Persistence.
My cousin Lara Caloosian is awesome. She's fifteen years old, and she needs to meet One Direction before she turns 16... and then starts driving and hanging out with boys with cars.
Now, I'm not saying she needs to meet them right now, specifically because of driving. I mean, it does terrify me to think of her operating a vehicle, but she needs to meet One Direction because she's a superhero of persistence.
She's a fangirl, and that makes her obsessive, but it also makes her committed. When I was growing up, there were fangirls of N'SYNC and Backstreet Boys, but social media has added a much deeper layer of obsession to the modern fangirl.
She has separate Twitter accounts for her different fangirldom interests, so then she knows that the purity of her tweets and obsession will be intact. She wants you to know that she loves you, and not to be worried with the other love spam coming from her other things.
But that's not why she needs to meet One Direction. She needs to meet One Direction because she's a dreamer, and she deserves to follow her heart. I've been living and working in Entertainment in Los Angeles since 2009, and her journey to meet these beautiful men started years ago.
Lara and her family had some rough times, and they had to move out of their apartment and live with her grandmother while they got back on their feet. She couldn't afford to meet One Direction or even get a ticket to their first tour, purely because of money. Passion didn't get her her dream, and money couldn't buy her love.
When the next tour came around, she wanted to meet them. But meet and greets weren't a thing anymore. She couldn't even pay enough money to meet her heroes. She asked me persistently if I knew of anyone who could get her closer to her dream, and I expired all of my connections with friends who worked at CAA, or had any potential pull to get her there. But the opportunity didn't exist.
Now, I look at the life cycle of a One Direction fan, and I feel like fans have grown with them and apart from them, but the one person I see that has been along for the ride, with clear eyes and a full heart, has been little Lara.
As I've seen this love for One Direction grow and deepen, it makes me feel helpless as a human being to help her. I think of my idols as I grew up, and I didn't even think that I would get the chance to meet them. That wasn't even really a consideration. The element of social media that is useful and detrimental to these fans today is that they are allowed to be even closer to their idols, in a way, but that also makes the idea that they may never meet them to be even more heartbreaking.
It's like the old saying that ignorance is bliss. Without social media she wouldn't have this urge in the same way. She's so committed, and she's so in love, that she doesn't understand why it wouldn't happen. I have good friends in their twentysomethings that deal with that same idea, but regarding their love lives. Why is One Direction so close, but so far away?
Another thing that kills me when I look at Lara is that she's so driven, and she's pouring all of her persistence into a cause, and she can get made fun of for it. She gets bullied at school for her fandom, and it's because kids can get jealous of someone with drive. Someone who really wants something and will push until it happens. That's terrifying to a bully, especially when you're looking at a small 15 year old girl who has all of the qualities that you wish you had.
So what else can she do? She's played her cards. She's reached out using every method she knows how. She's expanded her cause out to her network. She's out of options, and her dream isn't a reality. What does that say about how the world works?
What she will do is continue to learn the world through the tools we've given her. She'll connect with people around the world, and she'll have a best friend who lives in a different city, all because of FaceTime, Twitter, and Instagram. She does have this friend, this isn't hypothetical. She's going to meet this best friend this year at the One Direction concert in San Francisco, and it's going to be a dream come true for the both of them. Friendship is attainable through the means that she found a deep love of One Direction. I think that's really cool.
The reason she loves One Direction so much, and she prefers to listen to their music rather than anything with parental advisories, is because she can enjoy it fully around her family. She doesn't want to hide her love from anyone, and she wants to be open and share everything she's got.
She'll grow up with a better heart because of One Direction. She won't go through the angsty teenage years because she's hiding stuff from her parents. She'll know how to love someone fully because she knows what it's like to fully give yourself to a cause, which in turn she can give to another person. She's becoming her own woman through her love of these guys, but she might not know it yet.
So, why not meet her? She's cool. She'll probably freak out, and she'll probably try to keep it together at first, but then she'll explode into pure joy. She'll be hilarious, and she's probably not really say anything logical. She'll giggle, and she'll remember that moment forever. She'll fully realize that her goals are worthwhile, and she'll keep becoming an amazing person.
I'd say tweet at her, One Direction. You can do it. Your people who manage your Twitter account can handle the details. You can set up a thing, and you can make someone truly happy.
And if you don't, I'll keep getting text messages from Lara. She'll keep asking me what I can do. I'll keep doing my best, but I just wish you guys would help me out.
Lara Caloosian can be found on Twitter: @purelyzarry @hotdaiias @laaaarrrrr
She's also on Facebook, but she says that's for old people: https://www.facebook.com/lara.caloosian
Instagram, obviously: http://instagram.com/laaarrrrrr
And probably on a lot more, but I'm not sure how active One Direction is on Pinterest.
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