welcome to downtown coolsville

[Please note: this whole post is about how much this fandom means to me, and it gets very very soppy. Also, it's kind of long. If you can't stomach that at the moment, check out this list of the top 5 most horrifying bugs in the world. The soldier ants freak me out the most.]

I've been in bandom for a little over a year now. I don't know how it happened, really- a lot of it had to do with redheaded_itch, and twobit, and having lurked in an RPS fandom before, and already being (secretly) into the music anyway, and lots and lots of other things, but mostly I just kind of fell into it before I realized what was happening.

I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that was making me pretty miserable. I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that I had no idea how to address. I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that I needed to escape from. Music does that for me. Always has. So has writing. So I looked at bandom, shrugged my shoulders, and thought why not?

Because of where I lived (and live) and the amount of money I had, I couldn't go to shows or festivals or fan meet-ups. I couldn't really do anything but read and write and listen to music, and that was enough. It was something that was mine, something that none of the stupid shit happening outside could ruin or take away. Maybe it sounds dumb to say that bandom got me through the year, because lol overinvestment. But it's still true, at least a little. Bandom was my escape. It was a way to leave the ugly things behind and just be happy or silly or thoughtful or even angry about something totally outside myself, and I needed that more than anything.

There's so much I love about these bands. ( Here is a list of them! )

Bandom's at least partially responsible for a lot of changes I've made in the past year. If it wasn't for bandom I probably never would have picked up a bass. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have gotten the nerve to get tattooed or pierced. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have started writing songs again. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have gotten over myself and realized it was okay for me to look however I wanted to look, listen to whatever I wanted to listen to. If it wasn't for bandom I wouldn't have made the decision to leave Grenfell, because I wouldn't have been able to look at my real life versus my online life and realize that one made me miserable in comparison to the other. If it wasn't for bandom I wouldn't have been able to get outside myself at all, and that means I never would have been able to get better.

I'm not saying everything's okay now, because it's not. I still need to work on just about everything. But I actually can work on things now, instead of sitting around and wishing things would get better, and it's because of the music.

Music changed my life. Music saved my life. That's important.