colgate's story - 日本とコルゲート氏の物語 the story of colgate🟤 and japan🇯🇵

[colgate / bulldog]

colgate's story
The purpose of this thread is whenever I feel I need to look into my past and re-tell parts of my life story pre-KYIL to progress, I will do it here.

I'll tell my story in different ways when I feel I just need to get it off my chest.

table of contents
my story (original): this post
日本とコルゲート氏の物語 the story of colgate and japan
history of my social life and feeling like an alien in my own country (america)

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I was going to make this an edit of my first post on my main log, but I literally hit the character limit. Of course I did haha. So I'm just going to make a bunch of separate posts on another thread instead.



My story
I’m writing this in January 2022, so my mindset has completely evolved and become totally unrelatable to how it was when I joined the forums. Most of my thoughts were a tangled mess at the time, so I kind of just spewed a bunch of simultaneous and random goals to work on. But I can tell you that my goal was to focus on dating, even from that point.

After probably 6 months of spending most of my time on dating, I can look back and talk about why I decided to pull the trigger and jump in, since I've reflected on my pre-dating life in a different light at this point.

I want to share this because I always want to know other guys' stories of what their experience with girls was before they decided to take action, and maybe perhaps why they had so many roadblocks. Basically, this is a "retroactive progress log".

Pre-forums "History" with girls
tl;dr: 1 gf only holding hands, kissed 2 girls. Virgin.

- 1 gf who asked me out in my first week of high school (she was a year older than I). Dated for 6 months. I literally didn't know what to do and kept it a secret from my mom because I was raised in an extremely religious household where dating was bad. Held hands until I broke up with her because I didn't see it going anywhere (as I didn't know what to do). A mistake on my part because I should have opened up to her and tried to make it work.

- Asked some girls out in high school.
- First one approached me with her friend one day while I was eating lunch, later I asked her to be my gf over Facebook (lol!!!). She said "she can't date until she's 16" (we were both 14 at the time). I literally waited 2 years to ask her out again, and she declined (I forgot exactly how). In the interim, I remember sending her a 5 paragraph essay about how I was obsessed with her and telling all my friends how much I love her.
- Second one we were pretty good friends and so one day I asked her out before she had a class. She told me she'd think about it and let me know after class. So I literally waited near her classroom where we'd normally meet to hang out after school. The bell rang, and she didn't show up. Then I waited for probably another hour like wtf??? She declined me over a text message, but we still talked as friends for a while until she graduated (she graduated before a year before me).
- BIG REASON WHY I LOVE APPROACH: Throughout school and college I saw cute girls everywhere. My thought was always "I wish I knew that girl somehow". The big unlock for me was realizing, wait I could have just gone up to them and introduced myself. Now I look back on my school days with contempt that I never even tried.

- Madeout with a girl in India for a long time in bed when I was 18, also my first kiss. She was one of my cousin's friends and I won't get into the details of the entire dynamic here, but we probably would have gone way further if my uncle didn't knock on the door. Probably the closest I got to getting laid up until I joined the forums, but I definitely wasn't thinking "I'm trying to hook up with this girl", it kinda just happened one day when she lay in bed with me one morning and I just kept staring at her face for a while and went for it. I left India the next day.

- Fell hard for this really hot tiny Asian chick who was kind of orbiting me from a class. I was pretty active and dominant in the class and took a lot of leadership so I think that's why she kept hanging out with me after class and asking to meet before class. At some point it literally drove me crazy. I was running up and down stairs constantly, and I got a throbbing headache for the first time in my life. This feeling became the irreversible awareness that I was completely 100% straight (more on that below) because I realized there's absolutely no way I could feel that way about a guy. I had to get it out of my system so badly because I couldn't focus on anything else in my life, and I just told her something along the lines of "I'm madly in love with you, be my girlfriend" She said no, but we kept hanging out anyway. Later she would send me random pics of herself in various revealing outfits. But anytime I would try to ask her out to movies or some kind of date she would not respond or decline. Eventually I was at a loss and stopped talking to her 100%. Told her something along the lines of "it wasn't meant to be in this life".

- Countless blown opportunities with girls whom I was "friends" with, because I never made a move, even when they came to my place or I was at theirs. Even if we were incessantly cuddling in my bed.

- Turned down a girl who asked me to be her boyfriend over Facebook messenger. This one could be a novel-length story but I don't want to get into the details of it because it's pretty personal and this log is public. Only detail I’ll mention is that she was married and then got divorced during our friendship. We had been hanging out for maybe half a year and she would cook me food a lot, at some point was getting cuddly with me and saying shit like "I think about if we kissed but it would ruin our friendship..." out of nowhere and also randomly sent nudes. I was pretty much pushing her away the entire time and eventually I think she just broke and asked me out directly.

- Japanese girl I met from HelloTalk. I have plenty of Japanese friends, both guys and girls, but for some reason I fell pretty hard for one in particular. I don’t know what it was exactly, but I just did. I remember one day she sent me a kiss emoji and I was like “what the fuckk” and ran outside for like 2 miles at 3:00am. I had planned a Japan trip to meet all of my friends, including her, but when the day came, she ghosted me. This is so standard it’s like a parody looking on it now, but I was like wtf??? at the time. Regardless, I was going to hang out with a lot of friends and my Japan trip just started so I just concluded she was lame af and got over it pretty quickly.

- Asked out some girl I was friends with over text but she said she was gay. Lol.

- Was jamming out with some friends in another state. I was playing bass and this 40yo chick who came to the studio with her boyfriend was singing. This other guy was trying to play songs on YouTube and have us jam out to them. The chick didn’t like that he was playing songs she didn’t like or know. Eventually I told the guy to stop playing the music, because the chick and I can just jam out as a duet. Eventually he did, and we had a 10-15 minute acapella jam sesh. I mention this because it was one of the first times I felt like I was emotionally connecting with someone through music we were performing with each other, it was pretty symbiotic. I didn’t know what she was singing but I just backed her up as I pleased and moments she wouldn’t sing, I’d do something more melodic, and she’d come back in and sing again and I’d go back to backing. Anyway, after that we were kinda buzzed and she kept cuddling with me on the sofa and telling me right in front of her boyfriend “Colgate, I love you!! I wish I wasn’t dating, I wish I was 22, I want to be with you forever.” I was so wtfed by this and kind of just remained still and rigid.

- Met a girl on Discord, whom another online friend was trying to set me up with. I didn’t really know exactly what to do but I would chat her regardless. He would tell me how I should “flirt” with her and I pretty much just tried to do what he said. I eventually got some nudes from her. Later, I left this Discord channel and I learned that the girl could tell I was totally faking my interest in her. It wasn’t really “fake” from me per se, I was just like just trying to implement tactics some other guy told me which would “attract” her.

- I went to a dance club with some friends in Atlanta around May 2021 to see a DJ we were huge fans of play live. I was high as balls from some weed brownies and dancing my freaking ass off. This random buzzed girl was spam approaching every guy and most of them meekly interacted with her. But when she came over to me, I had zero inhibitions and just started dancing with her hard. Started grabbing her ass and she was into it. Eventually I grabbed her titty and she gave me a look and started making out with me. I was like what the fuckkkkk is happening right now. Friend was cheering me on. I think the makeout lasted an eternity. It was the most intimidating shit of my life at that point because I could tell literally everyone was staring at us. I think she got bored at some point because I didn't think to push the interaction any further (this was literally the second or third time I'd ever gone out to a club at night, and the first times were the previous month). She was talking to my friend's gf and being "emotionally consoled", and some random trans-looking person whom I remember was staring at us came over like "Yeah, I was worried about her!!!" Lol!!!!!!!

