good luck, darling
on a totally fictional definitely not real pop star
Let’s say, as a purely fictional exercise, that there’s a pop star. We’ll call her Gariana Ande. This pop star, who has never been exactly a beacon of health or good decisions, has, over the past year or two, become alarmingly thin. Now, the problem for Gariana Ande and the people in her actual life who care about her is this: if somebody is an adult and wants to destroy themselves, it’s pretty hard to stop them even if there’s nobody egging on their bad impulses. If that person is rich enough that neither a tempting carrot nor a threatening stick can do much to them, it doesn’t get easier.
The problem for everybody else is a little different.
Many people, diagnosing Gariana with a reasonable level of certainty with a mental illness, want to feel bad for her. She makes that hard, because she is a difficult person. Of course, some people feel bad for her anyway, some people don’t care, and some people tune out. There’s also a certain kind of person who carefully follows everything Gariana does, who selects the most skeletal and unflattering images to share, and who says that Gariana knows what she’s doing, that she’s repulsive, that she’s going to die, and that—this part is only ever implicit, but it’s absolutely there—she deserves to.1
Finally, there’s a slightly more distanced but nevertheless concerned person, who wants to know why “we” are letting this happen and the answer is—“we” aren’t letting anything happen, something is just happening. We are watching something happen and it feels bad to watch because it’s a bad thing. If you want to know what to do, the answer is to stop watching.
Instead of looking away, though, what “we” have basically said is that Gariana has a very severe illness, and for this reason, we don’t want to have to see her. She can come back when she’s better or she can come back when she’s dead. But nobody wants to see “this,” where “this” means a visibly and disturbingly ill individual. Even looking her is dangerous, or at least, many people seem to believe that it is.
And maybe it is. Dangerous to look, I mean. I wouldn’t know. I find the way that Gariana’s (apparently) compulsive and self-destructive behavior is moralized simply for playing out in public troubling. Not as troubling as the behavior. But I keep reading things about her and I keep thinking, yeah, she’s doing insane things, because she is (probably) sick in the head. What to do about that is hard to say but the explanation for her behavior is (or seems) simple enough.
If I were Gariana’s friend, I probably would have mostly given up on talking her into or out of doing things a long time ago. I’d be going “uh huh” a lot. But only mostly, because if you love somebody, it’s hard to give up on them all the way. But I’m not her friend and in any case, as we said at the beginning, Gariana Ande is not a real person and any resemblances to real pop stars with names kind of close to that name are purely coincidental.
OK, OK, OK. We all know who I’m talking about. But here’s the thing.
If you acknowledge it’s not just hard, but almost impossible, to get an adult to do something they don’t want to do, you have to shift back to what you yourself are doing. You can look or you can not look. You can change the channel, you can put on a different record. If you are worried about the effects of looking on other people, you can turn your attention toward those people. There are many times when the most responsible reaction is simply to go look at something else.
Nevertheless, I do think one thing is kind of worth saying, which is why I’m bending my own rules about not paying things attention to make this post: sick people certainly can do bad things, but they are not bad people for being sick. They aren’t some kind of toxic waste leaking over everybody else. They are not zombies who spread via visual infection. I don’t think many of the people who claim that it’s necessary, in order to protect children, to denounce the appearance of Ariana Grande really think that a picture of her is so dangerous either because, frankly, they’re more than happy to spread them. I don’t think a video of Ariana Grande saying on camera “dear children, it’s bad to starve yourself, as you can see by my hideous countenance, and I repent of my sins in so doing… do not be like me, even though of course you want to, who wouldn’t, as I am so very famous” would do much for the cause, but it seems like that’s what some people want her to do.
The line between “you’re sick and need help” and “you’re sick and you’re bad” gets blurred when people decide the primary victim of an illness is not the person who has it but rather their audience. Somebody else’s mental or physical illness is not about me nor is it about you. It’s one of many ugly things in the world the rest of us can’t do much about. That’s how it is. It sounds harsh, because—it is harsh. I hope Ariana’s recent announcement that she’s stepping away from the public eye for a while is celebrity code for checking herself into a facility. But people should stop trying to insert themselves into this story. They should just go look at something else. That is the only thing available to them to do.
Also the new album is fine.
I’m going to lock comments on this one just because I can’t really be around for them and it’s a touchy subject, but I do read email and try to respond to it (albeit it’s going to be a bit delayed through this week).
The people who do this are mostly people who share Gariana’s suspected illness, and so you see a lot of posts about how when this or that commenter was one pound despite being six feet tall and eating only a raisin a day, they never looked this bad.… I’m not here to call them hypocrites because it’s obvious that these people, like Gariana herself, are still sick.