Nanni

I am obsessing about a potentially hurtful thing I said over a year ago. Which is a thing I often do. I worry about hurting people a lot, and when I'm feeling down I loop into tracks about Did I Hurt That Person? I Hope I Didn't Hurt That Person, I Don't Think I Can Make Up For It Now.

In mostly unrelated thoughts, I'm feeling intensely ambivalent about lgbtfest. It's an odd thing. I like reading the fic that comes out of the fest, but I hate reading the prompt lists, because...

Okay, so this probably isn't entirely fair. But sometimes it starts to feel like a lot of the people prompting are basically prompting misery porn, and given that I have immense issues with the extent to which stories about LGBT people generally are. Not joyful. I mean, okay. As a queer teenager, I hated reading YA novels about queer people, because -

Well. Let me be honest here. I tended to get the feeling that those novels weren't for actual queer teens. That they were intended for straight teens, and that was why they were so horrible, and the people in them were rarely brought joy by their sexuality, and when they were it was frequently elided, while pain was examined and almost reveled in. It used to make me so mad.

It still makes me so mad. Because yes. Things are hard, and the closet sucks, and frequently so does being out, and people are always happy to tell you how you're not you enough, and sometimes it's hard not to believe them, and it's always dangerous, people might very well hurt you, and hurt you very badly, kill you even, and there is vulnerability and danger -

But damn it. Just. Just.

Fuck that, I'm going to be happy. Judging by the fic that gets actually written, a lot of people feel the same way.

(This might be somewhat ironic, coming from someone who writes incessantly about mental illness, which means I write a lot about fear and pain and sadness, but pfffffffft.)