A quick disclaimer before we begin.
The following creative nonfiction deals a lot with my mental health, the issues I've always had with it, and some of my current successes with it. This entry is not to be taken as me confessing that I'm crazy, that I need to be carted away or see a shrink. I have been evaluated by health professionals and while I am of sound mind, growing up with lots of expectations means that you have to put the mental legwork in as an adult to be normal. Fortunately, this is something I have done. I am not sick, I am not dying, the world is not ending. While everything is not always rainbows and butterflies, as this entry explains, I am totally okay and doing well.
Bottom line, fam: I am fine, I am not in any danger, and there is no reason for anybody to worry or freak out. If you think I'm looking at you, I'm looking at you.
The following creative nonfiction also makes reference to, but does not DIRECTLY mention outright, a major issue in the K-Pop industry stemming from an incident that took place nearly two years ago. (If you know what it is, then you know. If you don't, I'm sure you can Google that.) While I am brave enough to write about how far I have come regarding my own issues with the incident, I will not permit discussion about the issue in the comments; as such comments on this post will not be allowed. Any comments elsewhere of that nature (Facebook, Twitter, etc) will be deleted. In addition, please do not reach out to me personally or in my DMs regarding this issue. It is still MAJORLY triggering for me. Please respect me and my boundaries.
Thank you.
Initiation
(a really really really creative nonfiction)
The morning will come again
No darkness, no season is eternal
She taps her pencil against the desk. “So, remind me again why we’re recruiting you?”
And I look at my feet and I try to think of an answer that will make her happy. I’m leaning forward on this folded chair, hands in my lap, staring at the floor like it’s going to swallow me whole. I’m a Millennial feeling out of place, like I’m six years too late to this party, like I need to be yeeted out of existence. Her tapping at the desk, the flickering lamp over our heads, the bare walls -- none of this is helping my anxiety. You wouldn’t think this was practically an army recruiting room. It feels more like an interrogation, like I’ve been brought in by the police and I’m supposed to confess to a crime. But the only crime I can think of is that I’ve suffered for almost two years now, with no end in sight.
At least until recently.
“Well?” She stares at me, and I bow my head again. I don’t know why I feel shame. I suppose it’s because they’ve always taught me I should feel shame. I should feel silly to be here, asking for help like this. But when I twist the ring around my left ring finger, I remember, and I look up.
“My name is Emily Ann Imes, and I am applying to be in the ARMY, the official fanbase of BTS. I am old enough to be a product of the SM Generation. In the relatively earlier days of K-Pop, there was nobody else other than SM. No matter where you went, it was Super Junior, f(x), and especially Girls Generation. And then there was my band. I honestly don’t like boy bands at all. It comes with being a professional musician. But this boy band? For some reason, they were mine, and I supported them no matter what. Until the unthinkable happened.”
I take a deep breath. “Do you remember the year where spring never came?”
--
On December 18, 2017, I got a song stuck in my head.
It started as a reminder. This was your favorite song by them, wasn’t it? So I listened to it, and then to all of their old songs, and then it continued onward. No matter where I went, or what I was doing, I would have a song by my favorite boy band stuck in my head. When I woke up, it would be a new song. When I went to bed, there would be something different in my head. And I enjoyed it for a long time. It was a way for me to absorb the seriousness of the situation, for me to remember and be happy and make my own peace about the tragedy.
Until SM decided peace wasn’t in the cards for any of us.
Images haunt me more than songs do. I can do okay with most songs, even if they hold sad memories for me. But even the fleeting image of an empty stage, with an unused microphone in the center, hit home for me. And it felt like I was being left behind. How can SM make it seem so easy to move on from all of this? I haven’t moved on. I don’t think anybody has moved on. What kind of a package is this, wrapped all up in a bow? This isn’t what I want.
The music in my ears wouldn’t stop. The images wouldn’t leave my head. And it started driving me insane.
From a young age, I knew that I had it “easy.” I knew that there would be millions of people who would never have a career in music, for various reasons. I had these expectations on myself that I would succeed in their place, that everybody would live vicariously through me. Growing up a savant meant that the expectations of others always outweighed what I wanted. By the time I ever knew what I wanted, it didn’t matter anymore.
So I got good at hiding it. I changed up my art and started playing it safe. My plan was (and still kind of is) to go to graduate school, get a better music degree, then settle down with my boyfriend in his house and live happily ever after. Not famous. Not talented. So I could take care of people and not be triggered by empty microphones that still haunted me. And there is always someone needing help. If it’s not the hurricane who helped me drop my idol career, it’s my cat snake of a best friend who keeps playing the damsel in distress. And of course she learns about the music in my head, because I have nowhere else to turn, and she falls in love with a band that now triggers me.
Every time I get a second to breathe, I blink and there is more chaos. She has dropped her glass in the kitchen, and I must go clean up the pieces again because she can’t. It’s easier for her to pull me into her bedroom to watch another video with them in it than it is to kick her out, make her live in her car. And I stay quiet and I smile and I don’t show that I’m falling apart, because that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?
She asks me what my dream is. What is my dream? God, I don’t know anymore, to play piano for Mike or something, right? I feel like I’m two steps away from her taking that from me as well. She keeps saying she can take care of herself, but she doesn’t see the vacant look in her eyes when her disease takes over. So I don’t have a dream. I don’t have direction. I’m spinning in circles. My boss just got fired. I might have a cat, but I don’t know that for sure. I need the world to stop. I need for it to all go away, but I can’t. I am the caretaker, and I no longer exist.
