#leakyconboston

The last time I was at Leakycon was in Orlando in 2014. It was brilliant, of course, with the park event and the community, people I love were with me and we were there for this thing that we all loved so much that it changed our lives. It is truly one of my favorite memories to this day, I talk about it with excited eyes as if it just happened, even six years later.  Due to family obligations, and life, I had to take a brief (five year) hiatus, but a friend @hamiltonsgirlalmighty​ had heavily suggested I go back for the 10 year celebration in Boston. She literally already had a hotel room booked with a group, which we will come back to later. After far too many drinks, I agreed.

Honestly, after that I didn’t really think about it for awhile. It was in October for starters, and this was wayyyy back in maybe January? I don’t remember. It slipped my mind because my life came into the forefront. For anyone who knows me, you know that I have a lot going on with my family as well as my mental health, and so just dealing with those things were enough to make me forget. That is of course, until I got an email reminding me to buy my Leakycon Boston ticket.  I have a full time job y’all, but sometimes the struggle is real, but I did manage to get the money together to buy myself a general pass and honestly, I cannot begin to tell you just how buying the ticket and having it to look forward to again got me through a lot of the hard stuff that happened in 2019.

I would have a bad day, a bad week, a bad month and I would remind myself “you’re going home” and really, that sounds cheesy, but it helped a lot. Leakycon back in 2012, and 2014 when I had gone felt like home to me when I hadn’t really found my place in the world yet. I mean, I’m near 28 and I still haven’t, but that’s for another day. 

But time is quick, and the planning came around, and I was buying plane tickets and clothes and all of that sort of fun pre trip stuff, and I was excited to be going back to a place that I held so dearly in my heart. 

When it comes to conventions (and I've been to a few besides Leakycon) I always like to arrive a day or two early, so luckily my friend felt the same way and we both got there a day earlier than most of the roommates. Who, mind you, I had never met before. So here I am, excited for the convention, excited to explore a city I’ve never seen before and also filled with anxiety at meeting new people who all already had established relationships. It was terrifying.  But then I started to meet them, one by one, and I’m going to be honest with y’all. I am not the most social right out of the gate. I have anxiety and it makes me feel like pretty much everyone hates me, so this wasn’t easy for me. I was quiet at first and a little (see: a lot) awkward and I really thought I had made the worst first impression. But these people who had never met me, and only communicated with me through text made me feel as welcomed and as wanted as if I was one of them from the start. Shout out to RoR for giving me a little home away from home while I was there. It really started my first Leakycon weekend in five years off on the right foot, and I’ll always be grateful for that and them.

If I went into detail over every single panel, every single meetup that I went to, we’d be here all day and this would be forever long, and it’s already getting up there. So I will mostly say that walking into the convention center, registering and see old friends, seeing people in their cosplay and in their house robes and their house colors, seeing wands holstered to legs and groups of friends sitting in circles all around me, there was only one word for all of it, and I’m trying really hard not to be cheesy and predictable when I say it was magical. 

 From meeting up to volunteer, to walking through the marketplace past vendors who put their heart into the work they put out there for us to buy. From actor interviews to snitchwitches and wizard rock. From debates to inclusive meetups (the potterheads of color meetup gets a special shout out here), to people acknowledging and using my pronouns even though it was the first time I ever publicly used them myself, to going to bed at 3 am the night of the ball after staying up talking to old friends and new, every single bit of my first Leakycon weekend in five years felt like being welcomed home again.