- Hit on a hot girl at a tavern and bought her a drink. This was probably the first time in my life I deliberately and directly cold approached a girl (though it was at night). Then we danced. Then I got her number and I decided to hang around her and her friends as long as possible and they were all like "uhhh wtf" and guarding her away from me after a while. Then she ghosted my text. That's it.

- Approach at dance class in July 2021 + instadate + 2nd date. I was inspired to do this after hearing Andy's podcasts about approaching (not really a cold approach lol). Also the first date of my whole life. I just asked some chick whom I felt I was vibing with out to dinner after the class, and to my surprise she said yes. Asked for kiss in my car after, got declined with "wait how old are you?" Learned she was 9 years older than I, and since this was literally the first time I'd ever taken a girl out on a date, I was kind of like, uhhh ok lol and ended the date. She actually hit me up some weeks later for a second date (this was actually after I joined the forums, but I didn't log about it) and I visited her town. She proposed being bf+gf but I turned her down because she had a kid. I kind of was looking for something long-term at the time because I had no idea what I wanted otherwise. But looking back, I think I knew deep down that I would get tied up in something I wouldn't be able to handle.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

Physical Traits
I thought about not including this section about my physical traits because I actually thought it was irrelevant, but decided to anyway.

I'm a 5'5" (168cm) Indian, naturally physically weak, late-bloomer exclusively raised in the USA.

The only reason this is actually a relevant detail is because many guys think such "surface level" inherent traits about themselves are the reasons why they've not had success with women. But I can tell you this actually wasn't entirely the case for me, even when I did join the forums, because my story below would have likely been not too different if we swapped my actual physical presence with "average white American male". In other words, my physical presence was not one of my limiting beliefs about dating and women throughout my life. I've actually thought I was a pretty normal guy and completely unaware of how people did perceive me, and then get bewildered when someone tries to point out something that might be “different” about me.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

Why am I here on the forums?
I'd never slept with a girl in my life, even after having at least 5+ opportunities to start something with girls I've met throughout the years. But when I made this account, I'd not realized those blown opportunities. Regardless, I knew something was wrong, that I was 25 years old and had a career, but almost zero experience with girls in my life. I didn't even have any sort of sexual "urge" or desire to actually meet women or date, and this realizing this fact about myself at the time ticked me off that something was wrong. It was 100% cerebral.

The above realization was a seedling back in January 2021, and over the next 8 months until I joined the forums, it grew into a beanstalk which arrived at the giant's house of KYIL. More on that below.

Early viewpoints about dating and how they were shattered
SInce I was around 13 years old, I've been deeply entrenched in internet communities, far more than real life ones. It was a recluse from real life because I was raised in an extremely religious household by mostly my mom. What held me back very early on was trying to hide a "double life" that I had between school and home, in addition to values I was taught as a child about dating and relationships.

My initial baseline of how I thought meeting women worked was you just "click" with a girl from your social circle, then you get married relatively quickly, then you are allowed to do physical and sexual things.

This frame was chipped away at slowly over the next 10+ years. I saw people kissing in high school, I heard weird sex stories from both guys and girls I was friends with, and at some point I realized even my friends who weren't so overt about their sex life were also likely hooking up, contrary to everything I understood about relationships as a child. At some point, my baseline understanding about relationships and dating was completely shattered.

That shattering was probably at around age 20. But I was still in university and I was focused on graduating and finding a job, and usually pushed away any opportunities I could have had to start dating, including girls coming over to my place alone and incessantly cuddling while listening to music and talking and deliberately not joining my lifting buddy in going to raves and parties.

Then I finally did graduate, and I'd already had a job lined up because I was working part-time throughout university. I was ready to move in with a Japanese friend to an apartment and try to develop a new social circle with the local Japanese community when the pandemic hit in March 2020. I definitely had the mindset to start looking for a girlfriend, so I thought that would have been a good start. Who knows where that would have led, but it was not meant to be. I was basically stuck at my parents' place for 6 months until I got fed up of the days blending into each other and ejected to Tennessee to live in a big house on top of a mountain with some friends I knew from online.

We mostly spent the rest of 2020 cooking big feasts of Indian food and jamming out together everyday, until we got tired of that and realized we had to work on ourselves and the rest of our own lives.

Over the next 6 months, I would go on to have lots of deep discussions about trying to meet girls with one of my housemates, who was in a somewhat similar position with women as I. We went on a couple camping trips as well which basically ended up being therapy sessions for both of us.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

The Internet makes you gay
The next part of this story is going to be a huge tangent but I want to elucidate it because it's relevant for what exactly the aforementioned "therapy" was.

I'm going to be a pretty open book here because I think this part of my dating background is pretty novel on the forums, but not uncommon for guys deeply involved in internet communities. Also many guys may not want to admit this kind of stuff publicly, but I will.

Around age 15ish, I remember the topic of sexual orientation came up between a bunch of friends (mixed girls+guys). I'd never thought about it and decided to say "I guess I'm bisexual?" Since I had basically zero experience, plus hadn't even hit puberty yet at the time, my mindset was "oh a romantic relationship is just someone you click with right? sure I have plenty of guy friends too, makes sense." This is also despite my religious upbringing, but at the time I never personally had a problem with homosexual relationships since I couldn't understand why they were "bad" past "the Bible says not to". Lots of weird mental gymnastics here. Still, I'd only ever asked out girls in high school.

What I thought in high school about sexual orientation was pretty much 100% theoretical because I really had no practical experience or "desire". But this viewpoint was about to be pushed to its limit for me, far beyond what I'd imagined when I started becoming more and more antisocial in real life and entrenched in online communities.

Most online communities are a sausage fest, and they're usually centered around hobbies with 99%+ males. And many of these guys don't have success with women in real life, let alone social lives.

What happens as a result is a big circle of guys with a lack of romantic and sexual connection. Most guys in online communities have never been with women in the first place, so they probably have a lower sex drive overall. Some guys will be DMing each other often from the group chats. Usually it’s just friendly. But sometimes, they start opening up about their emotional and personal problems to each other. This mutual vulnerability hits one or both guys in likely the same parts of the brain as it would when a man feels a deep connection with a woman, creating a romantic attraction. They’ll often put in their online profiles that they’re “dating” this other guy in the circle.

I contend that most of these guys are actually not homosexual at all. Rather, they’ve become extremely emotionally invested in someone who happens to be a male. In other words, these guys become gay because they haven’t found success with women.

My supporting evidence for the above hypothesis is that these guys will still have interests such as e.g. cute anime girls. At the least, some of these guys will say they’re bisexual, so that “makes sense”. But I don’t think that’s the case at all, because other than the guy they are “dating”, they like feminine characteristics. I think the strongest evidence of this is the rise of “trans-lesbians”. Essentially, the trans-lesbian phenomenon is some guys take “I can’t get with women so I’m gay” to the logical extreme. They’ll attempt to become the girl they could never get. But they’re not attracted to males, they’re attracted to girls. Hence the “lesbian”. For the most part, trans-lesbians will “date” other trans-lesbians. In other words, two guys who don’t have success with women try to become females themselves and date each other. Of course, there’s many male <-> trans-MTF relationships too.

