By: Ella Corbett
As I’m sure many art students can relate, in middle school, you would catch me dead before you found me playing a sport or something disgusting like that. I took part in next to zero extra-curriculars, but while my social life at school was plummeting, my online persona was flourishing.
I was the ultimate fangirl back in the day, I had my grubby little middle school hands in practically every fandom, specifically boyband related ones. My drug of choice was the boyband 5 Seconds of Summer (2014 me would have fist fought me for saying the word “boyband”), their music was whiney and catchy, and they were so HOT! It was the perfect combination to drive middle school girls insane. I ran an Instagram page fully dedicated to this band where I would write little fanfictions about them and thinking back, it genuinely sends shivers down my spine.
I wasn’t particularly good at writing either, and I was also very lazy so they weren’t even real fanfictions. I believe they were referred to as “imagines” and it would be a paragraph about “How Calum would help you on your period”, that I would post on Instagram accompanied by a shitty photo I edited on Picsart. I don’t even know where I came up with this crap, especially since I also had absolutely no sexual experience and didn’t even gain any till my sophomore year of college.
One “imagine” that sticks out to me particularly was one I wrote that involved Luke Hemmings being my “high school bully” but he was really secretly in love with me. To give you a better picture, in middle school I was an overweight 13-year-old with really thick black liquid eyeliner and no other makeup. My hair was parted in a DEEP side part that my mother would constantly tease me about and I only wore black band t-shirts from Hot Topic. Like, yeah bitch you were definitely getting bullied, but nobody was in love with you.
Reflecting on it now as a semi-stable twenty-year-old on a hefty dose of Prozac, I think I just wrote those cringey fanfictions as a means to make myself feel better about my actual life, which is honestly kind of depressing. But I also think consuming so much weird niche media at such a young age was actually detrimental to my still developing brain. Now as an adult, I will find myself actually picking fights with my boyfriend just to try and recreate a fanfiction moment I read about as a teenager. I kind of subconsciously do it too, and then I’ll realize and think “hey, wait, stop you’re being a total freak” and then I just have to retreat and act like nothing happened.
I think that on one hand it was nice I had something I cared about in middle school since I didn’t really do anything else, but on the other hand I really wish I would’ve gone outside and touched some grass or something. But regardless, I will now always be faced with the consequences of my brain melting from reading too many 5 Seconds of Summer fanfictions at the age of 13.
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