Call Anything A Comeback!
Except now I’m 30 but still have cystic acne
Anything Can Be A Comeback If You Went Somewhere (Including a 2 Year+ Hiatus) (Welcome Back!) 🌻
In April, I turned thirty, which felt incredible (I made it!) and also implausible (I made it?). And maybe that’s why in the weeks since, I’ve thought a lot about love, because what is love if not those two things?
When I was a teenager, somebody, either my sister or my mother, told me, “Sometimes I don’t know how to love you.” It dug a groove into my brain that went so deep I believed that it was a fact, not just something somebody said. Why don’t they know how to love me? Because I’m me!
Now, with distance (though not forgiveness), I’ve begun to consider a different interpretation—that maybe they were unwittingly saying the brutal truth out loud: We aren’t born knowing how to love people. We learn.
Here, I think about what Kim Namjoon (also known as RM, the leader of BTS) wrote in a letter that he posted on Weverse in March, reflecting on Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving: “When it comes to love, the most important thing in a person's life, why do we just try do it, with no skill, no practice?” (Thank you, Internet Stranger, for translating this far better than Weverse ever could.)
Learning how to love somebody involves you hurting them and them hurting you—not because you want to, but because that’s what learning anything involves: mistakes. Mistakes! So many mistakes! (Me in my Korean class, after our teacher told us her fridge was empty: 음악을 사 보세요! TRY BUYING MUSIC!)
So of course with love, we mess up. It’s just that what we mess up is each other. And we treat that as a problem, when in fact, it’s a foundational premise of love.
What kind of cosmic joke is that?
In his letter, RM wonders about the love between an artist and their fans: “What does the person making music make, and what do the people listening to the music hear? What are we gazing at, what are we loving?”
It’s a two-way exchange: Artists share with us a fully realized expression of themselves, and because we receive it as such, we idealize it and, often, them.
One recent Friday night, my friend M and I talked about this in our WhatsApp thread:
M, succinct: and what does it mean to love an incomplete/idealised image of someone & how does that reflect the intimacy of those relationships?
Me, not: you can argue that as fans, we see artists at their best selves, in terms of they’re showing themselves to us through their art, and simultaneously, that could mean we’re seeing so little of them—paradoxically! even as they bare their souls! because they’re still in control of that baring! versus the love of knowing somebody is fucking terrifying because you CAN’T control how they see you!
One cynical interpretation of a fan is somebody who plays themselves: As a fan, I can’t just appreciate an artist, I have to idealize them too. I put them on a pedestal because they are proof that perfection exists. I discount anything that contradicts how I imagine them, even when it comes from them. It doesn't adhere to why I love them, so how could it be real?
And then, there is a generous interpretation: A fan is somebody who sees the ideal of the artist but knows that behind it is a real person, unknown and imperfect. I understand that the artist, both as an artist and an individual, will do things that they didn't do yesterday, and that the version of them who does those things might be unrecognizable to me. But I do not hold that against them. Why would I? I believe in them.
It makes me wonder if skilled love, love imbued with practice, rests in the tension between idealization and generosity—the acknowledgment that while I know you, I only know a few of the Yous contained in your universe. I appreciate that mystery, but I don’t want to solve it. I want us to keep making each other feel more possible.
Intimacy hands you a hammer, points at the illusion of yourself that you built, and says, Smash it. That is an awful amount of power, awful in all definitions of the word: enormous and terrifying, but also awe-inducing. RM’s question: “What are we gazing at, what are we loving?” Each other, through the mess we made.
Me to T, a profound realization: “I don’t think I can casually date somebody.”
T, who has known me since middle school: “You can’t.”
I haven’t spoken with my family for over four years now, and I don’t plan on changing that. When somebody says they love you but they keep hurting you, they apologize but they don’t change, they say they’re learning but they’re not—that’s not love. Regardless of who it is—that’s not love. Regardless of whether they can claim you as family—that’s not love.
Yes, estrangement is a choice, but it didn’t feel like one to me. It felt like the one remaining door in a narrow corridor suffocating me.