I doubt I’m the first person who has observed this. Some of my online friends have as well. But I’m probably one of the first people to just put it out there on the Internet. Mainly because you’ll probably get cancelled from all of the Internet communities about such views if you go public with them.

My “gay” experience and how I got out of it
This part is going to be hyper-embarrassing and it was extremely difficult for me to write this but I figured it 1) gives me authority on writing the above section and 2) explains why it took me up until age 25 and not e.g. 20 to start going hard with figuring out dating women. It’s not something I really like to talk about at all, but if pressed I’ll be honest about it. I thought about hiding certain details, but I think making this story public (without revealing identities) would be really helpful for any guy who probably is/has been in this same situation, or thinks he might potentially end up like I did. The biggest gift I could receive is if even one lonely teenager on the Internet somehow stumbles upon this, and realizes he might end up down this trajectory and eject out of it as fast as possible, because it will cost you years and set you back extremely far if you just want to freaking hook up with girls.

When I was around 16 years old, I had joined an Internet community and immediately figured out how to break the site a bunch. I was being a total asshole teenager and decided to exploit the fuck out of it. I was actually participating in the community legitimately as well though since I had a genuine interest in the hobby though. Regardless, I got scolded pretty hard and the community disliked me quite a bit at that point.

One of the guys in that community didn’t. He started to message me a lot. I don’t remember exactly what the initial lead-ins were, but he liked who I was and wanted to get to know me better. At this point in life, I’d pretty much lost my entire high school friend circle because I was taking clingy asshole Internet humor to my real life and pushed everyone away. Additionally, I had just run away from my mom’s house so I lost all contact with my friends from church too. So I wanted to have a friend at that point in life.

As I’ve described in the previous section, we essentially chatted a lot about our personal lives, and he too had never had a girlfriend or been with a woman (he was actually 25 at the time). We would talk all the time and we started acting “cute” with each other and in our online presences too. He introduced me to cute anime girls, which I initially disliked because I thought I was too good for anime, but eventually I too would bingewatch high school girl slice-of-life anime. He told me that he was bisexual too.

I remember at some point, he started getting extremely clingy and controlling. If I didn’t respond to his messages quickly enough, he would get livid with me. Also if there was anything I liked that he didn’t like, he would shame me for it. Eventually, a lot of my tastes started morphing into his, because I didn’t want him to be mad at me. This dynamic turned me extremely submissive, not only towards him, but towards life in general. He would also do this tactic on me where if I pointed out something about him, he would turn it back on me and essentially gaslight me into believing that I was the trait I described, not he.

When I finally turned 18 (lol), he flew all the way from Europe to visit me in America. We spent that week having fun and exploring various places in my area, and I enjoyed his presence. He was wearing pretty masculine clothing and I actually enjoyed the dynamic we had during that trip. We even went back to his hotel room several times and played some music on his computer and chatted a lot. At some point he wanted to put his arm around me, so I let him.

After he left, we continued to message often online. I even told my dad I wanted to visit him en route to a trip in India (where I ended up later kind of acting bf+gfey to one of my cousin’s friends and we madeout). My dad told me “son, you’re not gay. I wouldn’t have a problem with it if you were, but you’re not.” It was an odd comment but it stuck with me for a long time. How does he know I’m not gay? I’m literally “seeing” a dude. Regardless, he wouldn’t let me go to visit this guy in his country.

Somewhere over the next year, I just straight up told this guy I think we should be “formally” boyfriends. Like it felt kinda weird we were spending all this time together and not “dating”.

This guy took a trip again to America again the next year when I was 19. This one was pretty nuts. I met him at his hotel like the previous time, but he was dressed in anime girl cosplay. I was immediately put off. Why the fuck is this guy wearing anime girl clothes. I didn’t say anything first and we just messed around on the computer for a bit. Then, we went out to eat, but he changed his clothes to normal masculine clothes.

“You know, I actually like you more when you act and dress like a guy.” I told him. He was extremely pissed at this comment, saying that “no, I feel more like myself when I’m dressed up like an anime girl.” “No you’re not, you’re completely different. Something is wrong”. We had various back and forths like this over the evening.

This next part is probably the most difficult piece of writing I’ve ever done. Literally writing this sentence as a distraction to temporarily avoid writing it, but I’ll go for it anyway. It’s really TMI and graphic so feel free to skip it. Actually, going to put it in small grey font that’s less readable so you can skip it more easily. But here we go.

Eventually we went back to his hotel room and he changed into his anime girl clothes again. I decided to just roll with it and handle it. We ended up spending time in his bed and cuddling. At some point, he had his hands over my pants. I decided to reciprocate as well. Then he pulled my pants down and started sucking my dick. I was totally fucking confused. Why is he doing this? What’s going on? Something feels wrong. Regardless, I didn’t enjoy it. He would tell me later that he wasn’t good at sucking dicks (lol), but that really wasn’t the reason.

I told him to stop after a couple of minutes because it was really weird. We spent some more time in bed. I was still pretty confused but I didn’t really know what to do. So I tried to pull his dick out. It was completely flaccid. I was 400% confused. Why isn’t he hard? Doesn’t he like me? He said he couldn’t get hard around someone else (I didn’t know about ED at the time, but I really think this situation was beyond just ED). I tried jerking his cock but it was still completely flaccid. What the fuck? I was still aroused so I just jerked myself off until I exploded, which he said he enjoyed. We kind of cuddled some more and tried to fall asleep but I couldn’t. Eventually I got on top of his body and tried to makeout with him. He was completely turned off and kicked me out of the hotel room. I was so fucking confused.

Some days after the above experience I remember my dad wanted to meet him. So I told him to come over to my house. My dad basically grilled him on who he was and what he was doing with me. I don’t remember the specific details but obviously he started growing an animosity towards my dad.

Over the next year, up until summer 2016 we kept messaging frequently. It was pretty rocky and there was lots of drama between us. But nothing notable that I remember specifically. I did remember he kept telling me to stop listening to my dad and that my dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But I knew something was completely wrong and started challenging him. I stopped molding my entire worldview around this guy’s.

I mentioned earlier that I met a hyper tiny Asian girl in one of my classes. As I said, I fell hard for this chick and realized it was hitting me right in the primal part of my brain and making me crazy. It was nothing like I ever felt for this guy in my life. This was essentially my “red-pill”. I’m not bisexual. I’m completely straight.

I obviously mentioned this to the guy. He was pissed. Told me that it wasn’t real, what happened about us, ever since you started listening to your dad you’ve changed. I tried to maintain some kind of friendship with him over the next few months regardless. But it was essentially periods of us blocking and unblocking each other. At one point I remember I told him “we can be friends only if you get a girlfriend first”. Of course he was livid at that proposition.

How this story ends is one day, when I had him blocked, he was blowing up my phone during class (I had a regular cell phone at the time with only SMS messaging, note that I live in America and he lives in Europe). I tried to ignore it but after around 10 messages of spam, I left class during middle of lecture, all my stuff still in the classroom, and took my laptop to a study room.

We had a 1-2 hour period of heated emails to each other. I don’t know what kinds of expressions I was making, because saw people looking at me through the glass windows like “what the fuck???” Eventually I told him to never talk to me again. He threatened to kill himself because I was being so “mean”, and I just immediately ghosted him for another few months. My thought was, if you’re going to threaten someone with killing yourself, then you might as well just do it. Go ahead.

