Thomas Johnston is Worst Boyfriend Ever

Thomas Johnston is a writer from Hawaii who has published under the names thomas-sky, tsjohnst, Raised By Screens, and Worst Boyfriend Ever. He studied philosophy and marketing at the University of Southern California, wrote for the student satire site Sack of Troy, helped run USC's competitive Super Smash Bros. club, and later worked in advertising and marketing around Seattle. His date of birth appears to be January 5, 1999, based on posts written on his twenty-fourth and twenty-seventh birthdays.[1]

As of July 2026, Johnston has been publicly accused of rape. The accusation has not been adjudicated in the material reviewed for this account. Under the Worst Boyfriend Ever name, Johnston has also bragged extensively about raping women and making unwanted sexual advances. He writes in a skeezy, Bukowski-like register that is often "joking, not joking": the narrator heightens a confession for comic effect while leaving the reader unsure which part has been exaggerated. These are serious claims made in autobiographical writing, not independently established facts. Most of what can be said about Johnston comes from his own work. The surviving corpus includes two Medium essays, 405 complete Blogspot entries, 151 URLs from the former Raised By Screens Substack, and the later Worst Boyfriend Ever publication. The preserved public WBE material includes 100 long-form post records and 616 public Notes through July 2026.[2][3] Some of the same events appear more than once, rewritten years apart.

Johnston says that Worst Boyfriend Ever is his pen name and that the stories are based on real life, with exaggeration at times. Names may be changed, dialogue shaped, and scenes adjusted for publication. This account uses the writing cautiously for chronology and recurring self-description. Sensational claims that appear only in the WBE persona are left as claims made by the narrator.

Hawaii

Johnston grew up on the Big Island. In one piece he locates the family home in Kailua-Kona; a later phone record points to Hilo. He called himself Thomas Sky Johnston Gallo as a child and wrote the whole name at the top of his schoolwork until he was about ten. His mother had him tested for intelligence, homeschooled him, and arranged for him to skip grades. The result did not make him feel gifted. He remembered it as an early lesson in being out of step: "I felt no smarter than anyone else. Just younger and more afraid." The passage first appeared as "Thomas Sky" and was revised as "Thomas Sky Johnston Gallo".

His accounts of the family combine affection with embarrassment about money. In "Cheating in High School", he says his parents cared about him but could not provide much practical help with school or college admissions. He had limited access to a computer, no printer, and no smartphone for much of high school. "Squatting in Hawaii" says the family spent about eight years in a house without paying rent. The arrangement ended when a man in a bulletproof vest woke him and ordered everyone out. Johnston focuses his account on retrieving a GameCube controller rather than on the eviction itself.

His father was sociable and drank heavily. Johnston gives the harshest version in "The case against friendship", where he describes a man loved by nearly everyone who had nevertheless accumulated little security and numbed his shame about poverty with alcohol and drugs. This is also a description of someone Johnston is afraid of becoming. He recognizes the same impulse to please whoever is in the room. In "Trust", he admits that he sold a damaged car to a stranger for $800 without removing the plates because the buyer looked like his father.

His mother appears more often as a reader he is avoiding. Posts about friendship, internet use, and publication are sometimes written as answers to her. "Internet Addiction" begins by making fun of a parental warning and ends by conceding it. "My Parents Don't Know I Do This" makes concealment from his parents the subject.

Johnston was guarded around his sisters' older friends. In "Vulnerability", he remembers them trying to get him drunk or high. He had watched his father drink and did not want to lose control. More privately, he feared that intoxication would expose something shameful. He writes that he could spend years thinking about a girl without telling her or anyone else. From the outside he appeared asexual. Secrecy came before the sexual persona that later defined his work.

High school

Johnston says he graduated in 2016 as valedictorian and won a scholarship worth about $300,000 to attend USC. His 2020 resume names the Mork Family Scholarship, a full-tuition award with a living stipend.[4] An AdmitSee profile using thomas1738 repeats the same unusual group of details: Hawaii, philosophy, USC, a 2016 graduation, and a full scholarship.[5]

His pride in the achievement is mixed with contempt for how he got it. The Medium essay "Cheating in High School" describes stealing future exams, arranging absences so friends could photograph tests, and leaving class to search for answers. Before the SAT, he read College Confidential discussions posted by students on the East Coast, who had already taken the same test six hours earlier. He says that he reached the valedictorian podium without learning much of the material.

The essay does not ask forgiveness. Johnston portrays school as a game whose rules he could exploit. He contrasts his circumstances with wealthier classmates who had computers, attentive parents, and years of preparation, but the conduct he describes remains cheating. He emphasizes the scheme and the difference between being judged smart and actually knowing something.

