In August 2023, I left this blog after a series of things happened very rapidly. I watched the second season of Good Omens and became hyperfixated. While I said on the blog that I was obsessed, I didn’t adequately describe the extent of said hyperfixation, mostly because I didn’t yet understand what it meant for me. And to make sense of this, I need to go all the way back to 2014-2015, the year I lived in Boston.

While I won’t go into details, that year was extremely traumatic for me. I spent years afterwards dealing with health issues, deferred grief, and learning to fold myself into a specific shape in order to survive. As part of that process, I stopped writing. I’ve written fiction my whole life, and I loved doing it, even if I hadn’t managed to actually get more than a handful of short stories published. And suddenly, after that year in Boston, I couldn’t write anymore. I managed to finish the second draft of the WIP I was in, finishing in the summer of 2016, but after that, nothing. No matter how many times I sat down to write, no matter how many nights I went to bed planning the things that needed to happen next in various WIPs, no matter how much yearning I did, the words wouldn’t come. It took years, but eventually, I stopped believing that I would ever write again. This was just another thing I had to come to accept.

In hindsight, I understand what was going on. By folding myself into a specific shape to survive, I was essentially putting myself in a box, cutting off access to eccentricities and emotions that didn’t serve the space I needed to occupy. I didn’t think I had another choice, especially in the beginning when I designed said box, and I resigned myself to this sort of half-life for a long time. I slowly started to emerge in tiny glimpses in 2020 (ironically timed, as it had nothing to do with the pandemic, which probably slowed the process), but GOS2 broke open the box. Everything I’d repressed for almost a decade came roaring to the surface. It was like discovering that I still existed, and with that discovery came the urge to write.

In a blog post at the time, I said, “I have the urge to write fanfiction, which I’ve never had the urge to do before. Actually, I’m excited about potentially starting to write something at all, for the first time in nearly a decade. I thought I’d forever lost this love and excitement about writing after the traumas of my year in Boston, but here I am.” After quitting the blog – which I did mostly to focus my entire being on my hyperfixation – I turned to fanfiction and began writing like an insane person. My first ff was clumsy as I flexed my sluggish writing muscles for the first time since 2016. I thought I’d get the story out of my head and move on from ff – I still had major misconceptions about fanfic at the time – but instead, I dove right back in and wrote a second draft (though it was as clumsy as the first, heh). I created an ao3 account. I thought I’d publish the story and leave. But no.

In that first month of writing, I created two drafts of an almost 90k-word story. I finished right before my 2023 Med cruise, and began writing a second novel on the plane. With this story, I let myself play and just be silly, without trying to write well. Midway through writing this novel, I got another idea, wrote the first chapter, and posted right away. By the end of 2023, I’d finished and published three full-length novels, with no more thoughts of stopping.

It took nine months and six novels for the waterfall of words to settle into a more manageable rhythm. And during that time – plus the 18 months since then – I’ve grown so much.

I’ve learned to write better.
This seems obvious, but it’s more subtle than the surface-level meaning. I’d written several dozen novels (or drafts of novels, because I often wrote up to four drafts before I was satisfied) before my internal shutdown. By the time they reached their final form, I’d basically edited them until they were voiceless, trying to make them ready for publication. I was far too precious with my writing. By writing fanfic, especially by writing silly fanfic where I allowed myself to play, I learned to embrace my voice as part of the story. I learned how to write humor to act as a foil for darker bits, when before, I only had down/soft moments as that foil. I tried out different viewpoints. My audience had immediate capability to react, so I learned not only what didn’t work, but what worked well, with that instant feedback. I have yet to try writing original fiction again and I’m worried that I will feel too vulnerable and fall back into that more reserved writing, but I hope I can overcome that urge and keep my voice.

I’ve accomplished my oldest writing goal.
Some people write to publish, or get famous, or build a career. I wrote because I wanted to touch lives. I wanted people to read something I’d written and see themselves in it, or discover something about themselves, or to feel understood. I always thought that tradition publication was the only way that would happen, but fanfic has provided a far better outlet because I get to interact with people directly. Every time I get a comment telling me someone feels seen, that someone has discovered there is a name for ___ (their sexuality, their romantic orientation, their flavor of neurospicy, etc), that someone sees themselves or their traits in my iteration of these characters… that is priceless. That means far, far more to me than any publication goal.

I’ve healed a lot of trauma.
In January 2024, while I was writing a very silly novel, my writing mood suddenly veered dark. I didn’t want to angst-up my silly fic, but it was like something enormous had risen up inside me and it was going to spill out one way or another. So I pivoted sideways into a new novel and essentially trauma-dumped nonstop for a month, often writing up to 10k a day. I could not stop. When I wrote the last word, my entire body was instantly lighter. The story was not about the circumstances of my personal trauma, but I threw all the emotions in there, and started a healing process I hadn’t known how to accomplish no matter how many years of therapy I’d gone to. A later fic processed some earlier trauma, though to a lesser degree, but that first one… Honestly, I doubt I’d be as well-adjusted today if I hadn’t written that novel. And while it’s not my most popular story – there are a lot of triggers – it’s def the one that has resonated with people the most. Even now, almost two years later, I get people commenting about how they’ve just reread for the third or fourth time.

I’ve learned that I’m not doomed to be unhappy.
Until the summer of 2023, I could list the brief periods of my adult life when I’d been happy. Most of that time, I’d go through years of lowgrade unhappiness (not depression, but active unhappiness, based on environmental circumstances and personal repression), then a few months of reprieve before the next thing would tear me apart and send me scrambling for pieces of myself for another few years. I didn’t believe it was possible for me to sustain happiness, or to remain generally happy/hopeful even when life circumstances crumbled around me. The difference? Embodying my true self, rather than repressing it, and frankly, getting away from several situations that had long been toxic/abusive. Life hasn’t always been easy since August 2023, but I’ve generally been more happy than unhappy, and I’m satisfied with who I am as a person.

This last decade has been a trip to look back on: first the slow decline of my ability to write in early 2016 (a process continued from 2015), followed by years of struggle then giving up, and then breaking open the box to waterfall-write 750,000+ words (~2500-3000 pages) in 2.5 years. And now, the next adventure, to write something of my own (which obviously continuing my ff journey!). Wish me luck!