I Love You, Sad Girl
Where were you when you first heard Lorde’s Green Light?
I was about to turn seventeen and still felt like a child, more so then than when I actually was a child. I was sitting beside this boy—wasn’t there always a boy?—and he was trying to tell me what the song meant, that it was about moving on. I was listening.
Listen. I’m not very proud of this, but I only really started listening to Lorde then because of this boy. He was obsessed with her; he raved about the synth beats and the drums and the minimalist electro-pop and I was trying to impress him with the fact that I’ve probably heard Royals on the radio maybe five times in 2013. I saw him mention Lorde in a tweet and suddenly I was on her Spotify page, staring at the stark white typography of her album art. I was determined to hear the synth beats and the drums and minimalist electro-pop, determined to be in the same wavelength as him, to be on common ground with him, to be seen by him.
I’m not very proud of this either, but I kept searching for pieces of this boy in Pure Heroine. I kept searching for pieces of him everywhere, and I was so insistent on building this private world we could share, one that I could present to him and he’d see it and want to live in it. He’d see me as the maker of it and as part of it.
And again, I’m not very proud of this—I like to think I was mature for my age to not succumb to the nobody-understands-me angsty spiel of pubescence—but I felt very, very alone very, very frequently. Alone in that me-against-the-world kind of way, in that distinctly teenaged way. So I clamored for a way out of this isolation in this boy. I was always seeking this visibility from romantic relationships, because I thought they entailed constant reassurance and how you always have someone who can understand you. The idea that your ‘soulmate’—which is a culturally romantic concept—is your ‘other half’ makes you believe that oh, they’re my other half, so they must understand me. Our conception of completion is very reliant on finding this romantic partner: other halves, life goal is to get married—isn’t it crazy how the idea of lifelong partners always implies romantic partners? As if being romantically bound is a prerequisite for my own personal self-actualization. So I looked for comfort in romance, because that’s what I was taught. That’s where culture told me to go.
And yes, I’m not proud of this either, but I found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience. I mean, I get that love is never easy etc. etc. etc., but really? It wouldn’t even let me get to the ‘love’ part before I’d find it too difficult and give up? I found it so exhausting to always end up disappointed and emotionally unsatisfied, and instead of directing this frustration at them, I turned it towards myself: Why can’t they see me? Why can’t they understand me? I can understand him, why can’t he do the same for me?
That just made me feel even more alone; the fact that I lacked assurance and validation felt like a personal failing. I didn’t realize I was doing something wrong, that I was looking for these things in the wrong places. Now that I’m a little older I’m beginning to realize that feeling alone is a quintessential teenage experience, and I want to hate it, hate having to feel everything in this end-of-the-world way, but I don’t. In fact, I love it. “All my life I’ve been obsessed with adolescence, drunk on it. Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something children didn’t know, and adults ended up forgetting,” Lorde wrote in a note she posted in 2016 that I found a couple months later. “Writing Pure Heroine was my way of enshrining our teenage glory, putting it up in lights forever so that part of me never dies.”
Even when I got tired of this boy (feelings are just like the weather, after all) and managed to break my own heart in the process, Lorde kept finding me. “Five years ago, I thought that was as vivid as it got,” she said in an interview I begrudgingly read because it reminded me of my failed crush. “And to have this ‘oh, my God’ – it’s like that times 100. I think I’ve had a real emotional renaissance in the last 18 months of just being like, ‘Wow, it hurts,’ and letting myself feel all of those things, which has been kind of transcendent.” She always spoke about pain and our reaction to pain in this forgiving manner, like we were allowed to be lonely and be angry at our loneliness. “Even when I try really hard to not see things in very simple ways, those confines do still exist because I’m just so new to living. I’m excited to get older and get better and be able to do it like they can do it.” There is pain in youth, but in pain, there is growth. And according to Lorde, growth is something to be excited about. As she sings in Still Sane: “I'm not in the swing of things / But what I really mean is / Not in the swing of things yet.”
