Confessions of a Teenage Fangirl

By Sydney Gore

Never joke about your fan fiction with your boss because he will want to read it, and after he skims through it, he will make you write about being a fangirl. This is exactly what happened to me when I started rambling to Confusion about my so-called teenage life as a fangirl. After he read an excerpt of my fan fiction from 2011, he insisted that I write this post. And here we are a few weeks later, but nearly four years after it all began.

The definition of a fangirl is “an obsessive female fan (usually of movies, comic books, or science fiction).” Guys can be fangirls too though—I’ve seen fanboy thrown around, but it’s not as catchy. There’s also the term swimfan, but that’s the most extreme level of fandom and borders on stalker territory. If you’ve ever watched the 2002 movie with the same title, you know.

For some, being a fangirl brings back embarrassing memories—whenever I scroll through the fan fiction that I used to write, I can’t believe that this is what I looked forward to working on every day when I got home from high school. I am not ashamed of my past, but some of the things that I did on behalf of the bands that I loved were absolutely insane… and hysterical.

You start off generally interested in the music, you watch all of the music videos, you see the band live, but it will never be enough. You have to know everything about all the members: where they’re going next, what cologne they wear, what their favorite foods are. You pick a favorite member and then you find yourself with folders on the desktop of your computer, each containing hundreds of photos. You set alerts on your phone so every time they update their Twitter account, you know.

For me, it was more than waiting outside in the freezing cold after the show for the members of my favorite bands to come out and take pictures or sign merch—but yes, I did that. I’m still getting rid of shirts that I haven’t worn since 2012, and I cringe thinking about how much money I wasted buying all of them. The amount of Glamour Kills and Jac Vanek products that I possess is ridiculous.

One summer my friends and I chipped in to give The Summer Set a gift card to Chipotle at Warped Tour. A few months later, we gave their tour manager a gift card to Whole Foods, as if that was going to help us befriend them. One time, my neighbor and I met The Maine and she kept John Ohhh’s water bottle. She hung it from her ceiling on a piece of string. Another time, my friends and I drove all the way up to North Jersey to sit for hours in my friend’s car until the show was over so we could meet the band and I could give the guitarist his favorite flavor of Naked Juice that I bought with my own money. I lied to my Mom about what we were really doing. I knew we were crazy. We fangirls were devoted.

My parents weren’t lenient about letting me go off to fully pursue my musical obsessions, but they gave me permission to enter meet-and-greet contests. I won a few contests throughout high school with bands like All Time Low, We the Kings, Cobra Starship, and Taking Back Sunday. (Yes, I had a scene phase.) It was at these events that I met people like me who loved and appreciated the music on another level, a level deeper than a casual hobby. A highlight was being selected for the filming of 30 Seconds To Mars’ episode of MTV Unplugged. 30 Seconds To Mars fans call themselves the Echelon and they are some of the most genuine, down-to-earth people I have ever met.

December 6, 2009 (Philadelphia, PA)

Me and my neighbor with All Time Low. We won a contest to attended a private acoustic session with them before their show at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, PA. For some reason, I thought that bringing a Paul Frank sock monkey for Jack Barakat, one of the guitarists, was a good idea.

May 1, 2010 @ Bamboozle (East Rutherford, NJ)

The first time that I saw All Time Low in December, I got Jack Barakat’s guitar pick. I brought it with me to Bamboozle and had him sign it when it was my turn to meet him at the Glamour Kills tent. I turned it into a necklace which I now keep as a token in my room. The signature is fading because I wore it to too many shows and sweat the ink off.

October 19, 2010 @ North Star Bar (Philadelphia, PA)

Before this photo was taken, I gave Jack a note that I had written by hand. He made a sexual joke, as expected, and tucked it into his pocket. He probably never read it because it got wet from the rain, and I don’t remember what it said. I have not been to an ATL show since 2011.

“Loving a band with all your heart is something you only understand when it happens to you. On the surface, others can see it as a pretty obsession, but they’ll just never know the feeling of putting so much faith into a few people on the other side of the world. It’s hard to explain it to them, the listening to song after song on repeat, the waits for new albums, the excitement and surreal sensation when you finally see them live. They don’t seem to understand why the lyrics booklets give you a sense of comfort, or why you paste photos of them all over your bedroom walls. And they can’t understand why one band could matter to you so much. And you think to yourself, ‘Because they saved my life.’ But you say nothing, they wouldn’t understand.” – Alex Gaskarth, All Time Low

Being a fangirl is how I found a large chunk of my friends. High school is a weird period of self-discovery for most teenagers. As my music taste was changing, so were other things in my life, like my body and my hormones. My friend circle was constantly in flux, but when I started attending pop punk shows for local bands at the same local venues, I would run into the same people in the crowds.

