Last weekend I went to Tokonatsu, and unless you don’t follow me on Twitter then you knew that already. Tokonatsu is an annual, weekend long anime convention / festival where everyone who attends dresses up in costume, gets drunk and roasts marshmallows by the camp fire. It was a lot of fun and I met loads of lovely people, some of which I’d met before but not seen in a lot of years!

When I’m around large groups of people though, I’m generally a wuss. Anxiety creeps up and I found myself retreating to my tent for large portions of the conventions because I was a little overwhelmed by it all. I’d not been to an anime convention for a long time and wasn’t really used to the mass of people. By Saturday evening, I’d plucked up the courage to sit and chat to a few people and ended up having a great time with a handful of lovely people. And so with restored confidence, I was ok for the rest of the weekend and made friends really well! Phew!

The best part about Tokonatsu was the atmosphere. After overcoming my anxiety fuelled panic, I realised that there was this amazing atmosphere that flooded the entire convention. Despite the fact that I only knew about 30% of the people, I felt as though I could just go up to anyone and chat with them, because we all had something in common – we were all sharing the same experience of Tokonatsu. I’ve not felt that before in other conventions, even with the same confidence boost that I’d had.

I feel as though I’d like to take that atmosphere and just install it into my head forever, so I always feel comfortable talking to people, regardless of where I am and regardless of who’s around me, because we all have something in common anyway. So, thankyou Tokonatsu for letting me experience that and I hope you don’t mind if I steal your atmosphere forever.