“You’re not healthy,” my work friends say to me, and God, I know it, but I feel like God no longer exists and there’s nothing for me to stand on. I’m living off energy drinks and Code Red. I have no clue what’s going to happen next with grad school applications. I literally have no clue where I’m headed or where I want to go. I know I can’t stay here, because here is pain and employment, haha, and the last thing I want to do is discuss this with my friend and have her blank out on me again. I’m so sick and tired of saving the day.
When I finally listen to music again, it’s The 1975, by recommendation of a work friend. Matty Healy, the lead singer, ended up in drug rehab and came out the other side ok. The result was an album that felt so incredibly real, unlike the fake smiles that SM plastered all over the world for us to see. This is fine, right? And as I finally find something authentic to sing along to, I’m able to see that the kids aren’t paying attention to SM anymore. There’s a K-Pop boy’s club that I knew little about back in 2013 that has now somehow smashed their way onto local Top 40 radio.
“And I got tired,” I tell the girl behind the desk at the recruitment center, “of people being so freaking happy for BTS all the time.” And God, is that true. The ARMY is a group we all like to make fun of. The vast majority of my friends are too old to “get it.” We existed in the days where SM was truly king, from the band I still call Tohoshinki to Super Junior and Girls Generation and BoA and -- well, you know at this point or you don’t. Thanks to SM, I spend my days playing therapist instead of moving forward on my own, but I don’t tell the recruiter that.
“I mean, it makes sense, right? We’re used to perfectly calculated business moves and random comebacks and God, all that eyeliner, and someone decides it’s a good idea to give these boys a one month break? To do what? Relax?” It’s not fair that my fandom went through so much pain and here, these guys that are part of a totally different company get a chance to breathe for once. It’s not fair that they get to have social media accounts that aren’t doctored and fake. It’s not fair that they have a company that protects them.
None of this is fair.
--
The stress from the best friend and my job is too much, and when I can’t sleep, I go to the living room and lay down on the extra bed, and I cry for what must be hours. I know something has to change, and I know it has to come from me. And the only outlier that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is that freaking break that BTS got. And so I relent. Fine, gosh damnit, I’ll listen, but what to?
I whip out my phone at work and start digging. Seven boys, whose faces I can’t tell apart because they haven’t been plastic surgeried into oblivion like SM does. The only one I can tell apart is their leader, because he has such a distinctive profile, and he also does most of their English interviews. But when I pull his bio, he reads too much like the leader from my band. Nope. Hard pass for now.
I move to the next member, and I think I might be somewhere. SM usually scouts right off the street, or by audition, or by competition. The stars’ families need at least a good portion of the capital up front to finance their kids’ dreams. I’ve been around the SM block a time or two, but I’ve never heard of a boy band member who had to choose between bus fare and eating to get by. And it reminds me of grabbing a four dollar bodega sandwich, paid with in quarters because I have no money, before hopping on the train.
I dig further and I notice this ‘Suga’ has done solo music -- but it’s more than solo music. It’s not an album, either. And I grin. Now we are talking.
“In reality,” I mention to the recruiter, “it makes sense. It’s a smart business move, but it’s not one I would have expected a Korean company to pull.”
“And what’s that?”
I grin. “Putting a mixtape on SoundCloud.” I’m not sure she’s aware of the meaning of SoundCloud rap, so the meaning is probably lost on her.
I probably wouldn’t be able to tell her my connections with the Wu-Tang Clan, or that I am the ‘fly piano’ that Masta Killah versed about, or that I know the difference between flow and delivery and rhythm. She definitely doesn’t know that this white girl can spit every once in a while, though I usually don’t stick to it because I’ve been told time and time again that it’s a bad idea. I don’t blame them; it only shows itself when I really have something to say.
I’m not sure how to tell a grad school admissions panel that I want to go to grad school so I can sit in a studio for the rest of my life and make beats for independent rap artists to verse over. It makes more sense for me to move back to New York City and put the hustle in, but fat chance of that happening. I’ve put that dream away, shoved it into a corner somewhere. I had to fight for thirty dollar an hour studio time, but I still remember the sixth floor studio, watching the Metro North trains go by and doodling on sheet music with Sharpies, creating without a care in the world. My dream had come true, and was yet ripped from my hands when I could no longer afford the game.
Besides, I now have a house and a man in Ohio that I must care for. I cannot just randomly leave everyone to go to grad school, because why would I do so and have him fall apart and miss me too much? I’m not going to force him to leave the only home he has known just to chase down this girl he loves. That’s not how my mom said it’s supposed to work.
But I have a mixtape from a member of BTS who actually might know the meaning of the word hustle, and my brain won’t leave it alone. I ditch my coworkers at the end of the day, hop in my car, and queue up the tape. It’s under a different MC name, as Suga didn’t want to be just heard as Suga from BTS. He wanted to be heard as himself. I press play, and I suddenly realize I’m not listening to K-Pop anymore.
I don’t know what this is, and then I know what this is, and I take a deep breath, my first one in years.
