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My Fandom Experience with Loneliness
Jun. 13th, 2017 04:38 pmThis is from Page 127 of My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness...
...wherein a depressed young woman finds the validation and acceptance she's been craving from an online community that supports her. I'm immensely happy for the artist, but this also breaks my heart. This is exactly how I thought it would be for me, and this is what I wanted from fandom, but it never happened.
There's another page in the manga where the artist describes feeling "like being at ninety-five percent rejection" just about all of the time, so that when she experiences even a small rejection it's like the end of the world for her. I think, more than anything, this explains why I tend to get so butthurt about Tumblr. I always feel like I'm already at 95% rejection, so then when I turn to fandom, expecting to find validation and acceptance, the extra 5% of rejection destroys me.
Just as the artist describes it, I have a feeling that I'm not working hard enough, and that I will never be able to work hard enough for my work to be accepted. I'm not depressed like the artist, but this sort of ongoing existential crisis creates the exact same sense of emotional precarity. I wish that fandom could function as a way to escape this emotional precarity for me as it did for her, but I'm already expending so much energy just treading water that I really can't see where I need to go to make that happen.
For the time being, I'm laying low while I take a small break to recover a bit of stamina.
...wherein a depressed young woman finds the validation and acceptance she's been craving from an online community that supports her. I'm immensely happy for the artist, but this also breaks my heart. This is exactly how I thought it would be for me, and this is what I wanted from fandom, but it never happened.
There's another page in the manga where the artist describes feeling "like being at ninety-five percent rejection" just about all of the time, so that when she experiences even a small rejection it's like the end of the world for her. I think, more than anything, this explains why I tend to get so butthurt about Tumblr. I always feel like I'm already at 95% rejection, so then when I turn to fandom, expecting to find validation and acceptance, the extra 5% of rejection destroys me.
Just as the artist describes it, I have a feeling that I'm not working hard enough, and that I will never be able to work hard enough for my work to be accepted. I'm not depressed like the artist, but this sort of ongoing existential crisis creates the exact same sense of emotional precarity. I wish that fandom could function as a way to escape this emotional precarity for me as it did for her, but I'm already expending so much energy just treading water that I really can't see where I need to go to make that happen.
For the time being, I'm laying low while I take a small break to recover a bit of stamina.
