irony is the cowards way to enjoy things

be courageous, be sincere.

and most of all

be fucking weird with it

I used it as a shield for so long, but all it actually protected me from is joy. I was terrified of being cringe but all I was cringing away from was my own happiness.

Be loud, be weird, be unapologetic. So long as you respect boundaries and prevent harm, so long as you give yourself grace that overcoming shame is a process, so long as you keep in mind you are a creature and need to make sure your nest is comfortable and warm and your needs are met.

Be authentic, and fuck limiting yourself for the sake of the programming society shoved into your head.

In important corollary to this vital lesson that can take some time for folks to internalize is that courageously and sincerely loving something is not the same as doing so uncritically. Your emotions do not obligate you to an interpretation, and when the two feel like they're in tension, that's interesting.

Case in point: For a variety of reasons (cost, time, broadcast resolutions, etc.), older TV has tons of continuity errors, especially when it comes to action sequences. Think Riker on ST:tNG running while carrying someone and his phaser gets knocked out of its holster, only to reappear in the next shot. In my opinion, those sorts of errors rule, actually. I don't watch an episode of television and forget that it's fiction, any more than I would watch a play and wonder "Oh geez, when will the characters realize they're on a stage in front of dozens or hundreds of people?!" The imperfections don't take me out of the story, they're breadcrumbs that help me understand how the art was made in the first place. They let me connect with the characters at one level and the actors at another (and woe betide those who conflate the two).

An additional benefit of loving art both sincerely and honestly is that it makes it much easier to cultivate empathy and understanding for people who feel very differently about the same work. If your take is, "This rules, I love it," and someone else's is, "This sucks, it made me feel awful," there's a good chance you've missed something, either in the work itself or in the wider cultural context. Taking those criticisms on board need not be a recipe for poisoning your love for things - we should love things for what they are, not for what we need them to be. You'll almost certainly still like the thing, but with more nuanced and complete understanding of the work in context. A community that champions sincere love is not only stronger than one that polices opinions, doing so also fosters a wider and deeper pool of community knowledge that everyone benefits from.