This, my friends, is more than just a screenshot. It’s a validation of my feelings.
I know I touched on this a bit before, but it bears repeating. Because like I said, I’ve struggled with the line between fiction and reality my whole life. It’s so thin that I can feel it getting blurry in an instant. And that “blurriness” is what’s scared me. What’s been holding me back from truly acknowledging my feelings.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of crossing that line. In my younger years, I’d get ahead of myself, and I paid the price for it. My peers teased me a lot. I can look back and laugh about it now, but it was super uncomfortable at the time. So I eventually learned to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself.
Now, whenever I have really strong feelings about fictional characters, I always make sure that I know they’re not real, even though it sucks to admit it. Sometimes I wish I didn’t worry about that line so much. I mean, it’s invisible anyway, so it’s not like someone is going to recognize any signs of me going past some random point of no return, right?
I’ve been thinking about Charlotte Hope’s reply since it happened. And I think I finally realized what she means by “I don’t think it’s weird”: It’s okay to have these feelings about fictional characters. It doesn’t mean you’ve crossed “the line”.
I could very well have said “Is it weird that Catherine of Aragon …” instead of using Charlotte’s Twitter handle. Part of me thinks that maybe I should have. But another part of me wanted to experiment with whether she would even see my tweet, so I chose the riskier option.
Charlotte understood that I was referring to her portrayal of Catherine of Aragon. And, in doing so, she made me realize that I’ve never let myself truly think of my favorite characters and other people I look up to as family. I think it’s about time I work on that. Work on being comfortable with these types of feelings, and my chosen family.
