Lizi Collins, a 17 year old teenager, suffers from social anxiety and insomnia. She goes to a public high school called Newtown High School, where the school is fairly large holding about 4000 students. She doesn’t have any friends because no one bothers to talk to her. She doesn’t eat lunch either and during her lunch periods she would instead go to the library and sit by herself and surf the web, where one day she comes across ASMR. She tries her best to be invisible because she’s too scared to have a conversation with anyone. She worries if she does talk to her peers; they would find her weird, disgusting, rude, ugly, or embarrassing. She has voices in her head that scream at her these phrases of discouragement every time she looks at a potential person to talk to. As the timeline progresses and as she watches ASMR, her anxiety lessens.
These voices she hears include her mother, Annabelle Collins, screaming how stupid she is for not receiving perfect scores on exams or how ugly she is saying how back when she herself was a teenager looked so much better. Annabelle tells Lizi how fat she is all the time even though she currently weighs 85 pounds at a height of 5’7. She would say how she flew through high school with perfect grades and had the most popular boy is school at her hands, which is currently her husband, Derick Collins. Normally moms don’t want their kids to date in high school but Annabelle was something different. She wanted Lizi to be the perfect trophy wife/soccer mom in the future, preferably married to a star athlete, and the earlier she found the “star-athlete” the better. A part of her wants to be Lizi, she envies her to have another chance of finding the perfect husband instead of with the one she has now and she gets even more angry that Lizi doesn’t take advantage of her age and time to go searching for a man. She projects her anger and disappointment onto her child and doesn’t even realize it. Her husband ignores her and as years passed it went from constant yelling in the bedroom to him sleeping on the couch to them moving to a new home with an extra room where they currently live now separate from each other. However, Annabelle does seem to have some kind of “good” intention for Lizi, she believes that if Lizi was “better” or if she herself made Lizi “better” by criticizing her that maybe Lizi could find a “better” husband in high school than she has. Annabelle doesn’t consider the possibility that Lizi can fend on her own since she couldn’t do so even with her perfect grades. No employer gave her a chance and she was stuck being a house wife leaving her degree in management useless. The next 20 years of her life after tirelessly finding a job was with recipe books and Windex. As those years passed, she grew to believe the world was a “man’s world” and that women were not meant to be employed other than doing her “womanly duties”. With the feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment towards her husband combined with her wish that Lizi finds a better husband than she has, explains why she acts the way she does towards Lizi.
Lizi’s father, Daimon Collins, was no help either. When he was around he ignored Lizi. He would stand by and watch his wife yell at Lizi or just walk away. The most Lizi has seen her father do when his wife throws fits is shoot looks of hopelessness at his wife and look back at Lizi with apologetic eyes as he reads his daily newspaper every morning and night for breakfast and dinner. After that, he looks back down into his own sorrows since he is unhappy with his own career and life and ignores both his wife and child because of it. Back in high school he was the star quarterback on the football team and dated the prettiest and smartest of the school, Annabelle. However, he dated her not because he loved her but because of social status and peer pressure. He actually had interest in Annabelle’s best friend/disciple named Florence Canter. They snuck around a lot but when having the decision to go to Benjamin College or Surrain University, he chose Surrain to be with Annabelle. Although he didn’t love her, he chose to stay with her because it was expected of him by his friends and he was a coward and still is. He had a chance to go pro until during the finals he broke his leg and was unable to fulfill his contract with the scout. He was stuck to going to college and having to choose between both his mistress and girlfriend when he ultimately decided to study accounting at Surrain with Annabelle. He wonders what if he chose Florence, what if he didn’t break his leg, what if? Stuck in the world of what ifs and regret, he doesn’t want his family. Instead of owning up and accepting the choices he made, he ignores his family and sees them as a mistake.
Back to Lizi, Lizi goes to a doctor for help with her anxiety and insomnia. She doesn’t want to take medication so her doctor provides alternative forms of treatment and he begins with ASMR. She watches it to help her sleep and found that it became a nightly routine. She would feel more energized during the day having a good nights sleep and began to socialize among her peers.