rideonmidnightcowgirl:

I think fanfiction is one of the most potent ways of dealing with the unknowability of other people because I think we as gay people are constantly struggling with that. I think one of the only things that stops us as human beings from going crazy is being able to intuit the minds of other people and predict within reason what they’re going to do by reflecting off our experiences. Like if someone stubs their toe we can imagine how they would feel (big pain) and how they would react (big yell) because that’s what we’ve done before. And when they DO react that way it validates the fact that our experiences are things shared by other people and that our mind doesn’t exist independently among automatons. But like when you’re gay and you constantly see characters who SHOULD be gay ending up as straight it messes with that confidence you’ve built up over the years. Seeing people you can relate to not behave the way you’d expect based on your experiences…eventually reinforces the fact that there’s something flawed in YOUR conciousness. There’s a lack of control and a helplessness there that’s really terrifying in a deep way. Like there’s something (epistemologically? existentially?) terrifying about being gay in a homophobic world that goes beyond the social experience of homophobia…but fanfiction acts as a balm to that and lets you like…manifest a reality where people behave the way you would behave and just the physical reality of having a document where your intution about someone is a concrete reality is like…deeply healing imo