i’m not exaggerating when i say she is one of the most fascinating people in the world to me. dying to spend a weekend with her….. nic do you realize what you’re saying….
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@agapisms
i’m not exaggerating when i say she is one of the most fascinating people in the world to me. dying to spend a weekend with her….. nic do you realize what you’re saying….
Hey
Does anyone else have like. Anxiety-related memory problems. Like, after you do something, you start wondering if you messed something up or did something wrong, and you get really anxious over possible mistakes you made and you genuinely can’t remember if you made those mistakes or not?
Like for example maybe you write someone a letter and then after sending it you start imagining you made some terrible mistake and despite the fact that you yourself wrote and proofread and sent it, you can’t remember if you did or not?
It happens to me a l o t and it’s terrible and scary because I can’t trust my own memories when I’m anxious
Yeah those are cognitive distortions and they really mess with me
how do you even work at tmz as a human being, you look across the newsroom and your coworker is trying to figure out the most tasteful way to crop a photo of the dead body of a celebrity who has a 7 year old child so you guys can post it
"I have found myself talking out loud to you, hoping you can hear me" is a bonkers way for a celebrity to begin a public memorial statement less than 24 hrs after the death happened by someone who has possibly not personally spoken to the dead person in question for almost ten years. I cannot stop thinking about it.
In 2013, Channel 4 did a documentary called Crazy About One Direction that featured a number of high octane waaaay out there fans. I think the band was asked about it during an interview; Louis and the others basically disavowed it, saying it was an unfair representation of girls who like One Direction and the fanbase in general. He wasn't being totally selfless in sticking up for the fans, because some of those girls were profoundly sad and lonely, maybe unwell. And if your mission is to be marketed as a fun-loving carefree boyband, the last thing you'd want to be associated with are young, maladjusted, friendless girls.
Anyway, at one point, one of the girls interviewed says:
Twitter is like a prayer place. When you go to a prayer place, you feel like you’re connected to God. So when you’re on twitter, you feel like you’re connected to 1D. You just have hope. [audio description alt-text: an image of Louis as Jesus Christ]
Zayn is also the only one of the boys to have crossposted his message to twitter.
The thing about One Direction being an accident, sure, a manufactured accident, but an accident nonetheless, is that they were guileless going in, and it showed. I've been mainlining old videos this week, trying to compare those early xfactor days with their contemporaries who were trying to break out around the same time. With everyone else, it was always a band full of Liams: intensely driven little freaks. Sorry, freak is maybe too mean a word to describe that particular mix of hunger and desperation to be accomplished, to be famous, and at the bottom of it all: to be liked. There's been a conscious shaping of the persona in service of those goals: they've learned to dance, to perform, to give pitches, soundbites, hit camera marks on cue. Most of them were also older, in their early to mid twenties. It's not inconceivable to imagine such a trajectory for the most diehard theatre kid you knew from school who decided after uni or whatever ~ to follow their dreams ~. That was the more typical boyband background. (not Liam though. lad was fourteen. he was closer to another subspecies of the genus: the child star)
And 1D in contrast were unpracticed, unstudied, as Zayn put it in that slightly off-kilter way of his (which I always imagine to be indicative of a disjunction between the vocabulary one encounters in school and what everyone around them is used to speaking), "novice children."
Like, truly, they did not give a fuck cos it hadn't yet occurred to them they were supposed to. Liam aside, industry norms were a complete mystery to them, and for many years, they managed to inhabit that sweet spot of flippancy without contempt, whether it was about the project, themselves, or their audience. Liam tells the story about being the go-between for xfactor stylists and the boys and getting into so much trouble on their behalf for wearing human-sized babygrows during a video diary. "Because Westlife would never wear those." [The punchline he then delivers is that Westlife members were pictured wearing onesies soon after. (quite possibility due to how viral anything 1D-related got)]
The boys were so immature. The whole boyband thing had fallen into their laps. They were just happy to be there! This thing that they didn't even know they wanted, they somehow got, and it took the shape of four other boys in exactly the same situation. It comes across very strongly how taken they were with themselves and each other. Find yourself a guy who looks at you the way blah Larry Stylinson blah blah Ziam blah blah blah. Never mind that cos they were all actually so hyped with each other. Any time any of them says anything remotely clever, or funny, or notable, the rest of them lose their shit like they're in on the same hilarious joke. Even if there was no actual joke. Their entire existence at that point was the joke bc how on earth had they landed from where they'd been — small deadend towns hollowing out from deindustrialization — to where they ended up — the xfactor house headed for the very top about to win it all, in the way they did — saved from bootcamp elimination at the last minute, with who they did — four other working class boys they would have never been friends with in another life. It must have been a high like a kind of limerence, like finding long lost family members on the exact same wavelength, like love.