He sent me some messages in December 2016, and we had another chat. It was largely the same psychologically manipulative dynamic and heated arguments that went nowhere. So at some point I literally just said さようなら Sayonara, and never responded to him for the rest of my life. He sent me a couple messages after that, some more in Feb 2017, and some more in Dec 2017 the next year but I never responded. And when mutual friends tried to tell me he wanted to talk to me, I told him I’m not talking to him again. So that’s the end of that story.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

You have to actually try to get laid
Back to around spring 2021. I’ll keep this part kind of short because I’ve basically explained everything I’ve needed to about my background previously. But essentially the first half of 2021 was sorting out all of my mental issues from scratch. As I said earlier, being stuck on top of a mountain in a dumpy town in the South pretty much set me up to start inner work. I basically ended up coming to the conclusion over some months that something was completely wrong, that I’d never had real experiences with women and I need to handle it. My housemate and I would talk about this a lot (he did have some experience in the past). We had to sort out our own experiences such as the ones I’ve described above and figure out how to drive forward.

Initially I had a goal of, okay let me figure out how to get a wife. I started from a really secular point of view. If I have enough money, then I’ll be a stable rock and I can provide for the family we’ll have. I was still kind of in that mode when I’d joined the forums which is why I was trying to get into grad school initially. I was doing shit like trying to meet people in my city, actually through mostly cold approaching random groups of people at bars, practicing bass and instruments so I could potentially meet girls who are musically inclined, exercising a lot, etc.

But I had a realization everything I was doing was indirect. All of the above is good of course, but am I really trying to meet women? Am I actually trying to approach this directly? Turns out, no I wasn’t. But I hardly knew what to do. I thought you only met girls from your social circle and hobbies because that’s how I’d met them my whole life. How can I specifically focus on dating?

Finding KYIL
One day I was brute force reading every single result for “tinder guide” on internet search. I had a strong disdain for meeting people online, rather than in person (I don’t necessarily have this viewpoint anymore btw), but I was basically grasping at straws for “how do you directly attack the problem of meeting women”.

I stumbled upon Andy’s infamous Tinder guide. I was pretty astonished at the level of detail, but that guide wasn’t specifically what got me hooked on this site. I noticed there were a LOT of articles, about mindset towards women and life. I was also like, wow this guy has the balls to post explicit pictures of the girls he’s hooked up with? I pretty much just started reading a bunch of articles on the site.

I also noticed there’s a podcast, and at the time Andy was in the middle of his 365 project, so there was a LOT of content. I would just start listening to them in the car and while I was doing chores. I wasn’t absolutely enamored yet, but I really enjoyed the content and information, and felt I was on the path to something great.

I eventually ran into Andy’s cold approach content. This podcast specifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbyfWMVmb2g

I was driving through the Tennessee mountains and when this episode came on, it felt like time stopped and my understanding of reality shattered to pieces. This guy just went up to some college asian chick, not even as a student, and just told her she was cute? And then they went on a bunch of dates, fooled around, and then hooked up? What the fuck, is this real?

I voraciously listened and read about all of Andy’s cold approach stories and all of his content about it. Seriously? I could have just gone up to all the cute girls I’ve seen in my life and called them cute? I don’t know why it was so novel to me but I was suddenly motivated like never before. I need to know how to do this. Give me this superpower.

I hadn’t yet joined the forums, but I started hearing about guys like Toast and Manganiello having these massive approach sessions and started reading their logs non-stop. You can just do this? Just go up to as many girls as possible and actually date this way? It felt like the purest and most honest way to meet women. And it’s something I wanted to do as well.

Eventually I was ready to start taking some action so here I am.

 

[Now]

Fucking hell dude, I'm glad you wrote out your story. Props for admitting all of this.

I was at the edge of my seat reading the gay experience part.
Some of that is way too close to what I went through with online communities, including some borderline gay stuff though nothing going as far as yours.
It's always the real life losers trying to take advantage of confused kids on the internet.

The guy flying out the second you hit 18 and later threatening to kill himself... bro what the fuck. Good to hear you shut that down and got away from that shit.

It's not clear from your girl history, have you gotten laid yet?


We're all gonna make it,

Now

 

[pancakemouse]

I want to share this because I always want to know other guys' stories of what their experience with girls was before they decided to take action, and maybe perhaps why they had so many roadblocks. Basically, this is a "retroactive progress log".

I think you've seen mine, but I'll share it for everyone else: https://pancakemouse.wordpress.com/2018/11/21/my-story/

I remember one day she sent me a kiss emoji and I was like “what the fuckk” and ran outside for like 2 miles at 3:00am

Oh man. I met an attractive Mexican girl in a hostel in Spain when I was still a virgin (age 24 lawl). She had a boyfriend, too. Like two years later she revealed to me over Facebook Messenger that she really, really liked me. My heart was racing so fast that night from the validation and possibilities that I could barely sleep.

I'm a 5'5" (168cm) Indian, naturally physically weak, late-bloomer exclusively raised in the USA.

The only reason this is actually a relevant detail is because many guys think such "surface level" inherent traits about themselves are the reasons why they've not had success with women. But I can tell you this actually wasn't entirely the case for me, even when I did join the forums, because my story below would have likely been not too different if we swapped my actual physical presence with "average white American male". In other words, my physical presence was not one of my limiting beliefs about dating and women throughout my life.

Facts. I've definitely gotten more interest from girls as I've become more attractive, but I was an "average white guy virgin" from age 20-24.

This frame was chipped away at slowly over the next 10+ years. I saw people kissing in high school, I heard weird sex stories from both guys and girls I was friends with, and at some point I realized even my friends who weren't so overt about their sex life were also likely hooking up, contrary to everything I understood about relationships as a child. At some point, my baseline understanding about relationships and dating was completely shattered.

Oh man, yeah. In high school, I basically thought that you had to be in a relationship to get sex, and I was so fiercely independent that I wanted no part in a relationship. Thus, no sex. Then, late into senior year of high school, my friend told me he ended up hooking up with one of the girls in our mutual social circle at a party we were both at, after I had left. That was kind of a big unlock, I remember thinking "How did he make that happen?"

I was driving through the Tennessee mountains and when this episode came on, it felt like time stopped and my understanding of reality shattered to pieces. This guy just went up to some college asian chick, not even as a student, and just told her she was cute? And then they went on a bunch of dates, fooled around, and then hooked up? What the fuck, is this real?

Magical.

I've said this before, but I'm so excited to watch where you go with this. You are obviously undoing a lifetime of societal conditioning, so it won't be easy. But your mindset is spot on. You will achieve, no matter where you decide to go with all this.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

Fucking hell dude, I'm glad you wrote out your story. Props for admitting all of this.

I was at the edge of my seat reading the gay experience part.
Some of that is way too close to what I went through with online communities, including some borderline gay stuff though nothing going as far as yours.
It's always the real life losers trying to take advantage of confused kids on the internet.

The guy flying out the second you hit 18 and later threatening to kill himself... bro what the fuck. Good to hear you shut that down and got away from that shit.

It's not clear from your girl history, have you gotten laid yet?


We're all gonna make it,

Now

No I've not. This was supposed to be an edit of my first post on my main thread which did have that information, but I didn't include it here. Edited first post in this thread.

 

[Manganiello]

I think everyone who comes on this forum has a history that's a little bit fucked up with women.

Like we all underperformed massively and have to rescript and rewrite our lives to make it all happen.