Raised By Screens later returned to the SAT story. "Do You Like This Story" gives its narrator a disease that makes direct eye contact lethal and a pair of Google Glasses that mediates the world for him. The glasses become a cheating device. The SAT episode remains recognizable, but the social fear around it becomes fiction. This is an early example of the method Johnston would use more aggressively as Worst Boyfriend Ever.

USC

Johnston's resume dates his attendance at USC from August 2017 to May 2021. Two later memoir pieces place his freshman year in 2016, when he was seventeen.[6] The source material does not explain the difference. He may have deferred, misremembered, or compressed the dates.

At USC he majored in philosophy and minored in marketing. The resume says he made the Dean's List each semester and worked in the Child Interviewing Lab from January 2019, maintaining its WordPress site and helping analyze research about interviews with children. It also lists him as social media communications director for the USC Smash Club beginning in August 2019 and as a Sack of Troy staff writer beginning in July 2020.[4] USC Annenberg articles identify Thomas "Aloha" Johnston with the Smash team, and the Sack of Troy archive contains six pieces under his name from August 2020 to January 2021.[5]

His own college writing is more concerned with social education than coursework. "Vulnerability" describes arriving from Hawaii sober, sexually inexperienced, and unable to look people in the eye. On the airport shuttle he met a girl who had also never drunk or smoked. He wanted them to get drunk together as an act of trust. She refused. He soon joined the drinking culture in his dorm.

"College Parties" remembers a floor of high-achieving students who drank several nights a week, carried one another home, and treated vomiting or blacking out as an ordinary story. "Freshman Year" centers on a smaller humiliation. Johnston lied to a girl about where he was going because he did not want to admit that he was attending a Smash tournament. He wanted the girl and the game, but at seventeen he could not imagine presenting both without losing status.

Smash gave him rankings, brackets, regular events, and a social group organized around competition. He wrote about local tournaments in "The joy of local-level competitive smash", "Rm8 and The Crowd", and "Competitive smash tournament gamer". He continued to track tournament results even while complaining about the time the game consumed.

Writing arrived late in college. Johnston says he began doing it for pleasure during his last semester, while classes and social life were restricted by the pandemic. In "If I could go back to USC", he says he would start over as a creative-writing major and tell people, without embarrassment, that he wanted to be a writer. Philosophy, law, politics, psychology, and computers appear in that piece as respectable subjects he used while avoiding a simpler answer.

Seattle

By December 2021 Johnston had spent three months in Seattle ("3 Months In Seattle"). The move put distance between him and Hawaii and gave him the cold-weather adulthood he had imagined. "Why I moved to Washington" reduces the decision to clothes: a winter coat over a tucked dress shirt, slacks, and brown boots on a morning commute. Looking employable was part of feeling like a real adult.

He worked remotely for an advertising agency. "What Are You Up to Man" says the work felt meaningless, while the salary made the rest of life easier. Money paid for food, shoes, travel, and the ability to solve a problem with an Uber instead of panic. Once those conveniences became normal, leaving the job became harder. The same complaint appears in "Remote Work", "I hate my job", and "The People I Zoom-Work With".

In early 2023 he quit. He did not immediately tell his girlfriend or parents. He collected unemployment and went to a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Idaho. The organizers took his phone and car keys. He eventually smuggled a notebook into the bathroom because he could tolerate silence more easily than he could tolerate not writing. "Here's How to Be Happy" records the retreat as the moment he admitted that he would rather write for an audience that did not exist than keep the agency job. "Noble Silence" records a less flattering lesson. When the silence ended and the other men formed groups, he remained alone at the edge of the room.

That summer, money ran low. "Becoming Employed" recounts a month of applying for Seattle marketing and writing jobs through LinkedIn. He became fixated on a job with a small CPAP supplier in Redmond and studied the business while running. A delayed decision looked like rejection, and he screamed inside his car after losing a Smash set he normally expected to win. The company hired him for a general marketing job starting September 11, 2023.

One week into the job, the owner asked about his goals. In "Passions, Goals, Interests", Johnston says he wanted to write as much as possible and eventually own a business. He viewed the small CPAP company as a place to observe where its money came from, who did the work, and how ownership differed from employment.

The private archive

Johnston had already been writing for months before the public Blogspot began. In September 2021 the Notes app deleted nine months of work. "The notes app just deleted my last 9 months of writing" and "All my writing is gone" treat the loss as a missing part of memory. The point of the notes was not publication. He wanted proof of what he had thought.