--
I had an iPhone 4 back then, and I was sitting in Bryant Park in adamant refusal to go home. It wasn’t home anymore. It was just an apartment twenty three stories up in the sky, a room where my roommate didn’t like me anymore because my now-ex boyfriend had locked her out once, where I had to step over her wasted college friends to even have a chance to get to the bathroom at night. Instead, here I was, sitting outside the Kinokuniya bookstore on a clear July day buying manga that I could not afford. And now that I had somehow found myself free of my ex, I was creating music right and left with all of my newfound spare time.
I had never been to an open mic in New York City. I had never had time to, with the random work hours and buses and ferries and what not. But both my boyfriend and my full time job were gone, and I figured I might as well go do something to not feel like complete and utter shit. So I flipped into my phone and started looking up open mics. I found a site that loaded horribly in 2012 and probably doesn’t exist now that led me to a place called the Yippie, and they served tea, and I was newly a fan, so I was sold.
I took the BDFM to Bleecker and found my way from there. The small cafe was empty this early; the open mic wouldn't start for another three hours, but I couldn't, would NOT go home right now. The clearly gay man behind the counter said his name was Oliver and that their AC was out, but I didn’t care still. Over the next period of time I got a tea and a water, we chatted for a while about nothing, and when we set up the microphones for the open mic he turned on music and we both sang Hungry Like The Wolf as a sound check.
The guys who ran the open mic showed up with a sound board and nothing else. There was no piano, but I kind of anticipated that. I put my name down on the sign in sheet and wrote that I would just be singing, since I didn’t have anything else. I remembered a couple of weeks earlier, when my ex and I had broken up, and he had given me a hug and I had watched him disappear behind my door. Later that day, I had escaped the apartment again, and I ran to a Chipotle under cover of a sudden downpour.
I got called up to sing after a couple of people played their guitars. I announced that this was my first NYC open mic. And then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and went for it.
Rain falls from skies, your dark black eyes
How was I to know that it was already over?
Tied with a string called destiny
How was I to know that it was already over?
The stars gleam, you do too
Don’t leave me -- I’ve left you
When I look out the window of my car, I see Columbus go by, but driving onto Interstate 670 it might as well be the A train to the 59th Street Station instead. I might as well be sitting there, listening to the reference track Ford gave me for my session coming up. When I get to Harlem, if the weather is nice, I will walk across 125th Street and get Taco Bell. But I’m in Ohio, driving back to Reynoldsburg after my office job shift is done, and I weirdly enough have BTS on in a roundabout way, and this has to be West Coast because the feel is different but the sentiment is still there. For a moment, I become young again, standing on Ford’s balcony, watching the trains go by, feeling full of potential instead of just like lead all the time.
Glow, sparkle, shine, when you were mine
How could I have known that it was already over?
Take your things, I’ll take mine
Here’s the end -- let me shine
I can’t understand a freaking word of Korean, so I let the delivery speak for itself, and I’m lucky that I can. I’m able to banter to myself on what I can decipher, and not only that, but his beat creation is top-notch. I hit track 5 and I’m instantly in something we would have written at the Foundation, and I bob my head as one should. In later tracks, I’m not sure what the content is, but there’s something troubled and crazy and his voice is so full of passion and artistry that I’m left in silence as I approach my exit home, not sure what to say but in just total massive awe.
I pulled the microphone from my face that day after singing a cappella in front of a small group of strangers, and then the applause filled the gap I had left. I smiled, I reattached the microphone to its stand, and then I nearly pitched forward. The lack of air conditioning and proper hydration had finally gotten to me. The open mic continued as I stumbled to my table, grabbed my water, and made a beeline for the front door before I could throw up. As the open mic continued, one of the organizers ran after me to make sure I was okay. He brought me another water, made a few silly jokes to get me to smile, and walked me back to the 6 train.
The next day, he friended me on Facebook, and he invited me to his studio in Harlem. The rest, as they say, is history.
Irony strikes in the form of lightning
God’s tears fall upon my face
Keep the bittersweet memories spinning
I can’t forget this place
But I did. That’s why it’s history.
“So you listened to Suga’s mixtape, and then what?” the recruiter asks me, but I’m too busy staring at the spot in the floor where one tile meets another.
“And then it was like the entire universe made sense to me again. It healed me, somehow, weird enough. Do you ever have music that does that?”
“Well, yeah, actually. All of BTS’s music does that.”
“Then that part you definitely get.” I grin at the recruiter with what energy I have left. “I saw myself in his music. I looked myself in the eye, and I dared myself to exist.”
You at my door -- not anymore --
Why do I pray that it’s not really over?
How was I to know that it was already over?
In passing, when doing some quick research about this new fluffball -- literally, they call him a gummy, and his BT21 member is a cookie -- I learned about the poor household he had grown up in, the days where he literally didn’t eat because he didn’t sell a song, the hustle he went through to make music, the thirst for the sound and to make it happen. I read about how vocal he has been in the press and in his music about his battles with OCD and depression. That in itself feels like a huge glass of water being splashed in my face. It’s bittersweet. My pain was caused by one lone star’s silence, and yet here Suga is, imperfect and still shining.
Imperfection was a world that I was never permitted to be a part of. My parents were just waiting for me to say the word so they could get me back to Ohio. Back here, I could get a more normal job, and not starve, and they could do my laundry and take me to the zoo. At least we ended up in Columbus. They did have that going for them, but it did mean trading my dreams and my lifestyle for a 40 hour workweek and health insurance that I didn’t know how to use. I would have much rather been making music in NYC, but that’s not how this story goes. Years later, my parents move to Texas, and I move into a house with two hard working individuals who embody the message I love. But the damage has been done, and instead of a musician, I am now a babysitter.
