This is an EXTREMELY journal factory ass overshare of a post but whatever it's my birthday and I am feeling very emotional because I genuinely wasn't sure I was gonna make it to this one and it's like also about Everlark and fanfiction and how they've kind of, not to be dramatic or anything, saved my life, a thing I really can’t tell anyone I know IRL.
Everyone these days seems to be having a bad time in their own way, so I know I'm not special in this respect, but I've been struggling for at this point, a few years. I moved to a new city where I didn't know anyone for work and abruptly became fairly severely disabled before I could change that. I no longer have a driver's license. I've been losing my ability to walk a lot faster than originally anticipated. I work mostly from home in a job that's not really supposed to be that way (although my work has rocked with accommodations, and I am so grateful) and sometimes go weeks without seeing another person (and of course, on one of the few days I actually went to my office this year 4 people got shot so...). Most of the time when I do see someone it's a medical professional who is telling me something bleak. I tried to make up with my estranged parents in case they would do something to take care of me, but this blew up in my face spectacularly.
I have not exactly handled any of this gracefully. I've been on my own and taking care of myself since I was 16 and I don't care about anything the way I care about my independence, so unfortunately I structured my life around the principle that I can do everything myself, only now I cannot and I have kind of trapped myself in a mess. I've been in a constant spiral of mental breakdowns and crashouts and new symptoms and hospitalizations both mental and physical. It's all made me feel really fucking broken.
I don't remember why I decided to listen to the THG audiobooks a couple years ago after having not thought about the series in a while, but I did. And it hit me in a really profound and different way when I got to the end and saw that after everything they'd been through, all the mental and physical trauma, all the disability and dysfunction, the terrible parents, the depression, the over-guardedness, the trouble letting people in, the communication struggles, Everlark built this beautiful life on top of everything that happened to them and even if some things are impossible to completely heal from life can still be good again.
Everlark was always THAT SHIP to me anyway. I've posted before about how them ending up together influenced me in my youth, but now as a grown-up it just took on this new meaning for me as a symbol of hope for how you can be about as broken as it gets and even a flawed person who struggles with that emotional intimacy and you can still find a dandelion in the spring and make a meaningful, good life.
This made me want a lot more than that epilogue was gonna give me, though and so I started reading Everlark fanfic for the first time. I've been into the series since like 2010 but at that time I had stepped away from online fandoms and especially fanfic for professional reasons so this was totally new to me, and GBT fanfics became like more important to my mental stability than going to therapy. There were so so so many different stories and ways of doing it, but every time it told a story of working through all of that to make something good and it just became a way of grounding myself when I was spiraling or feeling like nothing could ever be good again. Because if they could figure it out in every universe, I could make it work in this one. After a while I branched out and read other stuff, but those GBT fics got me through some very tough moments.
After like a year of this, I decided to try to write some of my own Everlark last spring/summer. This is a very big deal for me. I wrote a ton of fic in my youth--growing up, the thing I wanted more than anything was to be a writer--and I mainly stopped reading and writing fanfic because it was considered professionally inappropriate in my circles (back then, obviously these days fanfic and the lit world are probs more tangled up than they should be). Anyway, some stuff happened like 14 years ago, it doesn't really matter what and I can't really talk about it anyway, but it's in the genre of be careful what you wish for, especially if you're young to be getting it. I blew up my entire life and ran thousands of miles away and promised myself I was never going to write anything besides like a work email ever again.
I probably won't ever share any of the stuff I wrote in 2025--I think a lot of it was just like working through my own demons--but as I started writing more and more and trying to psych myself up to the idea of sharing something, I also started feeling like I was rediscovering a core thing about myself that I had tried to throw out to get myself away from stuff I didn't want to deal with when I was younger. There's a huge part of me that loves writing and telling stories and exploring ideas through narratives and living with characters, and healing the relationship I have with that part of myself has been the thing that has kept me going as so many over things have been so hard to deal with. Writing literally makes me get up in the morning because I have something to look forward to later.
And in a season of life when I feel like I am losing so many of the things that make me me at an unfairly young age, rediscovering one that I'd tried to get rid of, one that I could still have with my all my diminished abilities has literally saved my life. Making time to work on fanfiction every day gives me a daily moment when, even if I'm feeling blocked and frustrated, I still feel like some version of myself. So corny and stupid as it is, Everlark are kind of my own dandelion in the spring. And I'm very grateful for that.
