me + Richard Armitage fandom: An answer to a reader query and a confession

Query [typos corrected]:

Servetus, I hope you don’t mind me posting this. I have a few things I have been pondering on and was hoping you could offer some insight or maybe even some advice. I am doing so here as I think it may be something others ponder too. I sincerely hope you don’t take any of this the wrong way. I am *not* judging – who am I to do so? This post is more born of fear I guess. I have been ‘following’ Armitage for about 6 months. So far I have been one of those ‘lurkers’. I don’t blog and never read them. No one knows of my RA admiration and I would be simply mortified if they did. Indeed, I think they would be worried for me. You are one of the few RA blogs I read – you are interesting and timely. Although, I must admit your cerebral approach sometimes exhausts me. My questions largely pertain to my conflict over RA fandom and how one lives with it. Indeed, if one should live with it. Ok here goes. Sometimes I wonder about you – how you find the time to write so much and with so much forensic analysis. I know you have a full-time job. So do I, full-time and then some. You are astoundingly productive! I doubt any of the academics I know would be able to produce what you do. I don’t think any of them would want to, whether it be your devotion to writing or the time you spend thinking about RA. Which brings me to my next point. As my RA ‘thing’ continues, I do find myself asking (myself) ‘what am I doing’ with a considerable degree of self-loathing. I feel ridiculous and ashamed that I am doing things which I last did as a 14 yr old over a very undeserving soccer player. I also feel that the object of all our affections certainly isn’t spending hours every day obsessing over someone they don’t know and will never meet. And I’m pretty certain he has never done that – high probability he leads a balanced and fulfilled life. Yes, I am implying what we do precludes this or is an indicator of its absence. Frankly, if RA had indulged in what we do he would not be in the position he is now. I cannot comment on your situation, nor would I presume to speculate on the details of your life, but I do wonder how you reconcile it all. However, this post is admittedly largely selfish in nature! My question is how do I reconcile it all? I really can’t imagine that I would have done the things in my life that I have done if I had had this experience earlier, and this leads me to wonder about what I am sacrificing now… Unknowns? A life that will remain undiscovered, uncharted and, ultimately real? As I said, any insight and advice would be appreciated.

I decided to answer this in a post (rather than in a comment) both because it will take a little work, and also because it’s been a while since I addressed this question, and it gets the heart of the reason I keep blogging (despite aggravations that have been a little too apparent for my comfort lately).

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Dear fellow fan of Richard Armitage,

Thanks for asking what feels to me like an honest question and one that affects your life. I’ll answer as honestly and sincerely as I can. The answer is a bit long but I wanted you to know I took you seriously. Let me say: if any post here is too cerebral — including this one — just click it away. Life is too short to spend it reading things one doesn’t have to read if they are not intriguing or interesting.

In my experience, most people who worry about their sanity are sane, but I also don’t want to discount the worried and negative moments in this message. If you’re concerned about your fandom in ways that you can’t deal with in the fandom, then it’s time to talk to someone about it (and not just me or other fans — here are some of their answers to your question). I use this blog as therapy, as many fans use the fandom, but if you’re so seriously troubled or disturbed that your self-loathing is pervasive or that bad feelings overshadow your joy more often than not, I urge you, please, to turn off your computer and seek professional help. I’m going to write as if your problem is not quite that severe and assume that fangirling Armitage mostly gives you a lot of pleasure and you experience the bad feelings mostly as a sobering or rationalizing intrusion — in other words, I’m going to assume that you feel sometimes “mortifying” embassment about the extent of your preoccupation and pleasure but that preoccupation and pleasure still take the upper hand.

In your letter, you ask a lot of questions about me as a way to asking question about you. I think you are the most important person in your query, and the question you ask, indeed the decisive one is the one you place at the end, so I will start there. You write

I really can’t imagine that I would have done the things in my life that I have done if I had had this experience earlier, and this leads me to wonder about what I am sacrificing now… Unknowns? A life that will remain undiscovered, uncharted and, ultimately real?