Some people won’t understand why I cut ties with my family: They’re your family! And I respect that. To those people, I only ask that you respect what I understood: that if I stayed, there would have been nothing left of me.
Because of my family, I didn’t know the distinction between suffering and pain. Now, I think about it like this: Suffering is senseless. It makes you succumb. Pain, on other hand, isn’t spiritually destructive; it may overwhelm you, but it doesn’t erase you. (This is not to romanticize pain, or dismiss it as “just” pain.)
The only way I can’t hurt you is if I don’t know you. (Or don’t use social media to attack you, a stranger.) Love asks us to have the maturity to acknowledge that it’s not a question of if we’ll hurt each other, but when. But making peace with that inevitability—seeing it as a fact rather than a failure—isn’t an invitation for complacency. The people who understand that? Those are the ones worth staying for.
Practicing love requires paying attention, an act that the philosopher Simone Weil saw as sacred: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” How else can you explain that we were once strangers to the people we love and who love us? Some people just make sense in our souls.
Sometimes, I have days where I’m around people and feel as though my skin is crawling up inside itself. It’s so exposed; I’m so exposed. Because somebody paying attention for no ulterior motive other than love—holding that power, just holding it, not holding it over me? I still struggle to believe it.
But then, if I don’t let you see me, how will I ever see you?
And I want to see you.
“Love is a determined resolution, a promise and a decision,” RM writes in his letter. Those words—resolution, promise, decision—emphasize that love is work. Love requires work. And honestly? It should. Otherwise what are we doing with each other?
So I choose to believe in a world where we can and do grow through love. I don’t want to stay inside that dented groove in my brain anymore; I spent two decades doing that, thinking that if all I did was survive, that would be enough of a life. But it’s not, and I don’t want to waste any more of my time.
So no, RM sings on “No. 2” :
No lookin back, no,
No lookin back, no
No lookin back
Don’t look back no more
In other words: Practice. (UGH.)
Also, if your fridge is empty, you should really buy food before you buy music.
음식 = food
음악 = music
🫰
The Best Little Bean: Aoife ✨
Say hi! Her name is pronounced eee-fuh. She is a chaos muppet angel. Follow me, but mainly her, here on Instagram!
Small Good Things ☀️
“I Gotta A Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas. While calling it a song is generous, it also quite possibly the most genius thing ever written: “Fill up my cup. MAZEL TOV!”
What I overheard a woman tell her friends, with complete sincerity, that she once told her ex-boyfriend Alex (who she had to pay off with $15,000 because of a water leak in her home and some light litigation): “Come to Estonia! Consult, intern!”
This subject line of a fundraising email from a politician: “Here's the truth:” with nothing else. What is the truth, why is it missing, and why might it involve Ben Affleck?
Developing a personal conspiracy theory (mine: Astronauts can’t be conspiracy theorists) and sharing the highlights with coworkers: They’ve seen the universe. Also, they seem chill.
The Spotify algorithm, specifically a week before I turned 30, for putting Blanket Kick on my shuffle playlist (the intro is a little Sugar Ray; the vibe is like peak early/mid-2000s California crunchy production) and making me realize that Butter and Dynamite are Trojan horse liars about BTS
A friend who makes you a four hour playlist of her favorite BTS songs so you can correct your mistakes (M is that friend)
Stress vacuuming and blasting Incubus on noise-cancelling headphones
Slow North’s Of the Sea candle, for ocean air and a sea salt soul
Setting #SMART Goals: I will pass into the next life with one of Round Lab’s vita niacinamide sheet masks permanently glued to my face
Establishing dominance: Scream in a trap of aerial yoga silks! (Do you know BTS?) (I DO NOW!)
Simone Weil, from Gravity and Grace: “I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”
(Me to Aoife, as she tried to make the book a snack: “AOIFE STOP CHEWING SIMONE WEIL.”)
I have never been to Estonia, and I hear job prospects there, paid and unpaid, are looking up. MAZEL TOV!
welcome back!!!!!
welcome to the 30 club 💜 happy to see you back