Hey trans people in my tablet, what's that experience like? Gender's feeling kind of weird for me lately and I want another's perspective. I feel fine being a girl but I wanna be a girl the way trans women or shapeshifters are girls. Any thoughts, advice?
So this is an essay on my experience with celebrities becoming my comfort characters. I didn’t think it would be so long but I didn’t know how else to get out exactly what I’m feeling watching the reactions in the Chris Evans fandom and I know writing it down will help. Some of it will come off as crazy and I’m aware people will laugh at me. But it’s my reality so here we are. I just thought that maybe it will be helpful to someone. So why not just put it all out there?
When I was growing up I had no friends. When I say no friends I really need you to understand I am not exaggerating. My parents were strict to a degree that is still hard for me to discuss. I went to school, was in all of the advanced classes per my parents, came straight home, did homework, cleaned the house, ate dinner, practiced piano, more studying, then to my room where I could read. I was not allowed to go out and play, I never went out with anyone after school because I was afraid to speak to anyone as I lacked any confidence or social skills. Dating wasn’t even a word that was said in our house. Lonely, stressed, anxious, and exhausted were the only emotions I cycled through. I wasn’t allowed to watch television, but my parents would watch it while I sat at the kitchen table studying. If I angled my chair just right I could see the tv without them knowing I could see it. That’s how I became aware of a show called The X-Files and more importantly David Duchovny.
He was my first celebrity crush and I became obsessed. I couldn’t look away from the screen when he was on. I would hear his voice in my head when I was speaking to myself. On weekends my mother would drop me off at a bookstore while she went shopping the rest of the mall. In these brief moments without her supervision I would run straight to the magazine section and grab everything I saw that had him or his show on the cover. I’d read every interview, every puff piece, every insignificant sighting, every tiny tidbit I could find. I perused unauthorized biographies and photo books. I even got bold once and ripped a picture of him out of one of the magazines before putting it back on the shelf (I of course wasn’t allowed to buy magazines). I remember semi-folding and semi-rolling the picture up as to not damage it and being terrified as I waited for my mother to pick me up. I clutched it in my pocket the whole way home, ran to my room, unfolded the beautiful picture and hid it under shoe boxes in my closet. When I was at school sitting alone or at the piano I’d imagine him sitting with me and talking. I began to fantasize that I wasn’t just some middle schooler who hadn’t even hit puberty, but an older and more sophisticated version of myself who was in love with him and loved in return. It wasn’t just an average preteen fascination; my home life and feelings of isolation lead to my imagination allowing real feelings to develop (as best they can when you’re a kid and don’t even know the person). Today I know that this is because he was my “comfort character” giving me everything I didn’t have, but at the time I was convinced that not only was I in love with him but if he could just meet me he’d love with me too.
Then he got married.
I remember seeing it on the cover of a magazine while at the grocery store. I couldn’t breathe. I just stared at the cover in disbelief. And you know what I did? I started crying. Right there, in the checkout line, while my parents were unloading the shopping cart. And when I say cried what I mean is I started screaming through tears. It felt like the bones in my chest were breaking and digging into my heart. I just crumpled into a ball, yelling and crying, hardly able to breathe. My mother was just standing there unable to comprehend what was happening. My father was hovering over me yelling at the employees to call an ambulance. I couldn’t speak. I felt like I would never be able to get up again. The paramedics did come and said I had a panic attack. My parents? Unconcerned but embarrassed. There were no questions about what brought this on or how I was feeling, just anger and nasty words about how I made them look. When I got home I pulled that picture out, laid on the floor of my closet, and sobbed over it. My fantasy was shattered. All I had was my reality which was suffocating. I eventually got over it but it did take a very long time and was almost more painful than any real breakup I would later experience as an adult.
I grew up, moved out, and tried to do all the things adults do. Over this time I had terrible jobs, sometimes working two or three at a time to cover bills and rent, and of course dated people who were not nice to me. All of them were degrading, disrespectful, and uncaring of my general well being while some of them were flat out physically abusive. But hey, at least they were there right? At the end of the night I wasn’t alone. But I still felt like it. Enter my second comfort character: Ryan Reynolds. This time I felt like I was more mature about it. I was an adult now, not a love struck 12 year old. I wouldn’t become obsessed or think about him constantly. It would just be the occasional fantasy, a once in a while indulgence. Boy how wrong I was! I wasn’t any more emotionally developed than I was during my last celebrity love affair but I was mentally developed enough to remind myself every so often that I was being stupid. That constantly checking the internet for news articles with no new information or staring at pictures of him all day was ridiculous. I’d laugh at myself but then still do it. It was like I had no control over myself. I worked in a retail store for a while and we had computers scattered around the sales floor. When it wasn’t busy I’d quickly buzz by one and Google his name until a customer came by. Multiple. Times. A day. My eight hour shifts were filled with these quick stops. Bathroom breaks were excuses to look at pictures on my phone. And before I knew it I was back in the headspace of living in a made up world. I would imagine we were dating or married. When I was home I’d speak out loud to him and pretend he was standing there talking back, laughing with me and telling me how happy he was. The height of my new obsession was fueled yet again by what was missing from my real life. What I had was a boyfriend who lived with me because he didn’t want to pay rent, who was happy to eat my food and lay around while I worked three part time jobs. Who would sleep with me at night to get himself off but didn’t care about me, and showed it by openly seeing other girls. I had an unexpected pregnancy and an even more unexpected miscarriage. The few friends I had began to ignore me because they were tired of watching me constantly putting myself in situations where I was hurt. I was alone again, stressed and constantly worried about absolutely everything and nothing at the same time. So I retreated back into that safety of my imagination and allowed those real feelings to start blooming again for someone I didn’t know, who didn’t know me and never would. And I told myself it was ok. I was aware enough to recognize I was living lies but not aware enough admit the biggest ones were the ones I told myself all day long.
