Dashcon 2 and some personal reflections
Watched Strange’s dashcon video and I started tearing up and getting all sentimental over how they spoke about their relationship with niche Internet history during their panel.
Being a person in my early 20s, who’s in college and reckoning with my childhood being over, seeing them talk so fondly about the one place that was the closest thing to a safe haven that I had growing up is really a full circle moment for me.  
My experience online wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Early onset internet access mixed with child neglect was legitimately traumatizing in a lot of ways. But hearing how Strange spoke with fondness, about things that I often times feel I need to relinquish in order to become a “real adult” was really heart warming, since a lot of the time when I think about me being a chronically online child, I think of it in terms of how many formative experiences I’d possibly missed out on.
As much as I believe that to be cringe is to be free, I suppose that on a subconscious level I’ve began to conflate respectability with giving up on a lot of things I used to identify with in my youth (while ironically returning to fandom spaces and revisiting the exploration of my gender identity in the past few years, things that I’d previously distanced myself from due to trauma and social ostracization).
Watching the footage from people at dashcon 2 be unpolished, enthusiastic, jazzed, and unapologetically free, it was really healing and validating. Especially in an online age where everything is so polarized and polished and rage bait-y, and where it feels like the only solution to that is to get offline completely, it was really nice to see that there is still that pure, unbridled essence that was able to hold me when I was a little freak with no friends.
I’m sad that I learned as I got older, in order to make friends, I needed to abandon the things that were my refuge. I’m glad that now as an adult I’m allowing myself to circle back around to what I’d once abandoned in the name of progress and growth.
