On Being a Fangirl: What Loving Things Deeply Has Taught Me Over The Years

A piece on love and fangirling as hard as you can. 🫶

How it's the year 2024 and the term fangirl is still being used in a derogatory way is beyond me. That we as a society keep diminishing people —especially girls— for loving stuff is something I have not yet failed to find horrifying. It does say a lot about the state of the world and society, if you ask me, that we’re constantly taught to play things cool and pretend to not care about anything or anyone. That you should refrain yourself from screaming your love to the wind, instead of being encouraged to do so. And I know that fandoms can sometimes be toxic and disturbing and border on the obsessive in a not so funny way, but for the most part they’re just made up by people bonding over their shared love for something or someone. Because humans crave connection and a sense of belonging that our physical communities failed to give us a long time ago, so the internet became this kind of holy ground or shared space where we developed our own communities. And even if it’s also the home for a lot of disturbing and dark spaces, it can be a safe haven for a lot of people that thought their tastes were weird and felt not quite understood until they found hundreds or thousands of people or even just another person that loved the same exact thing on the same exact level. And I think that’s something that should be regarded as beautiful, not frowned upon.

I’ve always been a fangirl to my core, maybe because when I like something I really like it. Maybe because I grew up on the internet. I don’t know how to do something by halves, so either I don’t care about stuff or I care way too much. And this is something about myself that I’m still learning how to love, too. That I still enjoy things with an almost childlike fascination that I should have outgrown long ago. That I’m consumed by the books I read and the music I listen to and I love to rewatch my favorite movies or shows over and over again. It is how my brain is wired and for the longest time I felt ashamed of it and tried to hide it, putting an I-don’t-care sign over my soft heart. But not anymore.

Because being a fangirl has taught me that loving things deeply can bring you to places you never thought you would go and to people you would have never known otherwise. Some of the dearest and most meaningful friendships I have to this day have come to me through different fandoms or shared passions. And those relationships are even more beautiful and rare because they’re not not contingent on convenience or location, but rooted in an even greater common ground that comes from loving the same things to the same degree. They’re rooted in the comfort place that fiction and fandoms can become, that safe haven you go to when you don’t know where else to go. They’re rooted in sharing interests and passions, and can last for years and span kilometers. I’ve traveled to other countries to meet these friends, even lived with them, and we’ve been together through thick and thin. It doesn’t matter if what brought us together was our love for Harry Potter when we were younger or our still current obsession with Taylor Swift or books in general. What matters is that we loved something and through that something we ended up loving each other too. And a friendship that comes from love is meant to be filled with it.

Being a fangirl is the very reason I started to write and the reason I have a job that I love today. I started writing because I loved to read fanfiction and decided to start writing it myself. I work with books and do a lot of bookish stuff because I shared my love for books on the internet. Talking publicly and loudly about the stuff I love has brought me many cool opportunities that I had never even dreamed of. I would have never found my passion, which is writing, if I never had loved a fantasy world so much I needed to try and write my own bits of it and share it on the internet with other people that loved it as much as I did. Any of this would have been possible without the internet, neither my friends and connections from my love for writing or my career. But it would have never been possible had I listened to society telling me to love things quietly and maybe not care that much about them.

So yeah, I love being a fangirl. And if you have to take something from all of this, let it be this: love things as fucking much as you possible can and don’t ever be ashamed of that. Because if the world needs something it is more love and never the opposite.