And that was the other key thing about the stratospheric rise of One Direction. We didn't love One Direction only because we loved this or that member. We loved them because they loved each other, because they loved themselves, because they loved us. And they used the internet to show it.
In 2010, mass social media platforms were in their nascence, which is to say, the exploration of how to be a person, with other people, online, at a broad level not limited to specific subcultures, was in its nascence. For many years now, given the levels of extreme over-exposure, the dominant mood has become the mortifying ordeal of being perceived and so on. We've somehow all adopted mini-celebrity mindsets of our own, weary of being exposed to the maw of an unseen public. To be known is to be surveilled.
But the boys individually and at the collective level invited surveillance back then. Because the inverse — to the surveilled is to be known — seemed more relevant for that moment, at the beginning. They made a point of living their newfound lives at least partially online.
They were constantly on twitter, they livestreamed with a dedication that rivaled x-factor video producers, and none more so than Liam. It was already reality tv, this was just the next bleeding edge of "real": the unfiltered, unedited, direct sharing of yourself and what you loved in the last days of the old free-as-in-freedom internet.
When they said, over and over again, that it was all about the fans, it was meant in a very literal sense. Social media and the reality it created produced a feedback loop between the love they had for each other and the band, and the love we had for them, until it was inseparable: their relationships, our relationships, the process itself. Parasociality as it is currently manifested might have found its first mass expression through One Direction.
In separate interviews from This is Us (2013) deleted scenes, Liam and Louis say that Zayn wears his heart on his sleeve. Yet within the best-friends-slash-brothers-for-life schema cultivated as the One Direction vibe, he did not seem necessarily exceptional in his frequent declarations of love and fellow-feeling for various band mates. What he did ultimately end up doing was pulling the trigger on the contractual form their relationships were bound within, such that the I-love-you's inevitably passed from unpracticed to rote to a mandatory matter of their livelihoods. Someone had to be the first to explicitly and consciously decide that this "love" was no longer something they could continue participating in.
From the same set of deleted interview, in a somewhat fitting twist of symmetry, Louis and Zayn go on and on (much longer than Niall or Harry) about how Liam had been the serious and sensible one, but they've managed to corrupt him a little. It makes sense to assume that Zayn is referring to the band in general, but one can also read it to mean the two of them specifically, being the eldest, and their meta-cognition of the terms and conditions imposed by One Direction as a phenomenon.
The love the members of One Direction had for each other and the band and the fans was undeniably "real." The making of that "realness" was conditioned by the x factor throwing together four boys who had very little reference for what the fuck they had gotten themselves into, and Liam. Liam was the intermediary. He was already a creature twisted up and contorting, trying his level best to wedge himself into whatever spaces there could be found in the juggernaut of the entertainment industry. His neuroses and anxieties made the rest of One Direction possible, made One Direction "real" and "not like the other boybands" because that DNA, that what-not-to-do instruction manual could just be crammed into him, and the rest of them could be let loose into the world, unburdened by expectation, free to not give a fuck.
Louis and Zayn's raw, unpolished, typo-ridden letters were the most direct and irrefutable way they knew to swear fidelity to the boy they knew, the band they built, and the lives they lived together. The unfathomable ether of the internet, of the fans, of the massed publics seen and unseen made them, it destroyed their senses of self in ways they could weather until they couldn't, and it's into this ether they send their words, their grief, something real of themselves. Because in the universe of One Direction, this is the orthopraxis by which one proclaims one's faith and one's hopes. This is the prayer place that transcends distance, time, even death. This is how their brother could somehow, some way, still feel their love.
