Okay so first? You've been so great this fortnight, even when I pissed you off, which is pretty amazing.
We talked about this super briefly when you posted this but I see myself in it, too. In June 2001, I had a job I hated and three of my four best friends in the city had moved away within that month, with the fourth (my beloved S) in a new relationship and therefore only kind of available. After I spent the week of 9/11 talking to my far-away friends on chat via my work laptop and my dial-into-work connection, I decided that it was time to finally get online from home. By Thanksgiving I had found FA, and when it moved from EZ Boards to its own place in January 2002 I delurked.
Fandom reminded me that I had a brain and I knew how to use it, something I had to actively deny in a lot of ways in my workplace. It reminded me that I was a fun and likeable person, when I had lost touch with that partly thanks to work and partly because NYC is a forbidding place to try to make new friends if you aren't 24 and you can't make them through work. I doubt that I would have had the strength and confidence to go back to school if it hadn't been for fandom. I got out of both my misfit job and my lonely spell thanks to fandom.
So, yeah. I might not need it as much as I used to, and now it feels more like a creative outlet, a place to think about something other than my degree for a little while. Certainly LJ has become a place for the media and pop culture musings that I used to make in emails to friends. And I have learned many millions of things about human behavior, not to mention fiction writing, that I would never have learned otherwise. So I, too, owe it a great deal.
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We talked about this super briefly when you posted this but I see myself in it, too. In June 2001, I had a job I hated and three of my four best friends in the city had moved away within that month, with the fourth (my beloved S) in a new relationship and therefore only kind of available. After I spent the week of 9/11 talking to my far-away friends on chat via my work laptop and my dial-into-work connection, I decided that it was time to finally get online from home. By Thanksgiving I had found FA, and when it moved from EZ Boards to its own place in January 2002 I delurked.
Fandom reminded me that I had a brain and I knew how to use it, something I had to actively deny in a lot of ways in my workplace. It reminded me that I was a fun and likeable person, when I had lost touch with that partly thanks to work and partly because NYC is a forbidding place to try to make new friends if you aren't 24 and you can't make them through work. I doubt that I would have had the strength and confidence to go back to school if it hadn't been for fandom. I got out of both my misfit job and my lonely spell thanks to fandom.
So, yeah. I might not need it as much as I used to, and now it feels more like a creative outlet, a place to think about something other than my degree for a little while. Certainly LJ has become a place for the media and pop culture musings that I used to make in emails to friends. And I have learned many millions of things about human behavior, not to mention fiction writing, that I would never have learned otherwise. So I, too, owe it a great deal.
Thanks for this, Ivy!