Fervent Mediocrity

BUT

I dated a girl at BYU for like a fucking year where the one time I tried to tell her a movie was sad (Dead fucking Poet’s Society, btw) and she didn’t text me back for half a week because she thought that was so gross. And now I have friends who bought me like $75+ of post-surgery recovery goods, threw me a surprise party (where everyone wore matching pajamas), and made me cake all because I DMed three sessions of Pathfinder for them while stoned.

I tell my friends from back home that I love them when we end voice calls and they say it back with enthusiasm. I once said that, platonically, to a straight friend after my mission and he acted like I pissed in his glovebox after asparagus night.

The thing is, there’s no way to know where these people are coming from. In the before, when fandom was more in the corners we all knew about, you could search LJ or a message board or whatever social bookmarking site we were using. You could join the community and participate.

You could get a little dopamine hit by seeing someone tell their friends why they loved your story.

Anymore, those recs are hidden in discords, or in tiktoks or instagram slideshows that you can’t search for. They’re inaccessible, not discoverable unless you’re already there. You may never know why 27 people left kudos on an old story of yours, what they liked and found in your writing. You just get the thumbs up and a kinda lonely feeling, cause these could be your people. You could like them, maybe. You could be friends.

But you’ll never find out why they stopped by, or what people are saying about you behind your back, and that’s sad.