You're Still Perfect

Chapter 10 - Growing Up

I had taken over song writing for our third album, which was one of our best albums we ever produced. Me and Liam wrote basically the whole thing. At this point in time I was going to turn 21 in december. I am the oldest out of all the boys and Harry was the youngest. Even though we weren't 21 we still for some reason were allowed to drink at award shows. The legal drinking age in the UK was 18. We were all of legal drinking age in the UK. When the award shows were held in the states we were able to drink while we were at the venue, we got driven and escorted home anyway. After the show we weren't allowed into any of the bars or pubs.

Being in the public eye when we were so young kinda made us grow up a tad bit faster. We still were like 5 year-olds mentally. But, when it was time to work we would flip over to being mostly professional, unless it was on stage. Being so popular and being in the public eye was hard. It seemed like everyone knew almost everything about you. If you didn't want them to know something you would have to keep one huge secret. You could never ever talk about it. Keeping mine and Harry's relationship was so hard. We couldn't walk in public alone. We couldn't go out to eat unless you set up something with the place you were eating at. Keeping our relationship out of the public completely was hard. But, the thing was our relationship technically was public, it's just the people who caught it all just thought it was and we couldn't tell them. We couldn't tell them whether it was real or not because of the deals we made with Simon.

Growing up like this, where I had to keep everything I did a secret or make up a lie for what I was doing. It took a toll on me. Like many fans noticed I lost my smile. I really didn't notice that I had lost my smile. Me losing my smile was really hard for our fans. They would notice during interviews that I wouldn't smile or laugh anymore. They would post screen records of certain parts of interviews where I look sad or lost in thought. To be honest, I was most of the time. I would be thinking about, 'what would Simon do to me if I just grabbed Harry's hand right now?'. I would also just be thinking that so much had been taken away from me, I couldn't touch my boyfriend, I had to lie in every single interview. I had to hide so much of myself. I think that growing up this was affected by how I am today and how I act. To this day I am very closed off about who I am. I don't let people in anymore. Growing up like this we were still just normal kids with abnormal jobs.