BTS and Their Language of Dreams (Contest Finalist)
Not being a native English speaker, “purpose” is a word I never quite learned how to pronounce. Purrpose, preprose, propose. My mouth can’t seem to handle the heaviness carried in each phoneme; my brain doesn’t seem to understand how the sharpness of the p and r fit with the soft slither of the final syllable. As a result, I find myself constantly looking for other synonyms. I say words like “dream,” “intention,” “motive”一all of which sound kinder to my Latin tongue, but appear with the same weight as their complex counterpart. I’m not able to just lightly bounce them off my lips, and that’s because their meaning feels so foreign to me. Despite having heard all of these terms a thousand times, I’ve never truly understood them. And so, I’ve also never owned them. However, seven Korean men, who now seem as familiar as the language I speak, taught me I might not need to.
When I was a kid, I used to watch many movies with the same formula: small person chasing after big dreams. The determined main character would have to face off against life’s challenges in pursuit of their wishes. Whether they succeeded or not in the end wasn’t that important一what ultimately mattered was that they had something to fight for: something worthy of effort, worthy of passion. It was thrilling to see. While growing up, I realized that this thrill wasn’t only present in the movies; reality was filled with people who had big dreams. Doctors, singers, actors, and engineers, they all had one thing in common: a movie-like purpose. Of course, I wanted to be like them and have something that made my life special. All around me, I was taught I was supposed to have something that made my life special. But, ultimately, my brain couldn’t grasp what that meant. Nothing I did ever felt extraordinary.
Within me, there never seemed to exist any grandiose love for arts, numbers, or nature. Everything was either kind of enjoyable or simply just okay. So, sooner rather than later, I grasped that the world of motives and purposes wasn’t one I could call my own. Nonetheless, I believed fitting myself into this ideal was not only necessary, but also essential. Set a significant goal, run towards it, call it a dream一that was my personal chore and how I spent all my school years. My mind chasing after first places. My head buried in books. My ideas flooded with work. I took away no enjoyment from what I was doing, but it didn’t matter, because I still had an objective I could fight for. Momentarily, even between the stress and anxiousness, I could pretend I was that resolute protagonist, whose every action was full of meaning and every choice led towards their bright path. Still, the beautiful tale surrounding me was nothing but a well-constructed lie, a morphological shield against a bitter truth: the burden of purpose was getting too heavy to carry. So you could imagine the backlash I felt with the bold question posed to me by seven Korean singers: “Hey, what’s your dream?”
I found BTS in a time where my high school goodbyes were approaching and college choices were already knocking at my door. The common feelings of confusion, loneliness, and lack of direction were already welling up inside me. My weighty strategy of chasing towards an arbitrary objective could only last for so long, and it wasn’t particularly useful when it came to making choices. Thus, losing myself in funny videos and charming performances by these boys looked like a perfect一even if momentary一means of escape. And it was: Run BTS, dance practices, and award show performances brought me such immense joy I was able to, for however many minutes or hours, just forget about anything else. Nonetheless, I didn’t expect the group to also pull me right back to reality. “What’s your dream, is it only this?” the dreamless youngsters were asked in the debut song, “Now you don’t even know how to dream” (Doolset Lyrics). And, to be honest, I didn’t. In their music, BTS was showing me a reality so similar to the one I was living I could think they were addressing me directly. Their earlier works were coated with so much anger against a world that couldn’t be translated, so much melancholy regarding a reality not made for the youth to understand, that it felt like these emotions were my own一and I believe they were.
“Why am I here when everyone else is running?” (Doolset Lyrics). A thought that seemed like my own was echoed back to me in lyrics and melody. In the piece “So Far Away,” by AgustD, the word “dream” is repeated over and over. Rather than being heavy with meaning, the term serves almost like a plea loose in the air, belonging to no one but the skies. It’s pathetic that I don’t have a common dream, but please let me be okay, the song seems to wistfully say, backed by soft guitars and a gentle atmosphere. The longing for purpose is not answered by the last accords, but there’s still hope carefully placed within the lyricism and the delicate beats. In my life, a song had never felt so personal. To my surprise, BTS, famous singers from the opposite end of the world, and I somehow stood in the same spot. I wasn’t asked to find and comprehend my big motive, but simply was comforted by words that mirrored my own feelings. No need to rush, no need to understand, you can just breathe for a moment. And that was the first lesson I learned with the boys: I didn’t yet need to know what I wanted to do; it was fine to be lost. It made for a path we could trace together.
However, being lost means you still have something to find. And, as the band and I grew alongside each other on this road we were uncovering, I did一an unexpected and beautiful treasure. The second lesson BTS taught me, now as their more mature selves, stepping away from the previous anger and confusion of more juvenile days, was perhaps the most important one. It changed significantly the way I viewed the world, and it all started because of just three minutes and thirty-two seconds.
In May of 2018, they came out with the album Love Yourself: Tear. In the midst of 11 wonderful pieces discussing the pain and joy that come with love, there was a song called “Paradise.” “It’s okay not to have a dream, as long as there are your moments to briefly feel happiness,” it said (Doolset Lyrics). It’s okay not to have a dream. It’s okay not to have a dream. It’s okay not to have a dream. After I heard these lyrics, my mind kept roaming around them, trying to soak in all the words. Their meaning wasn’t complex. They weren’t heavy or burdensome. They were simple, clear, obvious. “Just to live like this and to survive like this, that’s a small dream for me” (Doolset Lyrics). I’d never heard this kind of thing before, but it made sense. I understood it, no explanation needed. So, just like that, an evident truth slowly made its way into my brain, accommodating herself like it had always been there, waiting to be discovered: You don’t need to have a big purpose一just live to appreciate the joy of waking up every morning. Or the joy of buying a present, of having written something nice. Maybe of eating delicious food. Solely anything that kept you alive. Existing, breathing and, simply, living. It was a freeing sensation, realizing I didn’t need to endure a senseless marathon for a forced dream. Realizing that the answer lies not in the grand future, but in the most modest of places: daily life. I merely had to enjoy it. Pay attention not to the ideal of cinematic grandeur, but to my own present, no matter how quiet it was. Because, in the end, like BTS themselves said, every breath I exhaled was already in paradise.
RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, V, Jimin, and Jungkook. I watched these seven men grow up from kids who felt like they had no place in the world to adults who created their own space within their music. And, learning from the lessons they shared through that trajectory, I grew up with them. I never belonged in the world of dreams and motives, but I finally accepted I don’t have to force myself into it, creating a burden that was not supposed to be there. At last, I understood there was a place for me somewhere else: in the present of my own body, during every minute, second, and instant I spend existing. I still can’t pronounce the word purpose. I still can’t wrap my head around the meaning of its synonyms. But, even if my English diction and vocabulary remain limited, expanding them no longer feels necessary. I know my happiness won’t come from these extra complexities of words and sounds. I know that all I need are the simple phonemes I hear in day-to-day life. And seven Korean men, who never once felt foreign to me, were the ones able to teach me that.
This essay was chosen as one of the finalists of the first BTS Essay contest hosted by The BTS Effect. Find out more here.
References
All English translations from Doolset Lyrics.
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