I remember hearing about One Direction for the first time at age 15. “What Makes You Beautiful” was their new hit song with a few million views on YouTube. I thought to myself, “I don’t understand the hype. What is everyone on Tumblr talking about?”
A few weeks went by and I ended up stumbling upon their X Factor videos during one of my internet search sprees. They had covered “Your Song” by Elton John and suddenly…it clicked. A switch went off in my brain and I knew I was in deep. I spent every spare hour I had catching up on what I had previously neglected.
Quickly, my walls became adorned with Tiger Beat fold-out posters, and my newly created Twitter account was a dumping ground for any and all 1D-related content. I discovered the world of fanfiction on Wattpad, stayed up late when they did live streams and watched every interview I could. Every waking minute, Niall, Harry, Liam, Louis and Zayn were on my mind.
I’m not sure if One Direction could have existed in any era except the early 2010s. Social media was on the cusp of explosion and it was the Directioners who helped steer stan culture into how it exists now, for better or for worse.
It was a deep and magical parasocial relationship that the fans had with the 1D boys, before any of us knew what the word “parasocial” even meant. Every album release might as well have been a dose of medication. The momentous build-up and the sweet release of lyrics and music reverberated through my heart, directly into my veins. One Direction was my drug of choice, an addiction I was blessed to be burdened with.
Between 2010 and 2015, fans were given five studio albums, four worldwide tours and a full-length feature film. However, the added dimension of social media, and the internet at large, proved to be a double-edged sword.
The heightened exposure and engagement helped catapult them into meteoric stardom, however navigating these new psychological waters had also taken a toll on their lives. Zayn departed from the group in 2015. That day was deemed “the saddest day in Directioner history”- a title no one wanted to award to anything else. The quartet announced their 18-month hiatus would begin in 2016, and it’s been eight years since that day. Hope of a reunion was always on the horizon – a dream that ended with the passing of Liam Payne.
The news of Liam’s death hit like a freight train. Like so many others now in adulthood, I was trying to cosplay as a professional at my “big girl job.” My co-worker approached me and tenderly shared the news before I could hear it anywhere else. Suddenly, I was transported back to my teenage bedroom, adorned with posters of him yet reading the words “Liam Payne dead” on repeat.
This current reality and the one of my 15-year-old self became blended and compounded; this can’t be happening. My love of One Direction brought me through my teenage years and into adulthood. It led me to meet amazing friends, travel to new places and made me a believer in the power of fandom. I refuse to let it end this way.
As a teenager I pined for all five members and was grateful we were close in age – I never wanted to be faced with outliving any of them. Liam’s death is a gut punch to every unrealized dream that he and the fans shared. It’s the tragic reality that his son will now continue to grow up without a father and his family has lost their only son and brother. The situations and controversies centering Liam were complex to say the very least – it only adds to the weight of the feelings surrounding his death. A lot is still unknown about the circumstances of the fall off his hotel room balcony and yet the only thing on my mind is that he deserved better. No one deserves to die in such a devastating, heartbreaking way – especially not him.
His passing serves as a reminder of my own fragile mortality and forces me to reflect on everyone and everything in my life that I love. I believed with every fiber of my being as a teenager that each member of One Direction would live forever. Fanfiction would float the internet about how old and adult we would be someday when one of them did die, how our daughters would come to us and say “Mom, who was Liam Payne?” or having to pull off the road when hearing the news via radio. None of those stories reflected this outcome.
Looking through video edits and pulling out my worn copies of Tiger Beat, tears begin to take shape down my cheeks. You don’t imagine what life is like at 28 when you’re 15. I certainly didn’t imagine it would end in the death of a man who helped shape my life now as I know it.
The same lyrics I used to blast into my ears with euphoria are now full of pain and nostalgia as I reflect on what once was, and what should have been. In a resurfaced Teen Vogue interview from 2018, Liam reflects on their song “Once in a Lifetime” and how there were periods as a group where they felt “untouchable.” He talks about a sense of “calmness” the song evokes and I take him up on the offer of a re-listen.
Brokenhearted, with an evening breeze pouring in from my balcony, I let the final words of the song, sung by Liam no less, linger in the air…“Once in a lifetime, you were mine.”
