the mass deletion event: my fandom purge

existing online in the era of the content machine

In July 2024, I deleted all of my fanfiction from the internet. It was an abrupt, impulsive decision that happened right in the middle of what I can only describe as a mental breakdown: I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. For a week I barely slept, barely ate, and couldn’t focus on anything beyond the obsessive and perpetual state of anxiety that had dug its heels into the underside of my skull like the world’s worst and most irrational piece of adhesive. I’m speaking vaguely because I still don’t want to admit to the actual catalyst behind what I did, because it’s stupid and because I’m embarrassed. But after I wiped my account from existence, I felt a little bit better. Two days later, I went for a walk in a beautiful park and didn’t notice any of it; my brain was back on the hamster wheel of anxiety and paranoia. Three days after that, I regretted what I had done—but the button had been clicked and the words were gone, and four years of a carefully constructed identity were gone with them.

Fandom had been losing its allure for me for months already, and after such a public meltdown, I retreated from it entirely. I had, against my better judgement, already seen the tweets asking what happened to my work—not directed at me, but written about me, and not even really about me: they were just about the things I’d posted. People were wondering what had happened, were complaining that I’d deleted everything instead of orphaned it. I was still fragile and still reeling and I still think about those tweets, even now, with mingled shame and discomfort and with horror, too, at being discussed so openly, like I would never see what was being said. But it was, in a strangely cathartic way, also what I needed to read to convince myself that salting the same earth I’d carefully tended to for four years wasn’t all bad. It was another tally in the column of what had been bothering me about fandom for months, like an itch under my skin that I couldn’t quite scratch: the dawning realization that I was only in it for the validation, and that I wasn’t having fun anymore. I was just a cog in the content machine.

Most days, now, I feel fine about the mass deletion event. If I’m lucky, I can go days or even weeks without thinking about it; but sometimes the grief over what I’ve done hits me like an unanticipated slap to the face. I don’t miss writing creatively like that—I haven’t felt the urge or desire to do it for nearly a year—but I miss how writing creatively made me feel. Or, to be more honest: I miss how sharing my writing made me feel. The internet is a void and a ruthless churning vortex and I didn’t know most of the people who read what I wrote, but regardless of all that the endpoint was the same, and the endpoint was that I really liked being told I was a good writer. I liked feeling appreciated and admired. I liked gaining popularity, however fleeting and worthless, for something that I put together with nothing but my own hands and my own brain.

I started writing and sharing fanfiction in the summer of 2020, the peak of pandemic lockdowns, and I didn’t expect anything to come out of it. I thought it was a one-and-done type of situation. But then something odd happened: I kept writing, and people kept reading. In 2021 alone, I wrote 224k words of fanfiction; by July 2024, I had posted over 450k words. In a time of isolation and uncertainty, online fandom spaces were a beacon of connection and community, and I clung to them. I made them my anchor. My life, almost without my noticing it, was shaping itself around this new identity. I was always working on something, and in fact I felt adrift and unmoored without a doc to turn to. My following grew to a moderately popular size and I stopped writing personal tweets, because people seemed more interested in my fandom tweets and I wanted to keep people interested. I constantly kept an email inbox tab open on my phone and I refreshed it multiple times a day to check for new comments. I was obsessed with kudos and statistics: I started a new note in my phone titled Kudos until 500, where I kept track of—you guessed it—each of my fics with less than 500 kudos and how many more kudos were needed until 500 was reached, 500 kudos being my arbitrary threshold for a “successful” fic. And as with any arbitrary benchmark, the goalpost kept moving: 1,000 kudos, and then 2,000 kudos, and so on. I hated fic-posting days because I would spend the whole thing in a weird funk, refreshing my inbox and uneasily waiting for the kudos and comments to trickle in. I kind of hated reading new books, too, because deciding that I would write fanfiction for anything new meant handing over pure enjoyment and turning it into a game of strategy, paying attention to things like missing scene opportunities and loose threads and style and tone and character voices so I could capture them correctly in fic—because I wanted to be good at writing, and because I wanted to be told I was good at writing.

I tried to write fanfiction for books I loved, because I loved them—but I reread books all the time, and I’ve never read any of those books in full again. It was supposed to be a hobby, and I turned it into work. Worse than work: because I had liked it, and then I had ruined it.

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

Last week, I was binge-reading all of Ocean Vuong’s saved Instagram Q&A stories in preparation for seeing him on tour in May. One of the questions was, “Tips for a debut writer who wants to publish their work?” and Ocean responded, “Don’t force it. […] Envy for craft is good. Envy for ‘position’ or ‘fame’ is death.”

For someone who’s always joking about not wanting to be perceived, I’m obsessed with perception. Obsessed with reputation, too. I want to impress people; I want to make them look at me, and compliment me, and maybe even admire me. If I do something good, or something impressive, and nobody sees it, what’s the point? Was it worth doing at all?

Now, with my work wiped from internet existence and my painstakingly built fandom fame trashed, those are the questions I’m still struggling with. I was really, genuinely proud of the work I posted in 2023 and 2024, the closest I ever came to finding and being happy with my own writing style—most of it, ironically, some of my “least successful” work in terms of statistics.

Can I be proud of work that is not shared?

Was it worth writing if nobody else can read it?

What part of “fame” is more important to me than the act of creation?

The answer to that last one should be: None of it. Anything else is just akin to AI-generated content—shallow, soulless, and more concerned with output than with passion or emotion or a real, earnest investment of time. And when writing was good, even towards the end, it was really good—my focus narrowing to the doc in front of me, my brain moving faster than I could type, my mind drifting away from any other anxieties. A puzzle piece snapping into place when I broke through writer’s block, when I came up with a joke for dialogue that made me laugh, when I wrote an especially lyrical sentence that pleased me.

Can I be proud of work that is not shared?

Was it worth writing if nobody else can read it?

The answer to both of those needs to be: Yes.

Now the work is teaching myself how to believe it.

I started writing because it excited me; because there was nowhere else for the words to go but out—because I had been touched, and all of that emotion was spilling over like water from an overfull cup. I wrote, and my craft improved, and I was proud of what I’d done.

What else is there?

Envy for position or fame is death.

I’ve experienced the death, so now I can only turn in the other direction, and hope I can find myself over there.

None of these reasons are the reasons behind the mass deletion event, but maybe they are reasons why it wasn’t the catastrophic mistake my brain sometimes makes it out to be. I don’t know if I ever would have stopped unless my hand was forced—if I ever would have allowed myself to heal and rediscover my own happiness if I hadn’t pried myself away from something that was, at the end of it all, something that I really needed to step away from.

In a different Instagram story, Ocean Vuong wrote, “I think it’s ok to let something go if it stops bringing you joy.”

Well, I let go. I plummeted and I didn’t have a safety net prepared and my phantom fingertips are still scrambling for the ledge, trying to pull myself back up, but none of that is real now. There’s just the ground, the salt in the earth: a place to grow again if I can find the crack in the pavement.

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