The Role of Fanfiction in the Life of a Late Bloomer

By Cypher

I, like many other femme teens in the 2010s, grew up reading fanfiction. For me, these stories were everything. My home life was wrought with abuse, and I was an extremely lonely child. As such, this little corner of the internet where I read stories of my favourite characters was a haven.

For context, my mother was a deeply conservative Indian woman. She imposed many conditions on my life, one of which was that I was supposed to have an arranged marriage. However, as many people do when growing up, I experienced feelings of romantic attraction. Because of the rule my mother made about having an arranged marriage, my feelings of attraction made me feel like I was betraying her. So, I relegated my curiosities surrounding romance to fanfiction containing it. It is worth noting that I never let myself read anything with sexual content - in my mind, this was taking things a step too far.

I thought that by only reading about romance and not allowing myself to feel it, I would still get to experience romance without betraying my mother. In hindsight, this logic was far from perfect, but it was how I managed my feelings at the time. This compartmentalization carried on until I turned nineteen. It was at this point that my mother finally left our family.

After this drastic change in circumstances, the ideas of dating, relationships, and sex began to cross my mind. After all, I no longer had someone I felt obligated to obey. For the first time, I read fanfiction with sex scenes in it, and I became obsessed with the possibility that I could ever be in a setting like this. For most nineteen-year-olds, thoughts of sex are quite commonplace. But for me, these thoughts felt terrifying.

My newly developed interest in reading about sex was occurring in tandem with my questioning of my sexual orientation. Whenever these feelings came up in the past, I never let myself even begin to dwell on them. However, now that my circumstances had changed, I couldn’t help my curiosity. I started reading queer fanfiction, some of which contained sexual content. Up until this point, most of the stories I had read were heteronormative. This exploration even gave me the courage to try masturbation for the first time - something I’d spent my life believing was a sin.

For the first several years after my mother left, I received some much-needed trauma therapy. It was when I turned 22 that I felt ready to try my hand at dating. After having navigated 19 years of intense abuse, I have become pretty good at reading people. As such, I trusted myself to manage the emotional aspect of relationships. As per my guess, the connection part came easily to me. What I hadn’t expected, however, was for the sexual aspect to be so difficult.

Unfortunately, my first sexual experience was in a situationship with someone who deeply fetishized my virginity, and I was coerced into doing things I was not ready for. This experience really soured my perception of sex for a while, and it took me quite some time to feel comfortable giving it another try. The second time I tried having sex was with an ex-partner who was equally as inexperienced as I was. I was technically safer in this environment, so I thought I would enjoy it.

Instead, what happened was that the whole interaction felt like a performance. I felt like I was cosplaying the role of a sexual woman rather than feeling that way. Though my ex-partner was a safe person, I still didn’t feel safe enough to just exist as myself.

There are many factors to consider when trying to figure out why I feel this way - my insecurities about being a fat person, the trauma I suffered from my mother’s abuse, and the effects of growing up religious, to name a few. Since this realization dawned on me, I have spent a lot of time reading essays and listening to podcasts about sex. Through this, I’ve found people whose experiences with sex are really similar to mine. In addition to this, I have done lots of journaling and self-examination, as well as opening up to my queer friends, to try to determine what works for me and what doesn’t.

Through my journey so far, I’ve learned a lot about myself and have been made aware of the things I have yet to unlearn. But I don’t think this later self-knowledge and exploration would have started without my beginning in fanfiction.

There is a tendency to look down on fanfiction as something that ‘isn’t real art’ or a ‘waste of time,’ but for me, it was neither of those things. Fanfiction gave me a place to feel safe and to experience the things I was denied in real life. Because of this, it will always hold a special place in my heart. Even before I had ever found friends or community, I had a corner of the internet in which I found solace and escapism. It was there for me when no one else was, and I’m beyond grateful to have found it.