As I drive, I realize it’s Suga playing the piano with his voice overlaying in English. He repeats one word over and over again as Reynoldsburg’s main street rises up to meet me. Then, the beat is softer, the rhythm still steady, and the guest artist’s voice compliments the flow to a T, only occasionally interjecting in English. So far away, don’t fall away…
There’s a heaviness to this last track that feels almost entirely real in its execution. It feels like the day my ex closed the door in my face, leaving me in my apartment, all alone. It feels like that moment where I woke up in my sister’s room after being in New York City for five years, and it was just me, and I had no clue who I was anymore. Except I know, and I remember this now.
Therapy and searching led me back to the piano, which I had abandoned years ago in an effort to make music. I knew I had a skill that I could market, and so I chained myself to the piano in an effort to bring it back to life. Sometimes I imagine the man behind the empty microphone standing there, trapping me between the piano and him. I can’t escape if he is there. I have to play. It’s pain and sorrow and yet I still just keep going. There’s no passion, no confidence, only hoping that at some point this will all click again and I will come back to life, and maybe if I’m lucky, he will too, and this will all have been just a --
dream.
I turn onto Lancaster Avenue, and I knock on the door to apartment 6K in Harlem.
The song’s not done by the time I get home, so I park the car and I lay my seat back. And I feel myself become light headed again. The door to the Yippie is so far away. I cannot be saved. Nothing can fix my job, or the stray cat I brought home, or the tree limb out front, or my friend from having more mental health problems. But as I fall, I realize Suga’s just a normal, imperfect person, a voice on a recording. It’s not his job to save me. All any of us can do is fall together, and I fall through his music, never in any danger but existing through our shared pain and depression. And I realize it’s more than just a gangsta rap mixtape. I realize where I’ve felt this, time and time again, for years, and I always thought it was God and I don’t know why it’s him but I don’t need all of the answers right now. I just need flow, and delivery, and cadence, and to know that I’m not falling alone. And as I accept my situation, as I fall in love with how imperfect I am, all I want to do is lock myself in the studio for hours, days, as long as the take out will last me, until the album is done, and then I make the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
And as Jonathan Larson once said, I’m gonna spend my time this way. I’m not there yet. But at least I’m finally back somewhere real, where I’m not triggered every fifteen seconds, where I’m safe and where I can breathe. The ghost is gone, and there is a light out of the tunnel that’s not a train, and we’re all looking up at the same night sky and after months of not telling anybody anything I’m not alone, God, for once, I’m not alone.
I come up for air, and I gather my belongings and enter my house. I shut the bedroom door, and I break down, forgetting what oxygen could taste like, with nowhere to go but forward. I finally feel real again. After chasing cat snakes for months, I may not know where I’m going, but I sure as hell know I’m not alone. If it’s through this tongue technology that I can find life again, maybe this is where I belong.
My life might just depend on it.
--
Two days later, I visit the doctor and I tell her my issues. And after decades of mental health stigma getting the best of me, I finally have anxiety medication. The next week, I take the Mountain Dew at my desk and throw it out, and pour myself a cup of coffee. It tastes like total ass until I dump two creamers and a bunch of sugar in it, but I figure all I have to do is get used to the coffee taste. The next week, I tell my friend she needs to move out. There's a lot of reasons, but the room she inhabits was always supposed to be my music studio. There's no better time to start than now.
And over the next weeks, I start pulling BTS’s entire discography. I don’t binge it. I pull one EP at a time, listen to it for days on end, then move to something new. It gives me a chance to absorb it. I realize a little while later that I have something from them stuck in my head, and my band is gone, and it’s like none of it ever mattered in the first place. My mental health is a little wonky, and for a long time, I existed in a world where nobody cared and I was meant to suffer. Then someone finally told me it was okay, and I sought the help I needed. I just...never thought it would be Suga from BTS.
When Mike and I go on vacation to Cedar Point, Top Thrill Dragster is closed for the day, and the Dairy Queen has stopped carrying my favorite Orange Julius, and I’m about to throw one of Mike’s cheese sticks when I hear BTS on the radio around me. And Mike doesn’t understand why I completely break down, but he sits by me like he always does. I cry it out on his shoulder, and I explain on the way home. I’ve felt as broken as Dragster itself has been these past few weeks, missing a crucial part, waiting on it from the manufacturer, out of service. But Cedar Fair won’t give up that easily, and neither should I.
I have coffee and a computer with a workstation and anxiety meds and a cat and a boyfriend who cares, and now I have BTS, and maybe at some point I’ll have friends in the ARMY, too. If it takes the rest of my life, I will push the gears forward until I get them working again on my own. I will play not only classical music, but my own. I will hop planes and go to whatever studio will take me, and there will always be a house that welcomes me home at the end of the day. And while I will have to propel myself forward, it is in falling -- with so much style and swag -- it is in the chaos that we remember, and we strive, and we hustle.
After all, someone as cool and as imperfect as Suga is out there in the world, right? It can’t be that scary. I bet it’s even worth living in.
“So this is an interesting title,” the recruiter says, finally going over my paperwork. “You’ve applied to join the ARMY, but you’re insisting on some big title. What exactly does this mean, special defense forces?”
“It means I’m not a normal fan. I can’t be just a normal fan.” I smile. “I am a Sugar Soldier.”
