#pauley

Back in the summer of 2006 I was lonely. I was 13, my friends weren’t around and my family is, well, my family. I had started watching NCIS with my Dad on Tuesday nights earlier in the year and when I got my Christmas money from my Aunt and Uncle, I went out and, on a whim, bought season 1 of NCIS (this was also the start of my TV on DVD collection. From 1 season of 1 show as a poor 13 year old, I now have over 250 seasons from so many shows and the collection only grows). I binged the whole thing in one sitting. 15.7 hours of glorious TV. And when I was done, I started it again. My dad bought season 2 for me for Christmas. That was also gone in a single sitting. Season 3 wasn’t due out for another 5 months. I did however have one episode of season 3 recorded on a VHS. Mind Games... I wanted season 1, 2 and that single episode of season 3 more times than I could count that summer. And I’ve watched them more again since. 

That was how it start of some big things for me. I became obsessed with the show and with the character of Abby. From there I found fanfiction and the NFA forums (god bless NCIS Fanfiction Addiction in it’s heyday, what a ride!) and I made friends. I read so so so much and I found my love of writing. I started writing and I couldn’t stop. I literally have a degree in creative writing which I owe to fanfiction, NCIS, and Abby, the very first character I wrote about and cared about and created my screen name around. I felt so much more connected to the fandom than to people IRL that I literally got a version of my screenname, the one on this very blog, on my senior jersey.

For the longest time fanfiction and NCIS and Abby were my identifiers. At school, with my friends, with random people I would meet, I was the girl who loved NCIS. I was the girl who wrote about it with only minimal amounts of shame. And now my life looks completely different to how I thought it would, even a year ago. It’s hard to keep up sometimes but I still remember how it all started for me.