In hindsight I think this is really the blessing in disguise.

 

[Jacobpalmer123]

Its funny the height things really is all in my head. But I think we all have that background of simping for girls when we are young. I remember this girl I knew in middle school and waited a year to see her but nothing happened after that. Waited 2 years sent paragraphs. I suppose those are things that in the moment make sense. But as we get older and wiser they seem trivial and silly. It was a good read

 

[Squilliam]

I think everyone who comes on this forum has a history that's a little bit fucked up with women.

Like we all underperformed massively and have to rescript and rewrite our lives to make it all happen.

In hindsight I think this is really the blessing in disguise.

You hit the nail on the head. I've also noticed that most people here didn't do well with women in their childhood. They then have this desire to make up for lost time which propels them to work harder than the average person, which ultimately leads them to being above average.

 

[MakingAComeback]

I will read this fully and absorb it: just wanted to say, THANK YOU for sharing.

MAC

 

[CainGettingLaid]

I deeply respect that you shared this.

 

[ovnidos]

Damn bro... You're fucking brave, sharing this! Respect from the soul

 

[Sprezza]

Thanks a lot for sharing man!

 

[7FigureBrian]

I have massive respect for you for sharing all this, especially the "fine print".

If it was hard to read, I can't imagine how hard it was to write. So hats off to you bro.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

https://streamable.com/iznllf
View attachment 4

will explain later (this is a one-way ticket btw)

日本とコルゲート氏の物語 the story of colgate and japan
I've briefly hinted on KYIL a couple of times that I can speak Japanese but I never highlighted it or made a big deal of it because I felt it wasn't relevant to my self-improvement journey.

Here are those times by the way:
Boldly trying to get my forum-idol Toast to be a language partner before he had any Japanese ability and before I had any relevance on this forum

Doing my first cold approach in Japanese when I recognized her accent <---there have been several times where I was about to get instantly blown out by an Asian chick when I recognized her accent, switched languages, and turned the approach into at least an exchange

Going on my first date entirely in Japanese

Going on multiple dates with a Japanese girl and pulling

Video of me doing an approach in Japanese (but you can't actually hear the audio lol). pancakemouse had mentioned that my demeanor and body language had suddenly freed itself with this Japanese approach, to contrast with my English approaches. I didn't write the date report here in my log for some reason, but I actually went on a dinner date with this girl (split bill), and pulled her to my place and we cuddled while she sang YOASOBI songs I was playing. When I tried to invite her over for curry for a D2 however...

is it ok if i bring a coworker?
friday is fine. i want you to come by yourself
i only want to be friends with you so let's stop for now
ok


But given that I impulsively bought a flight ticket to Japan and posted about it without further explanation, and getting the appropriate feedback of "but colgate-san ur just running away from ur problems! japan won't solve ur problems! u need to figure out who u are and be that person! GEOMAXXING is not a substitute for deep inner work and taking real action!", I think it's time for me to get this story off my chest.

You have forgotten that I am BROWN and that I have no WHITE GUY ADVANTAGE (omg wait, I will explain this off-the-bat blackpilling too...eventually...).

I assure you that Japan is not a geomaxx hack in my case, and upon realizing it wasn't, I had made this decision to eject. But I didn't explain it on the forums sufficiently.

So it's story time.

The following posts are going to go into as much detail as I possibly can about how and why I got to this point. It'll be another version of "my story", but from a completely different angle.

The first time I wrote my story, I wrote it from the angle of just purely my experience with girls, and sexuality in general. It was stuff I had to just get off of my chest and out of my system to continue from that point.

This next series of posts starts in 2015 and I'm writing it to basically put out there how uhh...much of a weeb I am...and why doing anything that isn't going to Japan as soon as possible is only hurting my progress.




ライトノベル the visual novel
It was around noon and I had literally slept zero hours and I had just finished playing the best game of all time.

View attachment 3
That’s right, NEKOPARA

Preceding this, I had spent the entire year watching 79 entire anime series.
View attachment 2


I was a 19 year old in community college working in fast food night shift to fund it, and this was how I spent every waking hour I wasn’t working or in school.

I would come home from work around 7:00am, pop on yet another anime on my computer, and binge watch the entire series until I passed out and I had work or school again.

Nekopara is an erotic visual novel where you are some guy who just started a bakery business, but your little sister shipped off two catgirls along with your bakery and living packages. You "reluctantly" raise them as your "own pets", take them out with you for errands and dates, and then of course, you get to FUCK the catgirls in threesomes.

holy shit!!!!!!!!!!!!! i want to be this guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how can i be this guy?????????????????????????

wait…

what RETARD literally watches EIGHTY CARTOONS in a FOREIGN LANGUAGE without even understanding the language????????????????

also catgirls speak japanese!!!!!!

The realization that I had literally consumed maybe 600 hours of Japanese content yet had zero comprehension of the language hit me like a pile of bricks. Additionally, I had at least 7-8 years of passive Hindi immersion, but zero to show for that language either. I was completely monolingual in English.

Frustrated in my absolute retardation and perceived failure as a human being, I set my alarm for one and a half hours from then to attend class in total delirium.

When I got home from college, I flipped on Nekopara again but switched the language to Japanese.

i am going to read this ENTIRE THING in japanese!!!!!!!! like it was intended to be read!!!!!!! then i will have my catgirl harem!!!!!
...oh wait right they dont use english characters

After doing some research on how the Japanese writing system works, I realized I was in for a treat. three lettering systems, and one that has over 2000 characters.

But I wanted my catgirl harem, and I didn't care. I pulled up the Wikipedia pages for hiragana and katakana (two of the alphabets they use in Japanese), locked my room door, brought up a notebook, and slammed memorizing all of the characters and sounds that evening.

I had to go to work that night, and I was trying to replicate the hiragana and katakana tables from memory on blank receipt papers in between taking orders at the drive-thru. I came home the next morning and checked my work, realizing I missed a few letters (I didn't have a smartphone at the time to check my work). I filled in and reviewed the letters I messed up, and then I pulled up Japanese Nekopara again (I had it a little past the first line).

View attachment 1
uhhh ok.......ho n no ??? shi no ??? ??? mo a ru ke do <--- note, this took me probably like 15 minutes at least

oh...i can't escape learning those 2000 kanji huh....

I found out you can draw in kanji characters in google translate so I deciphered the characters that way. The only reason I remember the exact frame I was reading was because it had the word 不安 which became the first kanji word I ever learned.

I never bothered to actually figure out what the whole sentence meant, and was like, damn....this is going to take way too long.....do i even want catgirls???


sidenote: in retrospect, now that I actually understand what ほんの少しの不安もあるけど、means, it's fitting that this is literally the first sentence I tried to break down seriously. It's just basically "i have a little bit of fear but..." which is a recurring theme with any self-improvement and making big decisions


And then I proceeded to do absolutely nothing with the language for another 8-9 months. I even stopped watching anime for the most part, quit my fast food job and switched to a retail job, and largely flipped most of my interests and efforts back into music production (which is basically my lifelong hobby).

 

[colgate / bulldog]

授業 the class
Months later, I was signing up for my next semester's classes and realized I needed a foreign language credit to transfer out of community college, and saw that Japanese was offered.

I remembered my anime obsession from a year ago and the desire of actually being able to watch anime and play visual novels in their native language had resurfaced.

I signed up for the introductory class, and started going through some anime shows again.

