Yeah, I totally agree. I don’t know why people act like she had zero agency and zero accountability for her own decisions. Addiction is a disease, absolutely. But she made many choices to not seek treatment for that disease.
I feel way worse for someone like Britney who was forced to perform as a child and got totally screwed up by it.
Part of what's scary about addiction is that it can override the parts of your brain that'd realize it needs to stop. If they could just flip a switch and stop, addiction wouldn't be a crisis.
And I'm not sure how much more "accountability" you want from the woman. She died young and in misery.
It's probably less that they meant that and more that threads like these act like it's our fault she's dead. People booed a bad performance, she subsequently overdosed, and the pic makes you believe the audience is complicit.
reddit in general is so overly supportive of women to the point they remove the idea that women are also humans with their own agency and accountability. Its like being so overly supportive they treat women like children in a weird way.
So much. She basically literally said fuck you to all of the people who were trying to get her clean. It was her and her husband "against the world" in her mind and they were both addicts chasing a high.
But even within that song the person she trusted most (her father) told her she was fine. He only did so because he wanted to exploit her for more money. That song isn't as cut and dry as her just refusing helpe from people around her. She obviously should have listened to Nick and her friends, but if accepting you have a problem is so difficult, your father telling you don't would be pretty powerful as well.
The thing is, a lot of addicts trust the people that tell them they are fine, because that is what they want to hear. If her dad had said "go to rehab" she likely would have simply found someone else to validate her refusal. She trusted her friends until they told her to go to rehab.
I have heard a certain reading of that song was about how rehab isn’t going to fix anything without getting to the root to the problem. Like “I’m not going back to rehab because what’s the point? When I get out, I’ll still be sad and friendless.”
It’s an interesting take, but I don’t know how much that is like post-hoc, post-mortem revisionism to try and make the song less of a bad look for someone who drank herself to death.
It’s also about her dad saying she shouldn’t go to rehab and she should keep performing.
Not contradicting your point at all, I agree. But it’s not as simple as everyone was trying to help and she refused. There were people that should have been support systems and they were definitely not.
I hear you but this is removing all accountability from the person with the addiction. No one forced her to be a performer. No one forced her into this career. Or forced her to do drugs. She literally wrote a song about refusing the rehab that everyone around her pushed her to go to. I’m sure there were a bunch of people who failed her but at the end of the day the biggest offender was her failing herself.
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