I miss being a part of the fandom sometimes. And I have stopped talking to most people I met on here, not because I wanted to but because sometimes it feels like the only thing that connected us was the fandom. And as you’ve certainly noticed, I became less and less active on this blog after the finale, until it came to the point of going on hiatus (and seriously considering the possibility of not blogging on here ever again). And the reason why this happened was that fandom became a constant source of anxiety to me. Even before (but specially after) the finale. It’s almost like I couldn’t even engage in a conversation about Avatar with my friends without feeling anxious. It’s come to the point where I now want to experience this show on my own, instead of sharing it. It’s not that I always dread talking about it with other people, but that really depends on how similar are our preferences and opinions. And my dashboard is so full of diverging opinions (some of them that I’m indifferent to, some of them that make me mad) that it’s hard to deal with that. I’ve always been a non-confrontational, conflict-avoiding kind of person. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade and ruin their enjoyment of a certain aspect of the show (character, shipping, episode, season) just because I don’t share that particular preference/opinion. But like I said, some of them make me feel bad, angry and/or anxious, but I never want to make it about myself. I want to allow them to do their thing. And that leads to me bottling my feelings/opinions up, keeping them all to myself and ending up feeling too overwhelmed and just more frustrated w/ myself for being like that. It’s surprising how someone like me has managed to say in the fandom for so long. But I guess what made me stay was the fact that we all shared this immense love for this franchise, for this universe, and at least in the case of the people I follow, for Korra. And while the show was still airing, we always had things to speculate about. We were all waiting for every little bit of information we could have. Waiting for a release date, for a trailer, for a new season, a new episode, a new preview clip. Fangirling and commenting about it. It was fun and it was something I could distract myself with to avoid all the anxiety that fandom has always caused me (sometimes more, sometimes less, but it was always there). It’s like it didn’t feel too overwhelming at that time, you know? It was something I didn’t find so hard to brush off. Because of all of the other stuff that was going on. I could easily avoid it, pretend it wasn’t there. And I’ve been thinking a lot about it because I still feel guilty at times for abandoning the fandom even though I said I would never do that. It feels silly to care this much about something like fandom, but fandom was important to me and that’s probably why I care so much. In spite of all the anxiety it has caused me (I’ve honest to god spent entire nights without sleeping because something was going on and it was making me too nervous), I learned a lot with it. I’ve learned about social issues (fandom was how I was introduced to feminism and other concepts), about storytelling (thanks to all the wonderful meta/commentary I’ve read and the countless debates/discussions I’ve witnessed), about media and how we engage with it (which sort of overlaps with both social issues and storytelling), I’ve learned a lot about myself (I can’t really explain how exactly fandom did that to me, but I feel like it definitely helped), I’ve improved my english A LOT, and I’ve made many friends. And I had a lot of fun, too. Because of that, if you asked me if I regret my fandom experience, I’d say no. Not at all. I’m glad I went through it, even if it drove me crazy at times. But when the negative aspects of fandom began to to overshadow the positive ones, I realized it was better to leave it, which I did. But going back to the beginning of this post, I miss the good parts of it a lot. I miss talking to my fandom friends. But I’m terrified of doing it. I’m terrified of experiencing all that anxiety again. I feel terrible because sometimes I think you all think I don’t like you anymore, or that I’m ignoring you, that I’m done with you. It’s a very weird feeling of “I want to talk to you but I also don’t want to talk to you and I want to be active in the fandom again but I also don’t want to be active in the fandom again”. I don’t know, this probably doesn’t even make sense. I don’t even know where I’m going with this post anymore. I’m sorry if this is confusing, but like I said, I don’t want advice or reassurance - I just wanted to ramble and maybe justify my absence once again, to feel less guilty about leaving. To those of you who have read all of this, I appreciate it.
