Shawna Kenney's essay, "Feel So Different"

This summer, I am running a series of essays about Sinéad O’Connor to celebrate the publication of our almost-here book: Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us. AND, lest I forget to mention, the book is out in two days! By the way, there’s a feature on the book in the Irish Sunday Times! And if you’re in Brooklyn on Tuesday, July 22nd, join us at Books are Magic, or on July 28th in Chicago at Gman! (Links and info at the bottom of this newsletter.”

Today we have a powerful piece by Shawna Kenney.

Past entries in this series:

• ’s essay “Stretched on Her Grave” which originally appeared on her Substack, Off the Record.
• April Nance’s original essay, “Sinéad and Barbie and Me.”
• Emily J. Orlando’s original essay, “‘You Asked for the Truth and I Told You’: For Sinéad”
• Eileen Toomey’s “In Defense of Sinéad O’Connor,” which originally appeared in The Rumpus.
• Jocelyn Jane Cox’s essay “Sinéad O’Connor Helped Me Find My Voice,” which originally appeared in in Sari Botton’s .
• Jeff Dorchen’s essay “Ketch Vampire”
• Erika Meitner’s poem “Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along,” which originally appeared in LitHub.

Feel So Different

Shawna Kenney

It took me a second to understand that I was the animal under observation. A monkey in the zoo. More like the two-toed sloth. It was night, and I was brought there against my will—strapped down in an ambulance, tears sliding down my cheeks while “Nothing Compares 2 U” played on the radio through a crackling overhead speaker.

But nothing, I said, nothing can take away these blues

A big man in white hovered over, wiped my tears, and asked about the tattoo on my ear. “It means peace and everlasting life,” I laughed. More tears roll down. I didn’t want to talk to him. He was a few years older than me, handsome. In another situation we could have been friends, or more.

I could put my arms around every boy I see,

But they’d only remind me of you

But here I was just the mixed-up suicidal teenager with no health insurance and no parents in my life being transported to a state mental hospital two hours away, and he is the EMT who strapped me in back at the hospital while my boyfriend kissed me goodbye, whispering “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll get you out of there.” I was embarrassed that my own actions brought me there. Ashamed that the EMT had probably seen so many other dumb girls like me. I closed my eyes to escape on the ride and woke up in the center of a spacious room. The only light shone from one side, where nurses in white bustled behind what looked like bullet-proof glass. I was on a cot. The straps were gone. I sat up and watch some of the nurses watch me—the animal has awoken. Wooden doors with numbers on them line the edges of the big room. I close my eyes and re-open them, hoping the last few hours were a nightmare that would just go away. I’m awake now, I told…who? myself? No one? God? Anyone who cared to take it all away? No one did. I walk to the clear nurse-windows. There are humans there. They will talk to me. “Why am I out here?” I ask a friendly-looking red-haired twenty-something. “Because there are no extra beds. New folks always stay for a 48-hr observation in the group room anyway,” she smirks.

“Well, when can I leave?” I ask. She smiled with eyes that have heard my questions before, sometimes from patients who had been here for more than twenty years.

“As soon as you get the psychologist to evaluate you. He’ll decide.” I picture fangs growing down from beneath her red lips.

“And when will THAT be?” I ask, getting louder.

“He’s not in tomorrow and he’s all booked up the following day, and Monday’s a holiday, so probably after that.”

Ribs splintered beneath my skin as I grew out of my overalls like the Incredible Hulk. She doesn’t understand--I have to work the next day, and I don’t belong in a nuthouse. I’ve just been fighting with my boyfriend about something really important like what movie we were going to see. That’s what we were saying, anyway. What we weren’t saying was that somehow it was my fault his band had broken up. I was suddenly Yoko Ono, while they were never even close to being the fucking Beatles, but really, what movie should we all go see? When we couldn’t agree, I decided to stay home as he left with his friends. Then I calmly walked to the drugstore, bought two boxes of little blue sleeping pills, took them all with water in the parking lot, and walked home. The plan was to take a nap, sleep my way out of this. Make him sorry. I didn’t expect them to come home early. I fought them, he and his friends, in slow motion as they put me in the car. I was sleepily relieved when he found me—how long had I been out? Suddenly I was afraid…I didn’t want to die…what if I’d done a lot of internal damage to my brain or body? Never mind…I was too tired to worry about it too much. I was almost too tired to notice the hints of embarrassment tugging at the corners of my mind.

I went to the doctor and guess what he told me

“You have situational depression—not chronic.” They finally let me go, without drool-inducing meds, but with 'court-ordered therapy.' Apparently, it’s illegal to try to kill yourself in Maryland. With no insurance and the minimum wage job I held by a thread, I was shoved down the slippery slope of sliding scale therapy.

How the fuck you’re supposed to tell a total stranger your life story; I had no idea. But then to get to her office and find that A-she’s a college student just a few years older than you, working on her phD and B-she’s blind, was just too much. Blind! One hundred percent-sightless-with-a-cute-yellow-Labrador-retriever-at-her-side blind.

There I was, tough-girl, bad-ass, punk rock, smart-mouthed problem-child stammering out answers to a few of her questions while staring at her wide-open glassy-eyes and back at her dog, who I longed to pet. She moved her hands over Braille-covered papers, maneuvering around the room while gazing straight ahead. I kept my answers simple, since I knew this would be our last meeting—I would request a new therapist—they did say I could do that. I said goodbye and a fake ‘see ya next week’ but called my case counselor as soon as I got home. I mean, how could I ever talk to this woman, who obviously knows nothing about life, who knows nothing about what it’s like being me—a young woman ostracized by her family because of the color of her boyfriend’s skin. She couldn’t even SEE colors, for god’s sake! “What is it, exactly, that you don’t like about Theresa?” asked my caseworker. “We’re just not clicking,” I lied, now embarrassed that I’m the asshole who can’t deal with a blind therapist. The counselor promised to try to find me another one but asked that I meet with Theresa until then. Reluctantly, I agreed.