Blogspot became the backup. The captured feeds contain 405 posts dated September 4, 2021 through February 3, 2024, totaling 62,774 extracted words.[2] Thirty are dated 2021, 185 are dated 2022, 189 are dated 2023, and one is dated 2024. Many are under two hundred words. Some are jokes, some are scenes, and others read like messages written to a later version of himself.

Johnston often complained about writing while continuing to publish frequently. "Why I do this" says he wants something to read later, then imagines preserving every mundane thought while preventing anyone else from knowing him. "My blog" treats publication as storage. "Journaling" returns to the same use. In "All About Me", he says he wishes he cared enough about subjects outside himself to write about them.

The old thomas-sky Medium account contains two longer attempts. "Social Media, Weed, and Anxiety", published in December 2020, moves from TikTok and parenting to weed, dating, writing, and the fear that social media has trained him to perform for approval. "Cheating in High School" followed a month later. The Medium feed shows no other posts.[7]

In February 2024 Johnston moved much of the archive to a Substack called Raised By Screens. A May sitemap contains 151 post URLs and sections titled About Me, Stories, Drugs, Girls, and Ones I think are Good.[8] Eighty-three slugs also appear in the Blogspot archive, so the publication was partly a selected and revised edition of earlier work.[9] Only one complete article page and a few excerpts survived in the historical capture.

Worst Boyfriend Ever

Johnston first tried publishing the safer material under his own name. His later account of the period says that family and his girlfriend read those pieces, worried about him, and made him more cautious. Meanwhile, his private notes had become more sexual and more specific. Friends who saw some of them urged him to publish anonymously. In July 2024 he opened another Substack as Worst Boyfriend Ever.

The fullest version of this origin story appears in "Why I'm Homeless Now". The narrator says he took the most intimate writing from his notes and posted about thirty stories in a week. A larger account shared "Craigslist Porn Star", bringing the publication its first substantial audience. Johnston became afraid of being identified, deleted the Substack under his own name, and continued as WBE.

The Blogspot ranged through jobs, social fear, weed, dating, clothes, games, and small annoyances. WBE kept sexual and relational material in the foreground. Its narrator wants attention, resents obligations, describes lying to women, and turns those accounts into content. Calling the material confessional does not amount to repentance or accountability.

Johnston has said directly that the writing is based on his life and exaggerated at times. The posts themselves make competing claims about accuracy. "The End of Worst Boyfriend Ever" says that the stories were literally true. "Why I'm Homeless Now" ends with a fiction disclaimer. Dates can drift. Earlier work and "Scamming My Audience for $30,000" place his birthday on January 5, while "Why I'm Homeless Now" says he turned twenty-five on January 9, 2024. A small discrepancy like that is enough reason to avoid forcing the WBE stories into an exact calendar.

Johnston describes his publication process in "Why I'm Homeless Now." He says he writes soon after an event, sets the draft aside, and later publishes or reuses it if it still feels true to him. This process does not establish the factual accuracy of the resulting account.

The preserved public corpus records 100 WBE posts between July 2024 and July 2026. Eighty-six have public bodies containing 150,244 words. Fourteen were marked paid-only and were not retrieved. Their titles remain in the inventory, but no claim here relies on them. The corpus also contains 616 public Notes with 61,915 words.[3] Notes include diary entries, promotion, and exchanges with readers.

The first four months established most of the recurring material: infidelity, prostitutes, shame, the girlfriend at home, drugs, and the Sensitive Young Man persona. The story then changed because the publication changed Johnston's life. Attention made the writing feel possible as work. It also rewarded increasingly extreme premises. In "Why I'm Homeless Now," the narrator admits that he sometimes pursued an experience partly because it might produce a story.

That admission separates WBE from the older diary. Blogspot recorded choices Johnston had already made. WBE could become one of the reasons for making them. The audience appears inside the work as a source of sex, money, lodging, argument, and fear. "Why do girls like this blog?" asks what female readers see in the narrator. "Explaining My Blog to the Police" uses official attention as a plot. "Scamming My Audience for $30,000" is about the money readers sent after an online appeal. By then the publication was reporting on its own consequences.

Leaving Seattle

"I Should Run Away", published in November 2024, imagines leaving the job, girlfriend, and city before the anonymous blog is traced back to him. The fantasy ends with the narrator in a small-town jail, trying to relay a message to the woman he abandoned. He says that the writing will make him free even there.

