does anyone else have this other self they’ve created in their mind that is not really exactly you irl but is more like what you want to be and has a life that continues in your head with like weird continuing daydreams but they’re not perfect or anything and wow i forget where i was going with this
when you think about it fanfiction is actually amazing
there are thousands of brilliantly written novel-length stories kids wrote from their own brains about characters and shows/books/movies they love all twined into the internet and other kids read these 50k+ stories in their own time and invest themselves in it
nobody’s being paid to write it and nobody’s being told to read it, people do it because they legitimately enjoy it
one time when i was 6 my mom caught me trying to eat pure sugar out of the container so she stopped and said “Would you like to have something even sweeter?” and of course little naive 6 year old me said yes yes i would so she said “smell it first and then decide” and handed me a bottle of straight vanilla extract and of course it smelled like the tears of jesus so i said YES give me and she let me take a huge swig and this is why i have trust issues