We all have our own personal quirks that seem totally normal to us, until someone else discovers them and then suddenly we realize just how weird we really are. Maybe you have an oddball bathing routine, or a particular way you order fast food… Or maybe you hang around school bus stops even though you’re not a parent.
Yeah, I’m really hoping you don’t do that last one, but in a bold move, TikTok user @itsalexandrasedlack has admitted that this is a common past-time of hers — although at least it’s not as creepy as it sounds. Well, it’s marginally less creepy, anyway.
“Does this make me a psychopath or just a bit different?” Alexandra begins her video, ominous from the off. She goes on to explain that every day at 3 pm she goes and waits by the local “STOP” sign where the school bus stops, armed with a coffee cup, and chats with the other mothers before the kids arrive and they all go their separate ways. Except Alexandra leaves on her lonesome.
“And then I walk back alone, without a child, because I am not a mother. So none of those kids on that bus would be mine,” Alexandra explains. “But I just enjoy feeling like I’m a part of something, something bigger than myself. And maybe, like, someone needs me. Even if it’s just an imaginary child.”
Alexandra then signs off with a dead-eyed smile destined to haunt your nightmares.
You can’t drop a truth bomb like this on TikTok and not expect people to have a LOT of opinions, so unsurprisingly the comments section is a minefield of outrage, blackly comic jokes, and people just feeling generally unnerved by Alexandra’s whole demeanor.
“Are you OK?” reads one comment, which pretty much sums up what all of us are thinking. Others like to imagine how the exchange with the other moms at the bus stop goes: “‘Which one’s yours?’ ‘I haven’t decided yet.'” Some are certain that Spencer Reid and the BAU have investigated this exact case before: “This is like an episode of Criminal Minds.”
For some, though, the most shocking element of this confession bar none is that the coffee cup Alexandra is holding throughout the whole thing is actually empty. “Imaginary coffee is the worst part!” one wrote, while another said: “I’m imagining the moms like “here she comes with her empty cup just smile and nod.'”
To be fair to Alexandra, the desire to be part of a group is a basic and “fundamental human need,” as per the University of Kentucky’s Dr. Nathan DeWall. Being rejected from a social group registers in the brain as a type of pain, a holdover from our less primitive days when finding yourself on the fringe of the pack meant you might not survive.
Even so, I’m hoping for her sake that this is just a bit and that Alexandra has a dark and deadpan sense of humor that would make April Ludgate proud.
