My Twisted World

by Elliot Rodger

  Addison invited me to his birthday party. It was a small get-together on the beach in Point Dume, Malibu. I had a very hard time socializing with people, so I ended up drinking too much alcohol. Before Philip drove me home, I vomited outside Addison’s apartment, in front of his mother and everyone else.

  It was highly embarrassing and I put a lot of effort to block it from my mind afterwards.

  James came to my mother’s new apartment for a sleepover. We walked to the Calabasas Commons together. It was nice to show him all of my favorite spots there, like the window at Barnes & Noble that overlooks the whole area, and turtle ponds next to King’s restaurant. It was a great place to talk and contemplate. We had some deep conversations about our fantasies and our hopes for the future.

  When I was a child, Halloween used to be a fun and exciting experience, but ever since the last time I went trick-or-treating Halloween has been a time when I spent the whole night in my room while other teenagers were out having fun partying.

  On this Halloween, I was desperate to do something social. I just couldn’t sit in my room on such a night. I found out from stalking random people on Facebook that there was going to be a huge house party in West Hills. I decided to take a big leap forward and attend this house party, even though I wouldn’t know anybody there. I had nothing to lose, and it would give me more of a chance of meeting girls than if I stayed in my room all night. Because I couldn’t drive, I had to walk all the way there, and it took 45 minutes. When I got there, I was overcome by anxiety, but I couldn’t back out at that point. I paid the entry fee of $5 and walked right in. To my dismay, the party was smaller than I expected. All of the kids were smoking marijuana, and they all seemed to know each other. It would only be a matter of time before they detected that I was an outcast. I stood around awkwardly for a few minutes before giving up and walking home.

  On the way home, just as I was about to reach my mother’s house, a group of four young thugs drove by me in a pick-up truck and proceeded to throw eggs at me, laughing while they did it. They seemed intoxicated, and they missed me. I picked up one of the shells and threw it right back into their car. I was no longer a weak little kid who would take a hit without fighting back. I was stronger now. They got out of their car and tried to attack me, and they would have beaten me bloody if I didn’t pull out my trusty pocket knife, which I usually carried when I walked alone by myself. Thankfully, the thugs backed away and drove off. Perhaps it was the knife, or the look of extreme hatred in my eyes. I quickly ran home, terrified. It was an unsuccessful and misfortunate night.

  For a few days after Halloween, I kept thinking about that incident with the horrible thugs who almost attacked me. They must have seen me as a weakling who they could bully for their amusement. I didn’t want the world to view me as weak.

  This led to my new commitment to start exercising and lifting weights. I began working out at the gym in my mother’s apartment complex every other day. I hoped it would increase my confidence and make me appear a bit stronger. Maybe if I built muscles, girls will be attracted to me, I hopefully proclaimed to myself. I had never worked out or lifted weights in my life, so my body has always been very frail and delicate. This was a new experience, and it made me feel more productive.

  Soumaya’s grudge against me lessened after a couple of months, and she allowed me to go to father’s house for dinner occasionally. I was very angry with father, but I hid my anger. I still needed him.

  Father began teaching me how to drive once I received my driver’s permit, which was quite hard to get. I had to take a written test with many questions, and I failed it on my first try. On the second attempt, I managed to pass.

  My first experience driving was very scary. I’ve played a few racing video games in my life, but driving a car for real was much more intimidating. At first, I could barely even drive around my father’s quiet neighborhood. I was overcome by the fear that I will never be able to drive. I soon got more used to it during the next few sessions. Soon enough, I was able to drive a short distance up Topanga Canyon with ease. I still didn’t feel prepared to take my official driver’s test, though.

  Despite my attempts to improve my life, I was still feeling frustrated and angry. I was getting nothing out of my efforts. I still hadn’t made any friends at Pierce College, and I didn’t interact with any girls.

