I might as well not even bother providing context for this post because it will, inevitably, happen again.
Maybe next time it’ll be a musician who shaped my youth, or an actor whose body of work I admire. Maybe it will be a writer that I look up to, a game company which produced something I poured hundreds of hours of my life into. Perhaps it will be a sports team that I’ve long cheered for, or a politician who I’d hoped would bring positive change.
But eventually, everything I ever love will find a way to hurt me, and so too will everything that you ever love.
We are, all of us, fallible. I am not perfect. I’ve said and done things that hurt others, things I deeply regret. I am sure that I have been the thing that someone has loved that has hurt them. But dammit, sometimes the things you love make choices that could have easily been avoided. You begin to feel like you’re standing on the deck of the Titanic screaming about the icebergs for hours, just to watch the ship go careening into one.
This doesn’t mean that you should stop loving things. No, that’s impossible. When we open our hearts up to love, we open them up to be hurt, but if we close our hearts off to love, we become numb to the beauty of the world around us.
You have to learn to see the flaws, to acknowledge them, and say, “Yes, I love Thing even though there is this terrible thing about it. I do not like the terrible thing, and I wish that it were not there. But I still love Thing.” You can do what you can, in your capacity as a fan, to change it. What you can’t do is just ignore the flaws and try to silence those who would point them out.
You cannot paint over the flaws, then point to your paint job and say, “Ah, yes, look at how Thing has overcome hardship!”
That way lies peril.
See the flaws. Love your flawed Thing. And weep.
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