Bwahhh... love you too, Duke <3
You know, here's the thing. I wanted to write fanfic because I wanted somehow to communicate and connect with the rest of the world--show my true colors, as it were, and be totally, completely honest about who and what I am for once. But then I got to thinking about the characters I care about, and why, and how, and I realized that I'd be writing in order to heal the pain of separation, of distance from someone I felt I had grown to know so closely but could never protect, shelter, or influence.
And the thing is, that pain of distance and attachment is a feeling so powerful that I want to suffer through it. I don't want there to be any more of the work I want so badly to experience more of. I want to feel that sting as I realize that those expressions of vulnerability I had come to treasure so closely, as pieces of my own self or certainly reflections thereof, can never really be an organic part of me.
To me, so often it feels like suffering is the best measure of being alive, and so some part of me finds joy in it, in all of those horrible moments that terrified me so much. It's not that I don't want to avoid them by overcoming them. It's that writing the fanfiction won't make me any stronger, and it won't connect me to the rest of the world, either... not me. It only reinforces the link between the pre-created character and the fanbase, and myself by proxy. No matter what I write, it won't be seen as myself, only as a particularly skilled or unusual reflection and refraction--and I'm what I want to reach out with, not someone else's heart and someone else's idea.
And what's more, when you write fanfiction and try to be honest in that way, you show your hand and are forced to diffuse your images through someone else's lens. I can't be honest when showing myself through someone else. I have to make myself vulnerable if I'm going to tell the truth, and shirking that vulnerability by sending it through a sieve is a disservice to reader, writer, and creator.
I'm so lonely, and it seems like this is the only way. It's not that you guys aren't enough, somehow. It's that I've always needed something different than what I could find just discussing on the street. There's been something else trying to climb out.
So yes, I have hundreds (and hundreds, and hundreds) of pages of original fiction, none of which is public. Nor will it be, until it's time. It's not very good, but that's because I was driven to write without understanding why, or about what. Now I'm starting to understand myself a little bit better, and I'll probably try again soon.