Mulling over my history with Fandom and Grief...

There's a particular sensation of falling in love with a work of fiction. It's giddy. It hurts. I remember being a little kid in my attic room, reading as far as Frodo poisoned and lifeless in Shelob's lair, and crying myself to sleep. It wasn't until the next day that I realized, with Sam, that Frodo was still alive. 

I wandered through my day at Piney Branch Elementary in a haze, just wanting to go back to my characters-- to Middle Earth, to Earthsea, to the Magic Kingdom (for Sale--SOLD!).

My mom and I read The Lymond Chronicles together-- and we'd steal the books and get ahead of each other, and yell and weep about Lymond's self-sacrifice and brilliance, and Philippa's goodness and bravery. That world of 16th century high romance adventure overlay the dull and growing pain of real life. And we finished the last book together right before my mom died. 

I reread them all again, in a fugue of escapism, love, and grief. 

Harry Potter was the next thing to snag my brain. It was final's week at college, and I was in the library, in a corner, reading 700 pages of YA magic wizards. Sirius Black falling, with a terrible mixture of love, despair and relief, into the empty doorway. Dumbledore, taking his secrets with him, allowing himself to be pushed from the tower. Harry, greeting his beloved dead, and facing his difficult mentor's spirit in the cross roads liminal space of King's Cross Road Station. 

Then I fell for Sherlock. 

I had two little kids at home, I had started teaching full time after 6 years as a SAHM, I was trying to learn Hawaiian in order to function at my job, and I was crushingly uncomfortable with my place as a white person in Hawaii. We lived on a farm, in a crumbling little plantation shack that had no appliances, and often gave up the hot water ghost. I was suddenly coming to grips with being bisexual. My husband was reeling with his own mental health issues, drinking and raging. It was all way too much. 

But Sherlock Holmes... over a hundred years worth of stories, plays, films, TV shows, adaptations, parodies, academic studies, recreations, and fan fiction. There was a whole universe of story around this one figure, and his companion John Watson. 

And something about it was a lifeline for me-- a rope ladder over the mount doom of my own reality. Sherlock Holmes is an iconoclast, a genius. He can be kind, he can be delightful. He can also be disrespectful, arrogant, and reckless. And Watson as his counterweight can be diplomatic, humane, and ruthless. Their orbit pulled me in.

It was great fun to just live in the stories. The original Arthur Conan Doyle stories are surprisingly fresh and charming. The goofy 1950s American adaptation starring Ronald Howard, the gorgeous Granada Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Stephens. BBC Sherlock, and Elementary, and the Sherlock Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Junior all have their charms.  Japan's Miss Sherlock and her faithful companion Wata-san have my heart forever. And I love Neil Gaiman's spooky Sci Fi take with A Study in Emerald, and Laurie King's Mary Russel novels are life-giving. More recently, the Sherry Thomas Lady Sherlock series and the Enola Holmes books have captured my heart. 

And I've barely scratched the surface. There are infinity adaptations and pastiches-- weird Sci-fi cartoons and faithful Russian adapatations and Chinese historical genderswapped retellings that I can't WAIT to dig in to.

But the people. That is what transformed my love for Sherlock-Holmes related media into a fannish obsession. There were people out there, I discovered, who were writing BRILLIANT meta-analysis and criticism, making clever observations, sharing memes, and writing fanfiction. 

Anyway, that opened the floodgates for me. I read thousands of pages of fanfiction, and talked about it online with other people just as obsessed as I was. I went to work and set my phone alerts to Sherlock BBC sound effects. I made sample work for my students based on Sherlock Holmes stories, I traveled all the way to Indiana and Maryland for conferences. 

The Sherlock Holmes group-- the Scion-- in Maryland, is called Watson's Tin Box. I showed up once and they welcomed me. I showed up for the second time, a year later, and they said, "You come once, we figure it could be an honest mistake. You come twice, you are one of us now." 

I got teary. 

That second meeting was about the Arthur Conan Doyle story The Lying Detective. The presenter had a beautiful array of "artifacts" from the story, including a tiny bottle of poison. In the story, Sherlock Holmes takes it away from a suicidal woman and tells her, "Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it." I took a picture of that poison bottle, and captioned it with that quote. 

I didn't know Matt was suicidal-- not really. I was afraid that he was-- sometimes he would bash away from me, screaming curse words and smashing through doors and gates, and I was terrified he would destroy himself. But it wasn't a specific fear-- it was an anxiety. The same kind of anxiety that experienced near steep dropoffs. I knew there was an edge there-- that one swerve and one virtignous sway could tip us over the edge.  I worried for him. Sherlock Holmes had given me the words. 

"Yout life is not your own-- keep your hands off it."

A year later, he was gone. 

I couldn't go near any of the stories that had given me escapism and community before. Everything was too scary. There were dead bodies, suicides. Death, murder, blood, ghosts-- it was too much. And as for community-- what was I, anymore? I didn't feel like a person. I couldn't bring myself into circles of people. I was a deathshead-- a grim omen. 

I didn't watch shows or read stories. I only listened to music either without words or in languages I didn't know. Make food for grandma and the kids. Read to them. Drive. Go for hikes. Jump in rivers. Sleep. Just be a thing moving through time. Just be a container for grief. Or anger. Meet the kids' needs.

It took years for my imagination to get snagged on a work of fiction again. It took a dedicated little trio of writing friends who understood what a dark place I was in to gently introduce me to things that I could use to climb out of my pit and into imagination.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel was a 1009 page long book in an Georgian style, ribbed with historical tangents, footnotes, cross references, and with a plot that just...doesn't. And it transported me out of my head. Oh my God, the moor-- the magic. The Napoleonic war, the world behind the mirrors. 

Then this last year, I realized the kids were probably big enough to handle the campy creepiness of Supernatural. I showed them a few episodes and suddenly we were all HOOKED-- RIVETED. It took us months, but we watched the whole damn thing. All 15 seasons and 300 something episodes. Then we watched it again, but only the epsiodes with Castiel the Angel.

It was exactly right. The pain, the self-sacrifice, the trauma, the found family-- and the star-crossed romance between Castiel and Dean Winchester-- ouch, ouch-- it hurt in exactly the way my heart needed. 

And then like a cleansing breeze blowing away the bacon grease and motor oil and ashes, we fell in love with The Untamed. It's this gorgeous Chinese historical drama, and it's where I live now. I'm reading fic, talking with people online, rewatching all the different versions and reading all the source materials and derivations. The story is operatic-- Shakespearean. Betrayal, love, loss, politics, wars, hubris, loyalty, grief, and redemption. People weep openly, and bleed from their mouths.  Arms get chopped off and go flying dramatically through the air. People grow, change, improve, disintegrate, fail. Good people do evil, evil doers are loved. 

And I'm finding so much healing in grief in this story. 

And really, looking back at all of the times stories have swept me up and away, it's because they tell the story of grief. Well-- more than that. Sex, Death, and God-- the works that see me through the dark are navigating that lanscape. What is life and death? How do you survive life and death? What's the purpose of it all-- who's in charge? What does it mean? Is there love, is there passion? What is all this? 

Liko is next to me, listening to a music video about lungs: "we're your lungs, part of your resperatory system.." and I can hear RJ and Maile yelling together about some Untamed tangent, and my focus is flagging. So I'm going to make lunch and come back. Because I want to dive into this more, specifically about Lan Wangji's grief.