Rin Usami > Quotes

“In the same way that a night of sleep put wrinkles in a bedsheet, just being alive took a toll.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Phones and TV screens have kind of a grace built into their separation, like the distance between the stage and the audience. It was reassuring to sense someone's presence at a certain remove so that the space couldn't be destroyed by interacting directly, or the relationship ruined by anything I did.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“But this world where I showed up with my half-made-up persona was a kinder place.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Sometimes it was harder to be doing nothing than it was to do something.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Idol groups generally assigned each member an official color, which would be used for the light sticks that fans would hold up to show your support at a performance or for other individual merch. My oshi's was blue, so I systematically surrounded myself with everything blue. Just being in a blue space made me feel calm.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I still felt the burden of my involuntary role as a mammal dragging me down. In the same way that a night of sleep put wrinkles in a bedsheet, just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathed to get rid of the grime that built up on your skin and clipped your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Maybe if I kept putting out uncomplicated emotions, I could eventually turn into an uncomplicated person”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I couldn’t manage life the way everyone else easily seemed to, and I struggled with the messy consequences every day. But pushing my oshi was the center of my life, a given, and my one point of clarity. It was more than a core—it was my backbone.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I could see that normal people fleshed out their days with schoolwork, and activities, and part-time jobs that gave them money to go out with friends to the movies or to eat or buy clothes, which enriched their lives. I was moving in the opposite direction. My entire experience was increasingly concentrated into this backbone, as if I was going through some kind of ordeal to purify myself. Everything that was unnecessary fell away, until my spine was all that was left.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Why couldn’t I live normally? Manage to do the bare minimum needed to be human? I never meant to break things, make a mess of them. I tried to live, but things just kept piling up like the waste from my own body. I tried to live and my home collapsed around me. I”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“It was tiresome being told I was being taken advantage of, when I had no expectation of getting anything in return. My devotion to my oshi was its own reward, and that worked well for me, so I just needed people to shut up about it. I wasn’t looking for my oshi to return my feelings.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“There were as many styles of fandom as there were fans. Some people worshipped every move their oshi made, while others thought discernment made the true fan. There were those who had a romantic interest in their oshi but no interest in their oshi’s work; others who had no such feelings but sought a direct connection through engaging on social media; people who enjoyed their oshi’s output but didn’t care about the gossip; those who found fulfillment in supporting the oshi financially; others who valued being part of a fan community.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I still think you should graduate. You can keep pushing just a little longer. Think about your future."
I felt like what he was saying was true, but the voice in my head overwrote it with But my present is already too much.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“What Akari felt is not only isolation but irritation and disappointment towards herself because she couldn’t achieve anything, no matter what she tried. And discomfort at the fact of having to keep living each day in spite of this. Yet, she could wholeheartedly put utmost effort when it comes to the act of oshi. Allowing her to feel that she was living freely, unlike her experience in other parts of her life. Rather than fulfilling an isolation, I think she used her fandom to encourage and energise herself.”
― Rin Usami

“I imagined needing to put in extra work all the time, as though you were writing backwards when everyone around you was writing normally. Then showing someone what you’d worked so hard to achieve with your unsteady hand, only for it to be taken for granted and them to say, “I knew you could do it if you tried.” Having to write backwards your whole life, with no one even noticing—maybe this was your experience of the world.”
― Rin Usami

“The idea of making direct contact with my oshi didn’t interest me. I went to shows, but only to be part of the crowd. I wanted to be inside the applause, inside the screaming, and anonymously post my thanks online afterward.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“My living, moving oshi would be lost as soon as the show was over, but I wanted to take in every drop of what he was giving us, from the first look to the last breath. I wanted to remember that sensation of sitting alone in my seat feeling my chest fill up, to keep it with me, and I wanted the photos and the videos and the merch that would point me back to it.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Sometimes the thing in life you depend on is suddenly subjected to some kind of baffling, cruel calamity. What can you do when that happens? When the only thing you believe in, the one thing that helps you survive, is lost, how do you think about it, and what do you do?”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“There were as many styles of fandom as there were fans. Some people worshipped every move their oshi made, while others thought discernment made the true fan. There were those who had a romantic interest in their oshi but no interest in their oshi’s work; others who had no such feelings but sought a direct connection through engaging on social media; people who enjoyed their oshi’s output but didn’t care about the gossip; those who found fulfillment in supporting the oshi financially; others who valued being part of a fan community.
My angle was simply to keep trying to understand him, as a person and as an artist. I wanted to see the world through his eyes.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“In the play, Peter Pan kept saying, "I don't wanna grow up." He said it when he left on his adventure, and when he came back and brought Wendy and the rest of them home. The line landed in the core of me and cracked me open. It reconfigured a sequence of words I'd retraced with my ears for so many years without really thinking about it. I don't wanna grow up. Let's go to Neverland. Heat gathered at the tip of my nose. Those words are for me, I thought.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Bodies were so heavy. Legs spraying up water were heavy, and wombs that shed their lining every month were heavy.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“People who wanted balanced, reciprocal relationships said there was something unhealthy about connections that were only one-way. Stop pining over him, you don't have a chance. Why are you always the one making sacrifices for her? It was tiresome being told I was being taken advantage of, when I had no expectation of getting anything in return. My devotion to my oshi was its own reward, and that worked well for me, so I just needed people to shut up about it.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“I tried to live, but things kept piling up like the waste from my own body. I tried to live and my home collapsed around me.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“dancing, talk, personality, presence—everything about him. It was the reverse of that saying “Hate the monk, hate his robes.” If you fell in love with the monk, even the frays in his robe became loveable. I thought that was pretty normal.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“วันนี้โลกก็ยังกลมเหมือนเดิม งานก็ยังไม่เสร็จเหมือนเดิม โอชิก็ยังเลอค่าเหมือนเดิม”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Phones and TV screens had a kind of grace built into their separation, like the distance between the stage and the audience. It was reassuring to sense someone’s presence at a certain remove, so that the space couldn’t be destroyed by interacting directly, or the relationship ruined by anything I did.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“My oshi had shown me there was something l could dedicate myself to.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“It didn't make any sense. I couldn't tell when she'd defend me, and when she'd get mad. My sister expressed herself not through logic, but through her body, which spoke and cried and angered. Mom didn't get angry so much as judge. She would make snap decisions. My sister would pick up on them immediately and wear herself down trying to keep the peace.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“Can't we just be trying in our own ways?”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning

“His existence and my witnessing of it were all I asked for.”
― Rin Usami, Idol, Burning