, for the record, is correct. You stay. Tojima is clearly going to achieve something extraordinary. You want to be there for it. But the moment of realizing he means it completely is a moment I think about a lot.

His Crew, Who Are Also 10s, but

Here is the thing about Tojima: he is not alone in this. This is a story about adults who love Kamen Rider a little too much and start playing pretend for real. There are multiple adults. Playing pretend. For real. Together. As a unit.

They are a 10, but they have collectively decided that the correct response to a Shocker-inspired crime wave is to become the heroes from the TV show they watched as children, and nobody, not one single person in this group, has suggested that perhaps there is another way to handle this.

They are a 10, but their emergency response plan involves tokusatsu poses.

They are a 10, but their group chat is probably the most unhinged thing that has ever existed on a phone.

I would absolutely join the group chat. The group chat is clearly where everything interesting is happening, and I want to be there.

And Then There Is The Girlfriend Situation

Okay. I need to talk about the girlfriend situation. There is a character in this show. She is, by all conventional metrics, a 10. She seems normal. She presents as normal. She is in a relationship, and she appears to be a regular person navigating a regular life.

She is also secretly a Shocker member. She wakes up in the morning. She gets dressed. And what she is getting dressed as what she puts on before she goes out into the world to conduct her day is a Shocker uniform. She wakes up and becomes the villain. Cheerfully. With conviction.

UNHINGED.

She’s a 10, but she wakes up and puts on her Shocker uniform, and your boyfriend has absolutely no idea, and she is going to keep it that way. I sat with this for a long time. Because this is the most chaotic romantic subplot possible, and it is happening inside a show that is already operating at maximum chaos, and somehow the show went: yes, but what if also this. I am not okay about this. I mean that in the best possible way.

What It Would Actually Be Like To Meet Any Of These People

If I met Tojima IRL, I would think he was very earnest and slightly intense, and then I would find out about the dream, and I would be fully on board because the conviction alone is genuinely inspiring, and also the man is clearly about to have the most interesting second half of his life of anyone I’ve ever met.

If I met his crew IRL, I would ask to join. Immediately. No hesitation. I make a card game out of feelings and distribute zines to strangers and blog about my depression under a name that is a pun on ” hunky dory.” I am not in a position to judge anyone for their specific passion project. We would get along extremely well.

If I met the Shocker's girlfriend IRL, I would simply not know. That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire point. She seems normal. The Shocker uniform is in the wardrobe, and I would never know. Which is either terrifying or aspirational, depending on how you look at it. A woman who has a secret life. A whole other dimension to herself that she keeps completely separate. She’s a 10, but she contains multitudes, and exactly zero of them are what you expect. Honestly? Respect.

Why I Can’t Stop Watching

Because this show is doing the thing that the best comedies do, it finds something genuinely absurd and treats it with complete sincerity. Tojima’s dream is funny from the outside. It is completely, seriously real from the inside. And the show holds both of those things at the same time without resolving the tension between them. The dream is allowed to be ridiculous and real and worth pursuing all at once.

I have a card game where Devotion has the highest stats. I have a zine. I have a blog called Hungkydory. I am making things that don’t fit neatly into any available category and pursuing them with full conviction and zero irony. Tojima is forty and wants to be a Kamen Rider, and he is right to want it. I feel seen by this man. I feel seen by this entire unhinged show. She’s a 10, but she dresses as a Shocker, and I’m watching twenty-four episodes to find out what happens next.

Juju 🤟

Tojima Wants To Be A Kamen Rider is on Netflix. Go watch it. Come back and tell me she’s a 10, but for each character. I need to compare notes.