Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

When I need to, I can watch “We took a chonce” and experience what some people feel when they put their faces in front of a seasonal affective disorder lamp.

Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.

“I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman, I just don’t give a fuck anymore,” she told me. “I know there are things I like. I want to talk about them and go have a good time. I’m a millennial and I’m going to die.”

It was one of the rare moments in which the shape of my life, normally hazy, took on a bright outline. There are so few things I love to do more than coughing up money for a cheap hotel, sleeping there alone, and waking up in the morning with a sight to see: a boy in pearls and high-waisted pants, for example, plus fifteen thousand people who have grounded themselves the same way I have, using someone else’s gestures and vocal tics to mark time, to help them remember, and to return them over and over to the question of who they are.

Fandom is an interruption; it’s as simple as enjoying something for no reason, and it’s as complicated as growing up.