The following creative nonfiction deals a lot with my mental health, the issues I've always had with it, and some of my current successes with it. This entry is not to be taken as me confessing that I'm crazy, that I need to be carted away or see a shrink. I have been evaluated by health professionals and while I am of sound mind, growing up with lots of expectations means that you have to put the mental legwork in as an adult to be normal. Fortunately, this is something I have done. I am not sick, I am not dying, the world is not ending. While everything is not always rainbows and butterflies, as this entry explains, I am totally okay and doing well.
Bottom line, fam: I am fine, I am not in any danger, and there is no reason for anybody to worry or freak out. If you think I'm looking at you, I'm looking at you.
The following creative nonfiction also makes reference to, but does not DIRECTLY mention outright, a major issue in the K-Pop industry stemming from an incident that took place nearly two years ago. (If you know what it is, then you know. If you don't, I'm sure you can Google that.) While I am brave enough to write about how far I have come regarding my own issues with the incident, I will not permit discussion about the issue in the comments; as such comments on this post will not be allowed. Any comments elsewhere of that nature (Facebook, Twitter, etc) will be deleted. In addition, please do not reach out to me personally or in my DMs regarding this issue. It is still MAJORLY triggering for me. Please respect me and my boundaries.
Thank you.
Initiation
(a really really really creative nonfiction)
The morning will come again
No darkness, no season is eternal
She taps her pencil against the desk. “So, remind me again why we’re recruiting you?”
And I look at my feet and I try to think of an answer that will make her happy. I’m leaning forward on this folded chair, hands in my lap, staring at the floor like it’s going to swallow me whole. I’m a Millennial feeling out of place, like I’m six years too late to this party, like I need to be yeeted out of existence. Her tapping at the desk, the flickering lamp over our heads, the bare walls -- none of this is helping my anxiety. You wouldn’t think this was practically an army recruiting room. It feels more like an interrogation, like I’ve been brought in by the police and I’m supposed to confess to a crime. But the only crime I can think of is that I’ve suffered for almost two years now, with no end in sight.
At least until recently.
“Well?” She stares at me, and I bow my head again. I don’t know why I feel shame. I suppose it’s because they’ve always taught me I should feel shame. I should feel silly to be here, asking for help like this. But when I twist the ring around my left ring finger, I remember, and I look up.
“My name is Emily Ann Imes, and I am applying to be in the ARMY, the official fanbase of BTS. I am old enough to be a product of the SM Generation. In the relatively earlier days of K-Pop, there was nobody else other than SM. No matter where you went, it was Super Junior, f(x), and especially Girls Generation. And then there was my band. I honestly don’t like boy bands at all. It comes with being a professional musician. But this boy band? For some reason, they were mine, and I supported them no matter what. Until the unthinkable happened.”
I take a deep breath. “Do you remember the year where spring never came?”
--
On December 18, 2017, I got a song stuck in my head.
It started as a reminder. This was your favorite song by them, wasn’t it? So I listened to it, and then to all of their old songs, and then it continued onward. No matter where I went, or what I was doing, I would have a song by my favorite boy band stuck in my head. When I woke up, it would be a new song. When I went to bed, there would be something different in my head. And I enjoyed it for a long time. It was a way for me to absorb the seriousness of the situation, for me to remember and be happy and make my own peace about the tragedy.
Until SM decided peace wasn’t in the cards for any of us.
Images haunt me more than songs do. I can do okay with most songs, even if they hold sad memories for me. But even the fleeting image of an empty stage, with an unused microphone in the center, hit home for me. And it felt like I was being left behind. How can SM make it seem so easy to move on from all of this? I haven’t moved on. I don’t think anybody has moved on. What kind of a package is this, wrapped all up in a bow? This isn’t what I want.
The music in my ears wouldn’t stop. The images wouldn’t leave my head. And it started driving me insane.
From a young age, I knew that I had it “easy.” I knew that there would be millions of people who would never have a career in music, for various reasons. I had these expectations on myself that I would succeed in their place, that everybody would live vicariously through me. Growing up a savant meant that the expectations of others always outweighed what I wanted. By the time I ever knew what I wanted, it didn’t matter anymore.
So I got good at hiding it. I changed up my art and started playing it safe. My plan was (and still kind of is) to go to graduate school, get a better music degree, then settle down with my boyfriend in his house and live happily ever after. Not famous. Not talented. So I could take care of people and not be triggered by empty microphones that still haunted me. And there is always someone needing help. If it’s not the hurricane who helped me drop my idol career, it’s my cat snake of a best friend who keeps playing the damsel in distress. And of course she learns about the music in my head, because I have nowhere else to turn, and she falls in love with a band that now triggers me.
Every time I get a second to breathe, I blink and there is more chaos. She has dropped her glass in the kitchen, and I must go clean up the pieces again because she can’t. It’s easier for her to pull me into her bedroom to watch another video with them in it than it is to kick her out, make her live in her car. And I stay quiet and I smile and I don’t show that I’m falling apart, because that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?
She asks me what my dream is. What is my dream? God, I don’t know anymore, to play piano for Mike or something, right? I feel like I’m two steps away from her taking that from me as well. She keeps saying she can take care of herself, but she doesn’t see the vacant look in her eyes when her disease takes over. So I don’t have a dream. I don’t have direction. I’m spinning in circles. My boss just got fired. I might have a cat, but I don’t know that for sure. I need the world to stop. I need for it to all go away, but I can’t. I am the caretaker, and I no longer exist.
