I wrote over a hundred pages, both sides, in handwriting that changed from paragraph to paragraph, the ways kids do when they’re still figuring out different ways to be. All nostalgia aside, I’m absolutely certain Sparring Partners was terrible. But what I recall most about the writing of it was that the simple act of getting those words down, armed with just a Bic and a lined A4 pad – blue feint, pink margin – felt a little like meeting myself properly for the first time.

But soon there were important exams to be studied for, and a real life in the real world to be mapped out and made. Intentionally or otherwise, the message was that writing should be set aside.

So my writing stopped but my reading never did. When was the first time I came across fan fiction? I have a vague recollection of being surprised: So this is a real thing people do? It gets hazier after that point, because then, Reader – I married the internet.

My family thought I was being conscientious over my studies when I cursed the horrors of our unreliable dial-up connection and frowned at the temerity of people wanting to use the landline during normal waking hours, but really I was just craving those stories. It meant a lot of my fanfic reading was done at night: tumbling down the virtual rabbit holes of my favourite shows, lights off, with just the glow of the computer screen illuminating my face. These were the days my heart belonged to Angelfire websites and LiveJournal. Nowadays I’m usually Tumblr-bound, but the overall effect is pretty much the same.

The fanfic world is vast and I’ve only ever known a tiny corner of it, but that’s fine: I live in and love my wheelhouse – that wonder of wonders, the One True Pairing. My everyday acerbity dissolves when I am reading OTP fanfic. I can track my age by some of my favourite OTPs, the same way you age a tree by its rings. There were the Shawn and Angela days – distant now but still heady; my Mulder and Scully phase that fizzled out before the show did; Sam and Mercedes – an OTP that truly was a cinnamon roll too pure for this world, because its fandom cared more for it than its own show ever did. More recently, there’s been Rae and Finn, who I’ve mentioned in a previous piece. (In the course of writing it, I transcended into my final form: a giant heart eyes emoji listening to "Wonderwall" on repeat.)