It Happened To Me: I Actually Believed A Celebrity

Sarah Durham Wilson, creator of MIELE, discusses her journey from celebrity-led white feminist to collective liberator — and how she went from being ten thousand spoons to what the world really needs.

By Sarah Durham Wilson

This might be cringe, but I need to tell you of my blind spot when it came to celebrity: I believed that my 90s feminine heroine, Alanis Morrisette, was just like you and me. I really thought she was a revolutionary feminist who wanted everyone to be free (how wrong a little teen fan girl could be). 

As a teen growing up in a small Southern town, there was *pre Alanis me and *post Alanis me. At that young patriarchal maiden¹ time in my life, hearing Alanis set a big creative piece of me free.

I have very specific memories of my sophomore year in high school and being a lonely, scared, highly awkward, and intense teenager whose mother was dying of cancer. Alanis’ debut record, ‘Jagged Little Pill’, helped open up my creative life and gave me a process for my pain. In that tender time, you oughta know that I memorized every Alanis line and sang along to every song, all day long.

I remember driving my old green two door Volvo from high school to lacrosse practice and wanted to show up sturdy and with a smile despite my world crumbling. In our house, town and country we didn’t talk about the dark hard stuff in our lives — it was “under rug swept,” as Alanis would say.

Growing up in patriarchy, we good girls always said everything was fine, we good girls learned to lie with a smile. We protected the predator, and shamed and gaslit the victim, even if the victim was ourselves. 

But Alanis outed the predator. She didn’t whisper his secrets, she didn’t even just speak them. She SCREAMED THEM. It was the sweet primal scream of relief: she punched the suffocating silence with those primal feminine screams. 

Ahhhhh the relief! Punching the suffocating silence with those primal feminine screams.

For someone who was always sent to her room for pointing out the elephant in the room Alanis losing her shit and dropping the good girl bit was liberating and validating. Validation is still needed in maiden and I had very few if any mature feminine mentors. I had not yet seen such an unleashed feminine blueprint in my world of patriarchal nice ladies and good little girls.

I have the most distinct memory of driving on a sunny Fall afternoon to lacrosse practice after school and blasting ‘You Oughta Know’, and feeling that aching loneliness and longing to belong — and then suddenly there was this incandescent moment that I was distinctly *not alone. That ALANIS was with me. Like in the passenger seat. Maybe I’d seen the ‘Ironic’ video of her driving in a car too many times, and so it was just too easy to picture her as my ride or die. 

She was like a vision. A wild feminine mirage in the desert of patriarchy, beaming at me. I felt seen by the type of woman I wanted to be. And her vision came to comfort me at exactly the right time because music was a way I connected to the divine. 

I had been heading to lacrosse practice, where I was captain, to encourage all these women to win when I felt anything like a leader. And then she showed up. As if to encourage the leader, the fighter in me.

I was so desperate for permission to be different from the cookie cutter mold that was encouraged: you know what it’s like, being a girl in a patriarchal world bred to be pleasing and polite and never put up a fight. So yes, I thought I knew her. I thought she was a fighter.

Looking back, I see I bought that she was. She told us and sold us that she was. A feminist through and through. She was just like me! A REVOLUTIONARY FEMINIST WHO WANTED EVERYONE TO BE FREE. 

High school was a lonely, vulnerable time and I was more than eager to believe her lies. A piece of me felt indebted to her: I felt set free by her in a lot of ways to express a rage I’d long held in my patriarchal feminine cage.

But in October 2023 I have to swallow a pill about Alanis, and, you guessed it — it was jagged AF. It is not as if I had really followed her career for years. I think I ducked out at around the time of the GAP ads. But to be honest, she was still deeply threaded into the fabric of my life. 

As a spiritual teacher I sang lines from her songs on my drum and quoted her in my first book, ‘Maiden to Mother’. But after October 7, after the second Nakba of Palestine by Israel began, the world was plunged into the underworld and everyone was in their underwear.

And we still are.
Naked for everyone to see what we’re really made of.

Immediately I looked around to the people I had looked up to. As we know, almost everyone in mainstream music failed this test — with a few fellow human and true artist exceptions. 

At one point, pre-October 7, Alanis had even followed me on Instagram! And liked my shit! In that moment, once again I felt seen by Alanis, just like back at sixteen, when it felt like she was in the car with me. But the sweetness of that didn’t last, because there would soon be a moral test she did not pass.

