Je suis la fille en feu!

And the universe said "I love you because you are love".

Are you okay babe? You’ve reblogged the I know love is real post 193893 times

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

here is what i am trying to say: there are words i use because i read them in someone else's work first. i construct sentences and imagery and metaphors because i was 11, 12, 13 14 15 16 and lonely and depressed and i found books and fics that made me feel so deeply and long for something i couldn't even put a name to, but knew i wanted to encompass and internalize and reflect back. i would copy lines i loved into notebooks and just study them, read them over and over again trying to figure out what could possibly make this string of words so beautiful to me - and if i understood it, maybe i would be able to write beautiful things, too. is there honestly any greater connection to have with people you don't know - people whose lives you've crossed purely in art? the people who inspired me have no idea they did, because i was a kid who hadn't become anything yet, who hadn't uncovered those secrets of how to build anything out of letters, but they shaped me in extraordinary ways.

i've now had the unmeasurable honor of people telling me these things, that i have inspired them and the way they use words to pick apart emotion and language, and i have seen that impact. i've seen people write with echoes of me because they read something and loved it the way i loved when i was younger - with that awe and wonderment and depth of feeling. i've seen phrases of mine, or dialogue, or metaphors, similes, poetry. i've had people ask for advice, or reference me in school work, or get tattoos. do you get the magnitude of that? it's not about ego. it's not that i'm trying to say, look how good i am. i'm trying to say that we all have the power and capability to affect each other through art in the most profound ways imaginable. i'm trying to say that once i was someone who didn't know how to write, and i looked up to people the same way people now look up to me, and it's completely surreal. we don't know each other. but we cross each other's lives and change each other without forethought or knowledge, and those people will go on to change other people, and i think fandom - for all its bullshit - interconnects us in such subtly tangible ways that it's impossible to even know all the people you've touched. but for me, it's something i deeply, deeply cherish about fandom; maybe we've never spoken, and maybe we never will, but for a moment, we were so close together. i wrote something to feel and you felt it. you felt it too.

and me, at 11, 12, 13 14 15 16, is a little less lonely.

TIL that a recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend.

via reddit.com

Socializing speedrun (Any %)

This is why it was so much easier to make friends when you were in school; you were trapped with those people all day Monday to Friday. It’s OK that it’s harder to make really good friends now that you’re an adult

Yes, this! It’s also why regular get together are so useful. If you want to make friends as an adult? Join a book club, go to a craft meet up, find an excuse to hang out w/ approximately the same people once a week for a couple of hours. As you get to know them, invite them out other places. Yes, it’s a pain to have to do the work to socialize, but if you want the friends, you have to trap yourself with the other people.

Reblogging for all my mutuals who have asked “Why is it so hard to make friends as an adult?”

“if you want the friends, you have to trap yourself with the other people” sounds so sinister. 

It’s also why so many people lose their entire social network when they retire or start working from home. Making friends outside of work is vital to your own survival when your main access to socialization is controlled by your employer.

I got fucking lucky holy shit. It's amazing how I went from friendless to a solid social network by the combination of school and mutual interests. And I will fight to keep it that way