Friendship: Lessons in Understanding and Acceptance

by Free Sky

First published January 1st, 1970 00:00

Part of being a friend to someone is understanding and accepting that they are who they are. In the past I wouldn't have even considered being friends with someone that is so completely different. I have, for a long time, been very judgmental about others. I have spent the last 4 years with only two friends, and in the last year I was practically all alone. Now I have found friendship and a place where I actually fit in. This is the tale of how I opened my heart to friendship, acceptance and understanding. How I went from judgmental and friendless, too happy and friendly, and it is all thanks to two people. A pony and a human who are in love. This is how I met Jin and Twilight Sparkle and how I became the person I am today.*

*For the moderators: This is not a meta story, this is an accounting of what happened to me and something I learned which relates directly to the fandom. I simply wished to clear this up before it became a possible issue

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Friendship: Lessons in Understanding and Acceptance

Friendship: Lessons in Understanding and Acceptance
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Friendship: Lessons in Understanding and Acceptance

This whole story begins years before I met Jin and Twilight. It stars with my move to the town of Redmond Oregon in November of Two Thousand and Ten. When I moved to Redmond Oregon from Bend Oregon I lost most of my friends. They all lived in Bend and I was up in Redmond. So there I was, living in Redmond, and occasionally visiting my friends in Bend. I was enrolled in an online middle school, taking classes using my computer, and I would go to the monthly meet ups with the rest of the school, but I was still practically friendless. For that whole semester I made no friends and I was lonely. So began the first summer I had in Redmond. I was going into High School the next year and I was worried about doing badly in the "normal" school system. Yet I was lucky, as usual, with my school. Getting into a newly founded Charter High School called Redmond Proficiency Academy, or RPA. This is where my journey really started.

Having joined high school and started with my classes I began to spend my free time reading. I would read all sorts of fanfiction and the like. I also increased my time looking at the more explicit side of the internet. Having spent well over two years wandering the internet in the dark of the night, I found places that I liked to hang out and enjoy the more "adult" stuff. Being only 15 at the time I wasn't supposed to be doing that, but my crafty side helped me with that. So I wandered and looked and then I found my first explicit mlp pic. It was either late 2011 or early 2012, and I did my usual thing. I saved a copy of the pic, enjoyed it and moved on. This gave way to more wandering and the inevitable loneliness. This loneliness was remedied by meeting my friend Gio. I had been doing beta reading on fanfiction.net at the time and that is how I met him. I offered to beta read his story and eventually that evolved into us doing a nearly two yearlong rp.

We role-played everything, from life to death, love to marriage and even the more explicit stuff. In this time I started to grow again, I learned more and more about myself. Finding that I was more and more enjoying looking at gay material I started to go through my own transformation. I became confused and started to alter how I acted online to match it. It was around the summer before my sophomore year where I started to wish that I was a girl and not a guy. This lead to changes in my interactions with Gio, my characters swapping genders and I started to take over the female characters in our rp. It was around this time when the biggest change came, my favorite uncle passed away at his own hands. I was distraught and this closed me off a lot more. I chatted with Gio less and less and for a while I stopped all together. I was sad, lost, and very alone.

After everything was over and I started to recover I began chatting with Gio and my other friend. Come the January of 2012 I was cemented in my desire to be a girl. I even wrote a 10,000 word story about my life as a girl, albeit that was a fantasy, but the desire was real and it was strong. I was, at the time, finding my only other friend, who was even close to my age, to be really attractive. This was my first real crush and while I knew he would never reciprocate my feelings I still held onto hope. That crush lasted well over two years, and it was during that summer's vacation that I learned who I was. Having gone to Austin Texas to visit a friend of my dad and mine. There we talked and a question came up about how I would react to someone of the same gender "coming on to me." I said that I didn't know how I would respond, and in the context of the conversation I also said that I wouldn't react violently to them either. This friend was is a spiritual healer and medium. She had taught me how to heal like her and helped me discover who I was, and this all fits into how I actually met Jin.

