Fanfiction Saved My Life
Hope: The Final Frontier
Content warning: mention of suicide
Being a suicidal Christian teen in the 90s was a helluva thing. By the time I was 16, I was so numb to my entire existence, I didn’t have it in me to hate anything anymore. I didn’t want to live, but church and Sunday School taught me suicide was the unforgiveable sin. If I ended things, I would spend eternity burning in the fires of Hell with no chance for redemption.
I struggled with faith, but as a kid, I never faltered in the belief that Hell was real. Life on Earth was hard, but the idea of burning forever made the emptiness of my existence tolerable. For a while anyway.
Losing My Faith
Rigid social norms and expectations as the first-born left me with the only place I could populate: the “weird” kid. The weird kid got bullied on the bus and was made to eat gum off the floor. The weird kid got the nickname “Animal.” The weird kid hated riding the bus. In sixth grade, I learned that if you’re the weird kid and a girl, everyone is going to believe the nasty boy when he blames you for why he has no friends. It’s not that he’s a self-righteous prick. No, it’s because you’re a gang leader that convinced all your classmates and teachers alike to hate this poor, lost soul. My mother was called into school to discuss my irreparable behavior. I was sat at a massive round table with the principal, all my teachers, the principal’s secretary, and my mom.
Understand, I was raised to not talk back to authority figures. Adults were terrifying monsters that had no interest in understanding the weird kid. My grandma reinforced this on the regular by reminding me that my parents didn’t want me or love me. It would have been easier to dismiss these awful words if she was a voice in my head during times like this. Instead, I felt unloved in my bones.
My mom asked me to explain myself. She didn’t fight back against these accusations that I was terrible. She didn’t ask to talk to me alone, so I could try to tell her how this boy was cruel to me and not the other way around. When my mom didn’t take my side in that meeting, all I could do was cry.
I was eleven years old against every authority figure in my life, and I was being told just how awful I was. I was an unforgivable monster. That was my new identity, and I accepted as I was told.
I wasn’t a perfect kid. I had done standard kid clique stuff. But that jackass was justifiably hated. He thought he was better than everyone in class, and he didn’t hesitate to let kids know. He enjoyed calling me names and working to insult my intelligence. “Buffoon,” he liked to call me. At 42, it feels like nothing, but to a broken child who knows her only value is as “the smart one,” it was devastating. I had nothing to do with his isolation. It was self-inflicted.
I learned the first important lesson that day. Adults could not be trusted to care about me or my perspective.
Into the Hellscape
Seventh grade was a new school. I started junior high. It was supposed to be a fresh start, and it was. A fresh start on a new brand of torture.
A pair of eighth grade girls found it entertaining to taunt me and poke fun when I just wanted to sit quietly and read my books. They always chose the seat behind me. Sometimes, they liked to kick me through the seat. Any way to make me uncomfortable. At one point they put gum in my hair while I was quietly reading.
I noticed it when I was getting ready for bed. I had A LOT of hair at that time, so it was easy to smear gum in towards the ends without me feeling it.
As I grabbed the peanut butter to go up to the bathroom and get it out, my parents sat on the couch watching TV. Mom asked what I was doing, and I did my best to pretend it was nothing as I said, “Some girls put gum in my hair on the bus.”
“Oh, they were probably just joking,” she replied. She didn’t get up to help me. I was on my own to fix this unfunny joke. It didn’t occur to me to ask for help. Remember, my grandma kept telling me my parents didn’t care about me, want me, or love me. Moments like this kept proving her right and solidifying that thought in my heart.
After the gum, I learned to move away from the girls when they sat behind me.
The girls were nothing compared to the boys though. Because the boys weren’t smart or witty or crafty. They were violent and brutish. One boy in particular enjoyed sliding into the seat behind me while I read by myself, not bothering anyone, and slamming me over the head with his school book.
I remember the sound more than the pain. By this time, I was slamming my head against lockers and brick walls. Pain meant nothing. The bus was almost empty, and that sickening crack reverberated around the metal tube. I sat stunned.
The bus driver didn’t stop.
Knowing yet another adult wasn’t going to take my side or help me, I stood up and punched him a few times across his back, desperate to send the message that I am not weak. I will not just sit and take it.
That only made it worse.
He hit me more often. He used two books instead of one. It didn’t stop.
