Author's Notes: My Brother Hasn't Left His Room For Two Months. Now I Know Why.

WARNING: This post contains detailed and graphic descriptions of self-harm, infestation, and gore.

This story is incredibly important to me.

It was my first Nosleep story, and ultimately my first taste of writing fame. It has 1.8k upvotes on Reddit, the most I’ve ever gotten on a post. The characters are also very special to me, and I still pride them as some of my favorite original characters that I have created. However, it hasn’t always been this way.

I wrote this story on December 13 of 2018. My biggest bits of inspiration came from both a song and a video. I can’t remember which I had seen first.

Around that time, I had started listening to a song artist known as “Ghost”. They are an independent song creator who uses the program Vocaloid. I had heard one of their older songs called “Centipede”. In each of Ghost’s songs, they either have a drawing or a video of characters that are meant to represent the singer. For this song, there were two characters. They looked similar to one another, and many interpreted them to be older and younger brothers.

The two characters from the "Centipede" video.

The song itself had a theme revolving around insects and infestation. I remember listening to the song, and imagining the scenario that ultimately occurred at the end of my Nosleep story, where Alex finds Ryan in his room. The only difference was that the characters I imagined were more inspired by the characters of Ghost, rather than my own.

The other inspiration behind the infestation theme of my Nosleep story came from an animation on YouTube. It was an animation meme featuring a character singing a song about worms. As the song goes on, the character appears in more and more physical distress, his eyes becoming red and his mouth bleeding. It is implied that the character has infested himself with bugs. In fact, the parasites in Ryan’s eyes were directly inspired by a scene in this animation.

The first time I imagined the story itself, with the current characters, was on the bus home from school. I was a junior in high school at that time, and the whole bus ride home, I planned out the idea of this Nosleep story using the inspirations I had. Once I had gotten home, I wrote the entire thing out and published it in one sitting.

At that time, I wasn’t very attached to the characters themselves. In my eyes, I still only saw them as plot devices. They didn’t really have development of their own besides the story itself. Funny enough, it wasn’t the story itself that gave me a genuine interest in developing these characters outside of the Nosleep story.

It was memes.

One of my best friends had read my story after I showed it to him. I’ve always been one to joke and meme about my own stories and characters, and there was no surprise that Ryan was getting the meme treatment. As I talked and joked about my story to my friend, I drew memes and joke photos of Ryan. Every time I drew him, I had began to genuinely get attached to him even more.

In the story itself, Ryan is obviously seen as mentally ill and desperate for attention, but he is far more developed outside of what I have written for him.

Ryan, his full name Ryan Lassen, suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness characterized by unstable moods and behavior, impulsivity, and intense abandonment issues.

It developed due to the trauma of parental neglect. He was 13 at the time, starting puberty and going through changes in his life, when all and any attention towards him suddenly disappeared in favor of his sick brother. The trauma only continued as his parents both had to work soon after, leaving the kids seeing less and less of them.

His mental illness affected Ryan for the remainder of his life. He found himself struggling with intense fears of abandonment, as well as unstable relationships and emotions.

Without context, the story itself might seem to imply that Ryan is just a rude sibling to his younger brother. However, this was actually caused by the intense mood swings that his BPD was causing him. Around others, he sometimes found himself irritable. When he was alone, he found himself more anxious.

Now, Ryan himself had ironically always found bugs interesting. Since he was a little kid, he wasn’t afraid to examine whatever bugs he found outdoors.

It was during an intense and heavy period of stress where Ryan finally got the idea to infest himself. It was the beginning of summer break and his senior year had just ended. He was alone in the house, his brother out and his parents working. His mind was racing, constant and intrusive fears and thoughts of abandonment going through his head. He flipped through the tv channels, desperate for any kind of distraction.

It was then he found a reality medical television show that focused on infestations of the body.

He watched the show as doctors dealt with a patient suffering from Myiasis, fly larvae infestation. Ryan found himself entranced in the show, and his thoughts began to change.

He thought about Alex, and how his own sickness had managed to get the attention of his family. Ryan’s mind was filled with erratic thoughts and ideas. It was there when he ultimately had a mental breakdown. This could be it. This could be the key to finally getting the love and attention his mind desperately craved.

Ryan was already set on his impulsive and erratic plan, so he didn’t have any doubts or regrets about searching the dark web for a place to purchase all kinds of bugs. Larvae, worms, flies, and even dangerous parasites. He didn’t care about the risk of using the dark web or potentially meeting up with a dangerous person. He wasn’t in the right state of mind.

He had managed to meet up with someone in a lot, who gave him the containers full of insects, eventually leading to the story itself.

The infestation itself was a slow and excruciatingly painful process. Ryan regretted every second of what he was doing to himself. However, he feared that if he came out and revealed what he had done to himself, his family would be horrified and abandon him. As a result, he stayed and suffered for two whole months.

Ryan infested himself in two main ways. He physically swallowed some of the insects. Others, he got into his body by cutting himself and putting them inside the gaping wounds.

For the next two months, Ryan dealt with constant, burning pain throughout his entire body. The constant sensation of squirming and buzzing further cracked his already cracked mind.

As time went on, he found himself not bothering to eat the nonperishable food he had with him. He found himself spending more and more time dissociating. Eventually, he ended up taking off all his clothes due to the itchiness and wetness of the bloody wounds against his clothing.

By the time Alex had found him, he was on the verge of death.

Now, onto the ending itself. Did Ryan have to die? As time went on and I become more and more attached to Ryan, I found myself regretting the decision to kill him off. However, I knew it had to be done and I couldn’t change the story.

Then I had a realization.

It started with the idea of an alternate universe where Ryan manages to survive, get help, and ultimately have a happy ending for himself. It stayed that way for a while, simply a non canon alternate universe.

Eventually I decided that I wanted that to be canon. But how could it be canon if Ryan also canonically dies?

It was there I came up with the idea of two separate universes, both canon. One universe where Ryan lives and survives, and one where he dies, which is the Nosleep story itself.

The universe where Ryan lives is an exciting story itself that I am currently working on and developing. I have an idea for a novel titled “Dragonfly”. It’ll be a story of both Ryan and Alex’s lives after the infestation incident. It will detail their own relationship, as well as their own struggles and experiences with healing, in Ryan’s case, both physically and mentally. I will make an official post about it eventually.

Ultimately, Ryan started out as a simple character from a horror story, to a developed character that I am very proud of. Ryan and Alex’s story in the bad ending may be over, but there is much more to come for them in the future.

Thanks for reading! As a bonus, enjoy both this meme video that my friend and I made, as well as the official Ryan meme blog.

Official Ryan meme blog