  My days at Pierce College grew more and more mundane and depressing. I went to my class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, taking the bus to the AMC and walking the rest of the way. In the classroom, I had a hard time socializing with anyone. Making friends seemed impossible.

  My mother was casually dating a very wealthy man named Jack at the time, though I wouldn’t find out they were dating until much later. When she first mentioned him, I thought he was just a friend. Jack gave mother the keys to his Malibu beach house, and we went to stay there for a few nights, though Jack wasn’t there. The house was a beautiful, white-colored mansion located right on a private beach.

  The backyard had a swimming pool and a hot tub, with a gate leading right onto the shoreline.

  Mother had a small get-together at the beach house, and she invited James and his family, along with some other friends. James didn’t show up, but his father Arte did. To my surprise, Maddy Humpreys and her mother came over. Seeing Maddy for the first time in six years was a very peculiar experience. The last time we saw each other, we were just kids. Now, she was a fully-grown teenage girl, and from looking through her Facebook pictures, I knew she was popular. She was a typical pretty girl who had lots of pretty friends. She was one of them, one of the popular kids. My first friend in America, someone I played with innocently as a child, had grown up to represent the type of people who have caused me so much pain in my life. I was very nervous talking to her, as I had no experience with talking to young girls, but I had to make the effort. She seemed weirded-out by my awkwardness. It was cringe-worthy.

  While staying at the beach house, I invited Philip and Addison over to hang out, as they were always in Malibu together. They came to pick me up, and while I was in the car with them, Addison kept talking about how successful he has been at mingling with the popular kids at Malibu High School. He kept talking about all of the parties he’s been to, and all of the pretty girls he has met. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Addison actually did it. He succeeded in becoming popular at his school. In such a short time, he was able to accomplish what I’ve been trying to do my whole life. I was extremely jealous. And that was not the worst of it.

  As I spent more time with them that night, I noticed that Addison’s new status amongst the popular Malibu crowd had changed his attitude. It made him very cocky and arrogant. He treated ME like a loser the whole time. Later that night, he ditched me and Philip to go to a party with some girls that he knew from Malibu. I was seething with rage.

  We then went to the Santa Monica pier with Philip’s friend Lenny, and I saw young couples everywhere. I used to love going to the Santa Monica pier as a child, but now it was a place of vileness.

  After putting up with Addison’s insulting behavior, this was too much. I became so upset that I tried my first cigarette. I would end up smoking a few times after that, though I would quit within a few weeks due to it having no effect on me.

  When Philip dropped me back to the beach house, I walked to the beach in the middle of the night and yelled out my anguish to the roiling ocean.

  After that last experience with Philip and Addison, my attitude changed. My newfound optimism about life subsided, and I began feeling intense anger and hatred towards the world again. The way Addison treated me made me realize what the world thinks of me. If I was one of those popular kids, Addison would have treated me with deference and respect, but I wasn’t. I was a complete loser in his eyes, and everyone else’s. No effort I made in the last few months changed the way the world saw me.

  The world still viewed me as a weak and undesirable loser, even though I changed my wardrobe and started working
out. What was the point anymore? I asked myself. I couldn’t help but feel anger and hatred. Life was too unfair to me.

  I continued going on walks around mother’s house in the desperate hope that I might possibly cross paths with some pretty girl who would be attracted to me. I would have been satisfied with that.

  Sometimes I spent two or three hours wandering around the neighborhood. It was all I could do. I never met any girl. Each walk left me bitterly disappointed, and eventually I stopped doing it altogether.

  My time at Pierce College became more miserable each day I went there. I despised having to take the bus. It was embarrassing and stressful, and it sucked all of the pride out of me. And for what? To go to one class where I didn’t talk to anyone? There was no point in it anymore. I couldn’t stand the feeling of loneliness I had there. No one wanted to be my friend. It just wasn’t worth the trouble. I decided to drop my class.

