I hate that feeling when you've just closed the book on something that used to interest you and you're left standing there without that burning interest and with no fandom to belong to. It's like finishing a book, but a little bigger.
Or at least for me personally, because I've always been part of fan culture, ever since I was a teenager and Buffy was the shit. It's a huge and lovely thing to find a little group and share interests with. It's a social interaction that's super easy to get into, because it comes with this long list of pre-printed questions to discuss. It makes interacting so straightforward, because there's always that ice-breaker present to smooth things over. Usually the good relationships go far beyond the shared interest, but fandom is a social lubricant that doesn't kill braincells. And the thing is, it's more than that, fandom is a teddy bear of acceptance, most of the time. It's a little cluster to belong to, to make proud, to help produce and to help re-produce.Ā
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of fan culture and it's also a huge part of who I am. But interests come and go, it's the nature of these things. For various reasons your attention and attraction is not a static island but more a life-raft floating along the river, it changes position and at times even disappears beneath the waves. And it's when it disappears that things get...confusing. Or well you suddenly find yourself in the river without anything to hold on to, everything is rushing by you so fast you can't really make out what's happening. It's just a mindless swirl and you feel pretty isolated. A feeling that's not nearly as much fun or as comforting as being part of a fandom and getting to bob along on that raft.
So when you've dropped an interest you become this lost and confused nomad. Sometimes you revisit old fandoms, which can be fun, but also confusing because it's like only visiting your parents house every 6th months and finding out that they've switched around where they keep the plates and the towels are now in a new cupboard, and I mean everything still exists inside that house, but it's been rearranged and redecorated just enough to make you really feel that this is no longer yours. Still you linger a little in old obsession, kick the ball around with whoever is there playing at the moment, but you know you can't stay more than a few nights, it's just not, no it wouldn't be right.
Which means you soon find yourself drifting alone again. Sooner or later you'll bump your head into a new interest and it'll turn into an obsession and with it you'll be submerged in a new fandom to call HQ. But until that happens you become an individual again and that's...it's scary. Collective living is so much more rewarding. This lone wolf thing is kinda bullshit.
Then again you can't force it, then you'll only break it. Because when that lone wolf tries to go live with the beavers, it's...no it doesn't work. You've got to wait for a new tribe to come along and offer you a place.
Still, until that happens you're weirdly untethered and very individual and it's a weird thing. I mean what topics do you bullshit? Which ideas do you let inspire you? Which fanfic do you read? What do you do with your own creative output when there's no outlet for it? Also how do you interact with people without that lubricant?