I don't know when it happened, but at one point I stopped writing fics for the sake of it and instead wrote to share ideas. Headcanons, interpretations, my fics became essayfics and essayfics alone. It wasn't sustainable, and I stopped writing fics entirely.
It made things rather easy when I switched to writing meta, and most of the 3,500+ people who forgot to remove my blog from their list probably found me that way. YoI meta. My brain vomiting what I used to put into fics, in a long-winded, vaguely pretty prose (because I couldn't give up that habit entirely, I think.) This wasn't sustainable either---the way people see meta changed, the way people approached fandom changed, and it was altogether too weighty for me to do the same thing under the eyes of three thousand people or a dozen, and I stopped writing that entirely, too.
Fandom stopped being a joy, things happened with fandom that stressed me out and broke what used to be worth it, and I left fandom. For, I don't know, seven years. For all those seven years I grew gravely anxious whenever people mentioned my old self, my name, I didn't even want to see new fic reviews (though I had enough of an ego and sunk cost fallacy to keep the fics up, ironically).
So that's why I haven't answered any of your asks for seven years. I did see them. Perhaps way later than I should've seen them, but I did. I just wanted to be forgotten so badly, to disappear into the internet's past like so many other people from my time.
I still wouldn't have changed my mind if I didn't see ... ten years. People still reccing the things I wrote ten years later, talking about it like it's new, like it's natural that it should still have the capability to touch someone's heart. Irrespective of whether I was there or not, the things I left behind meant something to some people. It's not a question of remembering. It meant something new to people who wanted to see those things, for the first time.
That changed something in me.
Foolishly, this past few weeks have been the first time in my life that I can see fannish things as what they probably have been all along. Divorced from me and my brainwaves and my wish to share and whatnot, they are things we leave behind, for people like us to maybe find out of dust and detritus, whether we are there or not, whether we remember it or not. That changed something. That meant something. It has nothing to do with anything I ever wanted with fanning, and it meant something.
I'm sorry to everyone whom I've wronged with silence in the past seven years.
I'm grateful to you, all of you, who were here with me, who weren't here with me, you who will never know where the ink-trails on the internet leads, who know me and who will never know where I am.
That's all I wanted to say.
