1. Joey asked what my favorite pictures of Shirley are. These are some of them. :)
2. I was supposed to make an ‘eloquent’ post about Shirley for her birthday yesterday, but honestly, I don’t know how to say any of this eloquently, which makes this quite daunting, which is why I didn’t do it yesterday, but I must, so I’m just going to ramble.
WARNING: This is extremely long and I mention my eating disorder and other things in here that might be triggering.
Do you ever look back and realize that one little action you took changed the entire course of your life? One day in 5th grade, my family and I went to Barnes and Noble, and I randomly picked up a No Doubt album and decided to listen to it. It was from this that I fell in love with No Doubt, my first favorite band. Throughout 6th grade, I would spend a lot of time on the No Doubt forum talking to other fans, and I found that many of them were also massive fans of this band called Garbage, so I decided to listen to them too. Little did I know I was about to discover the band that would shape my entire life and really, my identity.
I had a beautiful childhood. I was surrounded by a loving, generous, supportive family. I was an extremely creative child. Before I even knew how to spell or hold a pen, I would dictate these wild stories to my grandma to write down. I wrote my first songs out of words I made up…and I didn’t keep them to myself. I would go on various errands with my parents and insist on singing my songs to the employees of say, Home Depot. I sang in front of my private school class. I choreographed dances with my friends. I drew. All my babysitters would tell my mom how creative I was, that I would be a leader someday.
This all changed at the age of 8, when I joined Girl Scouts and became a victim of bullying. It was the first time I truly experienced people teasing me, making fun of what I said, wore, was, and being ostracized from a group. I would imagine horrible things, like, “They must celebrate when I’m absent. If I died, they would probably cheer.” It took a toll on me. I turned inward, became painfully shy and quiet, and started going home after school every day to just watch TV and eat junk food.
The bullying continued after my first year of girl scouts, when I transferred to the public school for 4th grade where all of the girl scouts went. By the time it was my first day of school, one of the girls in particular had spread lies about what a horrible person I was, so that people I didn’t even know were whispering about me and moving away from me when I tried to sit with them. Needless to say I had no friends that year.
Anyway, to make a long sad story short, I spent the next few years saying almost nothing in school, becoming hostile and bossy to the friends I did have, and growing more and more self-conscious of my ever-increasing weight. I was taunted every day, had stuff thrown at me, my clothes cut with scissors, and was literally spit on. I would give people my lunch and do their homework in hopes of them liking me in return. That didn’t happen.
I was regularly bullied up until 8th grade. However, once 7th grade started, something changed. Because I had discovered Garbage, I had this new comfort that I never had before. My day may have consisted of my entire art class and the teacher making fun of me, notes being passed around that I was a lesbian, people pulling my hair, groups of boys daring one of them to go tell me I’m pretty and touch me while they all stifled laughter, but I just had to get through the day because when I got home I had my Garbage CDs to listen to. I had this band that understood me, that knew what it was like to be a freak. I had this band that felt like mine. Nobody else I knew listened to Garbage. The band felt like my secret weapon that I could channel for strength, comfort and reassurance. I think Shirley has said a similar thing about Siouxsie Sioux.
Finding out that Shirley herself was bullied in school made a world of a difference to me. My mom and grandma had constantly told me that the bullies were “just jealous” and that “many famous people were bullied when they were younger too,” but I didn’t believe it. But here was this woman I admired so greatly, and she went through the same thing I did. If she made it through this hell and became the successful, beautiful, strong, outspoken woman that she is, then I could become like that someday, too.
My entire life, I have wanted to be a writer and a singer, but Shirley changed the direction of my aspirations. I wanted to be a ROCK singer. I wanted to do what she did and sing about the pain I went through so that other people could find solace in it like I did with Garbage. I started writing lyrics that were inspired by Shirley’s. By the end of that year, I was proud to be different. The bullying hurt, but I knew it didn’t matter. I had a sense of identity. I embraced my weirdness and I knew that whatever darkness I went through would only make me strong and beautiful in the end. In fact, this quote of Shirley’s became my philosophy ever since (I even quoted it in my high school yearbook):
It’s a torturous time, when you learn almost everything you really have to know about survival. The important thing to remember when you are living through it, however, is that you have absolutely no idea quite how smart and strong and beautiful the pain will make you. So go forth and suffer…. you’ll rule the world.