“You’re not healthy,” my work friends say to me, and God, I know it, but I feel like God no longer exists and there’s nothing for me to stand on. I’m living off energy drinks and Code Red. I have no clue what’s going to happen next with grad school applications. I literally have no clue where I’m headed or where I want to go. I know I can’t stay here, because here is pain and employment, haha, and the last thing I want to do is discuss this with my friend and have her blank out on me again. I’m so sick and tired of saving the day.
When I finally listen to music again, it’s The 1975, by recommendation of a work friend. Matty Healy, the lead singer, ended up in drug rehab and came out the other side ok. The result was an album that felt so incredibly real, unlike the fake smiles that SM plastered all over the world for us to see. This is fine, right? And as I finally find something authentic to sing along to, I’m able to see that the kids aren’t paying attention to SM anymore. There’s a K-Pop boy’s club that I knew little about back in 2013 that has now somehow smashed their way onto local Top 40 radio.
“And I got tired,” I tell the girl behind the desk at the recruitment center, “of people being so freaking happy for BTS all the time.” And God, is that true. The ARMY is a group we all like to make fun of. The vast majority of my friends are too old to “get it.” We existed in the days where SM was truly king, from the band I still call Tohoshinki to Super Junior and Girls Generation and BoA and -- well, you know at this point or you don’t. Thanks to SM, I spend my days playing therapist instead of moving forward on my own, but I don’t tell the recruiter that.
“I mean, it makes sense, right? We’re used to perfectly calculated business moves and random comebacks and God, all that eyeliner, and someone decides it’s a good idea to give these boys a one month break? To do what? Relax?” It’s not fair that my fandom went through so much pain and here, these guys that are part of a totally different company get a chance to breathe for once. It’s not fair that they get to have social media accounts that aren’t doctored and fake. It’s not fair that they have a company that protects them.
None of this is fair.
--
The stress from the best friend and my job is too much, and when I can’t sleep, I go to the living room and lay down on the extra bed, and I cry for what must be hours. I know something has to change, and I know it has to come from me. And the only outlier that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is that freaking break that BTS got. And so I relent. Fine, gosh damnit, I’ll listen, but what to?
I whip out my phone at work and start digging. Seven boys, whose faces I can’t tell apart because they haven’t been plastic surgeried into oblivion like SM does. The only one I can tell apart is their leader, because he has such a distinctive profile, and he also does most of their English interviews. But when I pull his bio, he reads too much like the leader from my band. Nope. Hard pass for now.
I move to the next member, and I think I might be somewhere. SM usually scouts right off the street, or by audition, or by competition. The stars’ families need at least a good portion of the capital up front to finance their kids’ dreams. I’ve been around the SM block a time or two, but I’ve never heard of a boy band member who had to choose between bus fare and eating to get by. And it reminds me of grabbing a four dollar bodega sandwich, paid with in quarters because I have no money, before hopping on the train.
I dig further and I notice this ‘Suga’ has done solo music -- but it’s more than solo music. It’s not an album, either. And I grin. Now we are talking.
“In reality,” I mention to the recruiter, “it makes sense. It’s a smart business move, but it’s not one I would have expected a Korean company to pull.”
“And what’s that?”
I grin. “Putting a mixtape on SoundCloud.” I’m not sure she’s aware of the meaning of SoundCloud rap, so the meaning is probably lost on her.
I probably wouldn’t be able to tell her my connections with the Wu-Tang Clan, or that I am the ‘fly piano’ that Masta Killah versed about, or that I know the difference between flow and delivery and rhythm. She definitely doesn’t know that this white girl can spit every once in a while, though I usually don’t stick to it because I’ve been told time and time again that it’s a bad idea. I don’t blame them; it only shows itself when I really have something to say.
I’m not sure how to tell a grad school admissions panel that I want to go to grad school so I can sit in a studio for the rest of my life and make beats for independent rap artists to verse over. It makes more sense for me to move back to New York City and put the hustle in, but fat chance of that happening. I’ve put that dream away, shoved it into a corner somewhere. I had to fight for thirty dollar an hour studio time, but I still remember the sixth floor studio, watching the Metro North trains go by and doodling on sheet music with Sharpies, creating without a care in the world. My dream had come true, and was yet ripped from my hands when I could no longer afford the game.
Besides, I now have a house and a man in Ohio that I must care for. I cannot just randomly leave everyone to go to grad school, because why would I do so and have him fall apart and miss me too much? I’m not going to force him to leave the only home he has known just to chase down this girl he loves. That’s not how my mom said it’s supposed to work.
But I have a mixtape from a member of BTS who actually might know the meaning of the word hustle, and my brain won’t leave it alone. I ditch my coworkers at the end of the day, hop in my car, and queue up the tape. It’s under a different MC name, as Suga didn’t want to be just heard as Suga from BTS. He wanted to be heard as himself. I press play, and I suddenly realize I’m not listening to K-Pop anymore.
I don’t know what this is, and then I know what this is, and I take a deep breath, my first one in years.
--
I had an iPhone 4 back then, and I was sitting in Bryant Park in adamant refusal to go home. It wasn’t home anymore. It was just an apartment twenty three stories up in the sky, a room where my roommate didn’t like me anymore because my now-ex boyfriend had locked her out once, where I had to step over her wasted college friends to even have a chance to get to the bathroom at night. Instead, here I was, sitting outside the Kinokuniya bookstore on a clear July day buying manga that I could not afford. And now that I had somehow found myself free of my ex, I was creating music right and left with all of my newfound spare time.
