Reflections on Sinead O'Connor

It's Been Several Hours & 15 Days Since Sinead's Death (Still, Nothing Compares 2 Her)

Reflecting on Sinead the past two weeks has opened my eyes to what a huge influence she had on me during my formative junior high and high school years. One of the first albums I bought as a tween was The Lion and the Cobra. My friend and I, both misfits with fiery tempers, were so in love with the album we chose not one but two of the songs on the albums to use for our lip synching videos in Theater Arts class - Jackie and Drink Before the War.

It was Troy, though, that was the truly epic song on that album and certainly one of my peer's and my first exposures to the imagery of a phoenix rising from the flames. 

I’m pretty sure shaving my head senior year in high school was at least partly influenced by her, even though by that time I'd moved on to Tori Amos and Fleetwood Mac. At the very least, it represented a solidarity in our shared outrage. It’s not uncommon for women to change their hair after painful events - some just take it further. Having been voted "most intense" in my high school senior year, none of this should be very surprising to me. And yet, it took her passing away for me to see the connections.

All these years, despite revisiting her albums from time to time, I never followed her personal life. I just remembered her being a rebel tearing up that picture on SNL to take a stand against unthinkable behavior going on in the Catholic Church. It's easy to see now that she was a profound trailblazer, way ahead of her time, for John Paul II had not yet acknowledged the sexual abuse within the Church.

It was only a few years ago I became aware of her mental health issues, which in hindsight makes so much sense for someone with her background, growing up when she did. If a woman today ripped up a picture of someone they saw as representing child rape, there's a good chance they would be applauded - if not for the sentiment, then at least for so vulnerably sharing their own truth. 
 
"It’s a crying shame how the world reacted to Sinead at the time. The world never did give her the apology she deserved. What a betrayal she must have felt when she expressed so vulnerable a truth only to be despised. She deserved protection, not persecution," was my first reaction the day after I learned of her death.

But after researching her history over the next couple weeks, I realized the SNL incident and the public's reaction were almost insignificant compared to the trauma she experienced as a child.

No, it seems that the real betrayal she suffered was at the hands of her severely mentally ill mother who, according to Sinead, not only used to lock her outside in the dark as punishment, but also sexually abused her. It's one thing for a stranger to hurt someone, but one's own mother? THAT, my friends, is about as dark as it gets. Yet surely, it doesn't stop there - it goes back to her mother's mother and father, and their parents, and so on.(footnote1)

Now I see Sinead's relationship to her mother, who died in a car accident when she was a teen, woven all throughout her music. She has an album called Universal Mother featuring a song called All Babies for heaven's sake. And just yesterday I read that she felt one of the most healing things she did was forgive her mother. 

It makes me sad that despite her creative outlet and the forgiveness she found for her mother, her cPTSD and borderline personality disorder seemed to worsen rather than lessen with age. I'm not sure why. There's a million possible reasons, I suppose. Some tragedies take more than a single lifetime to heal. Perhaps the lessons her life embodies and beg to teach us would not ring as loudly if she had had some fairy tale ending in her lifetime. Perhaps that would have minimized the depth of her childhood trauma in a way. So much of the self help movement involves spiritually bypassing tragedies that simply cannot be addressed by positive thoughts alone. All we see of most people is the tip of the iceberg. We really have no idea. 

If there's one thing this reaffirms for me, besides the power of the mother, is that it's rare for someone with the kind of childhood Sinead had, and her resulting cPTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder, to ever make it into the public eye at all and leave such a powerful mark on the earth. Those that do often die young (think Vincent Van Gogh, Silvia Plath, Princess Diana, Carrie Fischer, Marylin Monroe, Kurt Cobain). [Footnote 2]

In this way, it seems her entire life is a victory. Look at what she accomplished - one of her greatest missions was to open discussion about child abuse and mental illness, which she certainly did. She also now has left a legacy on forgiving the mother. 
 
I wrote this poem in 2012 after a bad experience with someone who had the worst upbringing of anyone I'd ever known, and I'm now seeing how deep it goes, how this resonates so much with these reflections on Sinead, and her amazingly sweet beautiful eyes.

Something changes in you forever
when love is born and takes you over
When you've seen the sweetest eyes
and the heart break of time
what cruelty can do to a child's mind
like those flowers that grow out of stone
and the miracles of nature
no one could have predicted or known.​

Sinead has already risen like the Phoenix from the Flame. ​

Footnotes:
1. It seems like it's always the mother, more than the father, that gets all the rap, maybe because the mother is typically closest to the child, or maybe because she is held up to higher standards. But why a child grows up the way they do, I have found, is tied just as much to the father, if you look closely. Even in cases where the violence doesn't come directly from the dad, it still has a great impact - remember the quote "the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother". Either way, it's undeniable how powerful, and in some strange ways underestimated, the role of mother/woman is in this world.)
2. Celebrities cited as having BPD or BPD-like symptoms include Princess Diana, Vincent Van Gogh, Silvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Morrison, Marylin Monroe, Jim Carey, Carrie Fischer, to name a few. 

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PS. It boggles the mind even more remembering it was in her hauntingly beautiful song Feel So Different, that Sinead cites the Twelves Steps prayer:

God grant me the Serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And the Wisdom to know the difference

I am not like I was before
I thought that nothing would change me
I was not listening anymore
Still, you continued to affect me

I was not thinking anymore
Although I said I still was
I'd said, "I don't want anymore"
Because of bad experience

I have not seen freedom before
And I did not expect to
Don't let me forget now I'm here
Help me to help you to behold you

The whole time
I'd never seen
All you had spread before me
The whole time
I'd never seen
All I needed was inside me

And now I feel so different.

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