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Challenge #12

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

The first person I lost in fandom - really lost, not moving blogging platforms and falling out of touch, not drifting apart, not a falling-out so extreme there's no talking anymore - wasn't someone I knew well. I knew people who knew her well and we'd spoken in person at BASCon a couple times, and because we had nametags, we could greet each other easily. But between one year and another, something went wrong - complications with surgery, as I recall - and she wasn't there anymore.

I've since lost a lot more people. Some I'd spoken with frequently, some who were friends of friends. Some I knew by wallet name, some where I couldn't tell you any more than what fandoms we shared. Sometimes it was a surprise and sometimes it wasn't unexpected. A few times people told me, a few times I wondered about them and went to check and learned that way, a couple times it so happened I'd see something they'd made or stumble over their account and then learn they'd passed on years ago.

Late last month, someone I knew pretty well - we'd chat a few times a week, pass links onto each other - disappeared off Tumblr. Deactivating their blog, deleting their Archive of Our Own account. They'd been undergoing some fairly drastic health issues and had occasionally stepped away from the internet for weeks at a time, and after a few days of worry, it was seeing the deleted AO3 account that actually made me feel a bit better. Tumblr's a place where deactivation can happen willy-nilly, but AO3 requires deliberate effort. It let me tell myself they made the choice to step away as far as they could, rather than them leaving without providing a forwarding address. Tonight I found someone else I knew pretty well - we shared dinner in London once - who'd stopped posting over two years ago had their Tumblr account deactivated, also. Maybe they stepped far away. So I tell myself.

I knew I'd lose people someday. It's part and parcel of knowing people - knowing that they'll leave. When I got into fandom, I mostly made friends with people older than me; I've lately looked around and realized I'm mostly making friends with people my own age or younger. I don't know how long any of them are going to stay in my life. I know it's not going to last forever, or even as long as I'd wish it would. But I know they're here right now. And I know they've made my fandom life better, no matter how much time we had together.