And to think that for the longest, most pathetic stretch of my life, I genuinely believed I was the problem.
I spent years violently mutilating my own personality to please other people. I tried to become easier to like. Easier to understand. Easier to accept. Whenever a situation fractured, my instinct was to assume the fault lay entirely in my own hands. If people looked through me with cold dislike, I must have committed some unspoken sin. If I was systematically excluded, there had to be a flaw in my character. If I woke up suffocating under the weight of loneliness, it was simply because I wasn't fighting hard enough to be human.
So, I kept changing. Kept adjusting. Kept twisting my spine into whatever grotesque version of myself I thought the world demanded.
The tragic comedy of it all is that none of it worked. Because I was desperately trying to fix a vessel that was never actually broken. I understand the geometry of that cruelty now. Back then, I was blind. Back then, I genuinely believed that if I just worked until my hands bled, smiled until my face ached, spoke differently, existed differently... eventually, someone would choose me.
But trying too hard in the wrong direction can mutilate your soul just as violently as never trying at all. And I learned that lesson the hard way.
Seven Years Earlier
By my third official day at Rider Entertainment, I thought I had accurately mapped the terrain of my new reality.
The members of the group didn't want me there. The senior executives and office staff clearly didn't want me taking up space either. Fine. I told myself I could stomach that. I had survived far worse in my childhood than cold stares, corporate hazing, and awkward silences in the hallways. All I had to do was out-work their hatred. If I made myself indispensable, they wouldn't have a choice but to accept me.
At least, that was the naive playbook I relied on. The reality turned out to be infinitely uglier.
Because the real, systematic damage didn't come from loud voices or open hostility. It came from something quieter. Something insidious, invisible, and completely impossible to prove. The exact brand of psychological cruelty that forces you to question your own memory, your own sanity, and your own eyes.
That morning, I arrived at the executive floor exceptionally early. I wanted the coffee brewed, the databases polished, and the schedules printed long before the first bell of staff arrived. The night before, I had spent nearly two agonizing hours organizing the complex choreography rehearsal timetables, updating confidential contact sheets, and formatting the logistics for their upcoming high-fashion shoot. I had manually saved the progress across the network. Twice. Maybe three times.
I didn't trust my own brain to make mistakes. Not here. Not with a hundred pairs of eyes waiting for the stray dog to slip up.
I sat down at my desk, the canned coffee from the day before sitting unopened by my keyboard. I booted up the terminal, logged into the shared drive, and my fingers completely froze over the plastic keys.
The directory was empty. The entire root folder was gone.
I blinked, a cold shock hitting my chest. I refreshed the browser. Nothing. I checked the local cache. Empty. I plunged into the archive logs, the trash bins, the shared server partitions.
Still nothing.
My stomach violently dropped, my blood turning to ice water. "No way. No, no, no..."
Every single byte of data. The timelines, the medical contacts, the expense sheets. Every document I had poured my sweat into last night had been completely wiped from the system as if I had never existed.
For several agonizing seconds, I could only stare at the glowing white void of the monitor. Then, I forced my lungs to expand. Panicking would only draw the sharks. I could rebuild it. It would be a brutal race against the morning clock, but I could manually input the data from my physical notepad.
Before I began typing, I turned my head toward the senior receptionist sitting at the main desk across the aisle. "Excuse me..."
She didn't even drop her phone to look at me. "Yes?"
"Did anyone access the Rider administrative root folder after I left last night? The rehearsal files I uploaded are completely missing."
Her eyes lifted briefly, flat and uncaring, before she gave a lazy shrug. "No idea. Maybe you forgot to hit save. Or maybe you deleted them yourself."
I frowned, the skin on my face tightening. "I didn't delete them. I verified the server sync three times."
This time, she slowly pivoted her chair to face me directly. A small, curved smile appeared on her lips—not a warm expression, but a sharp, knowing smirk. It was the look of a predator watching a creature walk into a snare. The kind of look that instantly makes you feel like you are the punchline of a joke the entire building has been whispering about.
"Are you absolutely sure about that, Sok-joo?" she murmured, her tone dripping with mock pity. "New hires always think they know how our system works. Mistakes happen when you're out of your depth."
A toxic, suffocating heat crawled straight up my neck. It wasn't anger—it was humiliation. The agonizingly familiar shame of being forced to doubt your own reality. Of being told that the malice being inflicted upon you was actually your own incompetence.
