Is it okay to be a superfan of so many things?
And how The Sims, spreadsheets, and Josh Groban are all related
I haven’t “technically” played the Sims since March.
I have, however, watched other people play the game. What started out as an ironic joke and a quick chuckle, led to a full-on YouTube crush on a 25 year-old Australian man who plays the game for his million subscribers. It doesn’t stop there.
His girlfriend, yet ANOTHER Sims YouTuber with a million subscribers, has now made it onto my regular watchlist. I, as the kids say, “ship” them very much.
Frankly, I’m not quite sure how this happened.
No—I’m exactly sure how it happened. With the turn of the decade and the turn of my own personal decade (3-0 baby), suddenly The Big Things started to feel much smaller. The worries I felt about people finding out I enjoyed video games, or the precise voices that I use to speak to my rabbits, or that I’ve stopped shaving my armpits—those things revealed themselves as just part of who I am.
There’s a part of me that still is, and might always be, self conscious about the idiosyncrasies of who I am and why, say, I like spreadsheets so much. Or my immense admiration for Josh Groban, a man I found myself meeting (again and quite unexpectedly) almost exactly a year ago.
What I’m saying is, there are so many embarrassing things about me and, in the light of a new decade and a *literal* pandemic, I think that maybe it’s okay to let go of some things. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that being a chronic superfan meant I couldn’t be respectable—I can be both, most certainly. If those things are the wind in my sails, if those are the things that make my flags wave wildly in the sun, so be it.
Sail on, strange ship.
Today’s Prompt: What is that one thing (or two or three) that turns you back into a superfan teenager, full of energy and excitement? And can you let yourself love it out loud?
This is fan service, for me: