Learning to love again
Thoughts on the OT7 reunion and BTS's 12th anniversary
Everyone says the world has changed
Thankfully, things between us still haven’t changed yet
- Life Goes On by BTS
When I originally started typing this up, I just came home from the J-hope concert screening, and it was D-21 until the reunion. I felt like it was high time I reckoned with my feelings around the enlistment years and what’s to come. In many ways, I felt like I was on a break, and now I was going back to my actual full-time job as a fan of theirs. Before that, I thought I should try to properly understand what their absence meant and what I could take from it.
I’ve had a lot of difficult emotions these past almost two years. Just to mention a few, I didn’t like all the solo releases by the members with the same passion, the company actively tried to destroy their legacy and the good name of everything BTS has built, the compulsive heterosexuality in some of their recent music and MVs was hard to swallow as a queer fan, and the company’s obsessive focus on the American market and pandering to the media there disgusts me. There’s also the fact that some staff and producers who have been with BTS from the start turned out to be frauds, hypocrites, or harmful people. I still firmly believe the members are authentic and unchanged, but it isn’t always easy to discern where the artist ends and where the company begins.
These were all the rational thoughts and worries I’ve been struggling with, things that made the wait difficult and burdensome. What I didn’t expect was that as June rolled around and we suddenly got four more members back (even though it was still D-10 until OT7), all of these concerns would suddenly become noise, then fade into the background, and the floodgates would open.
Truthfully, I have been in total denial about how much I missed BTS and how huge a hole they left in me. When they appeared on my screen again, not just their images from years ago, and I understood that they would be part of all my days again, I finally felt it. Up until that moment, I was unanchored, adrift, bereft, and lost my direction. I realized that I even distanced myself from BTS inside my mind from time to time because of how much it hurt to be apart.
If that sounds dramatic, let me explain that BTS is the scaffolding that’s been holding me up through some of the most difficult shit in my life. I dedicated tens of thousands of hours of my life to this group. Like, they were the last thing I listened to before they rolled me away to operate on my brain. I deliberated carefully which song I’d listen to last because it might as well become the last thing I’d ever hear (it was Mikrokosmos, the closing song of the then-current Love Yourself era’s concerts). I was so afraid that I wouldn’t wake up or would be forever changed, but I didn’t let myself despair because of the strength I gained through them. They also gave me the courage to end an abusive relationship that was slowly but surely destroying me. They motivated me to work hard and pursue promotions because I wanted to be able to afford more of their merch and albums. In the process, I ended up improving my circumstances beyond what I ever thought was possible for me. I developed skills, tirelessly worked on myself, and grew into this person I’m finally able to love, because I wanted to be more like them and someone they could be proud to have as a fan. They were the first thing I thought about after waking up and the last thing I thought about before going to sleep, for ten whole years.
Losing all that was traumatic, and I’m not using that word lightly or jokingly.
And now those old feelings of closeness are coming back. There was a wall between them and me for these two years, but it didn’t disappear brick by brick; I just blinked one day, and it suddenly wasn’t there. They haven’t even had any official activities together, and Yoongi still isn’t coming back for nine more days, but I already feel it coursing through me, probably because today is the anniversary.
I am supported and held up by them again. They’re there in my mind, and I can go back to laying my head down to sleep on their metaphorical chests every night.
The final distance vanished, I think, when I read Namjoon’s 0613 letter today.
Looking back,
it always felt so distant.
Every album, every project, every comeback.
How did I dare to engage in the act of creation and
confidently present myself?
Saying this is love,
this is us.
After resting for a year and a half, I can’t seem to
remember at all.
Even now, I still can’t see the path ahead.
I just try my best to find it each time.
I feel reassured and sad, and struck down by love when I think about how they felt exactly the same as I described above. He also wrote: “I have truly been waiting more than any of you, I waited and waited and waited” and “Once again, I’m going to try to go somewhere,/ though I don’t know where”.
It was so dumb and selfish of me not to even think about how I wasn’t the only one who was having doubts, who was suffering. I was so absorbed in my pain that I couldn’t look through it and understand that we’re in this together, too. That they likely felt just as unanchored and directionless. Would I have felt closer to them during these times if I just knew for sure that we were the same, even in our sadness and hurt over being apart?
