![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Fanfiction
May. 20th, 2002 07:08 pmFor some reason, when the depression hit me last year, all I could read was fanfiction. I'd discovered it about a year earlier in the Buffy fandom and even wrote a few pieces. As a matter of fact, the darkest part of my depression coincides with the most fertile period of my writing.
For the past 18 months though, no muse. For the first seven months of the depression, I couldn't concentrate on anything well enough to read. Even magazine articles were too much. But fanfiction, that I could handle.
Later, when I started to have a brain I could call my own again, it began with translating an ambiguous song lyric from French to English (the one used in Pillow Book for anyone who's interested). That's when it clicked. Intellectually, I was fried, but I could handle emotions.
Well, maybe not handle them. Black days of tears and fear, pain from nowhere both physical and mental, love lying like poison in my throat from realizing exactly how toxic my last love affair had been. And from prolonged contact with my mother.
My housemates are, or can be, pretty cool people. The fact that they refer to my mother as "The Soul-Sucking Vampire" is an indication of how painful it can be around her.
And all this emotion churning was soothed by a bunch of people writing about television shows. In a very real sense, fanfiction saved my life. The T tracks run through my back yard. I'd have been on them.
For the past 18 months though, no muse. For the first seven months of the depression, I couldn't concentrate on anything well enough to read. Even magazine articles were too much. But fanfiction, that I could handle.
Later, when I started to have a brain I could call my own again, it began with translating an ambiguous song lyric from French to English (the one used in Pillow Book for anyone who's interested). That's when it clicked. Intellectually, I was fried, but I could handle emotions.
Well, maybe not handle them. Black days of tears and fear, pain from nowhere both physical and mental, love lying like poison in my throat from realizing exactly how toxic my last love affair had been. And from prolonged contact with my mother.
My housemates are, or can be, pretty cool people. The fact that they refer to my mother as "The Soul-Sucking Vampire" is an indication of how painful it can be around her.
And all this emotion churning was soothed by a bunch of people writing about television shows. In a very real sense, fanfiction saved my life. The T tracks run through my back yard. I'd have been on them.