WTF i HATE watching this.....i'm at the mercy of the damn subtitles!!!!!! and WTF i know they are NOT saying that shit i've heard that mouthnoise with a different subtitle before this makes NO SENSE I HATE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
all of these anime girls are just having fun with their friends and here i am sitting in my room with zero friends jerking off, i could be having this fun myself!!!

These two realizations simultaneously stemmed off into
1. me starting to randomly insert myself into circles of people in my classes like I already belonged there and over time, developing my college friend circle. i think part of my anime dependency in the previous year was that i was trying to use it to fill my need for social interaction, and upon realizing that i should just be doing this in real life, it made me start trying to put myself out there in college

and more importantly for this story...
2. resurging my dormant project to learn japanese so i could have my catgirl harem

And I'm not going to wait for hell to freeze over and have some onee-san teach me in a class. I'm going to get a huuuuuuuuge head start and learn this shit myself.

I reviewed all of the hiragana and katakana again.

But realized I was now in the real shitter.
Kanji.
Over many centuries, thousands of Chinese characters were imported into the Japanese language in lieu of having a prior writing system.
The Japanese government has approved 2138 of them for standard use in newspapers and to be taught to all Japanese students over their 12 years of schooling.

I researched various methods to learn and memorize them, and initially decided, FUCK IT! let's just start by physically creating index cards for every single kanji.
I spent a couple days making a couple hundred cards, decked out with their meanings, possible readings, random words, etc.

They were slick as fuck
But they were also completely useless!!!

Frustrated, I kept searching out for various ways to learn kanji, and eventually stumbled upon a site called Kanji Damage, whose eighth entry aptly points out the kanji for 姦rape is three women. And with that, I knew this was where I had to learn kanji from.

I started learning about 10-20 kanji characters per day using this site with Anki electronic flashcards, while trying to decipher random anime, manga, twitter posts, visual novels, etc, etc. Repeatedly frustrated that I couldn't, I would learn grammar bit by bit from many online sources, and then go back to deciphering Japanese content.

After about a little over a month of doing this, the real Japanese class started. I was excited because I could finally find other people who wanted to learn Japanese, have a teacher, and fill in gaps in my knowledge.

except nobody actually wanted to learn japanese!!!!!!

I was a total ball of plasma in the class, trying to find people who wanted to talk about Japanese learning with me and introducing myself in various mini-circles of people, talking about all the anime I've been watching, new Japanese grammar I learned, etc.

oh i cant read the letters yet haha
haha that looks really difficult
man you really like anime lol

The Japanese teacher also seemed kind of amused but mildly cringed at my eagerness to learn the language because I wanted to understand anime.

now it's war!!!!!

I was now even more motivated to prove to everyone that I knew what the FUCK I was doing in the class.

All you fuckers want to do is eat mochi and watch One Piece. mochi SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! no wonder why everyone in america is fat!!!!!!!!!!!!! all of you would be better off for society burned in the furnace for FUEL!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh wow, you're so cool for liking "Japanese culture" instead of anime. I'll see you serving me water at the shinto shrine real soon then!!!

All of you Chinese people are just cheating, you're like "oh we already know the Chinese characters so this will be an easy A! we all just have our own secret ring where we find the answer keys and copy off of each other anyway"

The anime I watch is superior! It's all girls and all of the girls are cute and they have fun with their friends! You guys are all gay! LOL explain how watching shows with male characters isn't gay???? exactly!!!!!!!!! I will learn how these anime girls speak and they will all be mine!

I felt like I was the only person who genuinely wanted to learn the Japanese language and I wasn't ashamed about my reasons, I wanted to watch cute girl anime and have my catgirl harem.
View attachment 2


戦争 the war
Realizing it was me vs the 世界 (world), I saw I had my work cut out for me and I was going to have to lone-wolf this.

I went into hyperdrive, constantly watching aforementioned anime/manga and visual novels, listening to Japanese music, reading Japanese twitter posts, anything I could get my hands on.

And I was absolutely livid that I understood next to zero.

I tried as hard as possible to understand things. I would take each sentence I ran into, break down each of the words, try to understand their functions, get frustrated that I'm only picking up a few words, crash study a bunch of sections of grammar books and resources, rinse and repeat.

Every few days I would have epiphanies of understanding new things that I couldn't before, after spending anywhere from 10 minutes to read short sentences, to 12 hours to read simple 10 sentence articles.

At some point, I would write little diary entries in Japanese. It started with dumbass shit like "I woke up. I ate eggs. I went to school. Going to sleep." After a bit over a month of studying I posted this (super cringe and filled with errors) entry onto a now-defunct and account-walled foreign language correction exchange site:
View attachment 1


I had now repurposed the Japanese class as my personal mini-Japanese study hall where I paid zero attention in lecture, and then went up to the teacher after class to help me correct my crappy Japanese diary musings.

I would do things like this everyday, arrogantly believing and outwardly behaving like I understood Japanese, while simultaneously realizing and being frustrated that I understood zero. The way I would make up for this obvious cognitive dissonance is spamming myself with Japanese content all day and as much as I could and toiling over how I could understand wtf is going on.

Around a month or two after I started studying Japanese, I had to host a kids' workshop at my retail job.

I was outside manning one of the tables, when I overheard some families speaking Japanese.

Turns out a bunch of local Japanese families had brought their kids to this workshop.

MAJI KA YO?????????????????????????????

wait fr???? ok time to speak japanese. because i clearly know japanese right. i mean i've been studying it for literally a month. that's plenty of time to study japanese.

I have no idea what I said to the families since this was about 6 years ago, but I tried as hard as possible to speak entirely in Japanese to them, with my maybe ~40 days of experience.

I was helping the kids build little model whiteboards from pieces of wood and etc. There was lots of asking "what is x in japanese" from my end, but I remember persevering and not switching to English at all, other than asking about certain words. And I'd even avoid asking about certain words, I would just point at objects, saying "this, that" etc or motion with my hands what I wanted to express if possible, and the kids would tell me.

I got affectionately called "colgate-sensei" (teacher colgate, if you aren't a total hyper-weeb) by the little kids.

I went home that day feeling like HOLY SHIT did that just happen??? I obviously wrote a yet another Japanese diary entry about it.

What I had realized is while the range of what I could express was extremely, extremely limited, I could make myself understood in Japanese and understand little kids and their parents speaking Japanese directly to me. Conversation that didn't involve me was of course lost, but the moment they were talking to me I was surprised at how much I could understand, rather than "could not", and took that and sprinted off with it.

This was the point of no return. I want to learn this language and find out the deal with Japan and its people. And now my interests have been redirected slightly away from anime. I didn't realize how much joy I got from literally being able to confidently talk to people, a position I had rarely experienced in my life up until this point.

It wasn't like speaking English either, I felt like I could just be myself instead of trying to pigeonhole whoever tf I am into American culture and nonsense social rules.
With English, one fuckup and I'm out.
But with Japanese, I basically realized I could relish in the "American foreigner pass" and communicate however I wanted to, freely and mostly unrestricted.
Yes, Japanese culture has its own and even arguably antisocial rules, but I'm not subject to them as much as native Japanese people are.
The mere fact I have any competency beyond asking where the toilet was is "amazing" to these people (I would later learn it's more of a sarcastic shock response than a genuine compliment, but I didn't give a FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you think my japanese is 上手？？ then you'll get more where that came from dickheads).
I could express the more base and fundamental version of myself in Japanese even with hardly a month of active studying.
And the more Japanese I learn, the more my freedom increases as my granularity and expressiveness increase.