The next account says he acted on the fantasy. In "The End of Worst Boyfriend Ever", Johnston quits his job, refuses to renew the apartment, sells his possessions, and buys a 2005 Chevrolet Astro for $4,000. A stranger helps him build a bed and desk inside it. "Why I'm Homeless Now" dates the departure from Seattle to October 22, 2024. The title "I Should Run Away" may have been written before the decision and published afterward; the sequence is one more reason to distinguish composition date from event date.

The van suited Johnston's old wish for control over his time. It was a home and an office that could be moved whenever weather, money, or a relationship became unpleasant. It also supplied settings. The narrator could arrive in a city, meet someone, sleep in a parking lot, and leave with a complete episode. Van life turned the lack of a lease into a premise he could sell.

By April 2025 he reported self-publishing a book while homeless. The long-form archive follows him through the West Coast and a wider trip around the United States. In October 2025, "I Fled To The Philippines" says that a friend bought him a one-way ticket to Manila and that he left the van in Tacoma. Posts from late 2025 are set in the Philippines and Japan. "Playing Ping Pong With My Prostitute", dated July 2026, places him in Tokyo with a man who had proposed making a documentary about him.

The later stories are longer than most of the 2024 pieces and more conscious of the brand. Travel increases the supply of strangers and misunderstandings. Transactional sex makes the premise legible before the reader opens the email. The narrator still returns to older subjects: lack of money, reluctance to speak before writing, the desire to sleep beside someone, and the question of whether the life he arranged for material is worth living.

Social fear and appearance

Johnston's accounts of social anxiety are among the most consistent parts of the archive. In the 2020 Medium essay, he says that he avoided other people in high school and did not look even close friends in the eye. He thought that looking away might keep them from noticing his face. Weed made conversation easier and sometimes produced a more theatrical version of him that other people liked.

"Anxiety" and "Social Anxiety" distinguish his academic ability from his performance around people. A test or lecture did not require him to be visible, so he could think. At a summer customer-service job, attention was directed at his face and voice. He forgot instructions and appeared incompetent despite being his high school's valedictorian. He later came to understand the difference as anxiety rather than stupidity.

He says that college, drugs, sex, and repetition made eye contact easier. He also became practiced at choosing the reaction a social situation seemed to require. "Dopamine" describes celebrating during a soccer game while high and realizing that the excitement was spontaneous. Usually, he writes, even a simple "yes" after winning was performed because it was what a normal person would do.

Johnston tried therapy once in 2022, missed a later appointment, and never returned ("Therapy"). In "Anxiety Medication", he argues from his own experience that people should study their triggers and expose themselves to feared situations. He presents this as personal advice and admits he has no medical training.

Physical appearance carried much of the same fear. "Self-Reflection" mourns a younger self with straight teeth and clear skin who could not enjoy being good-looking. "Growing up ugly", "Acne", "I have Sunken Eyes", and "The Way that I Look" return to skin, sleep, concealer, online comments, and the unstable belief that he is attractive. He says that insults about appearance hurt when he already thinks they are accurate.

The WBE narrator is louder and more sexually confident, but he keeps checking the same things. He compares height, skin, clothes, race, money, and the expression on a woman's face. The social fear has become material rather than disappearing. Anonymity lets him describe the monitoring in a voice that pretends to be shameless.

Relationships

Dating, sex, girls, love, or relationships appear in roughly 190 Blogspot entries under a broad lexical count.[2] In the early writing, access to women is evidence that Johnston has escaped the withdrawn boy he remembers. Dating apps turn the problem into volume. Weed reduces the cost of an interaction. A girlfriend makes it easier to believe he is attractive.

He also becomes restless when affection produces claims on his time. "The Eternal Problem With Casual Relationships", "I quit dating", and "Dating Addiction" move between wanting closeness and wanting an exit. "The Worst Thing I've Ever Done" says that he ended a six-month relationship by disappearing instead of telling the woman he wanted to leave.

A November 2023 post titled "About Me" addresses another girlfriend. He acknowledges that she is hurt by his distance and says he wants her to have work, friends, and plans that do not depend on him. He also says he does not intend to change simply because he understands her pain. Near the end, he lists the things he is doing badly at once: work, writing, tournaments, health, and the relationship.

The same preference appears in friendship. Johnston likes people more easily when there is a shared task. A tournament, trip, business, or event gives the meeting a purpose. "Sensitive Young Man" says he can miss a friend who left the country while still wondering what the friendship is for without a project. "The case against friendship" fears that answering every call will leave him well liked and empty, like the version of his father he describes.