I looked away first, breaking the contact. Arguing with a brick wall wouldn't bring the files back.
Instead, I dragged my chair back to my desk, opened a blank document, and began frantically typing from memory. One row at a time. One cell at a time. By the time I managed to reconstruct the primary timetable, nearly an hour had vanished. An hour wasted on a crime I hadn't committed. An hour that, somehow, the toxic atmosphere of the room still managed to twist into my fault.
And that was the most lethal part of the poison. Not the lost data. Not the exhaustion. It was the fact that a small, broken voice in the deepest recess of my mind was already whispering the question I had spent my entire life trying to silence.
What if they're right? What if you really are just stupid? What if you messed up again?
I loathed that voice. But no matter how old I grew, the echo of my mother's disappointment always found its way back into my chest, anchoring me to the floor.
By mid-morning, my eyes were bloodshot from staring at the glare of the monitor, but I had managed to salvage the core files.
I was meticulously cross-checking the choreography room numbers when a shadow fell over my desk. I looked up to find the department director looming over me, his face set in a stern, impatient mask.
"Kim. Do you have the physical printout of the rehearsal timetable? I need it for the executive board meeting."
"Yes, sir. Right here." I reached out toward the neat stack of documents on my right—
My hand caught empty air.
My heart violently stopped. I checked the left side of my laptop. Empty. I tore through my drawers, flipped over my notepad, searched the floor beneath my feet.
Nothing.
The air in my throat turned to ash. I had literally set the printed copy down less than ten minutes ago. It was impossible. It couldn't have just walked away.
The director's brow furrowed, his heavy watch ticking loudly in the silence. "Well? I don't have all day, Kim. This meeting dictates their entire promotional budget."
"I... I just had it right here, sir. Give me one second—"
"Maybe our new manager forgot where he put his own hands," a voice sneered from a nearby cubicle.
A wave of low, cruel laughter rippled across the office floor. Another senior manager looked up from her screen, her eyes full of cold amusement. "Again? Honestly, how did this boy pass the background check?"
The word hit me like a physical strike to the sternum.
Again.
Such a microscopic, ordinary word. Yet it carried the weight of a thousand historical wounds.
For a terrifying, split second, the bright corporate office dissolved into a gray fog. I wasn't twenty-one anymore. I was back in the suffocating hallways of my middle school. Back in a classroom where the other children moved their desks away so they wouldn't have to breathe the same air as me. Back in corners where the whispers followed my heels like a plague.
"Did you lose your books again?"
"Why are you always so slow?"
"Can't you do a single thing right, you freak?"
The cruel, adolescent voices blurred together until they gave way to the one voice that had truly broken me. My mother's sharp, exhausted cadence echoing through our cramped kitchen: "I just wish you could be normal, Sok-joo. Why can't you just be normal like your brother?"
I violently blinked, my vision snapping back to the present. The office returned. The director had already turned on his heel, walking away with a look of profound disgust. The surrounding staff members went right back to typing, laughing, and living their lives as if nothing had occurred. As if that single, engineered word hadn't just reached into my chest and ripped open scars I had spent seven years trying to cauterize.
I lowered my gaze to the desk, my knuckles turning white against my laptop. I went back to work. Because when the world has already designated you as the victim, survival means keeping your mouth shut.
The psychological trap only tightened its teeth around me as the day progressed.
Around noon, a digital internal memo popped up on my screen, explicitly stating that Rider's afternoon rehearsal room had been moved from Hall A to the private basement suite. The message came directly from the senior scheduling account. I immediately updated the group's master calendar and sent out the automated notification pings to the members' private devices.
Exactly one hour later, the building erupted into pure chaos.
Shouting voices echoed down the corridor. Staff members were sprinting back and forth across the floor, paper files flying as phones rang off their hooks. The members of Rider had arrived at the wrong hall, missing a crucial live-stream tech rehearsal with their international sponsors.
And somehow, despite me explicitly following the written instructions on my screen, the entire multi-million-dollar disaster was dropped squarely on my shoulders.
"Where is the manager?!" a director roared in the hallway.
I stood paralyzed against the wall, clutching my clipboard like a shield while a dozen senior coordinators talked over me, entirely ignoring my existence while discussing my punishment. Nobody asked to see my laptop. Nobody checked the system logs. Nobody verified the notification pings. The verdict had been handed down before the crime was even committed. I was the scapegoat they had hired me to be.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors at the end of the hall swung open. The members of Rider walked out, flanked by security.