Eventually, the bus driver called in the vice principal, who gave the boy who hit me, and his friend who stuck to cruel words, detention for a week. My claims about the girls who tormented me were ignored (they were Honor Roll students). And I was told to stop fighting back.
Adults abandoned me to my fate. I must have done something really horrible for God to hate me this much. I had no idea what it was, but I must have deserved all this. This only happened to bad people who deserved it.
Restoring My Soul
I floated through the next few years.
Finally, I was starting 11th grade, and I’d had enough. I didn’t care about eternity anymore. I had a plan. I wasn’t going to see 12th grade.
I entered my chemistry class and sat at the back as far from the teacher as possible. I never sat in the back. I was an A student with vision issues. I always sat in front. Not anymore though. There was no point to trying hard to achieve.
I sat in the back, and the girl that sat in front of me was everything that I wasn’t. Shame radiated through me as I felt even more isolated from those around me. I was tall, fat, and brunette. She was short, thin, and blonde. She was my opposite. Or so I thought.
We weren’t opposites. We complemented each other. Our personalities synced almost immediately. We liked the same sci-fi stuff. She also had Star Trek toys and brought them to class.
She saw me as the person who had been shoved down into the very bottom of my personhood, and she threw me a rope to start climbing my way out.
That rope was a fanfiction universe created for a biology class assignment. She created the spaceship Jamieprize. It started as a copy of Star Trek with a little Star Wars for flare, but it grew to encompass everything we loved: Red Wings hockey, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Conan O’Brien, 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Pretender. In this universe, we created our ideal selves. I dreamt up Bill the Great, captain of the Millenium Ostrich. A person who was larger than life who energized everyone they were around. Everything about them was everything I wanted to be. They didn’t make themselves smaller or try to disappear. They embraced their differences from the rest of the group, and more importantly, they celebrated them. I learned about who I was and what I wanted my life to look like.
Stories poured out of me, pulling everything I loved into this universe of our creation. Our frustrations had solutions. Villains got their comeuppance.
We created versions of ourselves that were our ideal adults. I saw myself in a new way as a real person. I wasn’t God’s broken mistake. I was Bill the Great. The one who set me free to live. They inspired me to write and keep writing.
Writing fixed the broken bits. Writing gave me space to exist and the confidence to stop being invisible. I went from being branded a gang leader as a negative to buying a patch from Hot Topic that proudly said “Cult Leader” and putting it on my favorite shirt. I created a crew of nerds around me.
I renamed people with silly nicknames and gave them permission to be different. I was impervious to my bullies. I had a vision of who I wanted to be, and I was becoming them.
I was free.
Fulfilling My Purpose
I have wanted to share that feeling with other kids for over 20 years. Space Trek, as we called the stories, never left me. Not for a day.
I grew up, and that girl from chemistry class stayed my very best friend. I got professional jobs that required my unique brand of creativity and thinking. I got married. I had a kid. I am a good mom.
Then, my kid started talking to his friends at elementary school about wanting to die. He beat me to it by about three years, and I couldn’t understand why. We got him into therapy immediately, and thankfully, it was mostly a cry for attention. I have no regrets about taking it seriously. Kids should always be taken seriously when they talk about wanting to die.
I realized that I wanted my kid to meet Bill the Great. They set me free. Maybe they could help him too. I started a short story where Bill the Great picks him up in the Millenium Ostrich and takes him off to the stars.
It wasn’t a very good story, and it took me a while to realize it’s because the idea was too small. My kid wasn’t the only one that needed Bill the Great in their life. All our kids should meet them.
Thus, Space Trek: the next generation was conceived, drafted, edited, revised, renamed, and eventually became Swim the Stars. My first novel was published on February 7, 2023.
My kid has read it. My nephew has read it. They love it just as much as I do.
Now I’m building my career as a writer on the lessons of my childhood. I write stories where finding your fit means trusting in who you are.
I found where I fit when I quit questioning why I didn’t belong like everyone else. I’d like to save some kid from the heartache I went through.
Fanfiction isn’t new. Many books considered “the classics” are fanfiction: Dante’s Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Washington Irving wrote fanfiction of George Washington and Christopher Columbus that I was taught as fact in elementary school. E.L. James made a very successful career with her Twilight fanfiction that became the 50 Shades of Grey series.
Fanfiction is powerful.
Fanfiction can save lives.
It saved me.
