I wasn’t that bad when it started. I had been promoted out from under the manager who was driving me crazy; I had moved out of the apartment with dog piss on the floor; I had allowed myself to believe that these external changes meant things were definitely going to get better inside of my crazy head. The first time I listened to One Direction it was foggy in Los Angeles, night but a soft night, darkness you could wrap yourself up in.
I walked to the bus on my way to a friend’s apartment and got taken by storm: yeah the taste of your lips on the tip of my tongue is at the top of the list of the things I want. At the 2:17 mark in 18 the music, which has been spare, so far, solo vocals, acoustic guitar, swells all the way up, orchestral, and all five boys—the last record with five of them on it—come in on an aching harmony: I have loved you since we were 18 / long before we both thought the same thing.
The lyrics are mostly irrelevant but I can’t quote the music behind them at you, so they will have to do. What I am trying to say is: listening to One Direction felt like an inhale. Like the biological opposite of a sigh.
Or: this is my metaphor because when things happen in my head, I feel them in my throat. When my anxiety gets bad, which it was, that fall, that winter, all the following year, it feels like I’m choking no matter what I do. At first I’m afraid to swallow food. Eventually I become afraid to swallow air. I get thin. And then I get shaky.
On the one hand, I came down with a depressive episode because my brain is hardwired for depression, because it can’t manage its chemicals without help sometimes. One the other hand, I came down with this depressive episode because there were a lot of things I wanted that I wasn’t allowing myself to have—or even admit to wanting.
I wanted to leave the job entirely. I wanted to write full-time. I wanted someone to fall in love with me. I wanted to be less accommodating to friends and family and colleagues. I wanted everyone to notice that I was falling apart, like, really, really just coming apart at the seams, but without having to tell them that’s what was happening, you know?
I wanted someone to look at me, and know what I wanted, and then give it to me. A divine intervention in re: desire, which would allow me to pretend I hadn’t wanted anything in the first place. The feminine ideal of pure, generous grace. I could not ask, but I was allowed to receive.
Why wasn’t anyone giving me anything?
Later on the album there is a song called No Control. It’s about fucking. It’s about the ecstasy of submission, of giving yourself up and over to something: powerless / and I don’t care it’s obvious. It is my favorite One Direction song. It might be my favorite song. Do you know who’s allowed to want things? Fucking boys, that’s who. They can yell about it, they can harmonize about it, they can sell out a football stadium and tramp around the stage yelling “NO CONTROL! NO CONTROL!”
I could listen to them in my headphones. I could buy tickets to their concerts and drive six hours in hideous standstill rush hour traffic to be one of the girls shouting back to them “NO CONTROL, NO CONTROL.” I could not submit to my own desire but I could submit to theirs. I could submit myself to become part of their fandom, a screaming mass, subsumed in a rite of girlhood: the windows we find to slip through, the ways we find to give voice to our messy, needy, desperate selves.
I could spend the rest of my life writing essays about One Direction, about girlhood and boyhood and narratives of desire, about depression, about what it feels like to be so shit-scared to admit that you’re lonely that you stop allowing yourself to feel anything at all, just cut off the blood flow until everything goes numb. But it would just be me quoting lyrics at you, trying to use the words to make you understand what it feels like, what it felt like, why I look at a picture of Harry Styles and my heart beats out of time and I don’t think it’s stupid or embarrassing, anymore.
It’s easy to say: I was very depressed, and loving One Direction was a coping mechanism. It’s true, but it’s not—I mean, what I was coping with was not particularly wanting to be alive. Coping sounds like a weak word until it’s all you can do. I was grappling. I was grasping. When I think about the fact that I will willing to grab onto anything, to find something that felt worth clawing my way back for—sorry but, it was brave. Loving One Direction is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Loving anything is the bravest thing I’ve ever done. It taught me how to be tender again. It was the first step in learning how to let myself survive.
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