Then he got married.
I remember very clearly that I was at work and I did my swing by Google search and BAM! It was all over the place. I couldn’t unsee the headlines. My heart broke. I locked myself in a bathroom stall and sobbed. I sat there with my knees brought up to my chest and cried and cried and cried some more. I kept saying how stupid I was, how stupid my reaction was, telling myself how ridiculous I was being. But it didn’t change what I was feeling. And what I was feeling was hurt, pain, betrayal, denial. I felt as if I had actually been cheated on, the same way my boyfriend at the time made me feel but amped up to a crazy degree. My boss (who was a man) was so worried about me that he came into the women’s restroom to check on me. I just told him I didn’t feel well and that I had personal issues going on. Bless him for giving me a hug and telling me to take the rest of the day off. Spoiler alert: I didn’t just go home early that day, but I called out the next TWO days. I was so depressed and so lost that I couldn’t get myself out of bed. I only ended up going back because I was out of all my time off hours and couldn’t afford not being paid. But I was broken. Fifteen years after my first heartbreak here I was again feeling just as awful. I had left my preteen years, my teenage years, my young adult years, and was moving ever closer to my thirties and felt like I hadn’t grown at all. I was mad at myself for feeling so terrible. I was disappointed in myself for over indulging in fantasies. I was embarrassed that a celebrity crush had consumed my life to the point where I was too depressed to leave my bed.
And then I started asking myself why. Why did I feel so terrible? Why wouldn’t the feelings go away? Why had I lived my life with an imaginary partner? And then I asked myself what. What had lead to me diving so deep into these unrealistic feelings? What was missing that made me feel like I was in love with someone I had never met? What was chaining me to the loss I felt? And then there was the how. How do I distance myself from the emotional attachment I had formed? How do I keep myself from blurring those lines again? How do I build the rest of my life in a way that I wouldn’t need the comfort of a make believe world?
Answering these questions wasn’t easy. It’s jarring to put a magnifying glass up to your life and examine all the cracks and empty spaces; maybe even harder to look at the solid parts that formed those cracks. And once I had the answers it was even more difficult to figure out the plan from there. Making sure I recognized what was wrong, what was missing, what I was responsible for letting into my life and what had been done to me that I couldn’t control all fit into the plan but I didn’t know where. This was not easy. And it was not quick. Moving to a place where I felt comfortable enough with myself to not fall into false narratives took years. A lot of self reflection, a lot of journaling my feelings, hours of counseling (I am a firm believer that EVERYONE can use a few sessions with a therapist or counselor regardless of how together they believe their life is). And once I did those things, once I put in the hard work, life got easier to navigate. I became better at making good decisions for myself and for the life I wanted.
I made much better decisions moving on from my 20’s. I kept good people in my life who had my best interests at heart. I listened to them when they were concerned about me. I talked and trusted them when I was feeling things that dragged me down. Working on my self confidence and working on not selling myself short were priorities. I found areas of interest to build hobbies from, took time to think/pray/meditate every day, journaled my feelings so I could read them back and examine them, started spending more time outdoors just walking through my neighborhood or a park. And I slowly began to realize that I was becoming more ok with being alone. Not in the sense of having no friends or family, but in the sense that I was comfortable being with myself. I was finally not just liking myself but enjoying who I was. And when I was really comfortable that’s when I met my husband. And he’s phenomenal. I have zero doubt in my mind or heart that he loves me, respects me, cares for me. He tells me how beautiful I am, how much he loves the way I look at him, how lucky he is we met. He has literally picked me up off the floor when I was having anxiety attacks (child hood trauma/PTSD is no joke). My life isn’t perfect. Nothing is. There are still areas of hurt and pain, I still get depressed sometimes seemingly for no reason, and sometimes I’m not on board with myself the way I should be. But I’m happy and I’m content now in ways I didn’t think I ever would be. I wish I could tell 12 year old me not to worry about the future so much because even though it will be a long journey where you end up is going to be beautiful. And I’d also tell her that no one goes to jail for ripping pages out of magazines so don’t lose sleep over it.
