Redefining "Belonging"

Image description: The BTS concert held in SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles, California on 11/27/21; this is the view from my seat as I looked out into the crowd near the end of the show. All the lights you see are individual lightsticks held by people in the crowd as we awaited BTS's encore. Today, I'd like to share a little bit about this experience and the incredible ways it changed me.

 

Content Warning: Mentions of depression, grief, and loss of a pet

As 2021 comes to an end, I find myself approaching one of my favorite times of the year (Christmas) and one of my least favorite times of the year (New Year’s) far faster than seems possible. My family knows that I find New Year’s Eve a rather uncomfortable holiday, mostly because it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of looking forward blindly without knowing what will happen – being caught up in a wave of optimism without considering that we will face both highs and lows. For all my trepidations about New Year’s Eve and my attempts to not fall into this trap, I’ll admit I did exactly that last year at this time, eagerly awaiting the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021.

During various posts in 2020, I made a point of discussing how the year was not entirely wasted, and the valuable lessons I myself learned that I hoped others might draw inspiration from. But even so, for as productive or content as I managed to make myself throughout the year, things nevertheless began weighing on me the longer the year stretched on. I couldn’t help but be tired of it by the time December rolled around and found myself eagerly anticipating 2021, despite my misgivings about the expectations many had for it or about the general act of looking ahead without knowing what was going to occur. As it turned out, the usual reasons why I dread New Year’s proved eerily accurate; 2021 turned out to be one of the worst years of my life.

If you’ve read my posts recently, you know that October 2021 forced me to say goodbye unexpectedly to my beloved cat Hermione, my companion for over half my life. Losing Hermione not only sent me into grief-fueled depression, but left me actively questioning my identity. Over the past few years, there haven’t been many things in my life that have been constant, but being Hermione’s caretaker was a huge one. Being responsible for her and aware of her needs felt like an important purpose for me, a level of stewardship that I was more than happy to take on. To no longer have that left me feeling like all my actions were pointless, and that in turn made me feel guilty for making her passing all about me, both of which made my depression even worse.

But as I was in this tunnel, there was an unexpected light waiting at the end of it, an adventure I wasn’t expecting to undertake – seeing BTS live in concert for the very first time. In order to explain the true significance of this or why it felt like such a miracle, I need to take you back – yes, back to 2020, to the place I think we’d all agree to skip over if we had a time machine. Although the concert itself happened just under a week ago, the voyage to get here took a lot longer, even well before 2020. So for today, my last actual post of 2021 (with only my year wrap-up to go before we say goodbye to this year), I would like to take you on that journey with me and ask the question – what does it mean to belong?

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Being a sex-repulsed aromantic asexual, I have grown rather accustomed to the feeling of never quite belonging anywhere. It’s a topic I’m sure many of you, if you read my blog regularly, have likewise grown accustomed to hearing me discuss. Media of all kinds usually makes me feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome, and even for media I do find accessible, more often than not I end up struggling to find purchase in their associated fandoms for very long. While media does not owe me anything, it is nevertheless disheartening to always feel like an outsider in so many of the things I see or do.

Fast-forward to February of 2020, when I launched this blog and became a member of BTS’s fandom ARMY on the very same day. The instant comfort and safety I found in BTS and their music, not to mention the fortuitous discovery that they were having a concert less than half an hour away from where I live, made it an easy choice to purchase concert tickets for their 2020 Map of the Soul world tour. And within a few weeks of me buying those tickets, the world changed. Naturally, the entire tour was postponed – at first on a temporary basis and then indefinitely, before eventually being canceled officially in August of 2021 (yes, we were on pause for a while). Of course, having a tour postponed is on the extreme low end of things that happened to people during the pandemic, but it was nevertheless a tough pill to swallow, one that got tougher and tougher as time went on. If you read my post about the lessons I learned from 2020, written in November of that year, you know the conviction I eventually developed that I would never get to experience being with BTS at a live performance. Throughout 2020, seeing them became something of a golden dream for me, and it felt both beautiful and completely unattainable for a variety of reasons – COVID restrictions not getting any better, potential required military service for BTS as Korean men, etc. Even when the latter was temporarily cleared up, the former was not, but that didn’t stop me from going into 2021 with that blind optimism I mentioned earlier.

2021 crushed my optimism quickly. Obviously, the real heartbreak of this year didn’t come until much later, but even as early as the first few months of the year, I found myself in the usual patterns of feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere. This started first with watching the Grammys, a very uncomfortable and disappointing night of my life that I was able to turn into a meaningful moment through sheer power of will alone, but only after it first lingered in my head for nearly a month. The next several months were then spent feeling, as always, completely alienated even within my own fandoms, until I felt isolated and alone. As I mentioned earlier, this all culminated in my concert being officially canceled in August of this year after an extremely tough summer in which it felt like all the self-confidence I had built up in 2020 came crashing down around my ears.

