Through Fanfiction, I Learned the Machinery of My Mind

In second grade, my teacher handed me a stack of papers. “Pass enough copies for each row,” she said, already starting a lesson on the whiteboard. I stood at the front of the classroom, my small hands shaking as I walked down the first aisle, handing each individual student a piece of paper. I heard nothing but the ringing in my head; I felt my throat constricting, sweat lining the creases on my palms. Sharply, my teacher called me back and counted off enough copies for the students in the first aisle, handing the copies to the student seated at the end of the row.

“Like this,” she said, her impatience and derision palpable. “Do you understand?”

Then: I remember sitting in a sterile room, undergoing days of testing. Shortly after, I was diagnosed with a learning disability, and my IEP (Individualized Education Program) was finalized.

I require repetition. I need certain directions dictated to me more than once. It can take me time to piece everything together and to register details. It was okay, though, because now that the ringing had a name, I could be safe. Now, I could be still.

*

I didn’t realize that it wasn’t okay to be different until I started middle school. Southern California was a WASPs nest of rigorous academic standards. I was also the daughter of Iranian immigrants, which meant that I had to excel academically. I was expected to saturate my schedule with AP classes and extracurricular activities like all the other brown kids. Instead, I became a special-ed kid. I was pulled out of the classroom before every exam, performing a delicate walk of shame to the special-ed room, where I would take my exams with additional time and modifications. My parents never made me feel inferior or othered, but I was instructed not to disclose this facet of myself to our insular Iranian community.

In the valley, a tepid heat carried into autumn, fluctuating in the winter. Like most schools in the district, we didn’t have an indoor cafeteria because we could always be languid in the open courtyard. I brown-bagged my lunch every day, relishing the hour I could spend with my friends outside our granite classrooms. At fourteen, we weren’t talking about college, but it came up once. I was sitting with my best friend at the time, and I told her I couldn’t wait to get there.

I was expected to saturate my schedule with AP classes and extracurricular activities. Instead, I became a special-ed kid.

“It would be so cool if we went to the same college.” I pictured us on a campus across the country, surrounded by autumn foliage.

“I’ll probably get into a better college than you, though,” she said, laughing. “I don’t have a learning disability.”

Even now, I can recall that particular feeling of shame—it was both numbing and heavy, the weight of my imperfection scaling across my chest.

“Thanks,” I said, peeling at the crust of my sandwich. She shrugged, unmoved by the sting in my tone. I began to wonder with unease if this was what my other friends thought too—that I had too much ambition with too little behind it, drawing in half-formed shapes where everyone else drew lines.

I resented whatever part of my brain couldn’t wire itself correctly. I began to hate myself.

*

By high school, I felt wholly out of control. I would come home with a backpack clotted with C-plus math work, the additional time I was given on exams doing little to curb the swirl of red marks and slashes. I was bad at math, but I was worse at chemistry, struggling to make sense of abject formulas and numbers. It didn’t matter how hard I worked or how desperate I was to understand. I was working twice as hard as everyone else only to maintain a C average.

It was only in my bedroom that I gained a semblance of control. Under glossy posters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter, I logged into my FanFiction.net account and became my pseudonym. Fanfiction allowed me to become someone else entirely; I claimed the identities of those fictional characters who represented everything I wanted—and everything I wasn’t. In my fandoms, everything was linear because everything was scripted. Conflicts were swiftly resolved. The characters were quick-witted and bold, nothing was unattainable, and no one was out of reach. The story was mine, and I could alter it, tweaking the perceived imperfections. Years later, the creators of both Buffy and Harry Potter would deeply disappoint me, but at the time, I used the characters as a raft that carried me to a safe hiding place.

When I first began writing, I always wrote myself into the story. On the page, I was intact. I was smart and forceful. I had a comeback for every spar. In other stories, even if I was absent, I latched myself onto the characters who were intricately weird or inward, providing an access point into understanding.

On any given episode of Bones, Dr. Temperance Brennan (a renowned forensic anthropologist affectionately nicknamed “Bones”) will study the ridges of a human skull. Her partner, FBI agent Seeley Booth, observes her, commenting on the lack of skin, or teeth, or the eyes missing from the gouged sockets. They bicker until they solve the case, an attempt to veil their weighted sexual tension.

In my writing, I imagined Booth and Brennan becoming other versions of themselves. Through Brennan, it felt safe to be different, because she was also fractured. If my earliest stories were meditations on assuming better, brighter costumes, then maybe I was healing—now, I was trying to accept the splintered shape of myself. Like Bones, I could be strange and wonderful too—and if it was her heightened intelligence that made her unnatural, then it would be my own barbed learning that would push me to do better, to try even harder.

When I failed my driving test for the second time, I finally let Booth declare his love for Brennan. I wrote by hand a scene where he parked in front of her apartment complex, letting his palms smooth around the leather of the wheel. Because driving was easy, wasn’t it? It was switching into gear and ticking the left-hand signal, easing into traffic. On television, everyone could drive. In fanfiction, I used driving to propel my two protagonists together, describing the discomfort of leather on skin to mirror the erratic beat of fear or loss.

In real life, I struggled intensely with direction. It was paralyzing to change lanes or merge into traffic. When I was sixteen, I drove onto a crosswalk and knocked over a streetlamp. Smoke exhaled from the exhaust. I peeled myself from the front seat, wondering how close I had come to hitting another car or a person. Days later, I had a conversation with my parents and my resource teacher about the nature of driving with a learning disability. It was harder, but it wouldn’t always be hard. I listened to the grown-ups talk, feeling too exposed and completely absent. Everyone was eager for me to be okay, so I told them that I was.

