Content Warnings: child sex trafficking & PTSD mentions.

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You know, these days, I am getting sort of tired.

I don’t really know how else to describe it, so we’ll just go with the simplicity of I’m really just kind of tired. And the worst, most unsightly aspect of it all is this: I don’t really know what I’m tired of.

I can give you a list of reasons without hesitation:

1) I spend my entire time in fandom, because fandom is my passion. I run a fanfiction archive with ~360 users and around 500 different fandoms. Fandom is, quite literally, what I have dedicated my life to for the past fifteen years. And fandom, apparently, fucking hates me. Yeah, so it turns out that if you’re different from what is considered Normal and Acceptable in any way, you deserve to die and are subhuman, according to others. This widespread harassment is reminiscent of my days being beaten up and nearly murdered as a child at my Waldorf elementary school—unfathomable, needless cruelty fueled by a hatred of anything they don’t want to understand. So what if I like to cope by writing dark fanfiction? So what if I just fucking like dark fanfiction? What are you going to do about it? Stop me? 

But unfortunately, there are actual repercussions for openly liking dark content. People can and will try to ruin your life, your source of income, your relationships, your safety. And I’m a sensitive alien, okay! I’m a goddamn child trafficking survivor and to be called a pedophile over fictional aliens shatters my soul in ways no one can even begin to comprehend unless they’re in the same situation.

I shouldn’t say that, probably. I shouldn’t let people know about that weakness. It’s like a KICK ME sign taped to my back, a big red arrow pointing right to my Achilles heel.  Come and cut me. But I am in a human body in this life, and so I am human. And as a human thing, the comparison still will never leave me. It haunts, vivisects. I know who I am, and I cannot control how others perceive me, and I cannot handle being seen as a being of the same depravity of the people who hurt me. I just can’t.

I think this is a valid reason to be tired. It is still only one facet of the crystal.

I do so much for fandom. What does fandom do for me? It brought me my beloved. My amazing friends. But what else? What lately? 

2) I just do nothing. I have nothing to do all day. Oh, sure, I have tons to do, actually. I have ideas and I have projects and I have embroidery supplies and music software and cute little $5 kits from the store where you knit an ugly ass ladybug. I simply never have the wherewithal to actually do any of them. Is it the fatigue and pain I am constantly in? Am I just depressed and unmotivated because everything seems worthless? Is my psychosis acting up again? Do I need to have my meds adjusted, is what my family will say, if I tell them I’m struggling with motivation, so of course I don’t tell them. 

I can’t ever get the spark going. Like a wind-up toy that just gets tighter and tigher until it snaps, never moving forward. And I have no goddamn idea why.

I’m tired of being so tired. 

3) My family is aging and ill and my mother will not go to the doctor because she is scared. She’s sixty one,  her thyroid is dead, she needs to be on medication for it (hypocritical of me perhaps, since my thyroid is also dead and I don’t take my synthroid, but I’m going to start!!!), but she refuses to get a perscription. I’m terrified about what will happen when her body can’t take it anymore.

My nana has anxiety worse than mine. It’s so bad she stays up multiple nights having intrusive thoughts. She refuses to take any sort of medication for this or bring it up to her doctor. I’m terrified about what will happen when she gets too terrified.

I’m tired of being so scared.

4) Oh, yeah, and there’s that whole I-have-dissociative-identity-disorder-and-CPTSD thing. I’ve been having flashbacks almost every day lately. I’m tired of feeling broken. I’m tired of letting it break me, but I just don’t know how to stop thinking about it, writing about it, recreating it in fiction, thinking about it, throwing up about it, obsessing over it, thinking about it. I’m obsessed with it all, the pain that I went through and the siphoning of my innocence and the portioning of my body and so on. It’s all I ever think about. When will it stop? When will I stop feeling it? 

Torturing fictional characters in the same way makes it feel better for a little while. Like a band-aid over an autopsy incison.

I guess maybe I’m just tired of all of it. Of this frozen life I’m living. I keep thinking something needs to change, and I keep trying to make small changes to my daily routine, you know, build new habits, start a schedule, but it’s all futile, I fall out of everything eventually. I really need to start preparing for my future, because I guess I’m going to have one? And preparing for my future is not sitting here writing toxic yuri fanfiction all day, as fun as it is. I don’t know. I keep clawing at the walls of my brain, trying to find a solution.

I see a lot of my friends taking steps back from fandom these days. A lot of them are also creatives, and they’re choosing to focus more on original works instead. I find that option more and more appealing with each cruel post I see pass my Tumblr dashboard. I can’t decide if I really want to step back from fandom, or if I only feel a need to do so because still being so deeply entrenched in fandom when everyone else I know has moved on makes me feel a little self-conscious, and I feel like I have to follow suit or I will be left behind. But I suspect that while my insecurities are probably a factor, it has more to do with the harassment I’ve been facing over being a Nahla/Caleb(/Anisha) shipper, and the terrible things people have said about me because of it.

I don’t want to enjoy things in fear. I have my own personal archive using the AO3 software now; I rarely post to AO3 outside of exchanges. I keep my fics locked down to my friends and people I trust not to judge me. And… I’m someone who loves attention! I kind of need it to survive, clinically. But I just struggle to stay sane when horrible accusation after horrible accusation is thrown at me, and all I’m trying to do is enjoy myself in peace. I don’t want to have to hide or water myself down to be accepted, but unfortunately that is the reality of the world. We’re all paranoid, we’re all pointing fingers and pointing fingers and gnawing off fingers, we’re all cruel. I just can’t take it anymore.

The issue is that I run that aforementioned somewhat-popular fanfiction archive. And I enjoy running this archive! I want to do so much more with it! And the people I have met through it are absolutely wonderful. I don’t want to step back from Sunset and I don’t see myself doing so in the future. At the same time, though, I think Sunset and Dreamwidth and my tiny little Discord server will be the extent of my fandom participation for a while.

I want to focus on my original works and build a real career in writing. I want to make video games and finish my novella I’ve been working on for a year now that is still only at 4,400 words and I want to make music and I want to learn how to hand quilt and I want to have more things in my life than just television and fictional characters, but it’s kind of hard for me to focus on anything besides them. Or – it has been in the past. Maybe I’m finally so disillusioned with fandom that I’ll be able to focus on something else for a change. I don’t know.

I don’t really know how to talk to people outside of fandom, and in all honesty, I don’t know a lot about myself outside of it just in general. I don’t have much of an identity beyond that, at least in my own perception of myself, and that’s… well, obviously unhealthy. I want to go back to school and go to writer’s groups in the city and I want a life worth living. I want to make websites that aren’t AO3-based or shoddy things I threw together based on outdated Rails guides; I want to actually know what I’m doing with web development, because it’s something I find very fun and rewarding.

I just so desperately want things to change, but I don’t know how to change them. The only thing I can think of for now is that I must focus on building a life for myself that isn’t attached to a fictional character. It’s long overdue.