Sinead was right

Sinead was right. And in the spirit of her vibe, I’m posting this here because LinkedIn is where I have the greatest reach, “appropriateness” be damned.

Sinead O’Connor, singer, songwriter, storyteller, performer, all around bard, passed a few days ago, on the last day of our family vacation in Ireland of all places, a country we have no connection to other than a great appreciation for its traditional music. At 56, her passing was too-early, premature, unnatural. I usually find collective performative grief distasteful, but uncharacteristically, I bawled like a baby at the news of Sinead’s death. Why?

I was old enough to remember Sinead tearing up a picture of the pope and the collective ripped her to pieces in response. I remember because she was far from the only celebrity to do something provocative, so I didn’t understand why her actions were deemed transgressive and unacceptable. In the press, in commentary, she was pilloried for an act that, at the time, in my young, unclear-on-Catholicism's-nuances,?mind, I thought was both fairly tame and an echo of Madonna’s highly celebrated, richly rewarded, in-your-face antics. But overall, the response to Sinead’s stance against the Catholic church was vicious, merciless, punitive. Unlike other “scandals” it didn’t blow over. For some reason, Sinead’s brief, non-violent act provoked those most painful social responses: rejection, exclusion, derision, ridicule, shunning.

Looking back, she must not have played some intricate game that others did, the one we call politics or something similar. She clearly acted from sincerity, a depth of feeling,?some inability to tolerate hypocrisy and, clear to anyone with some awareness, a place of deep pain. And she made something beautiful with that pain to share with all of us. That act of creation is the very ideal of what one should do with pain, bad luck, and bad circumstances.

The broad wispy cloud we call mental health struggles came twinned with Sinead O’Connor’s talent. It’s a convenient foil for what may have brought on her untimely death. Sussing out the origins of mental health difficulties is a cornerstone of different research and clinical areas. Sinead suffered abuse in childhood, and that could have led to or exacerbated her psychological struggles later on. Maybe it was, as is often implied with mental health difficulties, a consequence of a fragile brain. Or the interaction of those two factors. Society acknowledges these problems and works to stem child abuse and learn more about brain health. But what does rejection, on a global scale, at the age of 26, do to one’s mental health? What does actually being gaslighted - Sinead was just calling out an institution’s extreme wrongs and hypocrisies - do to one’s psyche? It probably causes a lot of inner damage, the kind that might lead to an untimely death and yet, unlike child abuse, where no sane person would expect less than accountability from its perpetrators, we, the collective, in our response to non-conformists, in our merciless punishment of “misbehaving” women, adopt this mind-bending hypocrisy when it comes to taking responsibility for the consequences of our bullying. Mental health is some blank check we use to buy off our absolution.

Yet she, and others like her, are voices we need. The vanguard, the artists, writers, and scientists who are 10 years ahead of the zeitgeist, the status quo, or the collective’s comfort. What if we had seriously listened to Sinead back in the early 90s? Investigated her stance instead of boo-hissing it into hiding? Could it have led to less suffering at the hands of the Catholic church?

Rejection and exclusion are incredibly painful cudgels used to keep individuals in line. I cried over Sinead, a stranger, but at least 2 other dear friends took their own lives, I suspect, in the end, because society would not make room for their sincerity. We don’t live in small tribes anymore; we have the means to be inclusive on many dimensions and to make room for weirdos and those who challenge our assumptions. Especially women, because…the eccentric woman, unlike her male counterpart, has yet to be given a place in the pantheon of archetypes (please cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogues_with_Madwomen) And again, Sinead was not just off-beat, but right. I hope she had some resolution on the pain inflicted on her, not just by her mother or her Church, but also the rest of us. And I hope that in the future, all of us can think twice before giving in to some playground-bully instinct (or cowed silence) when faced with the unknown, the different, whatever, especially when it challenges our comfort.