Singer and activist Sinéad O’Connor died this week. Her death came after a long struggle with mental illness and the death of her son by suicide last year.
In reading about her life and how misunderstood she often was and how she became a punchline for so many people for far too long, I thought a lot about how we punish women for being outspoken. Hanif Abdurraquib wrote on Instagram that she was the “victim of society’s gleeful, never ending obsession with prolonged punishment. With punishment as spectacle.” He goes onto write that O’Connor also suffered openly and that our world doesn’t hold the suffering of others gently.