I have always had impossible feelings. I have always been filled to the brim. As a child, I remember not understanding how people walked about their daily lives not being bowled over by worry, fear, or sadness. How was it they were able to live inside the same world as me with their barriers intact? My sensitivity felt like something that made me defective, not made for this life. Tears were always close to the surface, ready to stream at any moment. And my body didn’t feel big enough to hold all the feeling inside.
This continued as I grew into adolescence. Though I had more containers for my emotions: I sang, I did theater, I found friendships with some of the other feeling girls. And, at the center of it all, I found music that mirrored and echoed what I felt inside.
Among that music was Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.
Let’s begin with the cover.
A woman with fiery red hair looks directly into the camera, her face is turned slightly upward, revealing the ridges and length of her neck. Her skin is over-saturated, almost ghost-like, translucent. Her hand covers her heart. Her name and the album title are written in cursive in what seems to be her own hand. The woman is striking but this is not necessarily what would be called a “pretty” or “flattering” photo. It is, instead, a powerful one: an image of a woman choosing to be seen on her own terms.
Even though Fumbling Towards Ecstasy hasn’t been in my regular rotation for decades, I still know every word of every song by heart. And the songs are full of all of the feelings that filled me at the time, the ones I still feel: yearning, rage, desire, loneliness, fear, heartbreak, and even, at times, elation. They carry the shattering of endings, the power of love, the beauty of being seen.
When I listened to these songs as a teenager, I connected with the words and McLachlan’s voice. Her voice held such a power and also an undeniable ache. Without having language for her technique, I marveled at her range: how she could make her voice both wispy and rope-strong.
I came of age in the eighties and nineties, when “feminism,” in many circles, was a bad word. I wore pantyhose to church and recitals and dances, and I got strong messages that my thighs and calves weren’t the only things that needed confining.
There were so many rules for girls, both spoken and unspoken. We were supposed to be powerful without being intimidating. We were supposed to desire but not inconvenience others with our want. We were supposed to be smart but not smarter than boys. I didn’t know how to make sense of these contradictions. Was I allowed to strive or did I need to shrink? Was I supposed to be myself or contort into the shape of whoever stood before me? It seemed that it was impossible to get it right.
When I read Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher in my twenties, I felt seen as I understood the great dilemma I and other girls faced. When we were girls, we were told when we could do anything. But as we aged, we were told incessantly except that.
Years later, when I began to take my writing more seriously, I would hear the phrase “confessional poet” spoken with dripping disdain by men and women alike. Women songwriter heroes of mine were described as saccharine. It seemed that when men mused about their inner worlds and tried to understand the workings of their psyche, that was philosophy, psychology, literature. But when women did it, it was myopic navel-gazing nonsense.
I have always loved to write and found power in using writing as a way to metabolize the feelings that were uncontainable. I had my first blog in my early twenties that I used as a place to parse through experiences and make sense of the world. I was writing essays, though I didn’t know to call them that then.
At that time, one of my roommates, who I never felt understood by, told me that she had found my blog and that it made her uncomfortable. She said, “it was like I was reading your diary.” In that moment, I felt a flush of embarrassment bolstered by the dissonance of knowing she didn’t get it. Did she not understand that I had crafted those paragraphs out of experience but not merely expelled them onto the page? Did she not understand that in languaging my vulnerability, I was making a choice?
When I was a senior in high school, I went to Lilith Fair. At the time, I was deeply grateful for women artists. I was also fascinated by feminists while simultaneously scared of being labeled as one. I understood that to be called one, in many cases, was to not only be reviled but also dismissed out of hand. I went to Lilith Fair with one of my best friends from high school and my cousin.
Sarah McLachlan was a hero of mine, not only because of her musical genius, but because she had created this space for women musicians. She did it, as she has said many times, because venues didn’t want to book two women acts in a row. They said tickets wouldn’t sell. So she made a whole festival made of women musicians. And she named it after the most maligned woman in the bible. Lilith: the first wife of Adam banished from the Garden of Eden for not being subservient to her husband.
