Dan Howell and Phil Lester consumed my preteen years. I thought about the YouTube duo all the time — while getting ready for school, while zoned out in class, while getting ready for bed. I listened to music popular in the fandom. I would even (poorly) doodle each of them in my notebook before going home and logging onto my Instagram fan account. Talking to me was a bit of a nightmare. I would not shut up about #hearteyeshowell and theories about their marriage or where they lived.
I was insufferable, and I miss it.
Loving Dan and Phil was a palpable, physical feeling. I was often so giddy about them I blushed or had to jump around my room. I was once so plagued by them that I was nauseous after reading a fanfiction where they fought.
My obsession has relaxed in recent years, as it felt so specific to my preteen misery. Maybe watching Dan and Phil and imagining them in love gave me hope that I too could find my way to love, especially as mainstream Queer representation lacked. Maybe I was just lonely and made them my friends, or I craved the interaction with the online fandom community. Whatever fueled my obsession, it spoke exactly to my preteen moment.
It’s been over 10 years since my Dan and Phil obsession began, and there still hasn’t been anything that made me feel quite that insane. 2019’s “Little Women” came the closest. I saw the movie in theaters at 15, and I felt seen in a way that changed my life. The film depicts an ambition that I hadn’t yet begun to let myself conceive, which I now see as part of the reason I dared to dream of college and writing.
The parts of the story that still speak to me now are those most attuned to who I was when I first watched the film. I would never have admitted I wanted to write at 15, but could feel myself quietly admitting it after “Little Women.” So much of the unrequited (but slightly requited) love between Jo and Laurie still destroys me in a way it couldn’t have without relating it to my teenage experience. The Meg I related to then, the girl who desired marriage and children, has turned into the Jo of my present, current me who desires freedom and a big, ambitious life. On every rewatch, I still find myself yearning for Meg’s life and her dreams, certainly representative of who I was on my first watch. I’m still — and hopefully forever — obsessed with “Little Women.”
It’s not just Dan and Phil and “Little Women” who defined my teenage years. I spent so much of my youth obsessed. “Dodie yellow” is still my favorite color. My morning alarm tells me to “seek a great perhaps,” and I ask people for their secrets because of a line in “All the Young Dudes.” It’s impossible to know where I begin and my teenage obsessions end. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever like something in the specific, painful way that I did in teenagehood or if everything truly ties back to who I was then.
After my exit from teenagehood, I’ve viewed this type of obsession as a purely teenage phenomenon. I have limited time, in my college years, to daydream about my interests in the way I did then.
But it’s more than just free time that fueled my obsessions. The specific loneliness of adolescence and the (maybe dramatized) suffering of my young life could seemingly only be bandaged by distracting myself with the things I loved. Any hour spent nourishing my interests felt like an hour caring for myself, something likely necessary for the development of any young person.
The wonderful thing was, my obsessions felt completely encouraged. Yes, “fangirling” is often demonized or made fun of for what feels like no reason except for girls enjoying things and being passionate. But I was so engrossed and impassioned, I rarely stopped to bask in the forced shame.
From my experience — the hours on my fan accounts, all of the time in my brain devoted to my interests — fangirling was the one privilege of being a teenage girl. Young boys are often taught to reject emotion, to push down their feelings and worship pure stoicism. While this means pushing down their anger, sadness and joy, it also means they push down their passions. As a result, internet stan culture booms with young girls feeling free to embrace their interests, without toxic masculinity encouraging indifference and weighing them down.
Any fan account was a wonderfully supportive place. There was never any shame around my wild passion, only a community of people dedicated to lifting each other up, encouraging each other to get further and further into their fandoms. That communal obsession was wonderful for lonely, young me and I feel lucky to have had those spaces in my youth, no matter how toxic the internet was.
I, the sappy person I am, often mourned the day my obsessions would lose their shiny sparkle. To grow up and not feel the same heart-racing rush when watching a YouTube video seemed like a great tragedy, a loss I feared would haunt me forever.
Last November, my mom saw “Wicked” in theaters for the first time — with no previous knowledge of the musical. Obsessed is not a strong enough word to describe her love for this movie: Glinda and Elphaba wormed into every conversation with her. I believe she saw it five times in theaters before purchasing it for $30 on demand. Every car ride with her included the soundtrack. She once told me she, on multiple occasions, had trouble falling asleep because of how distraught she was over the ending.
I’d spent so much time wondering if anything would ever strike me like my teenage obsessions, if there’s something about the naive teenage spirit that allowed me to love something so completely, something lost in my burgeoning adulthood. My mom and “Wicked” completely changed my perspective.
Here she was, in her mid-40s, losing sleep over the story of two magical girls. A newfound obsession completely overtook her life, with the same life-altering consumption I found in my teenage years. I admired it, and it gave me hope for all of the wonderful art that is yet to consume me.
I started thinking about what exactly drew my mom to “Wicked.” I, too, saw and loved the movie, but nowhere near to the extent she did. She didn’t have any previous interest in the plotline or the lead actresses — I can even remember her expressing a slight dislike for Ariana Grande. So, what got her?
When my mom was little, she wanted to be a performer. Her only dreams were of dancing and singing. Adulthood took the dreaming out of her, but it still comes through at times. “Wicked,” with its huge choreographed numbers, its over-the-top acting and insane vocal performances, seemed to strike her in a way reminiscent of who she was back then.
My mom loves a lot of musicals. But “Wicked” glows with a childhood wonder, a ridiculous whimsy, that I think might speak to her childhood dreams. Is she, too, forever finding her teenage self in her obsessions today? Is it ever escapable, what you wanted at 15? My mom and “Wicked” are telling me maybe not.
When I look back at my (not far gone) teenage years, what I remember most isn’t the schoolwork, or the lunchroom or every person I knew. What I remember most is what I was obsessed with, how Team StarKid or Hozier or Twenty One Pilots made me feel, how they spoke to what I was going through. Nostalgia will always bind me to what I loved as a teenager, but I’m starting to think that I’ll always be looking for a specific emotion in teenagehood, something I’ll process as contemporary but actually speaks to my younger self.
Maybe I’ll never escape what mattered to me at 15. I don’t think I want to. If loving new art always means I get to look at how far I’ve come, at the ways I have and haven’t changed since my youth, I’ll take it.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Campbell Johns can be reached at caajohns@umich.edu.