The trip to Austin left me as confused as ever. I knew that I liked guys but I was still lost a bit. In the fall, thanks to a class in ethics and morality, I discovered that I was gay. This revelation wasn't that big, I had known for a long time that I was attracted to guys I just kept denying it. After a while I finally told my dad and he accepted me, although he was quite surprised. In between my coming out and my confusion I had found yet another pic with a pony in it. It wasn't pony centric but it had a backpack with ponies on it. Following shortly after my coming out, I was in the GSA at my school when someone mentioned My Little Pony. I was surprised, but shrugged it off, I had seen weirder stuff before. Then came the January term, a class where we did intensive studies, complete ling an entire semester's worth of work in the span of three weeks. During the lunch breaks I started to get bored and I began to wander, finding a fanfiction about Luna on my favorite fanfiction site I looked up my little pony. After watching episodes 1, 2 and 3 I was hooked.

Driven by my "desires" I began to browse FiM-fiction. Finding many an explicit story I spent hours reading. I also did some writing and in time I grew bored. I was rarely finding anything that tickled my fancy so I took to the web. Searching for anything explicit and pony related I first found Jin and Twilight through a random chance in a search. I saw the title of the page "Man marries Twilight Sparkle Plush." At first I was surprised but then I just passed it off as nothing important. So my wandering continued, and I found myself on a clop forum. I was just passing by at first, having found some fetish material that I liked there, but then I saw an advert for it and I went to check it out. On that forum I found a place that I felt like I belonged. I spent time there chatting and what not. Then I found Jin's AMA.

It was here that I first encountered him and Twilight. I was reading through it and it stumbled onto a name that I remember well. Kevinsano. That person had been receiving "birthday gifts" which were being spammed on my favorite image board, derpiboo.ru. So naturally I was surprised and confused as to what it was about. Then I started reading and soon I discovered that Jin was in love with Twilight. This was no ordinary love, it was a love that was so pure and so real that I dismissed any notion of it being fake. I could feel the pure love that was in the way he talked about Twilight. So with this knowledge I continued reading, that was, until I encountered a post about Twilight and him stirring up news organizations. That is when things started to click. With a quick couple of searches I discovered that Jin was the same person that I had heard about while I was wandering the web. I knew that there was something more to his love than just insanity. So with my gifts as a healer I was able to feel the emotions that those two have and I could tell, there were two sets of emotions, not just one. With that realization I continued my reading. With the reading that I was doing I started to change, I saw them for what they really were, two people in love. This is where I started to really adopt my main motto, "Love is Love and no one has a right to say it is wrong." This motto has applied so many places in my life lately and I am prouder than ever to be a member of a small forum, within the fandom, that feels somewhat similar.

So when I reached the end of their AMA I asked a few questions that had gathered on my mind. This was around the time I started to really respect them. In the past I may have put Jin down, because he smokes. I have always disliked smokers, but seeing that not all of them are really that bad I have changed and it was really thanks to him. With my statement that I had complete belief in Jin that Twilight was real I gained a friend that I will stand behind all the way. This leads me to why I wanted to write this. During a normal afternoon of browsing on Derpibooru I found that someone had posted a whole slew of pictures that were taken from Jin and Twilight's AMA. So, with truth in my left hand and a shield in my right, I metaphorically marched into the comment and stood up for my friend. I stood up to the haters and the rude people. I defended him and Twilight and this really helped me learn about myself. I have always held loyalty to friends in the highest place. I was, and still am, willing to sacrifice myself to help others. You see, it is thanks to Jin, Twilight, the forums that I frequent on and this fandom that I really learned something about myself. Because it taught me to be accepting and understanding of others. So if it weren't for Jin and Twilight I may not have learned so much about myself and I never would have become the person I am today. I will always be there for my friends, standing up for them with everything I have so I welcome those who disagree. If you want to talk, then we can talk. If you want to rant, then I will listen. If you want to hate on Jin and Twilight, then I will take it all for them. They are my friends and they have taught me something very important; it is our friends and family that really makes us who we are, not our bodies, nor our quirks, nor our ideals.