Over time, I exchanged contact information with some of my fellow fans (usually via Twitter), and to this day, I still talk to a lot of them. My closest friends from home are the ones that I used to go to Warped Tour with every summer—they will forever be my concert crew. They loved the bands as much as I did. It was a special connection, something I probably won’t ever find again in life. It was a connection only a teenage fangirl could make. The nights I shared with them are some of my favorite memories from my entire 21 years of life.

Remember that part in Almost Famous when Penny Lane is talking about the purpose of the Band-Aids? That basically sums up the character of a fangirl. To me, being a fangirl is powerful. As ridiculously obsessed as you are with the artist, the music is the bond that brings you together with other people. It’s next-level. I know, it sounds kind of creepy, but it’s incredible. You love the music so much that it consumes you in all aspects of your life. The music becomes a part of your identity and shapes your entire perception of the world you live in.

Maybe I wrote some terrible fan fiction along the way that I would like to pretend to forget, but at least I was writing, right? I only saved three or four of my fan fiction stories, but I kept them because I am amazed at how wildly I allowed my imagination to wander. This was purely for my own personal satisfaction. Was I semi-delusional? Definitely, but these bands that I devoted myself to became my personal muses and inspired my other passions. Besides, at least I wasn’t pursuing friend fiction.

This was the beginning of my affair with blogging, though in hindsight I am grateful that I never posted my fan fiction on tumblr. My stuff is nothing compared to the erotic Twilight based fan fic that would turn into Fifty Shades of Grey. Reading it now makes me laugh and roll my eyes, but at the time, what I was doing was productive. To be honest, the tweets I used to send to John Gomez are probably more pathetic than the stories I used to write about him.

November 6, 2010 @ First Unitarian Church (Philadelphia, PA)

Me and John Gomez of The Summer Set. I had the biggest crush on him for about three years. The first time we met was at a singing at Best Buy in Philadelphia in 2009 after their show at the Theatre of Living Arts. John was the inspiration for the fan fiction below. Note that I never liked writing the real names of the band members because I thought it would be awkward to stumble upon if we actually dated. Dodged a bullet, phew! LOL

During my freshman year of college in 2011, the wall on my side of the dorm room was covered in laminated band posters, set lists, and concert ticket stubs signed by the bands that I loved. Now that I have my own room in an apartment off campus, I decorated my walls with a framed map of Paris and a tapestry of the United States of America. (I must admit, I do have a mini Drake shrine on the inside of my closet to spiritually guide me with my outfit-arranging decisions.) I swapped out the photos of me with my band crushes for photos of me with my family and friends, and I keep everything else in a box at my parents’ house.

I’m at a point in my life where I feel confident enough to say that I have grown out of my fangirl phase, but I have short relapses from time to time. I like to call the moments where I exhibit this behavior “fangirling.” Sometimes you get carried away when you love something or someone, but there’s a line between passion and obsession. It took me a while to find that line, but I’ve found it. Or at least I think I’ve found it.

If I had not been a fangirl, I probably would not have pursued a career in music journalism. I wouldn’t have learned that I can be a part of something that I love in a way that goes beyond listening to songs on repeat. I turned something that I love into something more productive than spending hours scrolling through tracked tags of someone on tumblr.

Not every fan girl becomes a music writer—some end up as creepy adults with posters of someone all over their walls for the rest of their lives. I allowed myself to get lost when I fell down the rabbit hole that is music discovery, but as I have gotten older, I have realized that my passion is so much bigger than me and my fantasies—it’s meant to be shared, preferably on the Internet. We all have the potential to turn our passions into something of value; I happened to do it by writing. If you had told me that the things that I’d been logging in my journals four years ago would be the inspiration behind posts published online someday, I wouldn’t have believed you. Back then, I was the only person reading this stuff. Now, it’s all out in the open for everyone to see, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you’re going to take anything away from this post, let it be this:

1. At one point or another, we were all fangirls for something or someone.

2. A writer is only as good as their fan fiction, but I should never publish mine anywhere ever again.

3. Every fangirl should watch Almost Famous and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.

Now leave me be as I plot how I’m going to star on my self-produced reality series WAGS of EDM as the wife of Jacques Greene…

“I always tell the girls, never take it seriously. If you never take it seriously, you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, you always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you just go to the record store and visit your friends.” – Penny Lane, Almost Famous