So how does this affect me now? Why I am here in this tag talking about things? I’ll be honest, Evans himself isn’t even my comfort character. I have never been invested in his personal life like I had been with those that came before. I put my imagination and fantasy into Ari Levinson with a little Andy Barber and a pinch of Steve Rogers thrown in. I don’t read real people fiction. I haven’t seen a lot of his interviews. Any pictures I saved or thirsted over were (mostly) his characters. I thought he was extremely good looking but I wasn’t really interested in him if you understand. It was fun to read smutty stuff about his characters (that’s the only reason I even made an account here) and thirst over gif sets and such. But I didn’t know much about him as a person and I enjoyed keeping it that way. It kept things fun and kept me from overly saturating my life with imaginative scenarios. I know part of that was done intentionally but a big part of that simply had to do with me being in a much better place in my life.
So again, why am I here? It’s not to brag. It’s not to say I’m more mature than anyone else. It’s to say that I 100% understand when I see some people online getting hurt over how their comfort character acts, behaves, makes decisions, is spoken about, is dragged. I know what it feels like to have this overtake you, how it feels to let their actions affect your mental health. I get feeling heartbroken and anxious and mad. You aren’t alone. There are plenty of people who feel this way about their favorites. I could lecture about parasocial relationships and how unhealthy they are and about celebrity worship, but this isn’t anything new. The internet has certainly aided and abetted these things but it isn’t the root cause. And honestly people who are engaged to a dangerous level with a firm belief that they know these people and can’t be told otherwise aren’t going to be reaching out for help.
I understand that a celebrity’s personal life is just that – personal – but I am also a walking example of how we can insert these people into our lives to the point of real feelings becoming involved even when you know better. It’s easy for people who don’t let their imagination overtake their situation to say, “Just walk away. Turn off the phone/computer. Don’t worry about what they do personally. It’s dumb to make yourself sick over these things. Get a grip and touch grass.” But it’s just as easy for people who need an escape to build one based off of ideas they have of someone. And I want you to know that there is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed. We are all going through our own things and we all approach how we deal with them differently. Sometimes you don’t handle things in a rational manner. Sometimes the way you choose to react may not be healthy. As long as you can step back at the end of the day and recognize those things then you’re going to be just fine. Admitting to yourself that it’s not doing your health or mindset any favors clears up a lot of room for other wonderful things. I promise. Reach out to your friends. If they don’t understand then reach out online. Message a blog or account that you have seen being thoughtful with their answers and responses. Be anon if you must. Look for people who aren’t going to fan the flames of your anxiety but assure you that you will be ok and that there are other things out there that deserve your attention and time.
I’m thankful to the mods who are so good to their anons who come to them with feelings of anxiousness or saying they are sick over their comfort celebrity. Sometimes just having one person tell you that it’s alright can make a huge difference. There are some blog owners who are less kind. I’ve seen some people say some very cruel things to each other, especially over the last few weeks even though I know it’s always there. Please remember that things that are unimportant to you may hold great weight for other people and while you may not understand their response you do understand basic feelings that we all experience. Telling someone they are insane or crazy, making fun of them, laughing at them... is not helpful. It's not that easy for some of us and you know what? That's ok. We'll get through it. Some people are extreme and can't be helped but most have a comfort character for a reason. Be gentle. Don't interact if you can't be kind.
TL;DR – I ripped a page out of a magazine when I was a kid and spent almost a year thinking the law was coming for me. Also love yourself. Also be nice to each other. And most importantly you’ll be just fine. This too shall pass and all that.
In the words of George Feeny, “I love you all. Class dismissed.”
Just remembered that Pinkypills made some art of Michael Afton so I went and looked at it again to see if it would make good reference and I have decided it does not. Meh. Don't really care for it. I mean it exists but I'm kinda glad it's not like official or anything. It says pinkypills drew it and I looked that up and the name of Michael and this showed up but it doesn't look anything like the rest of her art idk. Man I asked for this I've been wanting something like this and it technically exists and is accurate (save for post scoop Michael's eyes which are red and weird and lack the white glowing pupils which indicate a soul possessing something) but like ???
Oh well I'll just make my own friggin reference sheets
i think this morning at the ass crack of dawn when husband left for work? but i was half asleep, so if you want a conscious one, the evening before that, still husband. my kiddo's not home rn otherwise the answer would almost always be her, five seconds ago. she's a snuggler <3
92: Kissed a girl?
yes, a lot of them, mostly my friends, but it's been way too fuckin' long since i've kissed a girl 🥺
93: Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain?
yes! i love the rain. i've definitely kissed husband in the rain many times 😍
123: Dyed my hair?
okay i'm weird about my hair. i like it long and i'm very protective of it haha. i've dyed it three times, all three times to make it redder, and i've never liked it. my natural hair color is strawberry blonde, and it gets redder in the winter and bleaches a little blonder in the summer if i spend a lot of time in the sun. i like my hair. i love funky colors on other people but i can't do it. 😬
