An Open Letter
I lurk, I am a lurker. I was press ganged into my first Livejournal account in my freshman year of university and then promptly forgot my password. So I made another, with a name I actually chose for myself rather than one that was selected for me by the fabulous people I befriended in that first semester. I like my new handle and have managed to remember the password to this account. Sweet victory. I have even made a few friends and my current friends list is a testament to my varied interests. I see updates on subjects ranging from pastry recipes to Twilight fanfiction chronicling the “great romance of our time”- please note that I often experience what I have come to term Fandom Regret, defined as the lingering feeling of shame associated with a particular obsession once the first blush of that obsession has passed... kind of like a tattoo gotten in a moment of questionable decision making. I continue to look back on these fandoms with affection, because I remember just how badly I loved them in the beginning. You feel me?
But I digress.
Despite the chex mix bag of interests that is my Friends Page, I remain primarily, a lurker. I have never posted publicly and when I do comment on an entry it is generally on fiction and the author is rarely on my friends list. If we’re being honest here, and I’d like to think that we are, all of the work (be it meta, fiction, or random PSA’s) that I have read on my favourite haunts is so consistently wonderful in its uniqueness and clarity that I constantly feel that anything I might add would be inadequate. Better to leave it up to the women posting on human rights issues and personal theories on feminism and slash/fic who are saying it so much better than I would. Given the nature of the internet and the voice it lends to so many issues, it seems silly to confess that I lurk because I’m shy, but we were going for honesty right? Okay then. I’m shy. There is a shoulder shrug happening while I type this, please picture it in your minds.
So this is me, de lurking, because I have read so many wonderful heart clenching works of fiction, gained new perspective on womens issues and gender issues and learned so much from the posts that fabulous women have written that I needed to say Thank You. Thank you for writing about how women characters are treated on television and in other media; you have made me more aware about how women are represented to the public. I think about female characters differently now because of the thoughts that you shared. Thank you for knowing so much about gender identity and sexuality and writing characters who reflect that knowledge. I know that I understand myself better because of it. Many of the aspects of feminism that are now so important to me I learned from fandom, thank you for being so eloquent and passionate about your ideas and your feelings about women in literature and film. Mostly though, thank you for being so compassionate in how you share all of this. The consideration that you give to people you have never met, the hilarious and honest disclaimers you provide when sharing your thoughts have impacted me in an amazingly positive way. I am going to stop now, before I lose my nerve completely and delete this entry, because even now I don’t feel as though I am doing you all justice. In short, I implore you-
Never stop writing.