To Say What You Feel

Is to Dig Your Own Grave

When I was 19 years old, I shaved my head. Not to the scalp but close enough. And I learned very quickly that a woman with a shaved head in 1983 could short-circuit the minds of a lot of people simply by stepping into their sight line.

One evening I was walking across the campus of the University of South Florida when I was accosted by a group of frat boys who began taunting that I was the ugliest bitch they’d ever seen. I wrote a long letter to the editor of the Oracle, the student daily paper, decrying this abuse. The editor called to inform me she planned to publish the letter as a guest column and, by the way, did I want a job as a staff writer?

So, yes, a haircut launched my writing career. Reporting under the name I had also been gifted thanks to my buzz cut, I profiled punk and new wave bands and wrote light features. Once I did a weeklong series in which I tried out for the Sundolls, a dance squad full of tiny blonde girl-women bouncing all around. I showed up butch as could be, in vintage board shorts, punk t-shirts and mismatched Chuck Taylors, no makeup, stumbling and lurching to the right as they step-ball-changed to the left. (They played along all week and didn’t cut me til the end.)

Eventually I was given a weekly column, which I titled Bloody Monday. Without fail my observations—often about social injustice—ruffled many feathers. When I wrote frankly about going to the gynecologist, people freaked out. When I bashed frats, they fought back. Once the Greek boys hosted a fundraiser in which people could pay money to swing a sledgehammer at an old car that had my name painted on it. 

But the entry that by far got me in the most hot water was a piece I wrote in 1985 when I was 21. The piece was a parable in which a young woman goes to confession and reveals to the priest that she once shot someone for representing a foul institution. At which point she pulls out a gun and shoots the priest in both kneecaps.

The pushback went far beyond campus. Letters poured in from dioceses all over Florida essentially demanding my crucifixion. My newspaper advisor, Leo Stalnaker—who, I am more than a little delighted to report, is long dead and if I ever go back to Florida I would love to stop and shit on his grave—went on record with the city’s daily paper, The Tampa Tribune, saying my writing should never have been published. Maybe he was trying to cover his ass for not having reviewed and censored my words pre-publication. Whatever the case, he joined the rallying cry that I was a mouthy woman who needed to shut up and stand down.

I had put these memories far enough away as to have been essentially forgotten. Until last Wednesday when, moments after Sinead’s death was announced, my phone started completely blowing up. More than a few people had the same message for me: I thought of you first.

To be associated in any way with that beautiful, otherworldly, prescient, misunderstood creature who was far too good for this planet—I am deeply humbled. I am moved more still because I know my friends make the connection between me and Sinead not because of our shaved heads, punk ethics, music fanaticism, and age proximity. 

No. It is our Big Mouths. It is our Childhood Trauma. It is the wicked catholic church and all the sick abuse that was rained down on us in the so-called name of “god.” Terrible, terrible things. It is our Refusal to Shut Up and Go Away. It is how we are dismissed as CRAZY.

Let’s unpack “crazy” shall we? Crazy is not inaccurate. Because it is crazy-making to try to exist in a world where your heart and mind know, with full clarity, that the way you are being treated is utterly wrong. And yet the people perpetuating these wrongs are the ones in authority and, as such, get to insist you are not being treated wrong. That this is the way of the world and it is your job to adapt to it. And by adapt I mean, especially if you are a girl/woman, that you must never speak. You must sit down. You must shut up. 

You must OBEY.

Or else, like the old adage goes: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

The conflict of knowing, as a child, that something is dreadfully wrong while being forced to live as if everything is just as it should be is not the sort of mindfuck one ever fully heals from. Some of us, like Sinead and me, opted to heal out loud. This was very problematic for people who did not want to hear the truth. Could not bear the truth. Could. Not. Bear. It.

And so they told us shut up shut up shut up shut up. Which, after a while, is its own kind of crazy making. All that fucking shouting. 

Even when one finds loving people to live among, truly safe people, some of these people, too, will wish you would tone it down, offer gentle admonishments as intended kindness, not because they do not believe or support you. But because they know what will happen if you keep screaming at injustice. They have already seen what has happened before. They want to protect you, that’s all.

But some of us? We still cannot shut up. Because the suffering we witness, in ourselves and others, and knowledge of the root of the suffering, and how to alleviate suffering—these things push us to keep fighting. 

And yes, we pay for this. We pay dearly. 

In 2021 when I moved to Shitville, TX, I had my own mini Pope Picture moment when I dared to remove a flag some Trump Cunt had planted in front of my house with her business card affixed to it. I threw that crap flag in the trash and I wrote on my Facebook page (long since deactivated) precisely how I feel about jingoism, and how enraged I was to have such fascist nationalism forced upon me, the flag having been co-opted by the party that lifted up a rapist to the highest office of the land. 

As many of you know, the fallout was profound. A city council member co-hosted a parade to drive me out of town. This parade was sanctioned and legally permitted by the powers that be. A few days prior to the event, the mayor knocked on my door, and beckoned me to the Police Chief’s office. He explained my life was in danger and he would be assigning me protection for the duration of the parade. I protested that I thought this was overkill, escalation. He assured me I was wrong. So an armed officer stood guard on my porch while the fucking idiots joined forces to wish me dead. 

