Fannish Insanity (or how I learned to stop worrying and love my brain)

[tiggymalvern]

Every few years, I develop some crazy new fannish obsession. It’s been happening since I was seven years old (not that I knew what name to put on it then – I was nineteen before I discovered there was a thing called ‘fandom’ and other people like me). And every time it happens, it completely disrupts my life.

I become almost incapable of doing anything outside life’s absolute necessities, and compulsive watching, writing, thinking about whatever shiny new thing has hijacked my brain. So many other things I normally love to do go out the window – the hiking, the diving, the yoga, the socialising with RL friends, they’re all suddenly on the back-burner until that first rush of insanity starts to fade.

It was fine when I was a kid, and people expect you to be weird. It was definitely NOT fine when I was a teenager, and conformity is everything. As an adult, I can confine the most fanatical aspects of it to certain boxes, so it’s only obvious to the people I allow to see it, and not, say, my employers (though they get the side benefit of an irrepressibly happy me).

It's weird as hell, and it’s never exactly convenient. But at the same time, it’s AMAZING. I become a total Tigger of a person with an endlessly bouncing brain. Whatever mundane, tedious things I need to be doing, I can be transported out of them in a second just by shifting into the fantastic new world in my head. It becomes impossible for me to be anything other than excited.

I’ve fallen deliriously in love eight times since I met my spouse, and never had to go through a messy divorce, or find somewhere new to live, or argue over who gets custody of the cats. And the characters and the worlds I fall in love with are fictional, but the chemicals in my brain, that ‘dizzy, dancing way you feel’ as Joni Mitchell so perfectly puts it, they’re 100% real.

I can't conceive of how boring life would be without that. If life was just day to day reality, and work and grocery shopping and thinking maybe I should get my hair cut this week. How would it be possible to live permanently in the physical world, without an escape route? Without fantasy and idiocy and other equally crazy people to share it all with? I can’t imagine being any other way, and I love it :-)

Comments

[kronette]

That is one of the best parts of fandom. I switched up fandoms every few years and called myself a 'fannish butterfly' because my interests changed. I never thought to label it my Tigger response, but that's it exactly. Or the Squee Factor.

[silverusagi]

I do wonder sometimes how other people manage without some story to get obsessed with. I don't know what I'd be doing with my time if I wasn't doing fandom.