I don’t know what questions in your life you are referencing specifically, or what you might have done differently. Still, I think your life will remain “real” no matter what you do, because it will have been the result of your history and experiences and to the extent that you feel you have agency, your choices. Whatever you do in reality is real — whether it’s a job you like or one you don’t like, whether you are fulfilled in your relationships with the people who surround you or not. Choosing to spend a lot of time enjoying a fantasy does not make your life as you live it from day to day less “real” or a life that is prophylactically cleared of unattainable fantasies “ultimately real” (nor vice versa). In other words, I don’t really think anyone can lead her life in a way that will make it less or more real — as if (just to give an example that’s commonly thrown at me; I am not suggesting this is your conflict specifically) any truly unsatisfactory lover would make one’s real life better than a fantasy about Richard Armitage simply because the lover is physically present and Armitage is not. A fantasy about Armitage is preferable to some really-existing lovers and inferior to others, and only the person on the ground confronted with the options can know that, or indeed if a life without a partner and without a fantasy is the best choice. You are the only person who can decide if or how you are happy! People’s decisions are complex and those who look at them from outside (including me, when I’m the outsider) always miss some of the picture. We lead our lives as best we can given what we know at the time.

I do think fantasy — even allegedly obsessive fantasy — alerts us to things, though, which is why I focus on your question about what “I would have done” otherwise and “what I am sacrificing now,” a vital one for me. I’m particularly sensitive to it because of my mother’s recent death at 71, and because my first cousin, Architect, who held my hand all the way through my mother’s decline, recently got a breast cancer diagnosis. I’m 44 and Architect’s almost 40. Her mother (my aunt) died when she was 59. My grandfather (their father) died at 67. I haven’t had any serious, acute health problems at all in my life, but neither did any of them. And when it hit, it hit bad and hard and lethally. My mother was killed by her sixth (unrelated) cancer and she and her sister each had about seven weeks between the terminal diagnosis and their burials. So the question constantly coursing through my mind at the moment is, “what would you do this second if you knew you only had fifteen years left?” Because that’s my impending event horizon.

I think the answer is: I would do what’s necessary and I wouldn’t waste any time starting to do it. So that’s what I recommend to everyone who asks me — don’t shirk your obligations to other people lightly, don’t jettison your commitments and your history in any crazy hurry, take time to think. Don’t abandon anyone who truly needs you, don’t rush, take things at your own pace, but don’t waste any time, either. Figure out what your questions are and confront them and if you are not doing the thing you think you need to do, figure out how to do that thing. You don’t have to be great at it, the world’s best at it, you don’t even have to be good at it (although that often helps one’s enjoyment), you just have to need to and want to do it. Find that place where love and need are one, as Frost said in writing about work that’s play for mortal stakes. If you don’t ask yourself about it because you don’t think it’s sane or realistic, you’re losing an opportunity — even if what you end up deciding is that your life should stay the way it is. At least you will know why you are in the place you’re in.

The bigger theme of your question gets to the problem of whether Armitage fandom is a waste of time and “if one should live with it.” I’m going to answer slightly elliptically.

You say that you’re sure Armitage’s life is not like ours:

I also feel that the object of all our affections certainly isn’t spending hours every day obsessing over someone they don’t know and will never meet. And I’m pretty certain he has never done that – high probability he leads a balanced and fulfilled life.

For what it’s worth: I don’t know that balanced and fulfilled are really a pair, or if both are truly things that should be desired by everyone, or even if they really apply to Armitage. One could legitimately question whether the decision to move for two years, far away from family and friends, to work fourteen hours a day in a heavy costume and prosthetics and almost get drowned and temporarily alter one’s voice and one’s personality can be described with the adjective, “balanced.” Many great artists’ lives are not what we’d call balanced, and in particular, his apparent choice to live without a romantic partner (assuming that his representations that he’s single are true) could be read by some people in this very fandom as a sign of imbalance. I bet it was tremendously fulfilling to do that, though. The stuff of dreams, the kind of crazy dreams he had when they were filming LOTR and as he’s said, he couldn’t get himself seen to try out for even the most minor of roles. I’m not implying Richard Armitage is an attainable dream for any of us; my point is rather that this kind of life means “balance” for him. He’s the only one who knows. Just as you are the only who knows if your interest in Armitage is a sign of imbalance in your life.

No, I don’t imagine that Richard Armitage engages in immoderate devotion to an unattainable person. I don’t venture to say what he might have done as a teen. He’s admitted to a Wham! poster and a fascination with Michael Jackson that involved learning his dance moves and getting the hat and glove. Is it immoderate, if you’re a child who wants to be a professional dancer, to spend a lot of time looking at the most famous one in the world and copying him? (Context is everything for answering a question like that.) People with big dreams often started off with small steps and I am sure onlookers made fun of their ambitions. This comment on the blog made that very clear to me, and I wasn’t sufficiently grateful to the author who left it at the time.

