"Writing Yourself by Accident" by Recourse
This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.
[TW for dysphoria, depression, mentions of suicide and abuse]
The funny thing about the prompt “I Am Femslash,” to me, is how unnervingly accurate it is.
I started writing femslash around the same time I started taking writing seriously in general. I’d always wanted to be a writer, but found myself having trouble in developing the kind of long-form novels that I’d always wanted to do. As I started to actively work on my writing and putting out my first hundred thousand words or so, I somehow stumbled into writing Fallout: New Vegas fanfiction. I had an idea for my Courier, who she was, what her plans post-game were, who she loved, and was mildly pissed that Cass, the obvious choice for her, wasn’t available. So I started a little something.
I’d always played my main characters in western RPGs as women, and gay women at that. When I first picked up KOTOR, that was really when I should’ve known, as I just…selected the female option, because it felt right. And later I downloaded a mod to make the lady love interest bi.
This trend continued in my New Vegas fic, and this is where you start to see where I actually am my work, even when I didn’t know it at the time. I wrote Courier Six as a woman with deep-seated intimacy issues, who hated what the world had done to her body and despite loving other women found it difficult to make real connections with them because she hated being vulnerable. Funny how all that turned out to be me, too, dealing with dysphoria and self-hatred and the influence of toxic masculinity.
But I didn’t know this, at the time. I didn’t think I was writing me. I was writing a fucked-up woman, an interesting character to me. Definitely not relatable, I’m just a normal straight guy, right?
I was sixteen and in deep denial.
As I moved through high school, and then college, I kept writing femslash in the background. I felt ashamed of it. I didn’t do anything to separate it from my main online identity, but I never talked about it on my Tumblr (which gained a fair amount of popularity for my gifmaking stuff and feminist ranting) and I thought it was somehow a black mark against me. Despite the fact that I didn’t write smut at the time, I still thought somehow I was being that cringe-inducing straight person who writes gay stuff about the opposite gender as a fetish. It was just something I did, almost as a compulsion, when I couldn’t manage to pull together the inspiration to do my original work. It came so easy to me.
It never became terribly popular; partly because I was posting on FF.net instead of AO3, and partly because I almost exclusively wrote for dead fandoms. I didn’t mind. They were things I put out for myself, to excise my own persistent ideas of what should have happened in this, that, or the other thing. I didn’t even realize how I was expressing myself; how writing Commander Shepard as a sixteen-year-old girl convinced she’s ugly and worthless, suffering from mental illness and suicidal thoughts, was actually cathartic for me. To me it was just something I was doing, adding depth to characters who didn’t have it in the base game. The fact that I too felt ugly and had suicidal impulses was just a coincidence.
I also came to find that I just couldn’t write straight romance to save my life. I found it weird and alien, like I just didn’t understand how a man and a woman could even be attracted to each other, despite having a goddamn girlfriend (and a great one at that.) I started writing erotica as an experiment, and couldn’t even fathom writing it for straight characters or couples. It just didn’t interest me, and the idea of doing it actively disgusted me. So femslash it remained, constantly questioned, like I was dirty or disgusting or broken for writing it.
I put out my first public, smutty fic the same year that a friend committed suicide. I threw it up on AO3 under an alternate account, a different persona called Recourse, with no ties to anything beyond AO3. It’s pretty twisted, featuring (surprise!) a main character with deep intimacy issues and a strong dislike of being touched. I wrote this as stemming from trauma, but I already knew I was suffering from massive dysphoria in that area (and my girlfriend had figured it out herself by this point) and I was starting to get why I kept writing people like this. Why all my protagonists had mental scarring and intrusive thoughts and suppressed urges. Why they were all women, and why they all loved women, even if they didn’t want to.
I got closer and closer to working myself into my stories. My first halfway emotional work for Life Is Strange, the fandom I’m now known for, dealt with grief for a lost friend in a way I couldn’t in real life. I still pulled back on that work, though, thinking I needed to please an imaginary audience, not go too dark, not go too deep. They’re here for the smut, right?
It was when I finally threw away my inhibitions that I started to actually understand myself. I wrote a story that was explicitly about mental illness, about fears of abandonment, about suicidal urges. It was called Pedestal. Sure, I included a little smut, but once that work was finished, I realized that all the real attention from people was focused on exactly the stuff I feared would put people off. People connected to Chloe’s depression, her fears and anxieties. They thanked me, wanted to talk to me more.
I put she/her on the profile page.
I set up a blog for that persona. Didn’t post anything, just created it. Then I set to work on something else.
My friends, including my girlfriend, had been subject to massive abuse in 2015 (and before.) I was obsessed with the subject. And I was still grieving, still screwed up about how to grieve for someone I still have very complicated feelings about. So I wrote a story called Little Blue Pills, all about a spiral of self-hate and grief resulting in abuse and a suicide attempt. I tried to cap it off with something hopeful, and the strange response to that ending made me break down publicly on the blog. Writing parts of it had already given me anxiety attacks, and now I was struck with a feeling of imposter’s syndrome, like I shouldn’t have written this, like I should just be dead.
Someone followed me on that blog. I started talking to her. I found out we were both closeted trans women, and through the act of sharing my experiences with her, I started to make them make sense.
And I kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing. I found more and more friends, more and more people who connected with my work, because I was finally being honest about where it all came from and it shone through clearly in the authenticity of my work. And the more honest with myself I was, the more I wanted to be honest to the world.
I showed my girlfriend the account, the stories I’d written. I admitted that I’d become certain in my identity as a result of them. (Turned out later she’d found my first story a long time ago, but she kept quiet and waited for me to be ready, bless her.) With her following me, and my new circle of friends, I became more and more confident. I lost a bunch of weight. I chose a name. I started laser treatments. I got a prescription for HRT. I came out in November, went full-time, and I’ve never been happier.
Without femslash, without this outlet, I literally wouldn’t be who I am today. I might still be in the closet had I not met the people I have, processed my emotions through this medium. I might be dead. It is through the sapphic community surrounding Life Is Strange that I’ve come into myself. Thank you to all the authors and artists out there who showed me I’m not alone. I am femslash, I am part of this world, and I couldn’t be happier.
I’m Mogatrat, or Recourse, or Gloria, a 23-year-old trans woman from Colorado. I write largely for Life Is Strange, but have dabbled in various other places.
Where to find my writing: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/works and http://archiveofourown.org/users/Mogatrat/works
Main Public Blog: http://mogatrat.tumblr.com
Unlisted sideblog for LiS and writing: http://recourse-ao3.tumblr.com/