The year after that, 8th grade, was extremely difficult for me as well. Let me just say that I was in 8th grade way before Katy Perry released “I Kissed a Girl” and it became trendy for girls to make out with each other. Most of the kids I went to middle school with considered homosexuality to be the most revolting, taboo thing one could be capable of. That’s when the phrase “that’s gay” was at its peak. Nobody protested it. Not even me. That was the year I realized that I was not straight, and I didn’t want anybody to figure it out. My cousin had given me a wish bracelet, and when I put it on, I wished for a crush on a boy. I was just so confused. I thought something was wrong with me, that I was going to hell, that I was disgusting. I prayed that it was just a phase. But it was because of - yep, you guessed it - Shirley and Garbage that I grew to accept my sexuality by the end of the year. (I actually realized I liked girls because I had and still have the hugest crush on her, but that’s a story for another day.) I never in my life had anything against gay people; it was everyone around me acting disgusted by homosexuality that worried me. It was songs like Androgyny and Cherry Lips, though, that spun that around for me. Garbage exposed me to gay culture in a positive light. Similarly, Sex is Not the Enemy and Shirley’s many, many quotes about her sexuality and sex in general made me believe that it was okay to be a sexual person and to be open about it. My friends didn’t understand this mindset, but I knew I was right. I wonder what I would be like if I never looked up to Shirley this way. Would I still be a feminist? Would I slut shame? Would I still be in the closet? I don’t know. Even if I did end up with the same mindset I have now, it wouldn’t be the same. I wouldn’t feel like I had someone divine supporting me. In a weird but awesome way, Shirley’s lyrics and quotes and interviews about sex were the proper sex ed I never had. Her Ten Commandments of Love? Come on. If it weren’t for that, I would probably think my own period was gross.
A lot of times throughout adolescence, I would be going through something really difficult and scary, only to read something Shirley said or wrote and find that she once went through the same exact thing. I remember that in 8th grade, I found a lump in my breast and was really frightened by it. I was 13 and of course I immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had breast cancer. I kept it a secret for months and truly believed I was dying. Then, I happened to read this interview of Shirley’s from 2001 which said:
“The night was wonderful. I was like a movie of a little Scottish girl who turns into a rock star, and there’s hazy lights and a superstar encounter with Bono. I went back to my great posh hotel, fell asleep, woke up feeling wonderful, and I stretched.” In the course of that stretch, Manson discovered a lump. “I was completely freaked. A doctor said I was going to have to have it checked out, and from Ireland we went [on the tour] to the U.K., and (doctors there) tried to give me a biopsy, and they couldn’t get the needle in, and I had to see a specialist.” [Full article]
I remember wishing I was an adult so I could drive to the doctor myself. I didn’t want to talk to my mom about it, because, you know, I was a shy, moody, body-conscious 13-year-old. But somehow, finding out that Shirley had the same thing happen to her and that she did have to get something removed scared me enough to tell my mom and get it checked out.
Another incident like this was when I was 15 and going through a lot of drama within a friend group I was a part of. I had a best friend who had another best friend, and the three of us would try to get along as a group, but there would be so much jealousy and fighting. It was very high school, but I was in high school. The whole situation made me so sick with anxiety that it began to control my life and thwart my well-being. One night while I was feeling this intense anxiety, I happened to stumble upon this:
…she mentions constantly comparing herself to her ‘beautiful’ sisters, bullying at school, and a circle of teenage girl mind-fuckery. “I’ve only just worked it out that there was this really big confidence-losing event,” she says. “I was best friends with two girls, and I was so glad not to be on my own it didn’t occur to me that three is always a bad number.”
