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Sinead O’Connor Was More Than That Pope Photo
It’s easy to love a martyr once she’s gone — but Sinead O’Connor was a real person, and we weren’t kind.
I grieved Sinead O’Connor’s death by telling somebody with more power than me to get fucked. It was probably deserved. This person had been awful to me during a period when people were inundating me with abuse based largely around my then-current diagnosis of bipolar disorder; a bunch of people disagreed with me about an unrelated topic, and they knew I had a diagnosis, so they said I should be locked up, given electroshock therapy, that it would be funny if I killed myself, etc. When I said they were doing this, they said that I was making it up, or else hallucinating, because, as everyone knew, I was crazy. Who were you going to believe? All these upstanding Internet citizens, or someone with bipolar disorder?
I didn’t think someone who had taken part in that — who, at the very least, loudly supported the people doing it — deserved to write about what a shame it was that people had been mean to Sinead O’Connor when she ripped up that picture of the Pope on SNL. I don’t think you get to sit there and piously declare that you would have supported a dead woman who was publicly crucified for her principles thirty-one years ago — not when the actual people you’ve hurt, in…
