Just a Girl

Some people have it all. Youth. Unbounding talent. Originality. Fame.

If those 4 things a happy person could make, then gossip magazines and television entertainment shows would surely find themselves emaciated for content. There wouldn't be stories of eating disorders, run-ins with the police...drinking binges or hopeless drug addiction.

But as another young lady with the world in her hands snuffs out her own life as a result of addiction, I feel not cold or cynical...I feel deeply sad for her, and those who loved her. To them, she wasn't a celebrity...she was a daughter, a sister...an aunt and a friend. Just a girl with a big life.

Having loved someone very deeply, and having them torn from your life is unparallelled. Parents aren't meant to bury their children...20 somethings aren't supposed to have their kindred extinguished quietly like final smokey embers of a cigarette butt. But it happens...it happens all the time. We embrace a cynical, calloused attitude because surely...it won't happen to us, or to those we love.

I assure you it will. Someday, somewhere, life will blind you with it's unfairness...and you will begin processing just how precious it is to love someone through their weaknesses and frailties. Once that person is gone...you will change. You will become bitter and hard...or you will alter your outlook on the world, and become a respector of the whisper that is this life. You will look at the daughter of a cab driver...a tattooed, birdlike, beehived soul singer from England who struggles everyday with addiction...and you will feel compassion for her. Because she didn't get it. She didn't see what her life was. She was ravenous for the high...she longed for the buzz...and she wanted to repeatedly escape.

She succeeds...she breathes her last breath...and she dies alone.

She is not unique. Incredibly talented, vibrant people die everyday as a result of addiction. But know this, a pop star with an addiction is the same as your baby cousin who has an addiction. It's the same as the successful Insurance broker who has an addiction...it's the same as the veteran prostitute who will sell her fluttering soul for her addiction. It's all the same. Resources are available to all of these people...but it takes surrender to crawl out of the torture and towards recovery. Many don't make it...maybe most don't make it. It makes loving them, in all of their incompleteness...and their delicacy... that much more timely and necessary.

So to those I have loved and lost...you have taught me. Your release from a tortured life is horrendous to live with...but I am happy for your freedom, for your peace, and for your emancipation from the insatiable hunger. It's not easy...but it's been an honour to love you.

xo