And then, rather suddenly, came an unexpected announcement a month after: the boys would be doing four in-person concerts in Los Angeles, California. Needless to say, this was a shock – and one that arrived in my life right when I needed it. Believe me when I tell you that I’m one of the unluckiest people you’ll ever meet, so I honestly had no confidence that I would come out successful in the scramble to purchase tickets. I was even less confident that I would be able to purchase tickets specifically for the first night, which quickly became the new dream to replace my old Map of the Soul golden dream. I wanted nothing more than to see them the first night they returned to the stage after two years, but the notion of traveling all the way to LA was terrifying. Everyone around me supported me, however, their encouraging words mirroring the words in my own mind – “You have to go.”

There are so many layers here that show me how blessed I am, something it was often easy to forget this past year. The fact that I had the means to take advantage of this opportunity at all is a true privilege that I’m always grateful for; furthermore, I am extremely grateful that I not only had the emotional support from the people around me, but that my parents were actively willing to help me along with anything I needed to make the dream come true. And seriously, don’t ask me how I was lucky enough to get tickets at all, because I honestly can’t tell you. How ever it happened, I managed to convince myself to take the chance and it paid off. My life became a mess shortly after the joy and anticipation of getting tickets, but having this on the horizon was the only thing that got me out of bed some mornings.

The week leading up to the concert was the most nervous and excited I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’m something of a nervous traveler and, as I mentioned earlier, going alone had me very anxious. But somehow I managed to swallow the fear, knowing I would have a good time (and suspecting it might even be the best moment of my life), but also feeling like I couldn’t really share it with anyone, as is my usual experience in fandom. I was extremely surprised, therefore, to feel like I belonged amid the crowd. I fully expected to have a very insulated experience, and while some of that was only natural given I was on my own, there was a sense of togetherness that I have never felt in my fandom life, and have only rarely experienced in my life in general. To experience that in an enormous stadium full of lights and noise was remarkable. For as surreal and dreamlike an experience as it was, it also felt right – as if for three hours or so, everything made sense and I was where I was supposed to be.

Image description: Another shot of the crowd and their lightsticks. Although it is a bit hard to see in this picture, the lights in the stands spell out "BTS" and the lights in the floor seats spell out "ARMY," the name of BTS's fandom.

“Belonging” is the only way I can really think to describe it, and that is not a word I throw around lightly. I am endlessly grateful for the amazing people in my life who help me feel like I do have belonging and support, but whenever I leave that safe and comfortable bubble, I immediately feel like I can’t possibly belong anywhere else. But on that day, I was part of the amazingly diverse tapestry of people who were all united by our common love of BTS and our journey to see and support them. We were all able to trust each other and connect on that common ground, and thus I felt welcome in a way I very rarely do.

Beyond that, of course, I was there to see BTS - the seven young men who have given so much to me - and to try and give back to them in some small way. While describing the experience to a good friend of mine, I mentioned how tough I find it to explain why BTS is so meaningful to me. I’ve tried many times on this blog, but I also feel it’s difficult for people to truly understand unless they're in the middle of it. For so many people (myself included), the rawness and honesty of BTS and their message have truly helped us love ourselves; for me, they gave me something I’d been silently craving for so long – safety, and the idea of being understood, even by people whose experiences are so different from mine.

Part of why the concert was so beautiful was because it clearly demonstrated why those distinctions don’t matter. I live a very different life from the members of BTS – we’re from different places, for the most part we speak different languages, and they are internationally-recognized performers while I get nervous simply traveling to go see such a performance. But when they were on stage and I was in the audience, I was reminded that those things don’t matter. I often describe BTS’s leader RM as the “male Korean rapper version of myself,” but those distinctions don’t matter – our differences in gender, language, or situation don’t change the fact that we’re similar. And I felt that way about the crowd as well. I live a very different life from most people there, but even just for that night, I could feel like I belonged, like I deserved to be there as much as anyone else. For as surreal and dreamlike an experience as it was, it also felt completely right, like everything in that moment made sense.

This truly hit me as we approached the end of the concert. While most of the night was full of excitement and energy, I couldn’t help but get emotional as I sat there amid the light of everyone’s lightsticks, waiting to see how the concert would end. When “We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal” started – a song I’ve mentioned on this blog before as one I find deeply emotional – I broke down into literal weeping. “We shout without fear, ‘bring it on.’ Our first fight against the world, don’t want to die. But so much pain, too much crying,” the song says about their journey, and ours as their fans. After the past several months (and longer), I felt this all more acutely than ever before and let the emotion wash over me, reflecting on how much they and their music have helped me. This was followed by “Answer: Love Myself,” another song that has had a deep personal impact on me. These two songs felt like exactly what I needed to hear – reminding me that I can overcome my hardships and love myself. I’ll never forget standing there with tears streaming down my face, thinking, “this is the greatest night of my life.”