I had never been to an open mic in New York City. I had never had time to, with the random work hours and buses and ferries and what not. But both my boyfriend and my full time job were gone, and I figured I might as well go do something to not feel like complete and utter shit. So I flipped into my phone and started looking up open mics. I found a site that loaded horribly in 2012 and probably doesn’t exist now that led me to a place called the Yippie, and they served tea, and I was newly a fan, so I was sold.
I took the BDFM to Bleecker and found my way from there. The small cafe was empty this early; the open mic wouldn't start for another three hours, but I couldn't, would NOT go home right now. The clearly gay man behind the counter said his name was Oliver and that their AC was out, but I didn’t care still. Over the next period of time I got a tea and a water, we chatted for a while about nothing, and when we set up the microphones for the open mic he turned on music and we both sang Hungry Like The Wolf as a sound check.
The guys who ran the open mic showed up with a sound board and nothing else. There was no piano, but I kind of anticipated that. I put my name down on the sign in sheet and wrote that I would just be singing, since I didn’t have anything else. I remembered a couple of weeks earlier, when my ex and I had broken up, and he had given me a hug and I had watched him disappear behind my door. Later that day, I had escaped the apartment again, and I ran to a Chipotle under cover of a sudden downpour.
I got called up to sing after a couple of people played their guitars. I announced that this was my first NYC open mic. And then I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and went for it.
Rain falls from skies, your dark black eyes
How was I to know that it was already over?
Tied with a string called destiny
How was I to know that it was already over?
The stars gleam, you do too
Don’t leave me -- I’ve left you
When I look out the window of my car, I see Columbus go by, but driving onto Interstate 670 it might as well be the A train to the 59th Street Station instead. I might as well be sitting there, listening to the reference track Ford gave me for my session coming up. When I get to Harlem, if the weather is nice, I will walk across 125th Street and get Taco Bell. But I’m in Ohio, driving back to Reynoldsburg after my office job shift is done, and I weirdly enough have BTS on in a roundabout way, and this has to be West Coast because the feel is different but the sentiment is still there. For a moment, I become young again, standing on Ford’s balcony, watching the trains go by, feeling full of potential instead of just like lead all the time.
Glow, sparkle, shine, when you were mine
How could I have known that it was already over?
Take your things, I’ll take mine
Here’s the end -- let me shine
I can’t understand a freaking word of Korean, so I let the delivery speak for itself, and I’m lucky that I can. I’m able to banter to myself on what I can decipher, and not only that, but his beat creation is top-notch. I hit track 5 and I’m instantly in something we would have written at the Foundation, and I bob my head as one should. In later tracks, I’m not sure what the content is, but there’s something troubled and crazy and his voice is so full of passion and artistry that I’m left in silence as I approach my exit home, not sure what to say but in just total massive awe.
I pulled the microphone from my face that day after singing a cappella in front of a small group of strangers, and then the applause filled the gap I had left. I smiled, I reattached the microphone to its stand, and then I nearly pitched forward. The lack of air conditioning and proper hydration had finally gotten to me. The open mic continued as I stumbled to my table, grabbed my water, and made a beeline for the front door before I could throw up. As the open mic continued, one of the organizers ran after me to make sure I was okay. He brought me another water, made a few silly jokes to get me to smile, and walked me back to the 6 train.
The next day, he friended me on Facebook, and he invited me to his studio in Harlem. The rest, as they say, is history.
Irony strikes in the form of lightning
God’s tears fall upon my face
Keep the bittersweet memories spinning
I can’t forget this place
But I did. That’s why it’s history.
“So you listened to Suga’s mixtape, and then what?” the recruiter asks me, but I’m too busy staring at the spot in the floor where one tile meets another.
“And then it was like the entire universe made sense to me again. It healed me, somehow, weird enough. Do you ever have music that does that?”
“Well, yeah, actually. All of BTS’s music does that.”
“Then that part you definitely get.” I grin at the recruiter with what energy I have left. “I saw myself in his music. I looked myself in the eye, and I dared myself to exist.”
You at my door -- not anymore --
Why do I pray that it’s not really over?
How was I to know that it was already over?
In passing, when doing some quick research about this new fluffball -- literally, they call him a gummy, and his BT21 member is a cookie -- I learned about the poor household he had grown up in, the days where he literally didn’t eat because he didn’t sell a song, the hustle he went through to make music, the thirst for the sound and to make it happen. I read about how vocal he has been in the press and in his music about his battles with OCD and depression. That in itself feels like a huge glass of water being splashed in my face. It’s bittersweet. My pain was caused by one lone star’s silence, and yet here Suga is, imperfect and still shining.
Imperfection was a world that I was never permitted to be a part of. My parents were just waiting for me to say the word so they could get me back to Ohio. Back here, I could get a more normal job, and not starve, and they could do my laundry and take me to the zoo. At least we ended up in Columbus. They did have that going for them, but it did mean trading my dreams and my lifestyle for a 40 hour workweek and health insurance that I didn’t know how to use. I would have much rather been making music in NYC, but that’s not how this story goes. Years later, my parents move to Texas, and I move into a house with two hard working individuals who embody the message I love. But the damage has been done, and instead of a musician, I am now a babysitter.
