Declan Lynch
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
The lessons of Ariana Grande
Ariana Grande must be wondering at times if her life is happening in the usual earthly dimension, or if it’s all some dark surrealist experiment for which she has been cruelly selected by forces beyond her ken — beyond any of our ken.
It was of course at a concert of hers in Manchester that 22 people were murdered by an Islamist terrorist. She was then centre stage at the funeral of Aretha Franklin when she was joined by the pastor who was acting as a kind of MC, and who was accused of sexually harassing her right there in front of the congregation, in front of the world.
Then she had to deal with the reaction to the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, the rapper whose drug addiction killed him at the age of 26. The hashtag ArianaKilledMac was trending for a while.
And when he had been arrested for driving under the influence and being involved in a hit-and-run, a fan had blamed her in a tweet, to which Ariana felt obliged to respond thus: “How absurd that you minimise female self-respect and self-worth by saying someone should stay in a toxic relationship because he wrote an album about them which btw isn’t the case (just Cinderella is ab me). I am not a babysitter or a mother, and no woman should feel that they need to be. I have cared for him and tried to support his sobriety and prayed for his balance for years (and always will of course) but shaming/blaming women for a man’s inability to keep his shit together is a very major problem.”
And more: “Let’s stop doing that. Of course I didn’t share about how hard or scary it was while it was happening, but it was. I will continue to pray from the bottom of my heart that he figures it all out, and that any other woman in this position does as well.”
Well, he didn’t figure it all out, which is a very sad
thing, but one for which Ariana Grande has zero responsibility, in fairness.
Ah, but fairness is a thing that can be hard to find in these situations. Indeed many times you will find that the loved ones of addicts are reluctant to make an intervention, because they feel somehow that they are not entitled to be judging anyone. That they are not so saintly themselves that they can be sitting there pronouncing on the poor choices of a son or a daughter or a husband or a wife.
And objectively they are probably right — which of us is so supremely good, we can be taking it upon ourselves to judge any other person?
Indeed it is not uncommon for an addict to be sitting in some treatment centre looking at these ‘concerned persons’ listing all his character defects, and thinking it was surely them that drove him to it.
So how hard was it for Ariana Grande to walk away from that relationship with Mac Miller? As hard as it might be for anyone in that situation, no doubt, with the possible difference that she had the means to do it — she is a star, she was co-dependent only up to a point.
Some would envy her those options, but then this thing called co-dependency works in ways far beyond the mundane issues of where you live and how your career is going. It is one of the many nuisances that addicts inflict on those around them, that they must start to look at themselves in a new light, that they must start to figure out why they ended up with this addict? That they must have enabled it to some extent.
But even if they are right about that, it doesn’t matter. When someone close to you is getting deep into addiction, it doesn’t matter how right you are, or how wrong you are, about any other thing. Because there is only one thing going on now, and there’s a fair chance that as a result, someone is going to die.
“That Mac Miller died is a very sad thing, but one for which Ariana has zero responsibility”