“How to Quit Fandom: Apostasy” by Laiba Rehman

[Crossposted from my blog, BlueprintingHeaven.] Please note that the views I held and thoughts I had during the time immediately after my deconversion are not necessarily ones I have right now. It would be boring and annoying to constantly say this in the post, so here is your advance disclaimer! When I tell people I switched from wanting to do astrophysics to wanting to prevent death upon becoming an atheist, they’re usually not too surprised or confused. Sometimes they are, and I might make a blog post on that pipeline later, but most of the time they understand, even if they disagree about ending death being a good thing and even if they knew just how obsessed I was with astrophysics or becoming an astrophysicist. Something that may be more surprising or confusing is my almost total evaporation of fandom behaviour. Back when I was religious, at any given time I was usually into a fandom (more specifically, it was usually a particular character within whichever fandom), and this would be the default topic my mind would drift to in the car, whilst showering, etc. Each fandom phase varied in intensity and length, ranging from obsessively writing pages of [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: May 17th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4xtmJGeSbCoDEbR2x/how-to-quit-fandom-apostasy --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.