An Author Who Can Eat More Breadsticks Than You

Ok, not really, but why I keep saying so is pretty funny.

              If you’ve known me longer than an hour you probably know that this gag started with a cult I had in high school. A surprisingly unironic cult at that, it was one of those things where nobody would break character so the joke just sort of became real by default of nobody knowing who was joking anymore. 

              I was joking. For the record. I’m no god, but sssh, but don’t tell anyone else that. 

              So, this all started in about 10^th grade when one gal wanted my attention. She had a lot of boyfriends but honestly in retrospect I think she was a closeted lesbian from how her interactions with me went down. 

You may say “that’s a bit of broad assumption to make” and I have to tell you… look. We were a bunch of nerdy weebs who learned our social skills from anime, and she made several attempts stealing kisses from me and invading my personal space in ways I wasn’t cool with. She was not subtle. 

              (Any teenagers reading this? Don’t do either of those things to get someone’s attention, please, its not good.) 

              Anyways this gal decided she was going to go to rather extreme extents to get me to pay her heed so she became the high priestess of the cult of Apomadism, a cult dedicated to worshipping the divine apocalypse maiden (me) who will decide the fate of the world. 

              At the time I was super depressed and dealing with a lot of crap, like the kind of depressed where you can’t get out of bed in the morning and 90% of your thoughts are about what an awful person you are undeserving of kindness, so honestly this was the most hilarious thing to happen to me in awhile at first, being that I was suddenly the figurehead of a high school doomsday cult, so I ran with it because I was fifteen and it was entertaining. Creepy, but entertaining. 

              This never escalated past “we have a cult now I guess” but the gal did end up giving a presentation on her new religion to the school’s world religions teacher. That was pretty funny too actually. 

 Honestly the whole thing was so overblown, but we all went to an arts and theatre high school so none of the teachers really cared beyond mild concern, weird stuff happened all the time. It also got progressively sillier with Dimentio from Super Paper Mario being declared our resident Lucifer allegory and all the gal’s ex and prospective boyfriends joining the cult. We had like twenty people at peak. 

It was funny though, like it was weird and creepy but funny. I was the only person who had actually watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, an anime about a girl who doesn’t know she’s a god and all the adventures various supernatural forces get into trying to keep it a secret from her, so I was having a blast being the only one in on the fact that this was echoing one of my favourite anime. 

Things got weirder with the gal claiming to have reoccurring dreams of Dimentio tempting her to tempt me to destroy the world, it was just so exaggerated, this went on all the way until grade eleven when the gal finally gave up and we cut ties over some trivial teenaged fight that had nothing to do with the cult, hilariously enough. 

It was stupid. Like, beyond stupid. But like, you know how you know people with cat motifs who always portray themselves with cat ears, or fire motifs who always gravitate to fireball spells in games? By that end my motif was “I’m a really crappy god/demigod” and that joke just did not die. 

 Lumen is a demigod, their dad is some lesser Celtic deity. Lumen became a god because people believed they were for a time. Lumen sold their soul for godhood a la Faust. 

It is a joke that friend groups riff on to this day. And it is a joke, but it’s a super funny one because it’s backed up by this wild story. But like, weirdly this kind of stupid and ironic ego buff actually seriously help with the depression? 

I really absolutely hated myself at the time. Thought I was a monster, that nobody should be around me and they’d all realize it sooner or later. Being the false god of the world’s worst doomsday cult was, funny enough, something that helped. 

You know how people talk about how pretending to have a massive ego and joking around about it is better than self deprecation as far as habits of how you talk about yourself? That. Right there. 

Having your persona on the internet be a dragon or a wolf might be empowering for some folks. What was empowering for me was having my persona, the little character I play, be a god nobody believes in anymore who has to believe in themselves. And I do believe in myself! Now at least. 

Er… and by the way, I mean god in like, the polytheistic sense. Not one God. Many gods. lesser gods too. Like, the Greek pantheon or whatever. I ain’t stepping on Jesus’s toes.