Liam Payne / Joan Didion / Milan Kundera
they were just normal guys but terrible terrible dancers
The glue that holds One Direction together is Liam – a man who could easily be your boyfriend and your Dad at the same time in the least creepy way possible this sentence is terrible. But really, he wants to make sure you’re okay out there, because he actually gives a shit when he’s performing. He took the time to carefully get someone’s phone from the crowd and take a selfie, read some signs out to his fans and worked hard to make sure we appreciated their backing band. - projectu.tv
don't ever look up what your childhood friends are up to now!!!!!!!!!! like girl you're a nuclear safety engineer. i put on matching socks today. we played tag a thousand years ago.
honestly look at the bright side at least you’re not 14
I’M NOT FOURTEEN!!!!!!
oh no i’m seeing cycles and recurring themes in my own life
Imagining what could have been
hey. come closer.
do you understand.
Liam died alone in a hotel room trying to drown out the all the pain he carried in his heart and soul, thinking the world and his fans hated him. He never got the chance to heal, make amends and find his peace. It all feels so unresolved and unfair and I hate how this all unfolded I hate it so much.
Oh anon - I'm sending you a lot of love. There's a lot to work through here and I do encourage you to feel what you feel. The lack of resolution is really hard and it will take time.
I agree with you that Liam lost the chance to heal and make his peace. There's something so heartbreaking about knowing that he might have survived this night. He would still be in a lot of distress, but living brings chances with it.
I don't know if it helps or not, but we don't know what he thought. He may have thought fans and the world hated him - he may not have been thinking about that and been thinking about much more personal that had nothing to do with fans or the world. It can be useful to recognise when we're telling a story - and understanding that the story we're telling isn't necessarily true.
*******
Like with the Gemma anon I just got - I am going to respond to some of what you say that I disagree with. I don't think that's incompatible with saying that you allowing space for your feelings is important. One of the risks of writing things down and sharing them - is that people will have a range of views.
I have really struggled with the way that fandom talks about amends, and I couldn't publish this without talking a little bit about why I've struggled with what other people are saying. I invite people not to read any further if that sounds like a stressful topic for them.
The way fandom talks about amends doesn't connect with the way I think about it - and the way I have thought about it when responding to abusive men. Fandom discussion has made 'amends' seem much more fixed - much more general - much more thingified than I understand them.
I would only ever talk about amends in a context where someone who had done harm had started towards accepting that harm and stopping. In my experience, talking about amends in any other context - misses the importance of those two steps and often acts on pressure for people (usually the person harmed) to ignore the fact that someone is still actively hurting people and actively in denial.
I think fandom discussion of amends has done that. I don't agree that Liam never got the chance to make amends. He chased Maya with an axe four years ago - he had a chance every day. One of Liam's last acts was to not pay sex workers.
If he'd lived he'd have had many more chances - and we don't know if he'd have ever taken them. And I think it's important that any attempt to discuss the interaction of his death and his abuse acknowledge all of that.
Ultimately - I don't think fandom discussion of amends adds anything to an understanding of what happened with Liam, what was lost with his death, or of abuse.
Before he died - I got an anon who was asking if they'd ever be able to be a fan again. I talked a lot about various things, but I ended with the idea that it was easier to grapple with this as a personal question than an ethical one:
I could be wrong, but I think the fundamental question here is about you and not Liam. I think your actual question is 'I still feel a lot about Liam and I’d like to be able to be a fan at his at the moment - but I don’t feel comfortable.’ If you accept that fandom is something that you do for your pleasure - then I think it becomes easier to answer this question. You can trust yourself to make this judgement.
I recognise now that I was talking about myself as well. When it comes to redemption - I think it's usually a lot more honest to talk about what we lost, rather than risk placing ourselves in the idea of a process that never happened and would have been none of our business.
So I'll end by saying - that I had so much affection for Liam and I would have loved to see signs that he was healing and recovering - and it's so sad that I never will.
i did not once ever have a full night’s sleep from 2013-2015. nothing new to say that hasn’t already been said but it was so fucking fun being a one direction fan while they were still releasing albums/touring. can’t even put it into words or describe it. u were constantly terrorized while also having the best time of ur life.
zayn using a photo of them as kids is really getting to me. does he still see them like that? i look at some people i’ve been friends with for years and see ourselves as the age we were when we became friends. my mental image is stuck there. this is fucking awful dude