shipperjunkie

Hi,

As you may know by now, I’ve been re-doing my whole island, and with that comes the greatest pleasure of all time : finding new designs! So under this, I’m going to list all the creator code that I’ve saved in my game, enjoy 🧡

(It’s REALLY long.)

I was 11 when the TVD books were first published, all the way back in 1991 before most of you existed. I used to read them multiple times a week. I would act out Elena’s death, sobbing every time. I owned the computer game! Then for almost 15 years there was nothing new from that world.

New passions came. Buffy, Angel, Charmed, Veronica Mars. Big Brother. General Hospital. The Amazing Race. And things in the world, too. The 2008 and 2012 presidential elections consumed my life. I sometimes wondered at the things that became my obsessions - and vaguely asked myself if I was SUPPOSED to feel so tense and agitated all the time about things I loved.

Then TVD the show came. The pilot got awful reviews. I figured it wouldn’t last, but of course I was going to watch. And what did you know? It got really good. Amazing even. I was so proud that this special series from my childhood was getting rave reviews. I read all the recaps, started finding Tumblr pages; it was all good.

Then in S3, I saw Elena hate creeping into fan posts and reviewer articles. Insidious, continuous, unfair in my opinion. I started to get defensive. I would fume over one sentence all day. Around 3x14 and 3x15 was really awful. Everything I read was vicious.

We moved on, and S4 was here. Again, the hate was intense. The show itself even seemed to encourage it. I decided I wanted to add my voice to fandom to show Elena some love. I joined Tumblr.

On the one hand, this was good. I now had an outlet to express my own opinion, and there were a lot of Elena lovers there. I curated my following list VERY carefully. I joined a chat group, made a bunch of casual friends, made one friend who is now one of my best friends, whom I’ve travelled the world with. So it seemed like maybe I had found a coping technique.

Then the sire bond happened. Then no humanity Elena happened. Then torturing Elena to get her humanity back on happened. My Tumblr community imploded with some dropping DE totally, and some hanging on. Some of my favorite recappers who always “got” Elena soured on the show, and suddenly I didn’t have those positive outlets anymore. Reviewers were hating the show more and more. A person I always liked on Twitter announced that she now found Elena the least interesting character on the show, and it actually hurt me. Then Kol’s death happened and recappers (like someone whose name starts with P) literally called Elena the worst person on the show.

It was bothering me. A LOT. I felt personally attacked. Watching the show wasn’t fun. I would get sick to my stomach. I was glued to Tumblr, would search out every recap, hoping for some crumb of positivity.

During this time, my grandmother was slowly deteriorating from a fall in her late 80s, and I was taking on extra work outside my prestigious but low paying full time job to pay for an expensive apartment. This matters for full context.

May 5, 2013, was a Sunday. I had just finished my last big freelance project and could finally breathe for a moment. I went to a bar with some friends, had a good time and some drinks. I met a friend of a friend, we kind of hit it off, and I went to his place to “watch Game of Thrones.” (This was before Netflix and chill.) We fooled around a bit, and then, feeling uncomfortable the whole time, I left. I felt odd, I felt dirty, I was just so bothered. But I was a 31-year-old adult so I tried to shake it off. I realized later that the stress of overwork and my feelings about this particular incident probably contributed to what followed.

That Thursday, May 9, I was at work when I saw an article that Nian had broken up. For some reason, I was shocked. The thing is, I wasn’t what I would call a shipper. I had had my suspicions over the years that they seemed like maybe they were dating, but I had never seen confirmation before joining Tumblr a few months before. I didn’t follow news about them or anything. I didn’t think I much cared. So why did it matter so much?

I remembered I had once heard of a message board where an Atlanta insider posted info about the cast. I found it easily, and there she - and an entire board dedicated to Nian - was. For the next month, I spent every waking hour lurking there, reading every scrap of evidence and theory as to why the news was or wasn’t true. Eventually, I made an account and joined in. I was known for my “Positivity List” - clues and evidence we had that suggested they had not broken up, at least not for good, or that at least they were still very good friends.

Eventually over that summer of 2013 that board imploded. Trolls started joining in, criticism of Ian or Nina started becoming widespread which was against the rules anyway. A bunch of us left and started our own chat and that’s where we stayed.

During this time I could not eat. Food was sawdust. I literally couldn’t bear to put it in my mouth, let alone chew and swallow. The most I could handle was a few pieces of bread or some pita chips. The sensation of an empty belly and slight dizziness became standard. My coworker would go walk the city with me every day at lunchtime looking for something I could force down. Most of the time we didn’t find anything.

At work I was completely disassociated in meetings, stopped talking to all my friends, and spent all my computer time on the board and in the chat room. By some miracle I was still able to get all my work done, but I truly think I was only able to do that because I was terrified of losing my job and having no income on top of everything else. I slept with my computer and woke up every 15 minutes to refresh and check for Nian news.

I dropped from a size 14 to a size 6/8 in 5 months. I once spent 48 hours on my couch only moving to use the bathroom, and in those 2 days only ate 2 Oreos. I couldn’t let my phone out of my hand - EVER. I checked it every 10 seconds, constantly refreshing pages in case news came out. This was everywhere - in meetings, at dinner. Being on the subway for my commute with no Internet gave me panic attacks. (Yeah, those happened sometimes too.) I honestly thought I was going insane. I KNEW it was ridiculous to be so invested in a couple of complete strangers but knowing that didn’t change the feeling. I thought if we could get that one smoking gun that they were still together, I would suddenly be fine.