  My mother got very angry that I dropped my class at Pierce, even though I thoroughly explained to her the reasons. This was when she started pressuring me to get a job. Getting a job is something I never thought about before in my life, and I soon realized that the older I became, the more it was expected of me if I didn’t go to college. To placate my mother, I started searching for jobs online every day, but I wasn’t able to find one that was suitable for me.

  I felt hatred and dissatisfaction with the world and society, but I didn’t want to hide away from it anymore. I needed to be as productive with my time as possible, and I had a lot of free time at this point. The best way to make use of this time, I concluded, was to spend it self-educating myself.

  Knowledge is power.

  I began a daily routine of walking to Barnes & Noble in Calabasas every day, where I would spend hours reading books that ranged from biographies of powerful leaders, histories of significant periods, self-help books, philosophy and psychology texts, and historical fiction novels. I sometimes even spent entire days there, from the time it opened to the time it closed. In the afternoons, to my extreme rage, I sometimes saw young couples strolling through the store. Sometimes they would even sit on the reading chairs, kissing and fondling each other. Whenever I saw this, I got so overcome by envy and heartbreak that I went to the bathroom to cry. The occasional couples didn’t stop me from going there, however, because it was the most beneficial thing for me to do at that moment.

  I still met up with Philip and Addison occasionally, even though I hated Addison. They provided me with a sense of a social life, and a way for me to vent about my troubles. Addison treated me like a lowlife every time I hung out with them, and he kept bragging about the girls he met at parties in Malibu. I indignantly accused him of lying, as that was what I wanted to believe. He was only amused by my envy. I then found that Addison deleted me from his Facebook friends list out of the blue. This was the last slight I would bear from him, and I subsequently sent him a hateful Facebook message in response. I then viewed Addison as a bitter enemy of mine. He truly was a disgusting and treacherous little bastard.

  Addison was once in the same position as I, but right when he succeeded in integrating with the popular kids, he betrayed me and treated me the same way the popular kids treated me, as if I’m lowlife scum. The world truly is a brutal place, where a man must fight a bitter struggle against all other men to reach the top. Humans are nothing but vicious beasts in a jungle.

  I delved more into learning as much as I could from books at Barnes & Noble. I expanded on the political and philosophical ideals I concocted when I was seventeen, and I soon became even more radical about them than I ever was before. It was all fueled by my wish to punish everyone who is sexually active, because I concluded that it wasn’t fair that other people were able to experience sex while I have been denied it all my life. I started to have the desire to create a world where no one is allowed to have sex or relationships. I again saw that as the perfect, fair world. Reproduction can be accomplished without sex, through artificial insemination. Sex is evil, as it gives too much pleasure to those who don’t deserve it.

  I shaped all of these ideals through learning and self-educating myself for hours every day. My personality became even more rigid, and I started to dress in very conservative attire.

  I went with my mother to the yearly Christmas party at the Lemelson’s. I spent most of the time with James, discussing with him further about my ideals. We also played a lot of video games with Noah and his friends. Noah was really interested in Nintendo games, and he had a lot of them. Playing games with them reminded me of a time, long ago in my past, when I played Nintendo 64 as a child, blissfully living life in a world that I thought was good. I longed to be a child again, to be in a bright place away from the cruel darkness of reality. I will always treasure those memories.

  I had to go Christmas shopping, and I decided to do it at the Calabasas Commons. I was always going there anyway. While walking around, I ran into Maddy, who was there with her boyfriend. For some strange reason, I have never had any sexual attraction towards Maddy, despite the fact that she’s a blonde girl and I’m obsessed with blondes. Perhaps it was because she used to be my friend when we were children, I don’t know. Because I wasn’t attracted to her, I didn’t find myself feeling as much jealousy as one might think I would in such a situation. It was still very awkward. I just said hello to her quickly and walked away.