But I was splitting open, and the unsteady parts of myself I was so desperate to embrace were chipping away with the broken glass of my windshield. I wasn’t just weird or abnormal—the pattern of my learning left carnage, and there was nothing I could do to contain the smoke once the valve broke open.

I drove with a slow and tepid hand, because it never felt as easy as it looked on television. I would write about driving because I couldn’t tame it, carving intimate moments for my characters: Here they could blearily watch the sunrise on the hood of a car, drinking from brown paper bags, or find rapture in a back seat. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t master it because I could take ownership on the page, using driving as a catalyst for love, or redemption, and everything else that was good.

*

When I was seventeen, I began my first part-time job at my local Barnes & Noble. I was ecstatic at the thought of spending my days surrounded by books. My excitement, though, was short-lived—I struggled to follow the inventory process, and when I was asked to manage the cash register, I was acutely aware of how long certain tasks would take me, like counting change. I would stand in front of the metal box, my mouth dry as I tried to be quick with loose-leaf dollars. The amount was always correct. I knew the difference between a nickel and a dime. But the counting needed time, and I would soon hear the impatient tap of acrylics on the counter, an exasperated sigh from the customer. Weeks later, my supervisor finally pulled me aside and relayed her concerns about my performance. I tried to regulate my breathing as I told her about my learning disability. She was kind and understanding, but from then on, I felt nauseous before every shift. I was always reeling, wondering if anything would ever feel easy or safe.

Around that time, I started writing about House and Cameron. Next to my Buffy posters, I taped magazine clippings of the Fox medical drama House. I spent hours on LiveJournal, saving screencaps of Cameron on House’s motorcycle; House and Cameron on a date; House staring at Cameron in a fitted red dress. I became obsessed with the strange palette of their longing. House was older and messier, and Cameron was wrong to love him. Nothing in their chaotic flirtation promised a tender love story. The show was about House and his commitment to his solitude. Every week, though, I parsed the ripples of the one-sided attraction, finding the tender spots. The more anxious I became at work, the easier it was to fixate on the bridge between House and Cameron and how I could close the gap. At Barnes & Noble, I learned how to function as I disassociated, imagining where I would place them in an operating room. If I had Dr. Cameron’s brain, then I could be a doctor too. She was beautiful and brilliant, and that meant that she was worthy. So what if she loved badly—she still had a mind that was intricate and intact, and she was wired to save lives. It didn’t have to be real. I just had to believe that I could mirror her, internalize her, and then I could disappear.

*

When I began community college a year later, I thrived in a way I never did in high school. Two years later, I got into UCLA. I stopped writing fanfiction. Instead, I focused on writing stories with characters I made up. I read Chekhov and Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri, experimenting with prose styles. For as long as I had written fanfiction, I had resisted writing my own fiction because I knew it would require a loss of control. I would need to detach from the neat world I lived in, one where the blueprint had already been mapped out before me, waiting for me to link the dotted lines. Collegiate validation gave me the confidence to color into a void. I told myself I wasn’t stupid. I was smart, and capable, and I could write. I could write! Another impossibility—I got into Columbia’s MFA program.

Maybe I could become worthy through my art.

I spent my first year in New York assuming that this external validation would be enough. I privately told a few friends that I had a learning disability, and their reactions were disconcerting and ableist: “But you’re so smart!” Or, “But you got into Columbia!” Or, “But you don’t have it anymore, right?” I learned to stop telling people.

I had learned how to accommodate to my learning style, leaning into the beautiful machinery of my mind.

I became despondent that I couldn’t script my life the way I used to do in writing. When I began searching for work, I decided not to apply to jobs that described “fast-paced” environments or roles that demanded efficiency at handling several tasks at once. I started to have trouble sleeping. The accomplishments I had spent years so carefully curating felt hollow. The degrees and the academic praise didn’t feel okay, because I wasn’t okay. The only validation I needed was the approval I gave myself, but I didn’t know how to be forgiving.

No one is whole to begin with—we exist as broken halves, learning to refine the fragments. In therapy, I examined my fractured sense of self, bringing the scared, embarrassed child in me back into the room. I asked her to love herself and to be kind to herself because she is worthy of being loved. I asked her to face her shame, and I assured her that it is okay to be different because life is never linear or clear. I had learned how to accommodate to my learning style, leaning into the beautiful machinery of my mind. I did everything I told myself I couldn’t. And then I did it again, either excelling or failing, accepting that my mistakes were human.

It’s been years since I’ve written fanfiction. I often think about how the pages I wrote became a window into what I saw then as the lesser parts of me. At the time, I thought I was disappearing into sculpted lives. Now, though, I realize that I was always present and that my love for these fictional people conveyed a tremendous empathy. There was nothing unruly about the care I so meticulously wove on paper, or the parts of myself that it unlatched. Writing fan fiction (and, later, my own fiction) gave me the fortitude to tunnel deeper, giving voice to anyone that has felt muted or fractured. If it weren’t for my “broken” brain, I don’t know that I could write with the same kind of attentiveness. Nor do I think that I would be as gentle of a person. My stories come from a place of longing, and we would never feel longing if everything was always within our grasp.

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