One day a coworker came to me and asked what was going on with me. I mentioned that I felt fixated on this really random thing and my mind just kept going in circles. She immediately said, “I know what’s wrong, and you need to go see your doctor.” I went, and my doctor immediately said I had anxiety. She prescribed a very low dose of Prozac. I went home, started reading about Prozac, and fainted for the first time in my life. But I also felt relieved that someone had given me a scientific explanation for what was happening - I wasn’t crazy, there was just a chemical imbalance in my brain!

The first 2 weeks on my medication were a nightmare. I had read that side effects including depression were likely and that they had to be waited out, but there were times I just wanted to get up and start walking and never stop. (I thankfully never got to a suicidal place but that’s dumb luck; I am not at all surprised that many people do.)

I got a psychiatrist. He diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder and upped my dosage, and things improved slightly, but not much. At this point a few family and friends knew of my diagnosis. They didn’t know my trigger; I didn’t talk about Nian. I was too ashamed. But I was in our chat room 24 hours a day talking about them and looking for new clues.

That September my grandmother died. I was the only one in town when she did, and it was pretty much the most grief I’ve ever felt. The next day, my aunt and I were out shopping for funeral clothes when Us Weekly published an article that announced Nina and Derek Hough were dating. I immediately had a panic attack so bad that my aunt asked me if someone else had died. I had more panic attacks during that time over Nian than over my beloved grandmother. I beat myself up over that for a long time, but I’ve come to understand that it wasn’t my fault.

The rest of the fall proceeded like that. In January my doctor added a medication because the Prozac just wasn’t doing enough. Well, this was the right cocktail (and is why you should never just quit when one medication isn’t working for you, because a different dosage/brand/combination might). I started being able to eat normally again. I could concentrate better on work. I could avoid my phone for maybe 5 minutes at a time. I was not “cured,” I was a long way from that, but I was becoming more functional. After 6 months I could actually believe that this feeling might not last forever.

During this time I was very open with my chat group about my anxiety diagnosis, because I suspected that many of us who were this attached to Nian might also not realize that they were simply a trigger or symptom of a larger issue. It was nerve wracking to be so open about it, but I’m proud to say that because of it, several others went to their doctors and got diagnosed and are in much better places now.

Everything was not magically OK. Early 2014 I was still obsessed. I KNEW Nian were still hooking up quietly through S5. (I still believe that in fact, purely based on evidence, but that’s beside the point of this story.) So when Nikki popped up, I suffered a serious setback. Summer 2014 was hard. But it never got quite as bad as before, because I was on medication and because I understood more about how my anxiety worked. I was able to have a life. I eventually even was able to not check my phone for up to 30 minutes at a time. (Now I can go the whole length of a movie or plane ride.)

When Nikki and Ian got married, I was on vacation. I spent that day in bed. I still remember the date - April 25, 2015. Almost two years of this anxiety crisis had been going on at that point. But the next day I got up and kept going. It didn’t paralyze me anymore. All that time the same was happening with TVD. I started to work on ignoring Elena hate, and my medication helped me do that because my brain no longer fixated as much. It had space to breathe and to think about other things. I didn’t like storylines in S5 and 6 but I tried not to let that consume my mood for days. I joined Twitter because I still wanted to have a voice about the show and it actually helped my anxiety - sometimes. Sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes it still is.

This May, it will be 4 years since my brain went haywire. Many things have happened since then. I’ve had more personal losses, I’ve traveled, I’ve made at least a half dozen friends specifically because of the whole Nian mess who I get to see all over the world. So that’s certainly a positive.

And of course, TVD finally ended. It’s a relief for me. But the other thing I came to realize in that time is that TVD and Nian were not the cause. They were the symptom. When I look back on my life before 2013 I can now identify many other symptoms; many other times I fixated on a person, or a show, or an event, in a way that ultimately was unhealthy. So actually, I have to thank TVD, and Nian, and that one week in May, for triggering this crisis, because without it I might not have gotten help. And life is so much better with help.

I write all this knowing some people will not understand. But I write it for the people who make it to the end who DO understand, and who need to hear that even these “unimportant” “dumb” things that stress you out MATTER. The question is what you do about it. And the answer is ASK FOR HELP. It’s out there. And when you do, the one thing I want you to know is THIS FEELING WILL END. You won’t feel this way forever. One day, it will be in the past, almost like a dream you can’t clearly remember. I look at photos of myself from that time and it feels like it happened to someone else. But the person who came out the other side is someone I’m really proud of. Because I know now that neither the bad nor the good things are forever, and that you can’t always just do it yourself. You are not crazy; it’s not something you can just “get over.” It’s an illness like anything else.

The other thing I want to say is, be open, as much as you’re comfortable with. It matters that people are willing to talk about mental health. Be loud and proud about your struggles and your strength. You could save someone’s life.

Why did I write this now? Well, it matters now for a few reasons. One, with TVD over it felt like the right time to summarize what it meant to my life. The other is, the last year was very hard personally. I had a death in my family, I lost my job, and then Trump won the election. I’ve backslid a bit into some depression and some fixating. On the one hand, the future of this country NEEDS my focus so some fixating feels necessary; on the other hand, I need to find a balance so I can still have a life. So it’s still a challenge. Anxiety doesn’t go away. It will always be a part of me. But it’s not ME. And knowing that makes such a difference.

♔STAR WARS | FANCAST: Ezra Miller as Ben Solo/Young!Kylo Ren