Post October 7 has been a hell of a masks-off, mental and emotional roller coaster ride. It’s been the most fully illuminating time to find who would — and would not — (*cough cough* P!nk) stand against genocide. Never in a million years would I have thought people I looked up to were actually . . . genocidal. But of course, looking back — it all tracks.

Before October 7, I had been decolonizing and eradicating my white feminism — but it was a gradual process. In one fell swoop, Palestine ripped the bandaid off. 

And the inner and outer white feminist died. And I could see, I had been blind. Alanis sang for women who looked like her. She drew the line at the women of Palestine. One quick google search of her name and Israel revealed everything I feared. Y’all, it was not without my own white woman tears. She really had me fooled. Oh Alanis, I hardly knew you.  

I felt betrayed. My mother died when I was seventeen and she was forty five (my age now). At her funeral, they read “Do not go gentle into that good night”, by Dylan Thomas. The next part of that line is “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

Well, that poem seeded in me and bloomed in my body and now I am that poem. I raged with deep anguish against the white feminist machine of her. 

Like I said, Alanis had followed me on Instagram for about five months before October 2023. The first time I saw that I became giddy with tweenish glee. By October, I felt burned and spurned by her. Where was the woman who gave so many 90s tweens, teens and women their voice? How had she become a ghost when feminine rage was needed the most?

That inner maiden part of me was frantic for her voice — where was she! — this woman who taught so many how to fight?

WHERE WAS SHE!?
WHEN IT WAS TIME TO STAND UP FOR WHAT WAS REALLY RIGHT?

She knew how to stand up to her own predators — where was she against the predators of this precious world? So, I kept calling her in. Publicly and online.

Until one day I got a message from a mutual “friend”. It was a screenshot from her husband about me. He was very angry with me and, to be honest, it scared me. 

That was the resounding nail in the coffin from my white woman idol. To feel even moderately threatened into silence felt violent and painfully ironic from the woman I once thought helped unleash my voice. 

Before there ever was a social media Block Party I blocked Alanis — to feel safe! 

ISN’T IT IRONIC?

The woman I once thought was in the car with me, right there in the passenger seat. 

Oh but she’s not in the car with us, she’s nowhere near the liberation bus. 

As it turned out, Alanis was one of so many of the lily-white Lilith Fair-era feminists who failed to stand for what Lilith stood for (looking at you, too, Ani DiFranco). While Lilith eats the oppressor, Alanis and so many of her ilk upheld him and his deadly empire.  

Yes — so many white feminists failed Palestine’s great moral test. And the joke was on me, as another white feminist Brandi Carlisle would say in her Grammy winning song ‘The Joke’ (that even sings about displaced Mothers walking through the desert with babies on their backs — so evocative of the Nakba — but these were the very women she turned her back on). 

The white feminist joke has long been on us, middle class white women — “I care! Believe me! Now hand over your money” — and somewhere in the spectrum of artist-to-capitalist celebrity, these idols lost what made them honest.

(Side note: obviously Sinead O’Connor was a real one, I talk about her extensively in my September issue of MIELE).

I don’t think I’m asking too much to say an artist NEEDS to reflect the times. If not, they are just decoys and distractions for empire’s genocide and ecocide and femicide. 

In the words of the great Nina Simone: 

“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when everyday is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young people, Black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.”

Me too.

And now I wanna know about you. Is there an “artist” you once loved, who failed this great moral test? Who failed to say “Free Palestine” with their entire chest?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sarah Durham Wilson’s first job was at Rolling Stone magazine. She went on to work at GQ, VH1, Vanity Fair, and Interview magazines before running off with an indie rock star from Nebraska. When he left her at the altar at her Saturn Return, she nearly died from self inflicted femicide/suicide. In 2011, an awakening to the Goddess saved her — she became a women and femmes teacher on the return to the Earth and Goddess to save us from this ecocidal, genocidal, femicial mess.

She wrote ‘Maiden to Mother’ a book on the rite of passage to the Mature Feminine for Sounds True in 2022. She’s now burning bridges for liberation and the creator of the revolutionary feminist zine MIELE, which means “honey” in Italian. Because resistance can be delicious. MIELE aims to flip celebrity on its head by centering activists and the Polycrisis instead. She’s a witch in the woods of Maine with her child Avalon and their familiars, Ridley and Odin, named after the God of the Runes, in a nod to her Celtic heritage. Free Palestine. 

1. Maiden is the formative stage in the feminine wheel of life, when we are forming into who we will become, it’s much like the earth’s spring time or waxing moon before becoming full or fully bloomed. A time of seeking and reaching and becoming.