I think I’m gonna... unfollow some people and stop interacting with open mdzs fandom spaces on the whole

honestly my time in this fandom has been genuinely wonderful and ppl are great but there’s this one stupid completely irrational thing that just utterly tanks my mental health every time I go near it. like it’s not a “people do this and it’s objectively bad” problem, it’s like

an “I have an irrational fear of balloons to the point where I can’t stand even hearing mention of them and never know when people are going to mention balloons” problem

or like a fear of jgy’s hat.

sometimes I can read fic and pretend he’s not wearing the hat, but then they mention it and the illusion is shattered

so now I have overcorrected and become paranoid about any possible signs that indicate the writer might have imagined him wearing the hat while writing whatever I’m reading, even in a wildly different au where there’s no reason for the hat to exist

I do not have a fear of jgy’s hat but I do feel exactly that fucking ridiculous about the problem I actually have and I do in fact morph into a goddamn conspiracy theorist overanalyzing everyone’s words for potential signs of the thing I can’t deal with

which also doesn’t succeed in protecting me from getting smacked in the face with it in anyway so we’re doing real great at problem-solving over here. as always my brain and I are a flawless combination

it’s just not fun. I like talking to people and I like reading fic I can feel safe around and maybe I’ll come back to writing my own fic someday but I just don’t want to feel obligated to live metaphorically in the same house as the jgy’s hat metaphor anymore

genuinely relieved to have removed myself from a bunch of servers just now, unfortunately in the process of writing this thread I thought about jgy’s hat so much that I’m still too mired in that horror to fully enjoy the sense of emotional freedom and relaxation