Worst Boyfriend Ever takes the conflict with a partner as its basic plot. Johnston says the pen name allowed him to publish thoughts and behavior that he hid from his girlfriend. The narrator often knows that publication will humiliate someone and publishes anyway. Calling himself the worst boyfriend gets the accusation into the title before anyone else can make it. It does not settle what he owes the people in the stories.

Drugs, screens, and work

Johnston has written about marijuana, alcohol, psychedelics, Adderall, modafinil, and dopamine. The pieces are personal reports rather than medical evidence. Marijuana first appears as a way to cross the distance between himself and other people. "What Weed Does", "Drugs", "Dopamine", and "Smoking weed" also describe the cost: tolerance, lost motivation, and dependence on a chemical state for confidence or interest.

Stimulants are discussed as tools for getting through work and sustaining long pieces. Posts such as "It's Adderall Every Time" and "Modafinil" ask whether chemically focused work counts as the writer's own effort. WBE later makes Adderall part of the narrator's explanation for his output and for leaving conventional employment. The archive cannot establish a diagnosis or the terms of any prescription.

The phone is a more constant problem. In "Internet Addiction," Johnston lists the things he checks: likes, comments, bookmarks, messages, email, time, temperature, and group chats. Every check is small, but together they prevent him from staying with a piece long enough to improve it. The title Raised By Screens grew out of this concern. Worst Boyfriend Ever then made the screen productive enough that he had another reason never to put it down.

Johnston describes work mainly in terms of control. He complains about roles that require enthusiasm for someone else's goals and treats money as a way to reduce dependence on other people. Once WBE acquired readers, he treated the publication as a possible alternative to ordinary employment.

That route brought a new dependency. The job had a boss and hours. The publication had subscribers who opened an email expecting Worst Boyfriend Ever. The second demand was easier for Johnston to accept because he had created it, but the later writing shows him noticing that the character also needs to be fed.

The person in the writing

Across the archives, Johnston pays close attention to how he appears while an event is happening. He notices his posture around a shorter man, the amount of eye contact he is making, whether a laugh was natural, what an online commenter said about his face, and whether a stranger knows that he is performing. This supplies a great deal of his material. It also keeps him at a remove from other people.

He moves quickly between self-disgust and an expectation that he should be exceptional. Childhood testing, the scholarship, valedictorian status, height, looks, his assessment of his writing, and tournament ambitions all appear in his estimate of what he could become. A bad photograph, a weak tournament result, a job he hates, or a day lost to checking can make him feel that he has wasted it. He often makes an arrogant claim and then undercuts it in the same paragraph.

He describes school as a grade game, advertising as the conversion of attention into sales, and social media as a machine for comparison and checking. He repeatedly uses that suspicion of institutions to rationalize breaking rules once he has decided that a rule is illegitimate.

Johnston has continued writing through much of his adult life. The early notes were private, Blogspot made them public, and WBE turned accounts of partners and strangers into a publication. The pen name allowed him to publish without directly confronting people who could be exposed or hurt by the stories. As the audience grew, that separation became harder to maintain.

By July 2026, readers, partners, hosts, and would-be collaborators approached Johnston because of the publication. His accounts increasingly anticipate their future audience. Worst Boyfriend Ever had become his largest body of published work and the identity through which strangers encountered him.

Sources

Sources link directly to public pages or readable mirrors on this site whenever one is available. Corpus-wide counts are descriptive aids rather than personality measurements. Paid WBE bodies were not accessed.

^[1] "I am 24 years old today," January 5, 2023; "Scamming My Audience for $30,000", set on January 5, 2026, when the narrator says he turned twenty-seven.

^[2] The complete Blogspot archive contains 405 entries. Theme counts are keyword matches used to find relevant pieces, not personality measurements.

^[3] Public WBE material captured through July 2026 contains 100 post records: 86 public bodies and 14 paid-only titles, plus 616 retained public Notes. The public long-form bodies contain 150,244 words; the Notes contain 61,915.

^[4] Thomas Johnston resume, December 2020, mirrored from the public Acadium artifact.

^[5] Public identity sources include Sack of Troy, USC Smash, AdmitSee, Medium, and historical Substack pages associated with Thomas Johnston and thomas1738.

^[6] "Freshman Year" and "College Parties" place the beginning in 2016. The resume says August 2017.

^[7] Thomas Sky on Medium and the two article mirrors on this site.

^[8] The May 2024 Raised By Screens sitemap lists 151 unique post URLs. Most article bodies were not recovered.

^[9] Exact-username and title comparison records 83 matching Blogspot and Substack slugs.