Namjoon went on to say:
I like the book titled “An Experiment in Accurate Love”.
To be loved accurately and to love accurately.
That seemingly impossible task,
I’ve always wanted to achieve it.
What he wrote here resonates with something that I’m going through in my personal life, too. As we’re learning to love each other again with BTS, I’m also learning to love again in general, to be vulnerable, and how that feeling could hold value. I’ve been like an impossible-to-penetrate stone facade for years, and now that they’ve been back for a few days, I already cried publicly on a tram about how much I love BTS and how much I want to experience love again. I’m crumbling, or probably more accurately, the facade is crumbling. How could I forget the simple but devastating power these men hold?
Paradoxically, I’m the one who knows the least
about how accurately my love reaches you.
To receive your love accurately,
I think I’ve always lived by interpreting and trying to
align with it.
I’m often worried that I won’t be able to love anyone because of how much I love my idols, but the truth is more like, I won’t be able to love anyone if I can’t love my idols. I’m only just realizing now that every part of me felt like a barren wasteland while they were away. There was no way love could bloom there.
Loving someone so much is scary because what if their career from now on will cause me disappointment, sadness, grief, or won’t align with me in some way? But my idols are also teaching me a lesson about that, one that I’ve desperately needed at this exact moment in my life: that loving someone, putting all your faith in them, is terrifying but you still do it because you trust them not betraying you, and because by doing so you can win so big that the risks are kind of worth it.
I struggled so much with this thought since the last time I tried to love someone, and they set out to smother and snuff out all the beautiful and bright parts of me. It was impossible to believe that any risk at all could ever be acceptable, even if rewards awaited at the end. But I experienced a form of love through my idols that’s safe, that always comes back, and makes you more beautiful and brighter instead of taking away. This is probably the red-hot core of what I always mean when I talk about the transformative power of fandom, of loving someone and being loved by someone you haven’t even met in person.
Although we’re apart now
Our hearts are still the same, aren’t they?
Even if you’re not by my side
Even if I’m not by your side
We all know we’re still together
- Telepathy by BTS
I used to feel invincible every day because I’m a fan of theirs. It is fitting: the reason their name means Bulletproof Boys is because they’re supposed to be a shield that’s protecting us from everything that’s wrong and evil in the world. I feel a little bit of that protection again, I think. The sun shines just a little bit brighter, my mood can’t dip into depression, and maybe, just maybe, whatever life throws my way, I might be able to weather it somehow, right?
Rather than going back to my full-time job as a BTS fan, it’s more like waking up from a dream.
Welcome back, BTS 💜 We’ve been together for twelve years already, but in the immortal words of one Min Yoongi, let’s grow old together.
Note: I also love my other idols with an intense passion, but the bond you have with your first group, that's been with you through so much, that in many ways made you who you are, who changed the course of your life, is incomparable. Because I've been loving BTS for ten years, every cell in my body has changed since then, and I like to think that they're part of those new cells, the change they brought about in me being so deep and profound.
My other ult group is Stray Kids, and they're equally important to me in markedly different ways. They taught me different lessons and helped me through different trials in life, but they're just as significant. And I have five or six more groups I'd go through fire for, so I want to say here that the point of this piece isn't to imply that my other favorite idols were substitutes while BTS was away (I've even loved them side by side for years before BTS enlisted), it's to talk about how I feel about BTS and their return specifically. One day, I will write similar essays about what those other groups mean to me, but this month and this day are a sacred time for ARMY, and I wanted to honor that with this writing.
If you enjoyed reading this or related to any part of it, please leave a like and a comment, they truly make my day 💜
And before I go, have these two memes that I couldn’t just scroll past on Twitter!
Really resonated with so much of this 😭
This was beautifully written, Reka :)
I know the feeling of seeing the group together again after a long wait, can still remember how I counted down the last 100 days for ONF, and what joy it was to see them on screen again in their first post-military live.
The wait itself was both painful and full of hopeful anticipation. We had one member hold the fort and grow with us, I did some of the coolest pieces of fanart then.
Can say from experience that the company will likely mess up, time to time again, but it won't probably deter you from loving the guys. You also might find that they've grown into a bit different people than they used to be, since they were growing separately. If so, don't worry, you'll get to know them again :)