How I fell in love with One Direction

It wasn't supposed to happen. I haven't been in love with a boy band since I was eight and 'N Sync was popular. But it did happen, and here we are.

I'm 22 years old and I'm a directioner.

It started innocently enough. I'd heard the song, "What Makes You Beautiful", on the radio a few times and it was pretty catchy. Although I didn't know the words, I started figuring it out on my keyboard since I was too cheap to buy sheet music and wanted to play something new.

A few months before, in March, One Direction played at Agganis Arena, approximately 20 feet from my dorm. I wasn't at the concert or in my dorm room at the time; I was covering a hockey game at Northeastern. I remember coming back from the game and meeting up with my friends at T Anthony's for dinner, and while we were eating, some huge tour buses drove past. This is a pretty common occurrence since a lot of bands play at Agganis.

I had no idea who they were though. BU would send us emails letting us know who was playing at Agganis, but concerts happen so frequently that I never read those emails. When the tour buses drove past, I remember my friend Jill pointing out the two bands - Big Time Rush and One Direction. She mentioned one of the bands had a show on Nickelodeon. None of the rest of us knew who they were, and we made fun of her for liking Nickelodeon bands.

Later in March, I had another close encounter. I was covering BU hockey in the NCAA regional in Minnesota, and One Direction happened to be performing in Minnesota at the same time. My friends on the BU hockey beat and I went to the Mall of America to check out the roller coasters and stores, and apparently One Direction was there signing autographs. Jill texted me to tell me to get their autographs, but I once again just made fun of her for liking a kid's band.

(I'm not sure why these two encounters are significant, but I felt like they should be included in the story, so there you go.)

Anyway, I figured out "What Makes You Beautiful" by ear on the keyboard in my dorm room until I had it down. Then, in May, my friend Annie made a video of me for a project for class. She asked me questions about graduation and life as a senior in college. I gave her depressing answers and then played a bit of the One Direction song on piano for her as a joke.

I normally have terrible performance anxiety when it comes to playing piano, and it was the first time I'd really ever been filmed by anyone for playing (I'd done a couple videos of songs I knew for close family and friends, but those were filmed by my computer webcam). After Annie filmed me, I thought it was kind of cool to have myself on video playing piano. Somewhere along the line, this one-time, spur-of-the-moment One Direction piano-playing thing turned into the idea of playing a One Direction medley and putting it up on YouTube for my friends to enjoy.

Since I only knew "What Makes You Beautiful", I had to find some other One Direction songs to add to the medley. That's when I found "One Thing" and "Moments". By this time, I had graduated and was back home reunited with my piano, so I had plenty of time to work on the songs. I listened to them over and over again on YouTube since I didn't have any One Direction songs in my iTunes library.

One night, I found myself going through the One Direction channel on YouTube. Instead of just watching the videos of "One Thing" and "Moments", I found a few video diaries on the One Direction VEVO. As it turns out, the guys in One Direction were hilarious. Bored and jobless (and with nothing else to do at 2 a.m.), I looked for more video diaries from them and discovered the diaries they had done while contestants on The X Factor UK.



Everything went downhill from there. These guys were even funnier than I first thought. They acted like a bunch of teenagers, and I was missing that lifestyle since I was recently graduated and unhappily entering the adult world and all. I got sucked into the YouTube machine and gradually watched pretty much every interview, stunt, performance etc. that One Direction put on YouTube. I was learning more and more about their personalities and therefore beginning to care more and more about what they were doing.

Nighttime YouTube viewing gradually shifted into daytime Google news searching to see what was going on in the One Direction world. I found Sugarscape.com, a British gossip site that publishes hilarious articles about One Direction and other celebrities. Then, I got caught up in the Tumblr world.

Prior to discovering One Direction, I wasn't well versed in the social media magnet that is Tumblr. I had gone on Tumblr a few times to see funny hockey and baseball gifs, but other than that, I didn't really know much about the site. Soon enough, however, I figured out how to search Tumblr for all things One Direction. I now know how to enter in the URL to find tags to filter what kind of One Direction content I'm looking for, and I developed a few favorite Tumblr sites that I now check every day for my One Direction news.

Until the fall, I refused to admit to myself or anyone else that I was a directioner. After all, I'm 22 years old, I've moved out of my parents home, I've graduated from college and hopefully I'll have a paying job soon. One Direction fans are supposed to be teenage girls who have yet to enter the real world. As time went on, however, I decided it was stupid to both deny and hide my fanhood.

In October, my life changed radically when a friend of mine whom I had known since I was five died of complications related to a heart transplant she'd had 10 years ago. My friend, Marisa, was someone who was fearless, outgoing and fun to be around. She always had a smile on her face, was always willing to try something new and would say or do anything, no matter how stupid it may have seemed to others. She embraced life and lived it to its fullest, and after she died, I vowed to do the same thing.

I decided that there were worse things in life than admitting to being a One Direction fan, things like cancer and heart problems and death. In the greater scheme of things, who cares how old I am or what One Direction's typical audience is? They're a band that I like, and I shouldn't be ashamed of that. Everyone has their own taste in music, and people are allowed to like whatever they want to like. You never know how much life you have to live, so why waste any time denying something you enjoy?

And so here I am. I'm Arielle, I'm 22 years old, and I'm a One Direction fan.

The medley that started it all (as you can see, I haven't quite figured out how to record something with good audio yet):