the goblins were right

‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.’

I have always loved Fiona Apple, in spite of her occasional stage breakdowns and her long absences between albums, because she is just so strange. Such a weird girl that she freaks people out, and despite the fact that she is tiny and beautiful, they have never been able to market her as such because she is too angry and too odd. Watching her flail and growl onstage last week at her live show - the first time I’ve seen her and I believe her first tour in six years - I kept thinking about why Fiona Apple scares people so much. And she does scare people - to the extent that she represents female fury and honesty about how much relationships can ruin you, and also actual mental illness, with her alleged eating disorders and frequent disappearances and occasional interviews where she talks about being raped and not giving a shit what people think. If Fiona Apple were a man, her idiosyncracies would be chalked up to her being unique, quirky, wild. She would be Tom Waits. Her strangeness would be part of the package, celebrated. But because she’s a woman she’s “unstable” and “depressed” and “crazy.” I’ve read articles that imply that men should watch out for Fiona, because she clearly hates men and sings about the bad things they do. I am being unfair. There are plenty of men who like Fiona Apple, and it’s okay to like someone and be a bit afraid of them all at once. I’m a little afraid of Fiona Apple. She’s intense. She shouts and screams and pitch shifts all over the place and leaves you feeling unanchored, unsure of where she’ll strike next, raw. Why is there such a fine line between angry and crazy for women? When I was a teenage girl who didn’t understand why boys were so stupid all the time, why they treated me like shit, I empathized with Fiona singing oh darling it’s so sweet you think you know how crazy how crazy I am, but that song (“Fast As You Can”) isn’t really about being crazy. It’s about being made to feel like you’re crazy because you’re pissed off.

Part of all that, she believes, can be accounted for in those historically inscribed expectations of what marriage and long-term coupling offer—expectations that, more often than not, cannot be fully met by changeable, fallible humans. Cultural notions of what romance is all about fill us all with heady hopes; cheating is an attempt to fulfill those hopes. That, too, is new. It used to be, Perel said, that people outsourced their expectations of happiness to cultural institutions, organized religion chief among them. People found fullness in their lives—all the stuff of the modern-day wedding vow—not just from their spouses, but from community and civic engagement and religious faith. Or, as Perel put it: “‘Happy’ used to be for the afterlife.”

But here’s a little secret for you: no one is ever the same thing again after anything. You are never the same twice, and much of your unhappiness comes from trying to pretend that you are. Accept that you are different each day, and do so joyfully, recognizing it for the gift it is. Work within the desires and goals of the person you are currently, until you aren’t that person anymore, and everything changes once again.