Still, it’s my impression that Richard Armitage also has sustaining fantasies, though I can only guess at them and thus have no idea whether they are realistic. First, because humans tend to have them, and because ambitious humans in particular tend to have them. Second, because the detail with which he works (to the point of writing down what his characters dream or what they might be doing in the future, after the story ends) suggests that he creates such fantasies for his characters. Third, because anyone who pursues a goal with as much attention and persistence as he has over two decades could certainly have relentless pictures in his mind about things he would like to do in future — however unrealistic — that pull him forward. And finally, because living out a fantasy — a reality that he imagined for himself and worked to make real — is what Richard Armitage is doing: the thing he most loves and needs to do. That fantasy is not without its wrinkles, things like promotional tours and deep water mishaps, but I suspect that like many actors who have become successful, he’d have continued to try to find ways to do it even if he hadn’t achieved the notice for it that he has. It’s not so much that I am recommending Armitage to anyone as a role model. It’s more that I know, even from my own life before Armitagemania, that certain kinds of fantasies alert us to our needs and pull us forward along our paths. They make it worthwhile to do things that would otherwise seem pointless — like devoting huge amounts of time to practicing for elocution tests, engaging in dance rehearsals, or pondering the motivation for a role in which one’s essentially an extra. Or like writing extensively about something that fascinates one.

So is a persistent unattainable fantasy about Richard Armitage a problem? I don’t know. I would say the answer lies in what you choose to do with it. And you are the only one who has the capacity to decide what’s okay for you. If it leads you to commit crimes, I’d say it’s not okay with the law, but it’s hard for me to go much further than that, mostly because I can see now what fandom gives to a lot of people’s lives in ways great or small. There’s something about the electricity of the energy that goes into that devotion. I think fandom tells us that we are — or could be — powerful. I think the experience of an immoderate love teaches us that our love makes us strong, stronger than we realized (incidentally, that link also broaches the topic you verge on, the lack of reciprocation from the object).

I find I can’t really differentiate the great and the small when I’m talking about the effects of fandom. For instance, I have talked to Richard Armitage fans who’ve been spurred by their fandom to become successfully published novelists with mainstream presses or by self-publishing and earn a living from writing, to start small businesses (a soap factory, a film production company, to name two), and to develop technical skills at a level that they could use them as their means of support. I’ve talked to a former foster child who carried the series 3 Robin Hood discs around with her at all times because her identification with Guy of Gisborne got her through her impossible life and she couldn’t risk losing the discs in an unexpected move; because Guy comforted her in her time of trouble, she’s studying to be a nurse. I know someone who lost 100 pounds and kept it off for three years with the help of diet, exercise, and a picture of Armitage on her refrigerator. I know many more people whom Armitagemania helped to accept their bodies as they were. Armitage thoughts helped a young fan come out of the closet. I know someone who was on the fence about getting divorced and did it because of the self-esteem she was able to piece together from the feelings she got by watching Armitage, just as I know someone who was on the fence about telling a man she was attracted to him and did it because of Armitage-inspired courage. A mug on my desk that says “Mrs. Richard Armitage” and the Thorin figure that sits next to it have started at least three conversations with students whom I was able to listen to or even help because of the trust that sign inspired, because it made them think I was a human. I know dozens of people who started writing or drawing or designing or sewing for the first time, or for the first time in years. I know people who got through their relatives’ terminal illnesses by watching North & South on infinite loop. I know people who were inspired to take acting or dancing lessons and discovered entirely new sides to themselves. I know people who asked themselves “What would John Thornton do?” in difficult situations to help themselves make the right decisions. I know people who made friends. I know people who took journeys they’d never have taken otherwise, to meet new friends or to see places that Armitage’s roles inspired them to see. I know women who use Armitage’s voice to keep them awake on long car drives and others who use it to help them relax, so they can fall asleep.

You write that you feel that “what we do precludes [a balanced and fulfilled life] or is an indicator of its absence.” My own experience, and that of many other fans, suggests that intense and sudden fandom is often — though not always — a wake-up call about something. As these examples show, however, many of the fellow fans I know enjoy and have exploited the energy and inspiration they’ve gotten from their fantasies in many ways not thought of by anyone who dismisses the pursuit or enjoyment of fantasy on the somewhat obvious basis that it’s unreal. It’s not that they couldn’t have done these things on their own; but something about the energy of preoccupation with Armitage revealed something to them about their own power and capability that they hadn’t realized before. But even for those who don’t “use their obsession productively,” I’m not convinced that fandom is an illegitimate lifestyle per se. If it gives people pleasure, and they believe they have their priorities in order, is that wrong?