The following week I asked if I could pet her dog and she let me. Slowly I opened up the whole time wanting to be the one asking her questions, like was she born this way or how did she go blind and isn’t college hard and how does she ride the bus and don’t you get bored of talking to whining babies like me?

I’ve read that different creatures vary in the amount of brain devoted to vision. Over half of the brain of the octopus and the squid is used for sight. Insects are short-sighted, but hawks can spot prey eight times further away than human beings can. Diving birds have the best focus. Theresa may have been a diving bird in a past life. I was a short-sighted bug. Shane and I had fought the world, and then each other, but long before I ever suspected our relationship to be the major problem in my life, she picked up on something I had missed. One day when I casually mentioned the bruises left on my arms from him “just squeezing me really hard” when he was angry, Theresa gave me the number to what she called “ a battered women’s shelter.” The term was foreign to me and the concept completely alien. I mean, my boyfriend just had a temper sometimes, and he’d never go so far as to actually hit me. What did she think I was—some kind of talk-show reject? She was blind, and she couldn’t see how small and light the bruises were, and she didn’t know how he cooked for me and just bought me a new bike and how sweet and kind he could be when we weren’t arguing. Still, she insisted I take the number. I took it, crumpled it up into my purse, and thanked her politely.

The next time I stared death in the face, it was my lover who’d become my would-be killer. A little piece of yellow carbon paper naming my boyfriend as the Defendant and me as Complainant is all I have left from that relationship now. That and pain in my sacrum from where it cracked from the fall when he pushed me down the stairs. I can’t remember much about our last fight, but a policeman dutifully detailed it onto this carbon paper in exactly the way they must have trained him in the academy.

All the photos of us, the letters from tour he had written to me on the backs of napkins, set lists, and menus, in crayon, pencil, ballpoint, and marker, I put those all in a shoebox and threw them into a roaring fireplace at a friend’s house. It was too easy to remember the good things, which made it too easy to want to go back. So, I kept the police report.

I wanted a book or a map or someone to tell me what to do to feel normal again. Is there a word for a faulty fight-or-flight instinct? Why was I missing what even the lowest life-forms had to preserve their own survival? It wasn't my fault I was born without one. I read about karma, how Hindus believe what you've done in past lives affects your here and now. I spent a long time wondering what I had done, in some life I couldn't remember, to deserve all of this. What have I done, I asked God, the Buddha, Krishna, Allah, Ganesh, the doctors, the counselors, my roommate Yvette with the long gold braids and son named Valentine. I asked anyone who would listen. What have I done? While my roommates dreamed in beds, I dreamed in words, scrawled on the page, on napkins, receipts, flyers. Scribbled thoughts. Hope. Anger. Putting it all down on paper, like someone someday would care about any of this.

I know that living with you baby was sometimes hard

But I’m willing to give it another try

I called him from the shelter’s landline.

And we got back together, again and again.

Until I was done.

I had become the bird without a song. I was the flowers dying in the backyard.

Thirty-six years later, whenever I hear the soaring notes of that desperate, crackling voice, I know he never deserved to be centered in that song, my love, my devotion.

Thank you, Sinead.

Nothing compares

Thank you, Theresa.

Nothing compares to you

Shawna Kenney is an author, essayist and arts reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Pitchfork, Narratively, Business Insider and more. Her most recent book is Live at the Safari Club: A History of HarDCore Punk in the Nation’s Capital (Rare Bird Books) and her memoir, I Was a Teenage Dominatrix (Punk Hostage Press) won a Firecracker Book Award.

We’ve got more events and we hope you will join us for some!

• July 15 @ 6 pm: Dublin, IrelandHodges Figgis Bookshop: Martha Bayne, Mieke Eerkens, Sinead Gleeson, and Allyson McCabe in conversation with Una Mullaley
• July 17, 2025 @ 8:30 pm: Bantry, IrelandWest Cork Literary Festival: Martha Bayne, Mieke Eerkens, and Allyson McCabe in conversation with Eoghan O'Sullivan
• July 22, 2025 @ 7 pm: New York, New YorkBooks Are Magic, 122 Montague St., Brooklyn, NY 11201. Launch event with Sharbari Ahmed, Martha Bayne, Sonya Huber, Porochista Khakpour, Millicent Souris, and Zoe Zolbrod, with musical guest Monique Bingham. And on YouTube live!
• July 28, 2025 Doors @ 6:30, Show @ 7:30: Chicago, IllinoisGMan Tavern: (Bar attached to Cabaret Metro) Book talk and party with Martha Bayne, Sonya Huber, Zoe Zolbrod, Megan Stielstra, and Gina Frangello -- plus musical performances of Sinead O'Connor songs by Amalea Tshilds, Marydee Reynolds, Jane Roberts, Nora O’Connor, Jeanine O’Toole, Eiren Caffall, Julie Pomerleau, and L. Wyatt. 3740 N Clark St. | Chicago, IL 60613
• August 7, 2025 @ 7 pm: Westport, ConnecticutLaunch and conversation with Sharbari Ahmed, Sonya Huber, and Nalini Jones. Westport Public Library, 20 Jesup Road Westport, CT 06880 203.291.4800

Let me know if you have any questions, if you want a review copy, if you want to host an event, or anything else!

xoxoxox

Sonya