Thoughts on Depression, Alienation, Abuse, and the Long Arc of Time · 8:03am Jul 11th, 2021
(Alternate Title: In Which Robin Rambles and Gets Too Personal In an Attempt to Be Self-Reflective)
Ten years, eh? I must feel emotions.
The join date on this account may say December 2020, but I have been around on FimFiction since effectively the beginning, mere months after the site first went live, because that's how long I've been drawn to the show that started it all. I remember (and deeply miss) when the site had an extremely cozy banner that featured fanart. When there was a Twilicorn tag because dang, people did not like when the show slapped wings on the purple bookhorse for some reason, even though season 4 showed nothing has actually changed.
Back in those halcyon days I had a big thing for Human-in-Equestria stories, and would be floored by the amount of work that went into something like Visionary, which I have meant to re-read for years, and belatedly inspired me to try and take writing more seriously. Back then I used to check Equestria Daily by the hour, and waited with bated breath for each new episode of the Mentally Advanced Series.
A lot has changed since those days. I'm going to turn 27 this year, something that seemed incalculably far off until embarrassingly recently. Some lyrics are evergreen, it seems. I realized I'm trans almost five years ago, an enormous breakthrough in self-discovery that continues to evolve constantly. It's they/she now, btw, and my partner is strong-arming me into doing transition things for myself.
Speaking of, holy shit! I have a girlfriend! She's trans too, and we've been together for almost a decade at that. We even live together... Wild. If you told me any of what my current reality was back at age 16 I absolutely would not have believed you at first. Especially not the part where I moved out of the house I was terrified I would spend my entire life trapped in, and that my grandparents don't even live there anymore.
I guess there is one thing you could have told my past self though, and she'd just nod and say, "that makes sense". And it's that I'm depressed as all get-out because a lot of the changes outside of my personal life have been demonstrably for the worse. I don't even want to attempt to summarize everything that's kept my mood down over the course of this sites lifespan, because I don't think I can, I don't think I need to, and it's not like depression needs much of an excuse anyway. We could be living in a post-capitalist post-state utopia right now and it would still find reasons that I'm literally the worst and there's no hope and we're all going to die very soon.
Like, for instance, the fact that my hyperfixation on writing fanfiction sputtered out. As I had come to expect, and around the time I was prepared for, but I didn't expect the comedown to be quite so long. ADHD, autism, and imposter syndrome all makes for one hell of a concoction. Everyday that I hadn't written something only made it worse, and I have been utterly powerless in my mind prison to counteract it because you know what's cool about the cycle of hyperfixation? You literally can't devote any energy to even the things you love if your brain decides it's not interesting enough.
I don't even have the music I was working on to show for it. In part due to hardware issues, and I can only do so much about budgets and shipping times. Not that it'll stop me from blaming myself! Hahaha, ha,,,,, , ,,
But. You know. If you've been on this site in the last few years, you know that depression alone isn't the sole reason I've been away for the entirety of fucking Pride Month, the point when I was most likely to get visibility in the entire year, and effectively kneecapping my own success. And I've done my best to stay optimistic because wow, for a fascist hellpit there sure are a lot of queer people actively writing on here. But I guess it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I feel utterly alienated from the rest of the community, whether they want me dead for existing or not.
One of the things that has changed since 2011 is the level of belonging I feel to any part of what makes My Little Pony fans at large a "community", as it were. It was strange, to be honest. For several reasons much more deeply rooted and beyond the influence of any random loser on Twitter, my default state is Afraid of Others. If your experience in voicing your thoughts, your concerns, your passions, is receiving mockery, or even abuse, in response, it becomes pretty difficult to justify saying anything at all. But for a brief time in 2011 and 2012, it seemed like that fear was unfounded on the internet. At the time it was assumed that we were all dudes rediscovering how to feel things because some magical talking cartoon horses were learning basic lessons about life and selling children's toys, and that we could safely express parts of ourselves that would be accepted nowhere else by anyone. It was weird and new and exciting!
And some of the things being expressed creeped me out. In part, this was just me following the wrong trail of breadcrumbs into places I normally wouldn't have gone, but a lot has already been said about the community's penchant for inaction under the guise of "love and tolerance", and I probably would have been exposed to that one person ejaculating onto blind bag figures and posting it on Tumblr, or the infamous Lyra plushie, or the crypto-fascist language that some guys were "ironically using" to talk about how Derpy Hooves should stay that way and fuck the soccer moms who are coming in and ruining our little girls' show for children.
It got weird. And it got upsetting. And I voiced my opinions on such (in a less than measured fashion) and found myself othered out of the one space I had at the time for daring to say something might be messed up about all this. In the gap between then and the point I realized just how queer I might really be, I returned to the existential misery of isolation from others and the self.
You may start to see why I think it's so insane that I have a long term romantic partner.
So yeah. That brony thing only got louder and worse after I was pushed out. To the point where we have moderators complaining about having to moderate when a sexual abuser is outed and openly, shamelessly confesses, and receives loud support for their actions. To the point where we have people trying to infiltrate pride events with their unsavory predilections. To the point where (and this is really late for me to comment on this but) we have a celebrated author of one of the most beloved longform works on this site going out trying to slaughter minorities with an Extremely Shitty Sword. Because nobody stopped them when harm could have been avoided. Because nobody with a position of authority bothered to take a moral stand on the behalf of people who need them to.
In the face of all of that, and with no social mooring in the community, it's hard to stay optimistic, and it's hard to find reason to tether my ideas to a show that's long over, and about to be effectively replaced. My girlfriend and I are going to be making games together, and I have a lot of music to get back to working on. As much as I want to push back against this long-rising tide of hatred and abuse, I'm just one person, and my efforts are well overdue, and embarrassingly anemic. They'd probably be better served being put to use elsewhere.
Maybe that'll change. Maybe G5 will be the jolt of life this site needs to turn around, maybe it'll be what finally condemns it and the rest of the brony legacy to the Wayback Machine. I really would love to see a blooming of new, young writers and new works that actively promote a better and kinder worldview thanks to the refreshing of the brand. It'd be cool to see a lot of old writers find the spark again and return to ponies, even if just for a moment. It would be great to be a part of that. It's not like I haven't lamented my lack of drive to write horsewords before, after all, and I've learned better than to speak decisively about my future.
It's still hard to be optimistic. Ten years of Everything will do that to someone.
Whatever the future holds, I hope to have you there with us.