When the doors to the Magic Shop close
Finding my way back to BTS
Content warning: This article mentions severe depression and suicidal ideation.
“For so many people, the sound of MOTS 7 is tied to the last few memories of normalcy before the world shut down.”
Published on October 4, 2020, this tweet by Twitter user @tikklil articulated perfectly what I had been feeling for more than half a year during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as I scrolled through the thousands of replies and quote retweets, I observed an interesting theme to which I could not relate.
Several Twitter users had a positive association between memories of normalcy and BTS’s Map of the Soul: 7 (MOTS: 7). These ARMYs recounted their fond memories of listening to the album at university or at work, the feeling of looking forward to concerts and other plans that didn’t require mask-wearing or social-distancing, or, once the pandemic began, the comfort MOTS: 7 offered amid the drastic uncertainty. Several more described how MOTS: 7 and BTS provided them with unwavering support over the subsequent months. When listening to MOTS: 7, just for a brief moment, these ARMYs would experience a happy sensation of returning to that sense of normalcy before the world shut down.
But what happens when for some people, the support found in BTS does waver? What happens when for some people, listening to MOTS: 7 does not offer a joyous stroll down memory lane to those last moments of normalcy before the world shut down, but rather triggers memories of the severe anxiety and depression when that normalcy was lost and their world turned upside down?
I am one of those people. For months, I could not listen to MOTS: 7 without becoming overwhelmed with grief for the loss of normalcy. I had been living in Colorado for just a few months at the time of its release in February, and my best friend had flown in from Chicago for us to enjoy comeback weekend together. We listened to MOTS: 7 non-stop, and I quickly associated the energetic, forward-moving beats of Inner Child and Moon with long drives through snow-capped mountains, or the hopeful emotions in My Time and We Are Bulletproof: The Eternal with the thrills of hiking.
But within a month, I was moving back to the flat landscape of my home state of Illinois amid family members contracting COVID-19 and my own difficult, traumatizing-in-its-own-way decision to leave my master’s program. For me, MOTS: 7 was indeed tied to the last few memories of normalcy — the bright, exhilarating, beautiful normalcy of plane tickets and hugs, dinners out and completed homework assignments — before the world, my world, shut down. I could not listen to the album without mourning the mountains I had left at the hands of several factors: a master’s program I needed to leave, a full-on mental breakdown and diagnosis of severe depression, family members falling ill, all compounded by the stress of life under COVID. And so, I did not listen to it at all.
I felt like a horrible ARMY. Here was the album they had poured their hearts and souls into, one that meant so much to them, and I could not support it without feeling pushed further into the depression from which I was suffering. Here were BTS themselves, my “emotional support K-pop boys” since I became an ARMY in 2018, no longer providing me the emotional support I had grown used to finding in them.
I felt increasingly disenfranchised from BTS and from a fandom that seemed only to grow closer with each other through a collective comfort found in the very music that triggered my anxiety. This was through no one’s fault except perhaps COVID itself — though despite my best efforts, I did blame myself. In fact, it was this loss of interest in the thing that I’d previously relied most upon in difficult times that drove me only deeper into depression and hopelessness. If I couldn’t find hope in the one thing that millions of ARMYs like myself had always depended on, then perhaps all hope truly was lost. It felt like the doors to the Magic Shop had shut on me without warning.
For months, I was desolate, fighting severe depression and suicidal ideation, scrambling to find the key to those doors again in therapy, medication, exercise, prayer, anything. I felt nothing as I watched the “Dear Class of 2020” speeches and performances, except for the painful aftermath of my family members’ illnesses and my decision to leave graduate school. I wanted so badly to listen to 00:00 (Zero O’Clock) and tell myself that I’m “gonna be happy,” that things will be turned all around — but of course, I couldn’t press “Play” on that song without seeing behind my eyelids the memories of mountains, reminders of a life so suddenly taken from me. My everythingoes tattoo I’d gotten in 2019 now felt like a mockery. Nothing felt like it was going; not my depression, not the pandemic…
But then life lit up like Dynamite.
I remember the collective mourning on my Twitter timeline that, in many ways, the Map of the Soul era was coming to a close with Dynamite’s arrival. But secretly, given the pain I associated with the era, and feeling guilty given the positive meaning it had for so many others, I was thrilled. Apart from the colorful energy of the teasers, I had no idea what to expect, but I hoped against hope that perhaps this could reignite a spark within me that had long since died out… and reignite it did. I watched the Dynamite music video with a hunger I thought I’d forgotten how to feel. I watched it again, feverishly soaking in the music, the colors, the dance moves, the faces of the men who had felt a million miles away from me in the summer. I felt like I was falling in love with them all over again, and I cried tears of joy.
The tears continued when weeks after Dynamite’s release I heard their speech to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in which RM himself also acknowledged that he could never have imagined this pandemic happening. The grief I felt about my everythingoes tattoo lifted, validated by the writer of the words himself. My tears fell all the harder when they ended their speech with “Life goes on, let’s live on.” Those words in and of themselves confirmed that I made the right choice not to permanently give in to the hopelessness I felt just a month or two prior.
Over the course of the weeks following the UNGA speech, I found myself falling even deeper and deeper in love with them anew. At their virtual concert Map of the Soul ON:E in October 2020, I listened as RM said the following words:
“The ARMYs I know, and the BTS you all know, we’re all strong. We’ll find a way, we always have. If there’s no way, let’s draw the map, the whole map again.”
You guessed it: I cried again. Because this year showed me that I did find my way. After months of fearing I never would be able to, I drew the whole map anew. I’ve learned I always will.
