The tear was the truth

Just before I fell asleep last night, I read the news about Sinéad O’Connor’s death. and as I lay in the dark I remembered with sadness the impact she’d had on my life and how raw and real her music was…

So many songs from The Lion & The Cobra and I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got became my soundtrack to some of the pain and confusion of being a teenage girl in the 90s. even if, with hindsight, much of the shocking honesty and raw truth of her incredibly troubled life went over my head at the time. I bought a copy of her EP Gospel Oak when I was 16, and I played it over and over for months. a devotional, thoughtful collection of songs - not least of which includes the beautiful ‘This is to Mother You’ and the savagely haunting ‘This is a Rebel Song’ - it was, oddly, this collection of songs that truly spoke to me. many years later I ended up living in Gospel Oak in North West London, and felt like it connected me with her in some small way.

Now, in her death, I can feel some sort of collective in-breath from our community of women, all over the world. she was one of us, surely, in so many ways - in her bitter, raw anger, in her damaged, tender heart, in her talent, her truth, her courage, and most of all her fragility. She spoke the truth of what so many of us have yet to voice, she blazed trails that we wish she hadn’t had to. she was everything - too much, not enough, broken, beautiful, burning too brightly, and in doing so, lighting fires within so many of us.

I wonder now if we failed her. certainly, the world as it is failed her. how I wish she could have been wrapped in the love of a sisterhood that might have held her more closely than she was in her life. She was a soul in so much pain, her vulnerability laid bare for all to see. and, while there is so much power in vulnerability, her fame meant it was fodder for the masses to feed on. and she deserved so much better than that.

Katherine May has written a BRILLIANT piece about her this morning - which I urge you to read. she says, so much better than I can, that Sinéad’s true beauty lay in her vulnerability. and that in doing so she made voicing our own pain so much more possible. “With bare hands and bleeding fingernails, she dug out a channel into which so many of us have flowed: the difficult, broken, remade people, speaking out our complicated truths. Sinéad - and others like her - has seeded a redemptive moment in our culture, an uncovering of secrets, a voicing of the unspeakable.,” writes May.

This is so true. but as May goes on to say, we cannot have vulnerability without the safety net to hold it with tenderness and compassion. ‘there is something missing. The circle is not being closed. We are not taking good care of the people who give us so much through their sharing.’

It is a sage reminder for me, and all of us, really, that the gift of sharing our story, of vulnerability, comes with a collective responsibility to keep that person safe and held, not to fix or change them, but to be the safe container that supports and loves them through it.

‘My guess is that Sinéad didn’t have any support either,’ says May. ‘My guess is that she went out into the big, wide world as herself, and we loved her and then tore her to pieces, and then loved her again, and then laughed at her, and then loved again, but a little bit less each time. she would have swept up the ashes of this on her own, her head ringing.’

I started circles, in part, to ensure women didn’t feel alone in their journey through life, that there is always somewhere for them to lay bare their souls and know they are safe, that the circle is a container that can hold all the parts of who they are. i still so deeply believe this. and i will take forward with me the reminder that with deep vulnerability, comes great responsibility.

“I have a universe inside me
Where I can go and spirit guides me
There I can ask, oh, any question
I get the answers if I listen.”

Sinead O’Connor ‘The Healing Room’