I was ten years old when I read my first fic. It was a story about Pete Wentz being a vampire and Ryan Ross dating Brendon Urie and it was the best thing I’d ever read in my entire life. I’m not kidding, I read the entire 200,000-word story in one night and searched for more to fill the void it left.

I’ve always been a bookworm. I was the type of kid that would walk into a pole on the playground because my nose was buried in a book. No shame, my friends, no shame. Books were like friends. They took me to amazing worlds and gave me adventure and excitement, but one thing I never found in books hough were people that were like me.

I never once read a book published by a major publishing house that had gay characters, trans characters, Latino characters or otherwise, so imagine how excited little ten year old me was when I read a story about two guys falling in love. It wasn’t represented as wrong, or unholy, or immoral, it was simply a story about love and perseverance. It was exactly what I needed.

At eleven years old I was put back into public school after being homeschooled for almost four years. I was the only openly queer student at the time and I was targeted and bullied for it. I was jumped, sexually assaulted, and humiliated by students and staff alike. The only place I found refuge was in fanfiction. I would keep to myself and read ever piece of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco fanfiction I could find and when I wasn’t reading I was letting myself imagine a world like those that I found in other's hopes and dreams, a world where people like me were normal, accepted, loved even.

That was only the first time fanfiction saved my life.

After middle school, my mom talked me into going to a charter school that was more open minded than my middle schools had been. I wound up making friends and finding a boyfriend and started to feel accepted in reality. I stopped relying on the Internet to make me feel normal or safe. It wasn’t until my Junior year of high school, after my boyfriend dumped me and my friends stopped talking to me that I found myself pulled back into the digital world of “ships” and “OTPs”.

I went through the worst depression of my life after my social circle fell apart. I didn’t want to shower, I didn’t sleep, I really just didn’t want to exist but one night on a whim I decided to watch BBC’s Sherlock. I watched the entire two seasons in one weekend and finally felt something.

The night I finished the series, I logged back into my fanfiction.net account and went to work finding fiction to read. Once again I found myself transported back to the safe realm of fiction only this time, I didn’t only read, I started to write too.

I started to write stories about Sherlock going through situations like I was, I started to branch out and write stories about other characters in the show being wizards or anything else I could imagine and that’s when I started to make friends. Real friends.

These friends stayed awake with me when I was crying too hard to talk. They would send me funny pictures and little snippets of fics just to make me smile. We’d skype and study together, we’d watch movies together, I’d tell them my secrets and they’d tell me theirs. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone.

So, once again fanfiction helped me realize that I wasn’t broken, that I wasn’t alone on the planet. Fanfiction was a place for me to turn when I had nothing else and I know I’m not alone in that. People make fun of Drarry (Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter), they make fun of “girls just wanted everyone to be gay” but they fail to see what’s really happening.

Fanfiction is like an alternate reality where the minorities aren't made fun of or where life just simply sucks. It’s a place to make friends with people across oceans or continents that you might never have had the chance to meet but are practically your non-romantic soul mate, or romantic even. Fanfiction is communication. Fanfiction is hope. Fanfiction is not something to make fun of.

I’m not excusing some of the toxic behavior that happens in fandoms but what I am saying is that maybe fandoms are needed. Maybe they are beneficial. I’ve come to terms with my nerdy self, I am a nerd and I am proud but reader, if you ever doubt yourself, if you ever feel guilty for reading Stucky AUs until ungodly hours of the morning just remember, fanfiction can be your only savior, and that’s okay. Embrace it, give into the nerd side. We are all friends here.