I was astounded by this quote. By the time this was going on, I was dealing with my disordered eating, yet-to-be-diagnosed mood disorder, anxiety, etc. Hardships felt tens of times worse to me than they should have. This situation with my friends made me physically sick. I had gotten to the (ignorant) point where I didn’t think anyone in the world could relate to me. But I remember reading this quote and finding it so astonishing that Shirley, of all people, my idol, the person whom I already shared so many experiences in common with, also went through THIS. I didn’t have the words to describe it, but she did. I remember feeling justified in that moment, like I wasn’t overreacting or making it up, it was real and it was a thing other people experienced too. I also felt this…feeling I can’t explain. A feeling of “wow, people I thought were my best friends just left me, but I still have Garbage. I still have my favorite band who comforted me all these years. The fact that I found this quote of Shirley’s when I most needed it must really mean something.” I acknowledged my relationship to her and Garbage as one of the only constants in my life.
The anxiety I was experiencing then carried over into junior year, as I was starting school without the best friend I had the two years before. It was a really difficult transition period for me. It was that September that Shirley’s season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was airing. Okay, that was the most awesome thing ever. Just saying. Like, holy shit. I was having a difficult time with my friends, but do you know what I had to look forward to every week? Seeing my idol morph, mutate, form, whatever-you-call-it out of a urinal to shoot blades from her finger and kill a rude guy. That’s what. It was one of the highlights of that year for me. I loved watching her grow as an actress throughout the season. I loved seeing her as this invincible bad ass robot. I know that the Terminator movies, with their strong female characters, inspired Shirley to stay strong when she was younger. Well, she did the same for me, but with the show. That was the year that she got her facebook page and though she didn’t communicate with her fans on it yet, it made me feel closer to her. Throughout the fall and winter of that school year, I was slipping away into what was going to be the darkest period of my life (well, I hope that was the darkest period of my life). I wasn’t admitting this to myself - I wasn’t admitting anything - but I think I was scared. Terminator and “In The Snow” and everything Shirley was doing that year kept me from slipping too far away. Like I said, she was my constant. I think I was trying to hold on.
On March 17, 2009, I snapped. My under-eating, obsessive compulsive habits, anxiety - everything I was struggling with caught up to me and it was like some big black beast came up and swallowed my brain. I spent the next few months thinking about literally nothing else but food. If I had a conversation with a friend, I would be trying to determine how many calories their body must need. Seriously, everything was about food. This is where I got lost. Shirley’s season of TSCC ended, but by that time I didn’t relate to it anymore. I didn’t even relate to Garbage anymore. I was gone. I remember lying in my bed one day, miserable, when this picture of Shirley popped into my head. It was a live photo of her, with red stage lights. I remember it looked so far away. I remember thinking “Wow, I used to love. I used to have a dream.” It seemed like the most foreign concept to me, that my dream used to be music. Now my dream was to weigh and eat a certain amount. (That fall, I found it interesting how as soon as I got my period back from my eating disorder, season two of TSCC came out on DVD.)
My battle with anorexia and eventually bulimia (and everything in between) lasted from March 2009 to October 2011. The reason I’m writing about this is because, though this was a time I stopped listening and relating to Garbage as much, I truly believe it was the values Shirley instilled in me when I was 12 and 13 that kept me alive when I already felt truly dead. One, I knew that Shirley had body dysmorphic disorder, and I think deep down I knew inherently that if she made it through something, I could too. She taught me to be a survivor. I was a survivor, and I wasn’t going to change that. I had no idea how I was going to survive, but I knew I had to. Though in the pit of my disorder I had long forgotten my dreams of music, I think that live picture of Shirley that popped into my head came from a place deep in my brain that knew I had a dream to live for and wanted to remind me of it. I have a theory that my entire disorder started because I feared the future. I knew what my dreams were. They were to write and to sing and to play music. I didn’t want to go to college. But I didn’t know how to express this to anyone, so I turned to food instead. I hid behind it. I tried to disappear. When I finally couldn’t take it anymore and told my parents I needed to take time off from college, the clouds in my life slowly but surely started clearing. I went to much-needed treatment for my eating disorder and it really paid off. This leads me to the October 2011 I spoke of.