Image description: Another shot of the lightsticks spelling out "BTS" and "ARMY" before the encore

I’ve spent a lot of 2021 trying to be proud of myself – whether in my first anniversary post or the aforementioned Grammy post or the literal post about pride that I did for Pride Month. And for as many times as I’ve tried to feel pride, there are just as many times that I've ended up feeling shame instead. But on that night, I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say that all the shame I felt seemed to matter so much less. In his closing speech of the concert, RM discussed something very similar. “I remember the rage, the anxiety, the desperation for the past two years,” he said, referring to not being able to perform, and then discussing the strange feeling of being on the bus to come to the stadium for practice that morning. “As I looked out the window, it all felt like nothing.” I love the way he phrased that – not that those emotions weren’t real, not that they didn’t matter, but the implication that he could set these feelings aside and move forward. They’re a part of him, just as my own negative emotions are part of me; but like him, I also feel like I can put them behind me and let them control me less moving forward.

I don’t kid myself into thinking this feeling can be one hundred percent duplicated at all times. I guarantee there will be just as many fandom problems, or times when I feel unwelcome in my fandom spaces, including this one (in fact, I was feeling a lot of fandom frustration shortly before the concert that I plan to discuss in more detail in future posts). But I think that’s the really spectacular thing about this feeling of belonging; it didn’t erase the pain I’ve felt in the past, and it didn’t exist in spite of it, but rather because of it. At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that 2021 was shaping up to be one of the worst years of my life, and the reasons for that still stand. But in the strange way that life tends to function, the worst day of my life and the best day of my life were within a few weeks of one another. But maybe that makes sense.

This concert helped me relearn that being “perfect” is not what makes things or people or life in general “great”; rather, what makes things great is that they’re meaningful. As I stood there cheering or weeping or dancing or singing, I felt that all so clearly. And that leads me back to the question I asked earlier – what does it mean to belong? I had the extraordinary experience of “belonging” being a place, a moment, a group of people, and a feeling, all in one night. But beyond those things, I think I’ve come to define “belonging” as a state of mind above all.

About a week before the concert, BTS performed live at the American Music Awards, where they went on to win all four of the awards they were nominated for, including the night’s top prize of Artist of the Year. During his part of the acceptance speech, group member Jungkook said the award felt like the beginning of a new chapter, and after my own experiences seeing them live, I feel like I really understand what he meant by this. I think we’ve all reached the point where, whatever happens moving forward after COVID, we’ll never quite be able to go back to the way things were before. Such is life.

In my case, it’s tempting to look at the concert as a return to the good feelings I had during the early part of 2020 and see it as a fulfilment of my dreams at long last. And although it is indeed a fulfilment of my dream, I know too that I’ve returned from the concert back into a world and a life that is very different from the one I experienced in early 2020. I won’t lie and say I’m okay with that yet, because I’m not, and naturally one concert isn’t the magical cure-all that makes everything in my life rosy. But because of it – because of BTS, because of the sense of belonging I felt, and because of the things the concert awoke in me – so many of my struggles feel far more manageable than they did before, and that is a true gift. Something that’s always inspired me about BTS’s theme of “love yourself” is the notion of continuity – that as we learn and grow, we evolve, but we stay ourselves; that even the mistakes we made or the things we regret are part of our story, and can become beautiful if we believe in ourselves. For me, the concert was about belonging in a time and a space and a group of people, but it was also about belonging within myself and believing in my place in the world.

I know there will be times when this doesn’t stick, just like I made many efforts this year to feel proud only to watch them blow up in my face. I know there will be many times when I struggle with depression or anxiety, or when life hands me something that feels too difficult to bear, because again, such is life. But I hope that, for a long time to come, I remember that on November 27th, 2021, I pushed myself to do something I didn’t think I had in me to achieve a dream I had started to think was impossible. When I look back on this, I will know the effort was worth it. Earlier, I mentioned this being a light at the end of a tunnel, another feeling that RM echoed in his opening speech. “We’ve been in a tunnel for two years, and now we can see the light,” he said, looking out at the sea of glowing lightsticks. “And here are my 50,000 lights.” So even in the times when I struggle, I'll always get to know that I was one of those lights. And I’ll always get to remember the feeling of finally knowing what it means to belong.