I will never recover from the seven hellish months I spent in that burg of hatred. The attacks never ceased. The death threats. The rumors. The perpetual and ubiquitous cruelty. I learned that they especially hated that I—a woman alone—had somehow managed to acquire an historic mansion. Surely, they theorized, some man had bought it for me.

Jesus F. Christ it is so exhausting to be a woman who lives independently and speaks the truth and who is then punished for being independent and for telling the truth. And I know, beyond any doubt, when I saw and heard and felt the utter anguish that spread among so many women of my age when we heard Sinead was gone, that this was the thing that hurt the most. 

It is 2023. A year ago the Supreme Court once again stripped women of autonomy over our own bodies. The Equal Rights Amendment never passed. We literally, under the law of this supposed land of the free, are second class citizens. Second class citizens who most often still handle the lion’s share of butt wiping, dishwashing, food cooking, housecleaning, child rearing. Very often while also holding down a job or two to cover the bills—sometimes single-handedly. Jobs where employers are not required to pay us what they pay men in similar positions.

We contribute to our own oppression due to ancient indoctrination. I have observed this in myself far too many times. I’d be humming along, living a fine enough life on my own. Along would come a man. I’d get involved. The flip would switch. I’d become my mother. No matter what felt most important to me, during those affairs of the heart, I could only ever put the man first. As I had been taught to do. As had been insisted I do. No amount of therapy or self-discipline or feminist doctrine ever helped me get fully out of the cycle. Ultimately I made the choice to stop trying. 

Like Sinead, I never married my son’s father. As happened to Sinead with her first pregnancy, it was suggested I have an abortion. She was pressured by a record company who wanted her to put on heels and makeup and “sexy” dresses and, above all, not be a pregnant performer. In my case, my son’s paternal grandmother had no interest in a bastard grandchild being brought into this world and said so.

That grandmother was first generation American, her mother having come over on a boat from Ireland. I, too, am mostly of Irish descent. Even when she was very young, decades before the concept of intergenerational trauma was openly discussed, Sinead understood clearly the problem with her mother who violently abused her. She knew that her mother, like my mother, like my son’s paternal grandmother, had all been subjected to, baptized into, Irish Catholicism, which is its own very special brand of Hell on Earth. A place where women are lowly servants always, mere vessels to give the pope more followers.

Understanding how our mothers were so fucked up by the catholic church fosters deep compassion in me. Still no amount of comprehension can take away the Mother Hurt that haunts me every day.

I tried to tell my mother long ago that my father’s cousin, the priest, had molested me when I was a teen. She refused to respond. Many years later when another family member went to her on my behalf to repeat the information, she was ready with her reply. “That’s not true,” she said. “Father Ed liked little boys.”

Go ahead, chew on that for a bit. 

My mother’s devotion to the catholic church is so sick, so solidified, so unshakeable that she denies my truth in favor of the lies of that religious rock of hers. I can no longer speak to her. This is not out of hatred or even sustained anger. It is because she has made it clear that the only way I am allowed to converse with her is if I agree to deny the trauma that occurred courtesy of my father’s violence, her own complicity, my perverted priest cousin, and the doctrines of the world’s largest pedophile factory.

It’s not surprising that all of the Sinead tributes refer to her monster hit cover of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U. These references always include mention of those tears she spontaneously shed while making the haunting video. I watched it again after she died and I realized something. Far more powerful than the tears themselves is that she does not instinctively reach to wipe them away. She will not banish or hide her tears. 

Here are my tears. Here is my pain. My pain is real. 

Crying out the truth of one’s anguish, the pain of rampant child abuse, violent misogyny, pervasive fascism and rapist priests— crying out gets you in trouble if you are a woman. It gets you blacklisted and exiled. 

A few years ago the church released a long list of the names of priests who raped and otherwise molested and sexually assaulted countless child victims. My molester’s name was on that list. My unhealed wounds ripped back open wide. I pursued an avenue being offered by the church—little payoffs one could settle for if I promised to never file a future lawsuit. 

The process was not easy. First, a social worker hired by the church interrogated me, some sort of vetting procedure to, I suppose, “root out liars.” That woman was so cruel, so defensive, and so accusatory that I found it impossible to believe she had gone to school for her chosen field. Like my mother, she made it clear she did not believe me.

Then came the police interview. The detective maintained a neutral tone. She asked me to recount the details. I did so at length and with great clarity. Because the events remain crisp in my memory though more than forty years have passed. Which is one way my PTSD manifests—little horror movies on a loop. That priest is long dead. The memory of his sick hands on my body will only die when I do.

Until then, in the name of Sinead, I will continue to shout the truth. And so I will continue to be shushed and punished. But I will not shut up. I will not stand down. Because I know what she knew, what kept her going until she could not go anymore. 

We were right all along.