They looked flawless, pristine, and entirely untouchable even in their sweat-drenched dance clothes. As the group swept past the chaotic scene, one of the younger members paused. He stopped directly in front of my trembling form, his beautiful, stylized face twisting into a cold, arrogant sneer.
He didn't yell. He didn't look angry. He just tilted his head, looked down at my lucky suit, and let out a soft, casual sigh.
"I told Charlie we didn't need a pathetic manager like you," he murmured.
The words were spoken so lightly, like a passing comment about the autumn weather. He didn't wait for a response; he just turned and caught up with the rest of the group, leaving his poison to settle in my lungs. The comment should have angered me. It should have driven me to defend my honor. But instead, it filled me with a sickening, paralyzing terror.
Because deep down in the dark, I was absolutely terrified that he was right.
The remainder of the afternoon felt like an eternity spent in a purgatory of whispers. I tried to drown myself in spreadsheets, trying to ignore the mocking glances, trying to pretend the skin wasn't peeling off my bones from the shame.
Desperate for an escape, I volunteered to fetch the hard-copy archives from the basement supply room.
The room was small, suffocatingly cramped, and smelled heavily of old cardboard and dust. Industrial metal shelves lined the concrete walls, stacked high with decades of talent contracts and legal nondisclosure agreements. I was deeply buried in a corner aisle, searching for the specific folder of printed rider clauses, when the heavy heavy iron door clicked open behind me.
Two senior female styling assistants strolled in, talking loudly. The exact moment their eyes landed on my silhouette in the dim aisle, their voices died.
A dark, loaded look passed between them—one of those vicious, wordless communications that people think the invisible boy is too stupid to notice. I noticed. I always noticed the shape of a threat.
The first assistant folded her arms over her designer blazer, leaning against the doorframe. "Do you honestly think you belong in this building, Kim?"
I forced my eyes to remain locked on the shelf, my fingers trembling against the cardboard boxes. "I am simply doing my job."
The second woman let out a sharp, mocking bark of laughter—the kind of ugly sound reserved for stepping on an insect. "Your job? Please. You got lucky because HR needed a mindless stray to fill a seat."
The first one stepped deeper into the narrow aisle, her heels clicking aggressively against the concrete. "There are interns who have sacrificed their youth for three years just to get a glimpse of Rider's schedule. People who actually carry bloodlines and talent that deserve this position. And then you just walk in from the street?"
My grip tightened around the heavy legal folder in my hands until the cardboard began to tear under my fingernails. I kept my lips sealed. There was no currency in speaking. They hadn't come for an explanation; they had come to see blood.
The first assistant stopped directly beside me, her expensive perfume suffocating the small space. "Everyone in this office knows what you are, Kim. A mistake."
Without waiting for me to move, both of them forcefully shoved past me to reach the opposite shelf. The first woman's shoulder didn't just brush mine—she planted her weight and clipped my upper body with a hard, deliberate force.
The impact sent me stumbling backward into the iron shelving unit. A heavy tier of corporate binders clattered to the floor, exploding into a chaotic sea of loose documents across the dirty concrete.
The assistants didn't pause. They didn't apologize. They didn't even grant me the courtesy of a backward glance. They just grabbed their files, laughed under their breath, and walked out, the heavy iron door slamming shut behind them.
Leaving me alone in the dark.
For nearly thirty seconds, my body refused to move. The white papers lay scattered like ashes across the floor, completely surrounding my boots. The silence in the basement felt heavy, humiliating, and entirely suffocating.
And suddenly, the corporate clothing stripped away. I wasn't twenty-one anymore. I was fourteen. Standing in the freezing rain of a school courtyard, my backpack ripped open, my notebooks drowning in the mud while the other children stepped entirely around them—stepping around me as if I were nothing more than a pile of garbage they didn't want to stain their shoes with.
The exact same loneliness. The exact same biological shame. The exact same haunting question: Why does the world always want to erase me?
Slowly, my knees buckled, and I dropped to the cold concrete. I began picking up the loose pages one by one, smoothing down the crumpled edges, just like I had picked up my ruined notebooks all those years ago.
And kneeling there in the dim quiet of that corporate tomb, surrounded by the wreckage of a trap I couldn't see, I realized a terrifying truth.