Pure Heroine became part of my everyday routine. I clung onto every single word she said, both in song and off it. In the walls of her melodies I found warmth; when I stopped looking for the boy in her words, I found something else that caught me off guard—I caught her reading my mind. Whenever I listened to her, it felt like she was listening to me, too. In Pure Heroine I found art that held my hand, that made me feel personally addressed, like she was subliminally whisper-calling out my name with every track. I found intimacy, like I was one with it, the recesses of my mind being read aloud. I identified with Lorde the way I never identified with anyone else. That year, I stopped straightening my hair and grew it out in its wavy glory. I was sixteen and I might be hollow, but I’m brave.
(And yeah, I was embarrassed to admit I initially got into Lorde because I was trying to impress a crush. But even that, she understands—when a fan tweeted Lorde that an ex started listening to her music, she replied, “Cherish the secret world [you] built without him [and] know he’ll never hear it just the way [you] do.” He might have been hearing synth beats and drums and minimalist electro-pop, and those are all well and good, but I hear Ella. I hear this glossy idiot god, princess of her childhood streets, handmade and ugly and sure of herself. In the note she posted about turning twenty and how her debut album is different from her follow-up, she wrote, “I know you understand.” I do—does he?)
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Growing up as a woman means growing up suppressed. We operate within a culture that values silence and smallness; the term ‘emotional’ is gendered and inferior. After all, wasn’t hysteria initially a female disorder because it had the same origin as ‘uterus’ and was attributed to a ‘wandering womb’, with the uterus traveling throughout women’s bodies and causing parts of it to malfunction? Perhaps this is why catharsis seems like such a gendered thing at first—it first served to alleviate symptoms of hysteria through “talking things out”, in a process Freud called free association.
Catharsis has popped up in literature even before the 19th century. Aristotle used the term purely in its medical sense—as the removal of katamenia or menstrual fluid—until he wrote Poetics, where he used it as a metaphor. Catharsis became the act of expressing, or experiencing, deep emotions which had originally been repressed or ignored. Aristotle likened it to purification and cleansing; F. L. Lucas went further and called it purgation. The former also insisted that catharsis (in drama) was not only a source of entertainment, but also a necessity for survival in the long run.
That’s why catharsis is especially empowering for women. It’s the act of saying things out loud, of digging out the repressed and making it shared. It is in women and their art that I find so much solace and comfort, but also personal growth. Also liberation, also personal truths, also forgiveness, also understanding, also empathy. I feel loneliness, I feel desire! In great magnitude! I don’t know how to feel in moderation! I had just turned seventeen and was heartbroken when Lorde found me again and told me to care for myself the way I used to care about you. All the things I wasn’t proud of, she made songs about: “So I guess I'll go home / Into the arms of the girl that I love / The only love I haven't screwed up / She’s so hard to please / But she's a forest fire / I do my best to meet her demands / Play at romance, we slow dance / In the living room, but all that a stranger would see / Is one girl swaying alone / Stroking her cheek.” Then I turned eighteen, then nineteen, but Melodrama never left my side. I chopped my waist-length dark wavy hair into a bob—we were growing up. “And for the first time, I felt this intimate, empire-sized inner power,” she wrote. I did too.
While writing this essay I found it increasingly difficult to try to explain this love I feel for her art. It was this all-consuming, abstract kind of love that disappeared through your fingers everytime you try to materialize it. A few nights ago I was sitting beside this boy who I so very wanted to see me (I may be older but I am not at all wiser), and he couldn’t understand why I loved Lorde the way I did—almost blasphemously, almost transcendental; romantic love couldn’t hold a candle to it. Of course he wouldn’t understand—he wasn’t part of our secret world, not in our wavelength. Green Light is Lorde “shouting at the universe, wanting to let go, wanting to go forward, to get the green light from life.” Did she get it? Of course she did. Did I? Well, as she sings in Hard Feelings: “I’ll start letting go of little things / ’Til I’m so far away from you / Far away from you.”