The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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When I was a teenager I found a community of fanfic writers who I adored. They had their own shared canon and one of them was a Powerhouse of writing. Spitting out chapters longer than some books, filled with classical and pop-culture references, philosophical musings, good-vs-evil clashes, tense heroism, etc.
I would check their bio pages every day. Eventually they got a forum and I lurked there too. I watched them talk amongst each other and I wanted so badly to be their friend. A couple of problems:
They were clearly adults, and I very much was not. My parents forbade me from reading fanfiction. Obviously I ignored this directive, but I wasn't able to make an account because my parents also managed my email address.
But it would not be an exaggeration to state that this group of fanfic writers had a strong impact on my outlook today. These fanfics formed me the same way the Aeneid formed generations before me.
And more than that, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be their friend so badly. They were the coolest people ever.
By the time I was an adult and could sign up for an account, they had slowed down publishing. I re-read the corpus of work, commented on chapters, joined the forum, but I was an interloper, an outsider. I never could explain to them just how much they meant to me. I tried not to be weird, but I think I was probably very weird from their perspective.
Around the time I created an account, fewer chapters were published. Eventually it was all gone. No more posts on the forum, no more chapters published. They all knew each other outside the forum. Maybe they moved to discord.
Ten years later, I still have dreams where I find them, they welcome my presence, and we become online BFFs.
My husband thinks it's not weird that I had a fandom interest that defined my adolescence, but the damaging part was that I thought I could be one of them. The biggest Star Trek fan never harbored delusions that they would one day be friends with Gene Roddenberry, but through the magic of the Internet and semi-public spaces I had a sense of intimacy with these people who had no idea I existed. To some extent the Internet is mostly lurkers and I am certainly not the only kid who lurked on their forum.
I think people call this a Parasocial relationship, and it is one of the dangers of the Internet that was never explained to me as a kid. I knew not to share my real name or address. I knew not to talk with strangers. I didn't know not to lurk and pine for a friendship I would never form.
I think I came out of it mostly unscathed except for the occasional twinge of sadness or embarrassment.
That's strange. How did that happen?
For context, my parents started at a high baseline of paranoia and desire to control my cultural inputs. My mom forbade me from reading Harry Potter books. At first the kids shared a computer that was in a public area, eventually I received my own computer in my room so that my siblings and I could play online games together.
I discovered fan fiction when I finished reading Artemis Fowl The Eternity Code. I was very upset at the ending and I wanted to know if another book would be forthcoming. I found a forum discussing the books which had a link to fanfiction.net. Before I knew it, I found fan fiction for all my favorite books and shows.
I was a very timid reader. I recognized that I was under the age of 13 and wasn't supposed to be in most places on the Internet. I was very good at avoiding any stories tagged Romance. I only read stories rated K/K+ (equivalent of G/PG). I was the model child on the internet, studiously avoiding things that were beyond my comfort level for cursing, violence, and sex.
But there was something naughty about fan fiction itself. I knew about copyright in general terms. Most fan stories had a line up top saying "I'm not making money off this, don't sue me!" I wasn't 100% sure this was more legal than pirating a book. So I kept it hidden.
Eventually, my parents finally figured out I wasn't spending 2 hours a day playing solitaire on the family computer and was instead going to the same website every day. Because I kept it hidden, it was automatically suspicious.
My dad went to fanfiction.net and looked up a book series he was familiar with (Discworld.) He changed the filters to Rated M and Romance. It took about five minutes before I was forbidden from returning to the site.
I got better at hiding it and to this day I don't think they ever learned that reading fan fiction was one of my main hobbies as a teenager. I read library books fast enough that it was reasonable to assume that is what I was doing in my room.
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