As I drive, I realize it’s Suga playing the piano with his voice overlaying in English. He repeats one word over and over again as Reynoldsburg’s main street rises up to meet me. Then, the beat is softer, the rhythm still steady, and the guest artist’s voice compliments the flow to a T, only occasionally interjecting in English. So far away, don’t fall away…
There’s a heaviness to this last track that feels almost entirely real in its execution. It feels like the day my ex closed the door in my face, leaving me in my apartment, all alone. It feels like that moment where I woke up in my sister’s room after being in New York City for five years, and it was just me, and I had no clue who I was anymore. Except I know, and I remember this now.
Therapy and searching led me back to the piano, which I had abandoned years ago in an effort to make music. I knew I had a skill that I could market, and so I chained myself to the piano in an effort to bring it back to life. Sometimes I imagine the man behind the empty microphone standing there, trapping me between the piano and him. I can’t escape if he is there. I have to play. It’s pain and sorrow and yet I still just keep going. There’s no passion, no confidence, only hoping that at some point this will all click again and I will come back to life, and maybe if I’m lucky, he will too, and this will all have been just a --
dream.
I turn onto Lancaster Avenue, and I knock on the door to apartment 6K in Harlem.
The song’s not done by the time I get home, so I park the car and I lay my seat back. And I feel myself become light headed again. The door to the Yippie is so far away. I cannot be saved. Nothing can fix my job, or the stray cat I brought home, or the tree limb out front, or my friend from having more mental health problems. But as I fall, I realize Suga’s just a normal, imperfect person, a voice on a recording. It’s not his job to save me. All any of us can do is fall together, and I fall through his music, never in any danger but existing through our shared pain and depression. And I realize it’s more than just a gangsta rap mixtape. I realize where I’ve felt this, time and time again, for years, and I always thought it was God and I don’t know why it’s him but I don’t need all of the answers right now. I just need flow, and delivery, and cadence, and to know that I’m not falling alone. And as I accept my situation, as I fall in love with how imperfect I am, all I want to do is lock myself in the studio for hours, days, as long as the take out will last me, until the album is done, and then I make the next one, and the next one, and the next one.
And as Jonathan Larson once said, I’m gonna spend my time this way. I’m not there yet. But at least I’m finally back somewhere real, where I’m not triggered every fifteen seconds, where I’m safe and where I can breathe. The ghost is gone, and there is a light out of the tunnel that’s not a train, and we’re all looking up at the same night sky and after months of not telling anybody anything I’m not alone, God, for once, I’m not alone.
I come up for air, and I gather my belongings and enter my house. I shut the bedroom door, and I break down, forgetting what oxygen could taste like, with nowhere to go but forward. I finally feel real again. After chasing cat snakes for months, I may not know where I’m going, but I sure as hell know I’m not alone. If it’s through this tongue technology that I can find life again, maybe this is where I belong.
My life might just depend on it.
--
Two days later, I visit the doctor and I tell her my issues. And after decades of mental health stigma getting the best of me, I finally have anxiety medication. The next week, I take the Mountain Dew at my desk and throw it out, and pour myself a cup of coffee. It tastes like total ass until I dump two creamers and a bunch of sugar in it, but I figure all I have to do is get used to the coffee taste. The next week, I tell my friend she needs to move out. There's a lot of reasons, but the room she inhabits was always supposed to be my music studio. There's no better time to start than now.
And over the next weeks, I start pulling BTS’s entire discography. I don’t binge it. I pull one EP at a time, listen to it for days on end, then move to something new. It gives me a chance to absorb it. I realize a little while later that I have something from them stuck in my head, and my band is gone, and it’s like none of it ever mattered in the first place. My mental health is a little wonky, and for a long time, I existed in a world where nobody cared and I was meant to suffer. Then someone finally told me it was okay, and I sought the help I needed. I just...never thought it would be Suga from BTS.
When Mike and I go on vacation to Cedar Point, Top Thrill Dragster is closed for the day, and the Dairy Queen has stopped carrying my favorite Orange Julius, and I’m about to throw one of Mike’s cheese sticks when I hear BTS on the radio around me. And Mike doesn’t understand why I completely break down, but he sits by me like he always does. I cry it out on his shoulder, and I explain on the way home. I’ve felt as broken as Dragster itself has been these past few weeks, missing a crucial part, waiting on it from the manufacturer, out of service. But Cedar Fair won’t give up that easily, and neither should I.
I have coffee and a computer with a workstation and anxiety meds and a cat and a boyfriend who cares, and now I have BTS, and maybe at some point I’ll have friends in the ARMY, too. If it takes the rest of my life, I will push the gears forward until I get them working again on my own. I will play not only classical music, but my own. I will hop planes and go to whatever studio will take me, and there will always be a house that welcomes me home at the end of the day. And while I will have to propel myself forward, it is in falling -- with so much style and swag -- it is in the chaos that we remember, and we strive, and we hustle.
After all, someone as cool and as imperfect as Suga is out there in the world, right? It can’t be that scary. I bet it’s even worth living in.
“So this is an interesting title,” the recruiter says, finally going over my paperwork. “You’ve applied to join the ARMY, but you’re insisting on some big title. What exactly does this mean, special defense forces?”
“It means I’m not a normal fan. I can’t be just a normal fan.” I smile. “I am a Sugar Soldier.”