  On New Year’s Eve of 2010, the day that marked the end of the decade, I caught a terrible illness and had to stay in bed for the whole afternoon as well as the next day. My mother was going to go to one of her friend’s houses, but she felt sorry for me and stayed at home. I spent the whole time lying in my bed, brooding about my life. I don’t know what was worse, the physical pain I felt from the sickness, or the emotional pain and rage I had towards the world. I would say the latter.

  When the illness had passed on the following afternoon, I thought about how it caused me to waste my New Year’s holiday in my room, but then I mused that I would have done the same thing anyway, whether I was sick or not, because I had no friends to celebrate New Year’s with.

  I checked Addison’s Facebook profile with one of my stalking accounts, and I saw that he went to a huge New Year’s party at a mansion with his popular Malibu friends. He took lots of pictures of himself posing with various girls. I hated him so much when I saw that. The level of hatred I felt was unreal. He was doing everything I wanted to do! Why him and not me? I cursed at the world. What was seen can never be unseen, and I will never forget it, nor will I forgive it.

  My hope that I will one day have a beautiful girlfriend and live the life I desire slowly faded away. I was in the same dark and miserable place I had been a year previously; lonely, unwanted, miserable, and seething with rage at the world. I kept thinking about how some boys were easily able to get girlfriends straight after they went through puberty. I couldn’t fathom how they did it, and I hated and despised them for it.

  I kept thinking about Leo Bubenheim, and how he kissed that girl Nicole at the Sagebrush Cantina when he was only twelve. Twelve! He was able to have an intimate experience with a girl when he was only twelve; and there I was at eighteen, still a kissless virgin. My envy of Leo became an obsession. I kept asking my sister for information about him, but she refused to tell me anything. I frightfully wondered if he had lost his virginity already, and he most likely had. He was a popular kid, and girls desired him. Leo was happily living his heavenly life with the knowledge that he’s worth something to the world, while I had to wallow in my misery and loneliness.

  Life is not fair. One can either accept that fact, keeling over in defeat; or one can harness the strength to fight against it. My destiny was to fight against the unfairness of the world.

  My mother carried on pressuring me to get a job, and she would never leave me alone about it. She was a bit frustrated that I wasn’t getting one. The two of us had a lot of arguments, and living with my mother became an extreme hassle.

  After signing me up to a progra
m in the regional center, my mother found a life coach to counsel me and help me find a job. This life coach’s name was Tony, a boisterous 40 year old man who came to meet me every other week. I was open to going along with this. I had plenty of free time, and I was so lonely that any social interaction was welcome. For our meetings, Tony usually took me out to lunch somewhere in the Valley, where he gave me advice on socializing and self-improvement.

  I continued searching for a job, but I still wasn’t able to find one. I refused all of the jobs that Tony suggested to me. The problem was that most of the jobs that were available to me at the time were jobs I considered to be beneath me. My mother wanted me to get a simple retail job, and the thought of myself doing that was mortifying. It would be completely against my character. I am an intellectual who is destined for greatness. I would never perform a low-class service job.

  My father told me that I could work for his friend Karl Champley for a few weeks, to help him build a staircase in his new house. I knew Karl quite well, for he used to come over to father’s for dinner occasionally. Karl was just finishing up building his new house in Woodland Hills, just a few minutes away from father’s house, and he offered to hire me to help with the staircase.

  I agreed to take this job. Sure, construction work was lowly and laborious, but this was different. This was more like assisting a friend, and it would be in a private environment. It was the perfect temporary job opportunity, and it would most definitely get my mother off my back. I still wasn’t able to drive, so I rode my bicycle there from mother’s house every morning. The trip on the bicycle took 30 minutes. It was grueling to ride a bicycle up that steep winding road every day, but it provided good exercise, which I was in need of. I worked with Karl every weekday for about three weeks. It turned out to be quite a pleasant experience. Karl was very friendly and I enjoyed working with him. When we finished the staircase, which was a spiral staircase that led up to his roof-deck, we took a moment to admire the work we did.