Ours is a love affair that began when I was at the tender age of 13. Like any other relationship, we’ve gone through our ups and downs over the years. Not to carbon date myself, but we’re coming up on our 15th anniversary.

…Holy shit, I am getting old.

Moving on: The year was 2003. The fandom was Final Fantasy 7. As I finished my 5th playthrough in a row, I started to come to terms with my addiction. The returns had been drastically diminishing for those last 2 or 3 playthroughs, and I knew it was only going to get worse. Despair set in. How could I satisfy this craving? Somehow this fictional world had consumed me heart and soul. I was in love with the story and the characters so much that the idea of it being over just because I’d completed the game seemed not only unfair but downright cruel.

So I turned to the Internet.

This was back in the dark ages of dial-up connections and 4chan. Some of you reading this may be lucky enough not to have lived through such times, but now as I reflect back on it, I’d consider it a character-building experience. After all, nothing teaches you patience like waiting 5 minutes for a fanart pic to render pixel-by-pixel on your screen.

To be perfectly honest, I can’t even remember the first fanfiction I read or even where I read it. Back then I was jumping around from Geocities site to Geocities site like some sort of fanfic prospector looking for gold. And then, by Fate or circumstance or maybe just a better-than-average Google search, I discovered Fanfiction.net.

It truly was love at first click.

A whole website dedicated to fanfiction! I could scarcely believe my young teenage eyes. It was like finding the Holy Grail. My life was complete.

Okay, so that’s a bit of an overstatement. But I DID devour the FF7 fic archive in a matter of weeks. (It was small back then, and I was out of school for the summer. Thank God.)

Months went by, and my appetite for fanfiction had expanded to other fandoms. It seemed there was a near-endless supply of fic, and as such, I had begun to grow more selective in my tastes. It wasn’t enough just to read good quality fics. What I was searching for now were certain pairings, certain scenarios. Sometimes I found what I was looking for, sometimes not. But either way, it was only a matter of time until I found myself coming up empty-handed.

As summertime approached once again, an idea began to take shape, so absurd to me at first that I dismissed it out of hand: Write fanfiction myself?! Impossible! I hadn’t written a story since…

And now, dear friends, allow me to take you even further back in time, to another millennium where the idea of spending copious amounts of hours in front of a computer screen was still as yet unimaginable for most human beings. It was a simpler time. A boring time. It was on a day of particular boredom that 10-year-old me picked up a notebook and penned what would become the first of many unfinished stories: The Fountain of Cremoria

Unintentional morbidity aside, Cremoria tells the tale of best friends Meg and Ben, who stumble Narnia-style through an enchanted fountain and into the mystical world of Cremoria. Under the guidance of a talking owl, they begin their quest to find the magic key that will allow them to travel back home. It features such memorable quotes as “Hey look—an owl!” and “Oh no! The fountain is locked.”

After about five chapters, I abandoned it altogether. Even as a dumbass kid, I realized it was terrible and derivative.

Needless to say, my first foray into fanfiction authordom was similarly embarrassing. The title of my flagship fic was Continuation, and as you can no doubt imagine without having read even a single word of it, it continued the story of FF7 after the events of the original game.

Everyone has to start somewhere I guess.

The good news is that it didn’t take me long to start improving, and over the years the feedback I received from readers and other writers helped me hone my craft and produce pieces of writing that I could be genuinely proud of. In fanfiction I found a refuge, a sense of community. It was a place where I felt at home. A place where I felt like I could express my true self.

There’s nothing unique about my story. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you yourself have experienced the wonder and fulfillment that fanfiction can bring to your everyday life.

Even after purging my original author account in a fit of angst, even after months and sometimes years on end of heartless neglect, I keep coming back for more. Maybe I’ll pull away again, maybe someday I’ll venture out into the big, scary universe of o-fic. But no matter what, I know that fanfiction will always be waiting for me whenever I feel the need to lose myself in the worlds I love.

And for that, I remain eternally devoted.