Philedom
When The X-files premiered I was a sophomore in high school. Just prior to that, my parents had bought me a TV for my fifteenth birthday (prompted, I’m sure, by my constant requests to my dad to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation when he wanted to watch something else). Up until then I had not watched much television as my parents were fairly strict about that sort of thing. But since along with the TV came a cable connection (paid for, in part, out of my allowance), a whole new world opened up for me.
I really don’t remember when I watched my first episode or which episode it was. I know it was sometime in the first season and I know that I fell headlong into delicious, shivery love. The concept of other people feeling the way I did about the show, about the characters, never occurred to me. Since I was old enough to read, I’d been falling in love with fictional people. I just thought it was me. So that’s why it never occurred to me, when I got to college in 1995 and learned of the joys of the internet, to see if there were other fans out there.
In any case, I loved Mulder and Scully passionately and from afar until one day in 2005 when I discovered the X-Files Community on LiveJournal. I joined, I lurked, I learned of the wondrous thing called fanfic. I was hooked. I read a lot. I gorged myself until I was stuffed full of words and feelings, and then I read some more. It was fantastic. And my husband asked me, why don’t you write one? and I scoffed and told him, oh, I couldn’t do that. I don’t have any ideas. I could never capture the characters properly. Of course, one day I did wake up with an idea. And so my first fanfic was written and sent out into the ether. Whether or not I capture the characters properly is up to readers to decide. All I can say is that I do my best.