As to the self-loathing; uch, and you have my sympathies. I can’t say that I ever felt the depth of negativity about my preoccupation with Armitage that that word expresses to me. But I know what it is to hate oneself deeply, mostly because I’d spent so much time hating myself before that the rush from Armitagemania, the sheer feeling of relief from pain and then the experience of desiring something again came as a relief in many senses. I’m truly familiar with the question, why the heck am I doing this, why can I not stop myself? (I described that experience, from the vantage point of a year later, here.) Should I not be trying to stop myself? What would my friends think if they knew? Should I not be ashamed? Gradually, I concluded that suppressing the fantasies was not effective in trying to lose the shame.

Every second I spend thinking about what I am not allowed to say for reasons that have nothing to do with my own conscience is a waste of energy and a betrayal of self. Armitagemania happened to free me from the waste and self-betrayal I’ve experienced as a professional for the last decade. No more rules for me except those self-imposed: to follow my conscience, to be forthright, to be honest, to say things the best way I can. Not to waste energy, and not ever to betray my voice, even though it’s only developing now.

If I was going to have the fantasies anyway, I reasoned, I might as well ditch the shame, especially since the only person the shame hurt was me.

And that gets to me — the person you asked all the questions about (smile). You write:

Sometimes I wonder about you – how you find the time to write so much and with so much forensic analysis. I know you have a full-time job. … You are astoundingly productive! I doubt any of the academics I know would be able to produce what you do. I don’t think any of them would want to, whether it be your devotion to writing or the time you spend thinking about RA. … I cannot comment on your situation, nor would I presume to speculate on the details of your life, but I do wonder how you reconcile it all.

I don’t think the exhaustive focus on a small matter among academics is all that unusual. My grad school boyfriend, the physicist, spent his doctoral research discussing how very rare gas atoms bonded to even rarer metals at temperatures almost never found in nature, and he didn’t study it experimentally but wrote a computer program to describe it. He chose the problem because it had no known military applications. That kind of thing makes my dissertation, which covered twenty years, and my book manuscript, which covers fifty, look amazingly general. Similarly, I don’t think my level of focus is unusual for an academic. Someone wrote last spring to tell me I must have Asperger’s Syndrome, but honestly, in my world, every second person fits the generalized description of the symptoms. All I can say if you think I’m an Aspie is “wait till you meet an actual Aspie.”

Still, I was an unusual academic in many ways, and one of them was my “devotion to writing.” I taught at a major research university for a decade and I published a lot in that time (although not enough, it turns out, to be tenured), until, in the wake of the denial, I gradually became completely unable to write. I’ve explained what Armitagemania gave me in that space, but really, the biggest thing it gave me back was my capacity to write. I don’t want ever to give that up again. In fact, I won’t.

What did I get from Armitagemania? How do I reconcile what I do?

Because of Armitagemania, when I left that job, I replaced it with one with lower pay and less obligation; I started working fifty hours a week instead of seventy; I learned what it was like to get a full night’s sleep again and not to cringe in the hallways. Because of Armitagemania, I started writing again every day, here, on my academic articles, and on other topics. Because of Armitagemania, I started recognizing myself again. And finally, because I was able to write and communicate with others again, when my mother took ill, I’d found friends to hold me up with their thoughts, prayers and comments. My “scare quotes” friends turned out to be real, too and they proved it over and over again.

So I reconcile it because it’s simply necessary. It’s not really optional anymore. Writing here is not only something I love to do (because I love to write and I love Armitage), it’s a physical exercise like stretching before jogging, or a devotional exercise like praying before facing the day. Doing this is my sign to myself that I can trust myself enough to be courageous and to feel my feelings and say what I think and that I won’t let anything, a job or a person or my own shame and bad feelings, silence me again.

Will Armitagemania last forever? I assume not. I assume that as my other writing takes off other paths for the daily practice of writing will open themselves up to me. But for right now, I reconcile doing what I do here as an investment in my self-esteem, a building of a writerly persona, and most of all, an act of faith in myself, my desires, and my dreams. If I only have fifteen years left, the thing I want most to do in that time is not to betray myself.

Don’t hesitate to write again if I haven’t answered your questions or if you’re dissatisfied with this answer, or if I misunderstood you in some decisive way.

In closing, it turns out that I have been able to tell about six “real life” friends, and they were not dismissive — I suppose, as with anything, it depends on which friends you tell. You may be surprised by your friends. I was.

Best wishes,

Servetus

~ by Servetus on November 11, 2013.