Just hoping to hear from some others who may have had similar experiences to me. I spent the majority of my teens/young adult years DEEP into a few different fandoms that primarily focused on m/m ships. And when I say deep, I mean fanfiction (reading and writing), friend groups (after high school they were my ONLY friend group), social justice, and even my one and only long term relationship all came from fandom. Fandom was less a hobby, more a lifestyle for me for a very long time.

For most people, those teen/young adult years are about exploring who and what you want in a romantic partner. I did almost none of this, putting all of my energy that I should have been directing towards getting to know myself and my wants outwards into these m/m ships. I projected HARD, to the point where I was like, "haha can you be in love with a ship, not a person?" Like, serious social maladjustment territory.

(Probably unsurprisingly, I have struggled almost constantly since puberty with my mental health.)

I wrote so much fanfiction about men. I thought about them, their struggles, their hopes and fears and dreams, their sex lives, their relationships with masculinity and femininity and the confines of gender roles, I put so much of my personhood into them, all the while in real life feeling like a brain floating in a jar. In my mind and my fanfiction, these men were complex, interesting, imperfect individuals, and the ones whose POVs I wrote most frequently struggled with their sexualities, their exclusive same-sex attraction finally coming to the forefront after years of pretending to be/genuinely believing they were straight.

I wrote so much m/m sex. I loved the tension between the pairings when one half didn't even realize he was gay yet. I was obsessed with the idea of these men reaching their ultimate fulfillment: I'm gay, I'm in love with another man, after all these years I finally know and accept who I am, and I'm happy.

I never, ever, ever extended this amount of grace to myself. I never treated myself or thought of myself as humanely as I did these fictional men. The concept of fulfillment and happiness for me? Impossible. For this fictional dude who wants to get pounded into the mattress by his husband every night? Easy. Despite leaving behind fandom a few years ago, I still struggle with this. I still struggle with extending humanity to other women in the way I do with men, and I'm haunted by it.

Very slowly, things started to change for me when I got introduced to radical/gender critical feminism. This was all very lateral so I can't attribute any one thing to my shift in thinking, but one instance I'll never forget was having what I can only describe as a mental breakdown in the bath, tears streaming down my face as I tweeted to my fandom buddies on my locked account (fuck's sake) about how, after all these years, I felt suddenly and inextricably crushed by the reality of my biology. This wasn't a "questioning my gender" breakdown. I was speaking as a woman who finally accepted she wasn't a brain in a jar and the pain that comes from that realization. For so many years I thought of myself as a genderless, sexless being who championed boilerplate feminism. Actually understanding that I was a woman who was affected by sexism and misogyny just like every other woman felt like getting kicked in the head by a horse.

My social media friend group cared a bit, I think. I got the ever important, dopamine-inducing likes. But to be honest, the vibe at that time (and I'm sure still is in a lot of fandom spaces) is that woman and feelings related to being a woman (in a biological sense) are a terf dogwhistle. So even though I'm glad I had the breakthrough I did and it helped a lot to ground me in my body and reality, I still felt incredibly alone. I spent a lot of time thinking about John Goodman's character in 10 Cloverfield Lane and his inability to say the word 'woman'.

Eventually, while in the twilight years of my participation in fandom, I started gender swapping my m/m pairing de jour. Or cisswap, rule 63, "always a different gender", it goes by a bunch of names that always change because the previous one is deemed problematic. The characters weren't trans-- they were biological women. And, wouldn't you know it, around this time I got a lot more interested in sex in the real world, with my real world girlfriend. I was interested in trying new things, fantasizing (sometimes even fantasies I starred in, can you believe it? Starring in your own fantasies as opposed to fictional womanized gay men written by and for women??), talking more openly about what I liked and wanted, so on and so forth. The relationship itself sucked (and has since ended), but even then, there was something very personal and revelatory for me about how much I enjoyed sex as a woman with another woman in the real world with our real bodies.

My relationship to my sex, sexual orientation, and other women is still sometimes contentious. The work I've put into myself has been very lonely. I couldn't talk to my so-called social media friends about it, or my girlfriend. I've always been very introverted as well, and talking about emotions and being in touch with my own emotions is something I am still terrible at. A lot of the time, I still feel disconnected from the world around me. I often (and rightly) accuse myself of engaging in navel-gazing behaviors on a similar level to those in the world of gender ideology. There absolutely is a point at which self-reflection becomes circular and distressing as opposed to liberating and clarifying.

With all that said, I still wanted to share my baby steps with the women here. I'm a writer, and since leaving the world of fandom and fanfiction behind, I find myself way more interested in writing about women than I ever was previously. I spent so long projecting my own inner world onto male characters (who may as well have been women wearing strap-ons, honestly), and it's taken a lot of pain and confusion and anxiety to get me to where I am now, but I wouldn't be here if I didn't used to be there, if that makes sense. I have a long way to go still, and a lot to figure out, and I am glad to have a place where I can talk about these things freely and in a way I felt I never could before.

If you have a similar story and are comfortable sharing, please do! I know lots of the women here have fandom backgrounds, but I haven't seen any discussion about the lesbians who spent a lot of time in m/m fandoms specifically. I'm sure you're out there. God, we might even have crossed paths on tumblr back in the day.