After this experience with the Japanese families at the kids' workshop, my efforts only exponentiated over the coming months. Slamming kanji characters, shoving every minute I had with random Japanese content, using my frustration of inability to comprehend what was happening to actively study grammar and break down sentences, and daily diary entries.

But what kept me going was realizing this was my project and my destiny.
I didn't ask to be thrown into a religious cult as a kid,
I didn't ask to be pigeonholed as a submissive internet gay guy,
I didn't ask to be physically weaker than everyone else.

Japanese finally put me in control of my life. This was completely 100% my project, and my responsibility. Finally, I had no random external factors screwing me over. I had a fucking fresh clean slate and I could prove myself with learning this language, and the social atmosphere in Japanese isn't as cruel because I actually have value once I can speak their language. Since I'll "never be Japanese", it's literally positive feedback just for showing up and taking action.

Between months 2-6 I was doing the following (in no particular order of time/importance):
- nonstop japanese content: anime, manga, youtube, music, podcasts. both at home and in the car
- studying new grammar, both directly from books and grammar sites and indirectly by picking it out from sentences in stuff i was reading and listening to, and from sentence databases when i wanted to try to figure out how to say certain things
- bought dozens of books and manga even if i had no idea what was happening. JUST BUY THE DAMN BOOKS. i bought everything from simple graded readers to manga to freakin textbooks. sometimes i read the whole book, sometimes part of it, and sometimes i barely read one page of the book. and i would revisit books frequently
- bought a shadowing book and listened + mimicked all of the phrases on loop in my car for months until i could do the whole book. i think this book was at least 60% responsible for getting me out of low beginner to intermediate level
- writing daily diary entries, and also made a twitter account and followed japanese people/learners from the internet music community and spammed cringey unnatural japanese tweets
- memorizing 10-20 kanji a day, until around ~900 (month 5ish) when i fuckin bailed because i hated memorizing random symbols like an autist and noticed i don't think kanji is "strange" anymore, even if i've never seen a specific character. and i (correctly realized i) can just figure out new kanji and kanji words on the fly from context and using the dictionary from this point
- talking to myself in the shower, in the car, at work, wherever i could in japanese
- taking 12 hours to read a single 10 sentence article i could read in 30 seconds if it were in english. this time reduced over time of course as i read more things, but this specific instance was monumental because i forced myself to sit down and understand an entire piece of japanese 100%
- forced one of my internet music friends who was already fluent in japanese to speak to me only in japanese from then on, so i can take 10 minutes to read his 1 sentence messages and spend another 5 minutes formulating what i should say. these times dropped drastically over time of course
- generally obnoxiously asking friends if they knew any japanese people i could talk to because i just wanted to speak in japanese with people
- buying a smartphone specifically so i could read japanese content on the go and text in japanese (i previously only had texting slide phones), and also switching its UI language to japanese

Around month 4, I had my first "Japanese dream" where I saw a Japanese person I had started talking to and she was speaking to me in Japanese. I don't remember the contents of the dream now beyond seeing one of the people I was chatting with in Japanese talk to me in the language, but literally having a dream in Japanese was huge for me. I realized my brain was starting to actually process this as language and not just "anime girl noises".

I had many little milestones like the above too. Someone I'd tell about my Japanese adventures gave me this appropriate libel on a discord server I was not yet a part of (I found it when trying to research my past for this specific post):



I knew I had "won" my "war" with this Japanese class when one day my teacher told me to stay after class so she could talk to me. I had been perpetually late to class, interrupting her lessons, and blatantly not paying attention.

but she scolded me entirely in Japanese

It's not like she couldn't have scolded me in English, she had been living in America for at least 10 years and was married to an American. But just the fact that she scolded me in Japanese was enough for me to at least start respecting the class and showing up on time, and more importantly, proving that I was actually seen as somewhat competent in the language.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

国民 the citizens
One day, maybe after 5-6 months of studying Japanese, I was browsing facebook and I saw this post about how some girl was being "harassed" or whatever on this language learning social network app...

wait...LANGUAGE LEARNING SOCIAL NETWORK APP????

UHHH?????

I'M LEARNING A LANGUAGE??????????????????????????????????????

I scrolled through the comments and found it was called HelloTalk.

I immediately downloaded it, and figured out what it was all about:
- You can post statuses in the language you're learning, and it's shown to all natives of the language, and they can post grammar corrections on the status
- You can chat literally any native speaker of the language, and the chat feature has built in translation/transliteration tools for when you get stuck
- You can find native speakers in your area and directly message them

This was the best thing I had ever discovered for learning Japanese.

I immediately started posting passing thoughts, pictures of my life, explanations of difficult English points for Japanese people, in Japanese. I got frustrated at each correction I received, and that only fueled me to post more.

And I messaged nearly every person who commented or corrected my statuses.

I also refused to use English. I still arrogantly believed I knew Japanese. Even if the other person was responding to me in English, I would just relentlessly respond back in Japanese.

It filtered a lot of people out. There were plenty of Japanese people with good English and were vigilantly learning the language as I was. However, I never managed to make close connections with any of them and our conversations would quickly die out.

But this (unintentional) strategy also filtered a lot of people in. I was getting a lot of people who would claim "I want to learn English and make foreign friends", but the moment I'm constantly engaging them in pure Japanese (as crappy as my Japanese was), suddenly I'm the main person they're talking to. I started to realize this when they would ask me how to message some of their other English friends, and send me screenshots and I saw the conversations were sparse and not as deep as the ones I was having with them.

I would chat with 5-10 people everyday, entirely in Japanese over the next year. My sleep schedule had coalesced into Japan time as I was messaging Japanese people into the American dusk as night fell upon them, 16-17 hours ahead.

And by now my real life college social circle had started to stabilize so no longer was my life sitting in my hole watching anime all day. I would send pictures of me and my friends doing things to these Japanese people, and they even started to "invest" in my life and my friends.

I had unintentionally created a network of completely one-sided language "exchange" partners where I was getting all the Japanese practice I wanted while they got to get an in-depth look at what life in America is like, in the comfort of their native language.

I would video call these friends regularly too, and get my listening+speaking level up to par as well. Not only was it just for that purpose, but I felt I actually got to know these people more personally through video calls.

And when any of these Japanese people happened to be in my city, I would meet up with them. Our interactions would be entirely in Japanese, and I would tour guide them around the city, and even sometimes introduce them to my friends in person (where we would switch to English of course lol).



I think how I used HelloTalk over 2017 was responsible for 70% of my Japanese proficiency. If my pre-HelloTalk level was equivalent to maybe a 4 year old, this shot me up to at least a 9 year old.

If I had to say what's been the best era of my life so far outside of KYIL, it had to be the year of 2017. Thanks to anime and visual novels I had decided that there was more to life than sitting on my computer all day in chatrooms, started having a real social life, and found myself actually valuable to real people by learning Japanese and being able to speak to them, while showing them what life as an American is like.

