Buckle up team, because I’m about to quote some fanfiction. One of my arguably healthier stress responses is to consume a copious amount of it (healthier as opposed to some of my less flattering habits of drinking too much and not exercising or ordering Pizza Hut twice in one week . . . and okay I did do that last one once but I’m still counting January as a win).
All to say, I read a lot of stories about two characters in a swimming anime (Free! . . . that’s its name, though you can watch it for free as well). Most of this fanfiction is fluff or angst across a broad sampling of length, genre, and writing talent.
Reading one story the other week, I copied this passage down for reference because it described something I think has been at the heart of some of my conflict lately. Or rather, this is always at the heart of my inner conflict and external stress draws it to the surface:
Thing is, you get used to a lot of things with time. You get used to loneliness, until it transforms into solitude. You get used to solitude, until it transforms into self-sufficiency. For a person who naturally craves so much human contact, Rin is oddly proud of the fact that he has mastered each of these stages, not because he particularly ever wanted to, but because we cannot always choose what becomes of us in life.
I’m an expert at overidentifying with my favorite characters, but this one smacked me across the face. I don’t know how to describe my own brand of independence, and the journey to it, better than how this random fanfiction did. Down to the loneliness I felt when I first lived alone apart from my closest family and friends, to the point where I could articulate that it wasn’t loneliness and I enjoyed the aloneness, to now where I have trouble imagining anything interrupting a life I’ve worked so hard to steer by myself.
And then I reach for others on reflex — phantom touches — but no one is there.
This is coming off more morose than I mean it and, for all that I’m open in my writing, almost too personal. There are so many layers to this feeling: pride and longing, contentment and regret. I have a hard time imagining myself as a different version of myself in the present if my life had gone the way I had planned because I don’t want to be a different version of myself. I want to keep growing and learning and getting better, but I like who I am. I never wanted to learn how to be this person — the divorce and depression are not lessons I would’ve chosen — but we cannot always choose what becomes of us in life.
But fanfictions, or at least the fanfictions I read, are love stories. A complicated filter to this passage, which appears early in the work, because the rest of the story is about all of it breaking down: falling in love and getting the human contact he craves and striking at the loneliness that hadn’t really gone away. In these stories, love is the ultimate balm.
And I love to read them. And part of me believes them. Most of me can’t afford to. I’m happy to put all my bets on love — of family and friends and community and self — but it is a dangerous gamble to put all your chips in on romantic love. Because unlike most fanfictions, being in love does not fix every tangled thing within you. Only you can do that and learn to live that some of our string will always be a little frayed from all the knotting and unknotting.
Is that only something a divorcée would write?
From loneliness to solitude to self-sufficiency I am proud that I’ve mastered these stages, one by one. We cannot always choose what becomes of us in life. Sometimes I wonder what I’m becoming next.
With Love,
Natalie