shapechangers in winter // fandom-versary

[felinejumper]

3. This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.

Taking hands like children
lost in a six-dimensional
forest, we step across.
The walls of the house fold themselves down,
and the house turns
itself inside out, as a tulip does
in its last full-blown moment, and our candle
flares up and goes out, and the only common
sense that remains to us is touch,

as it will be, later, some other
century, when we will seem to each other
even less what we were.
But that trick is just to hold on
through all appearances; and so we do,
and yes, I know it’s you;
and that is what we will come to, sooner
or later, when it’s even darker
than It is now, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest
and candles are no longer any use to us
and the visibility is zero: Yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you.

-Margaret Atwood, "Shapechangers in Winter" from Morning in the Burned House

First off, merry christmas & happy holidays, wherever you are, from Eastern Standard Time! An excerpt of this poem crossed my path today, and while I am not particularly invested in astrology or god or christ, I did think it was lovely. "and the house turns/itself inside out, as a tulip does/in its last full-blown moment, and our candle/flares up and goes out, and the only common/sense that remains to us is touch," I find a particularly lovely section, and it feels like Christmas to me: lovely, and heavy, and a still moment on the cusp. This year feels particularly weighty. (also, wow, I get so painfully sincere around the holidays)



It was the solstice on the 21st, and a romantic friend did a lovely and very hard tarot reading on that same day, about how to possibly integrate the past year. In addition to my best-friend breakup, this year I: unexpectedly lost my job, got my first tattoo, came out to my entire close family about sexuality, gender, and non-monogamy, watched Black Sails twice, did my first creative writing in >4 years, went to 5 nat'l parks, made life plans in a scary long-term way, surmounted a major depressive episode (different than the break-up one), made several new close friends in a variety of disciplines, read Virginia Woolf for the first time, published my first big paper, got a glimpse of a hitherto-unimagined potential intellectual path forward, and had a parent face an unexpected and serious health scare. It's been so fucking much!

Christmas is also my one-year-in-fandom-versary! In a year of really big changes, fandom kickstarted a bunch of the good ones. I am emotional as heck about it. Christmas 2017 is when I figured out that I was reading about something more than "just" queer people, kind of like me, fucking. Which is to say: this exact time last year I was sitting in this exact chair by a very-similar fire reading the Paradox series and it felt like things were being pulled out of me that I didn't even know could exist. It was unreal. Like my entire selfhood unrolled onto my screen. I...really don't know how to describe that feeling. I refused to share it with my partner of 5 years for multiple months (which makes a lot of sense with woolf's idea of privacy now); at the time, that just didn't happen. Fandom has taught me: to read every text with a close & critical kindness; about characterization and motivation; new sex moves; what a good catalog is capable of; that I am allowed to participate; the fucking delight of being able to speak back to authors and say "Hey, this changed my life, thank you so much for this gift." I dunno, guys, I know there's a lot of Fandom Wank etc., but I am 100% still in the honeymoon phase and I don't really anticipate it going anywhere and that is...just, I did not know what I was getting myself into. But I sure am glad to have it.

Really, I am just overwhelmed by change, both in my own personal life and (it would be remiss to ignore) the fucking disaster on the national/global scale. A year ago me could not have begun to imagine what was coming down the pipeline. Today me feels better equipped to handle shit than any other me. (@ the good place)

Finally: I used tumblr as both personal & media record, but basically just for me. That seems to be less the case here, which is so cool and so intimidating, and also, weird: because I find quasi-public emotions really productive for me! But since it is interactive...I would love love love to hear about y'alls entrance into fandom. What made it tick for you? Was it all at once? Was it a distraction from something else and suddenly you've been here for twenty years, or was it a thing you'd been looking for and recognized immediately?

<3 merry christmas, happy yuletide(!!!!), please enjoy whatever celebrations (or not) you are participating in today