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How Fandom Gave Me A Safe Space for My Autism

And other neurodivergent fandom things

By TC13Published 2 years ago 3 min read
2
How Fandom Gave Me A Safe Space for My Autism
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I got into fandom when I was 11 years old.

If not a little younger, since it was back in 2011, and I'd been doing fandom-y things my whole life. Notebooks from when I was four and five had very poorly but lovingly drawn fanart in them, and I'd made up stories about characters that weren't my own my whole life — and even some that were.

I still remember meandering online one day and stumbling across Fanfiction.net, the big fanfiction site in the day after the LiveJournal strike-downs. Even as a child, it felt like a life changing experience. After years of just assuming my obsessive and creative nature were outliers, I had found other people — for the first time in my life — were just like me.

I wrote voraciously with a confidence that did not match my lacklustre (but good for my age) skill level. I got to chat with other fans in a small, friendly fandom and read more stories about my favourite characters. Looking back now, it's fun to see the writing that amazed me now feel more blasé with time. I like to think that both the writer and I have grown since then, more than ten years later.

In 2013 I made my way onto tumblr in early high school and did my best to dodge the big crossover fandoms at the time. I often only cared for one property in them (for the big animated crossover at the time, the only one I adored was How to Train Your Dragon). I read countless metas, fans analyzing movies and shows I loved, although I quickly had to learn to curate my fandom experience to avoid ships or opinions I thought were distasteful, silly, or sometimes downright mean.

No matter which way you look at it, though, fandom gave me a safe space — a hub — for my special interests. I could hone in on the stories I loved, learn more about their creation and various meanings. I wrote fanfiction, tried my hand out at meta, learned to make graphics. I even became decently well known and 'prolific' in now two fandoms overall, one of which I still reside it. I wrote novel length fics and essay long metas, some even surpassing 6,000 or 11,000 words, about the characters, narratives, and parallels that made my brain go a million miles a minute, and made my heart sing. Fandom was a place to express all the thoughts in my head, yes, but it was also the place where it felt encouraged, not just okay, to do so.

I never felt that way anywhere else in my life, even from being a very cheerful, Greek mythology obsessed six year old child (and not because of Percy Jackson, actually, although I loved it too).

I think I would've had a much harder time in high school, and university, without fandom.

I realized with the help of a therapist that I was autistic about three months ago. It made a lot of things click into place — my extreme consistency with food and hobbies, my obsessive nature with the things I loved, my homebody tendencies — and so much more. One of the beautiful things though is that, not only do I now understand just how much fandom was a refuge growing up, but I get to express my autism through fandom. Whether by connecting with other neurodivergent fans (of which fandom has many) or of noticing similarities between myself and some of my favourite characters, and headcanoning them accordingly.

Fandom gave me a safe space for my autism — and I will always be grateful. I hope it can do the same for others in the future, while they chart their own journeys in life.

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About the Creator

TC13

Aspiring author and mythology enthusiast with a deep love for fantasy. Writes from a queer nb (they/them) perspective.

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