I can still remember where I stood watching that giant stage and the power of witnessing all these women musicians wail with their voices and instruments. I remember watching them radiate as they collaborated one another. It made a different kind of life feel possible. About a year later, in college, I taught myself to play guitar using their songs: Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Dar Williams, Paula Cole, the Indigo Girls.
As years passed by, I saw the way some people tried to diminish or discount Sarah McLachlan’s talent. I saw the way incredible musicians were categorized as good “for a woman.” I saw the lingering misogyny in myself too: when I catered to the egos of men I played music with, when I underestimated my own talent.
Last week, I went to see Sarah McLachlan on the 30th Anniversary Tour for Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I went with my cousin, the same one I’d gone to Lilith Fair with. But this time we were joined by her two daughters, nieces to me, who are nine and almost twelve. When I reached out about the possibility of going together, my cousin told me she had already gotten tickets.
Sarah McLachlan is fifty-six now and though older than me, I feel closer alongside her as I move further into middle age. From the moment she walked onto the stage, she was fully present. I watched her: so self-possessed, settled in herself and in the truth of her talents. She was gracious and humble without being self-deprecating. She knew her worth. And in addition to sharing her own music, for decades, she has been running a school in Canada so that kids who might not otherwise have access to instrument or classes get to grow as musicians.
As women in the crowd sang around me, I felt the voices of our younger selves here with us. The emo girls we once were, trying to navigate a world of contradictions and be true to ourselves. I felt the thrum of our lives lived in between then to now. All our choices and mistakes and yearnings and witnessing. All our broken and repaired hearts. All the loves and friends we’d had as company. All the dreams lived out and those still waiting to be returned to. I saw all of us in our bedrooms spinning CDs in our boomboxes, walking through lockered hallways playing the cassette in our Walkmans until they wore out. All of us, singing out at the top of our lungs: this is what it is to be someone who wants.
Sarah McLachalan said that music is the thing that got her through. Music is her purpose, why she is here.
Towards the end of the show, she did her song “Fear,” which starts lower and then, over the course of the song, shoots upwards. She started at the piano singing and then she stood. She slowly walked over to the mic and begin to sing the chorus an octave higher, the piercing high notes. Her Dr. Martens rooted on the stage, she stood straight, her arms a little at her sides, palms open, her chest and whole center both steady and expanding as she propelled the piercing notes forward. A kind of melodic levitating.
We were, all of us, held inside the power of those notes. When she finished the song, I turned to meet the eyes of my twelve-year-old niece. Her eyes held the same amazement as mine.
Thank the universe for the emo girls who share their beauty and artistry with the world.
Sarah McLachlan helped me understand who I was and who I could be before I had the language and how to get there. She made me know, even before I could get there myself, that I could be myself. She made me feel possible.
And she was part of the unfurling of those truths I hold sacred: feeling deeply is a superpower, sensitivity is a gift, music is transformative, art is alchemy.
When she performed “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” Sarah sang the words:
And if I shed a tear I won't cage it
I won't fear love
And if I feel a rage I won't deny it
I won't fear love
She asked into the crowd, “How many of us live by that motto?”
Me. I do.
I just listened to Surfacing front to back for the first time in yeaaaars the other day. My ears were craving it. So many tears shed to that album in middle school. 😅 Now I’ll have to check out Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, I’ve never listened to that one. Emo forever 🖤
Lisa! This is so, so beautiful and real and true and my goodness do I resonate with every word. I remember reading Reviving Ophelia! I still know every word of every song on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy! It was like she knew what was in my heart and by tumbling out for me to hear and sing, I could grasp better at the parts of myself I didn't quite understand or know what to do with.
I love that you took another generation with you on the anniversary tour. I saw Alanis on the Jagged Little Pill anniversary tour and had a similar experience of feelings coming full circle. I've also been craving a lot of Dar in these tender days; I thought I loved "You're Aging Well" when I was 16, but oh I had no idea just how true a tune it was.
Thank you for your words, and for being you. I am so grateful you did not let the world tell you to put yourself or your feelings away <3