I discovered my love for writing when I was a freshman in high-school. I'd always loved complex and impactful stories, sure—whether they were in narrative-focused games like The Last of Us or mind-bending movies like Memento—but before my freshman year, it never really occurred to me that I could seriously write stories of my own. What made me realize I could was, a bit embarrassingly, fanfiction. Many people unfamiliar with fanfiction, or those who've only heard about the worst side of it, scoff at the idea of people writing using established characters and worlds. I can't say I blame them; even when I began writing my own fanfiction, I never told anyone about it out of shame, and I never expected to take it all that seriously, either. But then I got a comment on my work. Two. Three. It served as motivation to keep posting my writing, sure, but it also served as a reminder, both that I had genuine talent and that people actually cared about the topics I was weaving into my story. I'm a nonbinary lesbian who has struggled with my mental health, namely depression, since middle school. I've been able to find good friends who are either queer themselves or are allies to the community, but that doesn't change the fact that every time I meet someone new, I can't shake the anxiety that if I tried to tell them my actual pronouns, they would laugh. They would claim I'm not "real"—a phrase that I've heard from an actual classmate of mine who I'd been friendly with until that point. Then there's the matter of lesbian representation, which, unlike gay men, can usually only be found in children's cartoons of all things instead of serious adult media. All queer representation is important, but the disparity between the amount of gay men and lesbians portrayed in media is a striking one. Nonbinary characters are impossibly more rare. So why do I bring this up now? Well, fanfiction is especially popular among the LGBTQ+ community specifically because it allows queer people to see themselves in their favorite characters. In the case of shows that queerbaited their LGBTQ+ audiences, this is doubly important. In that way, fanfiction has become a safe haven of sorts where creators can create queer fiction taken seriously, and readers can consume it. The difference in the amount of gay fanfiction that's written versus the amount of lesbian fanfiction is still large, unfortunately, but in recent years the gap has been slowly closing. All this is to say, shortly after I began writing fanfiction, I realized how important it really was. Not just to me, who suddenly had a space to write the queer stories I'd always yearned for in mainstream media and could also write detailed and realistic depictions of mental health struggles in my stories, but to others as well. Since I started writing four years ago, I've gotten hundreds of comments on my work—people saying they loved my stories, how well-written they are, and so on, yes. But also people talking about how my stories got them through a really tough time in their life. People talking about how I inspired them to write themselves, or re-try treatments for chronic pain, or reach out to their loved ones for help. That's why I want to become a published author. I've proved to myself that the things I want to write about matter, and as great as fanfiction is, it's never been more important for these things to be written about in mainstream media, and that's exactly what I plan to do.