The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I feel you. I think these "scenes" just come and go. Either they blow up and the core group becomes big, famous professionals who are way too famous for a regular person to approach (like a punk band selling out to go on MTV and fill stadiums) or it just dies out all together.
I was also into fanfiction as a teenager. Maybe not as much as you, but I had a phase when I was reading a lot of it. Mostly on this one site dedicated to one show, which has since become unpopular and the site shut down. No idea what happened to any of the writers there, I assume they all just left and went their own separate ways. Oh, and I was using it with absolutely no filter. I don't think the site even had a filter. Good ol 90s internet...
When I was older I dabbled a little in writing fanfiction. Nothing too serious but I did my best. It was a fun experience, getting to express myself, seeing the view counts go up, and even getting (a few) positive comments. But it was pretty lonely just doing it on my own, and then throwing out to the anonymous internet. It definitely would have been better with a real community of peers to give me feedback, or at least let me know that there's real human beings on the other end reading this stuff.
I think about it like that rule in fight club: "If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight." Those communities don't work when there's too many onlookers just hanging around spectating without participating. There's something magical that happens when everyone is at least trying to participate, regardless of how good or bad they are. In fact, part of the charm in fanfiction is that the barrier is so low- there's tons of really bad writers writing garbage, so we don't feel shame at putting our own bad writing into the mix.
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