I have come to the realization that I have extreme anxiety when it comes to my writing.

Writing is the air I breath and the food I eat. I fell in love with my fiancee because he is also a writer. Both my parents are award-winning journalists. I write any and everywhere and find inspiration in anything. Fanfiction has been apart of my life for 17 years. I wrote my first fanfiction when I was 7 in the fourth grade on a trip to a distant family member's funeral. It was about the Powerpuff Girls and Harry Potter and Stephen King's Carrie and some kid in my class that I was crushing on. I wrote it on ice cream cone shaped post it notes bc I didn't bring a notebook with me on the trip. I then ripped it up bc a friend of mine told me it was trash. I later rewrote it in a composition notebook that I still have to this day. The cover has fallen away, so the pages are stapled together. The pages are yellow and frayed and the ink and pencil are so faded, you almost can't read some parts. I keep it in a plastic Ziploc bag. I have a printed copy of the first full length Harry Potter fanfiction I wrote that I keep in a binder. I have several plastic storage bins filled with notebooks and binders and folders full of half finished stories and worlds and characters. I have floppy discs, cd-roms, three computers and multiple cloud accounts that have my writing stored on it.

For me, writing is an extremely personal activity and probably the only thing in this world that I consider myself to be really good at. That being said, I have quite a bit of anxiety when it comes to my writing. What I mean is that I start these stories and I am so riled up and ready to go and will bust out a hefty amount of chapters in a short period of time. Yet I always reach this point where I hit a wall and I’m just like, do people actually like this? Don’t they get annoyed that I don’t post regularly? I actually start getting scared of logging into AFF bc I feel like I’ve done you guys a disservice by leaving you hanging without resolution to so many of the fics I’ve started and never finished. I mean, that’s a carryover from other parts of my life regarding commitment, but I really want to make sure that ya’ll understand where I’m coming from.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you guys to know that writing is my life. I have burst into tears (on several separate occasions) at the idea that one day I may not be able to write and share writing with the world. When I say that I am dedicated to finishing the fics I put up here, I mean it. It may not be in the next week, or month, or even year, but I will finish them. The AFF community has probably been the most welcoming and encouraging when it comes to my writing. I had never considered publishing one of my fics until I started writing on this website, and I have really been working hard to improve myself and my writing to a point where I can do that. It's not about money, it's not about fame. For me, its about one person picking up my book, or reading my fic and simply enjoying it. It's about creating a world where anything can happen. Writing is the closest to magic I will ever get, and if I could share that little slice of magic with just one other person, I feel so accomplished.

That's all I really wanted to say. I hope that if you are reading this, and you have the same problem as me, that you're not alone. And even if you don't have the same problem as me, I hope you know that you are not alone in anything. I love you all.

XOXO

aeru

EDIT: I ALSO JUST REALIZED I AM HELLA BAD AT MATH. Guys, I'm turnign 24 in two months. Originally, this post made it seem like if I started fanfiction at 7, and have been into for 12 years, that would make me 19. LOL. Whoops. I changed it to match my actual age. OTL