 

[colgate / bulldog]

夢殺人（ドリームキラー）the dreamkiller (really this should be called 夢自殺（ドリームキラー）though)
I had pretty much stopped actively "studying" Japanese and was purely relying on active and daily functional usage of the language around mid-2017 (about 1 year since I started studying). I wasn't native-level but I was at the point where I had several Japanese friends where the relationship was established entirely in Japanese, and I could do most of my daily activities in Japanese:
- knew basically what all of the Japanese was on my phone and computer (websites were in Japanese too)
- reading manga for fun in Japanese
- looking up my school subjects in Japanese and studying the corresponding articles instead of the given course materials

I would also do things like overhearing the occasional Japanese conversation at school and then cold approaching the group to be friends with them. So I started even making inroads into the local Japanese community in my city, and being exposed to group situations (I still don't have enough experience being in group situations in Japanese, so it's a weak point for me).

I was basically at the point where the only thing I really needed to know was more vocabulary, and I would keep learning new vocabulary as I just kept living my life.

My main focus started shifting towards my actual studies because I had transferred to university at this point, and I was hustling to get an internship. So Japanese became a passive thing. I don't think my Japanese improved much between year 1 and 2 other than increased vocab and comprehension from the passive immersion that I mentioned above.

It's time.

I need to go to this country.

what RETARD!!!!!!!!!!!! learns an entire language only to NOT GO TO THE COUNTRY???????????????????????

I bought plane tickets to stay in Japan for two weeks the next winter (7 months in advance!!), and spammed every single "close" friend I had. By now I wasn't really using HelloTalk so the amount of people I was talking to had basically stabilized to a set of 7-15 close-ish friends, and I think I really only actively kept in touch with about 3-5 of them.

The Japanese loooooove planning things super far in advance, and I had set up a precarious plan to meet all of these people. I generally tried to group people who lived near each other around the same time, and I ended up visiting all of Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Tokyo over 2 weeks. Some of the experiences I had were:
- the first person I planned on meeting up with me being an 18 year old girl and therefore ghosting me so I went to the aquarium by myself instead
- experiencing real family Japanese family life for 2 days with a housewife friend who took me to her house in the sticks an hour away from the main city (this was probably my favorite experience, not only was this the realest Japanese experience I had, I genuinely felt like I got a taste of real and normal family life, given my rocky childhood)
- going to various temples and onsen (hot springs)!!!
- enjoying the amazing convenience store food and hot lemon drinks daily
- having some random Japanese woman in an elevator freak out at me being able to read a sign saying "parking lot" and my Japanese friend getting more pissed off than I did about it
- hiking some mountains outside of Kyoto
- eating dried fish snacks and drinking Asahi beer while watching Japanese variety TV shows with a friend until 2 am
- singing karaoke with a cute girl who wanted to hear me sing in English and then proceeding to butcher the entire thing because I can't perceive lyrics
- going to the Tokyo Auto Show and seeing lots HOT BIMBOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (that i repressed all of my interest in) ...and also some cars or something
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I didn't really care about doing "tourist" things or anything crazy, I just wanted to finally meet these people I had been talking to over a screen in person.

And the best part was I used 100% Japanese the entire time. I don't remember a single time where we even briefly had a conversation in English. There were a couple times when I was at restaurants or random places that I had a bit of trouble and a couple of zealous English learners trying to pull fast Japanese on me when they realized I didn't want to speak English, but beyond maybe asking what certain words were, I still managed to operate in Japanese.

On my last day in Japan, my flight was leaving very early in the morning so I decided to stay overnight in a net cafe booth. I was trying to learn all of the different Japanese prefectures and geography on the computer (I still have no idea about these btw) and couldn't sleep.

I enjoyed my experiences in Japan, but I felt pretty down for the next few hours. For one, I felt like I couldn't fully sit in and enjoy the trip because I had literally brought only a small backpack and 2 sets of clothes, and was constantly moving around, meeting new people like a bullet. And I felt empty because I started feeling like I couldn't live here because I don't want to get a job here and deal with the brutal Japanese work culture, and raising a foreigner child here might prove to be a huge hurdle if I did plan to move here.

I was literally too scared of ruining my overly positive impression of Japan and Japanese I was able to craft by my own journey of learning their language. And I honestly seemed to care more about the fact I could speak another language and could escape the Western world, which I always felt shackled by my entire life. So I was content with that I suppose.

and well uhh...there's a lot of cute girls...and i didn't get any of them...i mean i had cute japanese female friends...but it's not like they liked me back...and some of them had boyfriends or were married anyway so i can't do anything about that...uhhh

I had made a decision that I can't live in this country and I could only enjoy it through the lens of a tourist who would come here every now and then to hang out with his Japanese friends. Learning the language was worth it insofar as it had given me a happiness I wouldn't have been able to achieve otherwise and pushed me way out of my comfort zone socially by making me actually want to socialize with new people, and for that I can continue to use the language. But living in Japan? well...sayonara Japan...

I flew back home, and was immediately depressed. no onsen??? stale and shitty convenience store food??? have to drive everywhere???

and uhh...i mean there are cute girls here sure...but nothing like those japanese girls...but i didn't want to admit that to myself at the time...

Luckily this depression didn't last long because my interests switched to powerlifting and picking up a barbell for the first time in my life thanks to a university friend who wanted me to be his lifting buddy.

Back home, I decided I'm going to try to integrate into the local Japanese community as much as possible. Fortunately I lived in a place where there was a sizeable Japanese population, so I guess I can have the best of both worlds, right? General comfort of familiarity with America (mostly due to my career), and I get to associate with the group of people I seem to enjoy talking to the most.

Over 2019, I had been doing these things:
- using the Meetup app to find local Japanese language exchanges and Japanese events, and making more local friends
- learning how to make some Japanese food (by reading the recipes from Japanese sites of course) so I had an excuse to go to the Japanese grocery stores without just buying random snacks, and talking to cashiers in Japanese
- reading the local Japanese newspaper to mine for events I could go to. the only event i ended up finding out about was this big Japanese "field day" event where 100-200 Japanese people (and like 2 or 3 hyper-weebs like me) met up to participate in various games like tug-of-war, obstacle courses, relay races, etc. now that I had started lifting too, I had some faith in my physical abilities and surprisingly wasn't a total train wreck at this (ie: i wasn't dead last completely useless, but i certainly wasn't top 10% either)

I saw that my university was offering a Business Japanese course. Seeing that it was my last semester and my courseload was light, I thought I should take it and learn more about Japanese work culture and formal Japanese because I had only learned casual Japanese really. It required majoring in Japanese and taking a bunch of prerequisite courses, but I was able to get in the class by emailing the Japanese department in Japanese and having them evaluate my ability.

At least in this class there were a few people who actually had comparable Japanese to mine and actually enjoyed studying Japanese so that was cool. I didn't feel like I was in some weird battle with the smug American mochi gobblers. And I enjoyed doing roleplays in class where I actually had to learn some things I didn't know.

At the end of the semester, we had to write a presentation on something related to Japanese Business. I decided to research my career field in Japan and prepare my presentation on that.

But I had discovered they make 30-50% as much as we do here in America (in retrospect, it's not a huge deal because the cost of living in Japan is lower). And the main thing that made me finally put the nail in coffin of ever moving to Japan was realizing that especially in this field, they will hold you in the office as late as midnight. I also knew many of my Japanese friends had pretty much no time to hang out because they'd be out working from 8:00am to 11:00pm. I didn't realize how open the world of business and making money was at the time, and thought my only destiny with making money was within my career field so I was like "やっぱり i should just stay in america and grow my life here, and go to japan every now and then to hang out with my friends or whatever i guess. they only value me because i show them what life in america is anyway"