So I was discharged from treatment. I was “recovered.” I had no school to go to. I had no job. I didn’t know what to do. It was around that time that Garbage was starting to make announcements about the new album. I remember having a difficult time mentally/emotionally and telling one of my best friends the release date for Not Your Kind of People. He reminded me, “Something to look forward to.” I was excited for that, but I was still stuck.
In the beginning of this year, maybe because I knew the album was coming out in a few months, I constantly had a strong urge to listen to Garbage. They were always my #1 favorite band, but I didn’t listen to them as much as I used to, simply because they hadn’t released anything new in awhile. Because of that, it was like I was listening to them with new ears this year. And at 19, it was different than it was listening to Garbage for the first time when I was 11. This time, I felt like I could relate to Shirley, woman-to-woman. I couldn’t relate to songs about breakups and sex when I was 12. Back then, they just sounded good and beautiful and gave me ideas. I just wanted to be like her. Now, Shirley’s lyrics move me in a completely different way. I love them to tears because I have felt the same feelings, but I also love them to tears because I can look back on when I was first a Garbage fan and see how far I’ve come. I truly have to thank Shirley for the strength to come any distance at all.
I can’t imagine this year if Garbage hadn’t toured. I’ve been to three shows on this tour, and that doesn’t feel like enough. I can’t put into words some of the moments I experienced seeing Garbage live. The moment I saw Shirley in real life for the first time in New York…there aren’t words for that. Singing my favorite lyrics at the same time she was. In Atlantic City, when she looked at me and nodded like she recognized me from the times I wrote her on facebook. That was literally lifechanging. And don’t get me started on Osheaga when she stopped walking to sing to me when she noticed I was there, pointed the microphone at me, smiled, blew kisses at my friends and me. These were the first times in all my years I ever felt my fantasy life and my real life meshing with each other. It is magic. I am so genuinely happy and in love with life when Garbage is on stage in front of me. Just one short show of theirs is enough to remind me what my dreams and values and identity are. I tend to get lost, if you haven’t noticed.
In Atlantic City, I wrote a letter to Shirley and gave it to her husband, but I don’t know if she ever got it. I told her some of the stuff that I have written here, and thanked her for her music and for being herself because of how much it has helped me. I had written her something of a similar nature on facebook before, which she saw and answered, but my letter was an updated version. On facebook, I told her that her music, quotes and everything helped me survive all the hardships I went through. But this time, in the letter, I told her that the wisdom of hers that helped me survive my adolescent struggles has also given me the strength to become my own person. Shirley taught me that if I survived the pain, I would come out strong, smart and beautiful. And now, I feel like I am finally becoming the strong, beautiful woman I always dreamt of being. I lived through the struggles because I knew Shirley survived them. Now I have survived. And I owe that to her. It was from her image and words that I derived the idea of the woman I aspired to be. Strong and unapologetic. And I’m becoming that version of me. I told her this, and I told her that when she talks about the absence of strong female artists in today’s music industry, I take it as a call to action. I said, “I want to be that female, and I hope to become someone you’d be proud of.”
Shirley gave me a dream a long time ago and she even blatantly told me to start a band. It’s like she gave me a direction, shaped my life, saved my life, and cleared a path in that direction. I know I’ve written a lot here, but I don’t know if I’ve even properly put into words how much she means to me. She means the universe to me. Shirley played a hand in raising me. She’s my favorite singer, idol, role model and my first love.
Anyway, this is my (belated) novel of a post for Shirley Ann Manson’s 46th birthday. I wanted to explain why I love her by describing my experiences in relation to my love of Garbage. I do hope that all of this has some meaning to it, and is not just me being a rock star-obsessed teenager. More importantly, I hope yesterday and today and the rest of Shirley’s life is as beautiful as she deserves it to be. ♥♥♥
(If anyone actually read this whole thing, jeez and thank you.)
I just re-read this post I wrote about Shirley when I was 19 and hadn’t even met her yet and I want to cry
When I was a kid I didn’t understand what “can’t touch this” meant so when I heard the song I pictured MC Hammer giving you a tour of his house but saying “You can’t touch this” when you walked past like an expensive vase or piece of art
