#mesies

hey honey, i’ve been sitting on this for a few days, ruminating.

and the thing is, i think a lot of zayn’s discussion about his time in 1d is a.) highly edited and re-contextualized by the people presenting his words to fit their own story and b.) always gonna be messy and clouded by the fact that he was in love with something and that something (even if not the someone’s involved in that something) hurt him.

we’d never begrudge that to anyone else in another situation! we’d never say “hey, the way you talk about a complicated past relationship you had when you were a 17 year old now that you’re out of it is really not straight forward and simple.” it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, dove. esp given that zayn endures the most critical lens of his words and self as a soft, vocal artist of color.

i do think that feeling a strangeness in terms of your own relationship to ot5 is very very understandable. i know i blogged about it at the time of. but i struggled so much in a scary way with the idea that i had a mistaken view of reality, that i had manufactured something in my head about the five of them, and led to the hurt or dehumanization of them.

what i came to is this:

your feelings are real. what you felt for them and with them and through them is as real as it gets. your feelings and memories are inside of you and you cannot help how you interpreted events given your perspective or knowledge at the given time events occurred. you can’t second guess or berate yourself too much on it. you tried your best.

what the lads felt as kids, as people growing into themselves, was real too. they expressed it as they could, and we saw it as we could, through the filtered lens that ot5 had available to them and that they felt comfortable with. we will never know the details of what went on intimately between them as friends and co-wokers. that’s theirs to keep, and honestly. i want them to have it. 1d has been chewed up and spit out and chewed up again so many times by the media, by friends, by their own fans - i want them to have something for themselves.

what’s the question you have to ask is this: is the part of your fan experience that you created, with the things, the love that they did give you, more important than what they didn’t?

because i think at the end of the day, that’s what i come back to. they’re flawed, human, celebrity artists, and they make me mad and confused as hell, yeah, but the one thing i know is that they loved me. and i know i made something beautiful by sharing that love with other people.