Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing: A Blueprint for Navigating Millennial Girlhood
Entertainment
Photo: Bob Berg
When I was a very little girl, my first love was just the entire concept of older girls. They weren’t crushes exactly, more like a sweeping awe at the idea of being a female teenager—freedom, possibility, a two-piece swimsuit with actual bra cups and two whole breasts to put in them. Having had just half a decades’ experience at being alive, being an older girl was literally the only thing I’d ever had to look forward to. Especially since the biggest events of my childhood had thus far pretty much been: My parents deciding, basically in the maternity ward the day of my birth that they couldn’t stand each other and making that feeling legal around my third birthday; my baby teeth coming in grey, requiring surgical removal; and a hubcap lodged in a tree in our front yard loosening itself at a moment unfortunate for the top of my skull, which introduced me to both the words “stitches” and “concussion.” Compared to me, who was largely invisible save for the occasional need to remove my teeth or sew my head back together, teenage girls were a whole different brand of person, lovely and perfumed top-shelf-of-the-curio-cabinet humans, content just to exist on earth in order to make it pretty and fun.
It was during these greasy doldrums I learned via Sarah McLachlan’s perfect album Surfacing that it’s twenty-something-year-old girls who know the fuck what’s up.
My sister is eight years older, and so when she was starting high school in 1989, I was starting first grade. Once, after their youth group meeting (the very gatherings where they set my rock albums on fire), she and two of her friends took me to Taco Bell. Their names were not Tiffany and Brandy, but they were close enough to understand that these were formidable, Heathers-caliber girls, their thick, tiered bangs artfully barrel-rolled and vertically shellacked until they’d fashioned something resembling a baroque dormer encircling oeil-de-boeuf faces streaked magenta with Cover Girl blush. They wore blazers with brassy buttons, and their loofah-like chiffon hair bows smelled of Rave Number 4 Mega Hold and Exclamation! perfume. In their Taco Bell booth, I cowered in a corner, too intimidated to eat or speak, which was ultimately to my benefit because on that day I learned older girls will tell you everything if you just shut the fuck up and listen.
In particular, these girls had found an illicit love note from a girl they hated to Tiffany’s crush Brian, who had flirted with her at Army of the Lord rehearsals yet been weird ever since. She’d had the audacity to sign the note SWAK, an absolute indicator that she was planning to break her purity pledge to be at the very least fingered by Brian. I did not know what any of those terms meant, but as with Penny’s abortion in Dirty Dancing, it did not matter if I could not grasp the minutiae. The feeling was transmitted just fine.
Over the next six years, I learned a lesson the tween little sister character Danielle Chase explains in an early episode of My So-Called Life: keep to the corners and pretend to be reading. As a younger sister, I also realized early that this approach often means no one even knows you’re in the room listening, and then, at some point, they just accept you’re there. Outside of watching Bold and the Beautiful in the summers with my grandmother, lurking near teenagers provided nearly the entirety of my early understanding of human relationships. A friend’s older sister introduced me to VC Andrews; a middle-school neighbor to Sweet Valley High; once, while my babysitter was in the shower, I worked up the nerve to look at nearly two whole pictures from the issue of Playboy featuring Drew Barrymore.
But by the time I was an actual teenager, I’d come to understand that those girls were full of shit. Because for all my listening, nothing that good was happening. While the boys were still child-sized, I fell asleep one night to wake up five-seven and always just positively slicked with oil despite the layers of Clinique double powder quadruple powdering my T-zone. A neighborhood boy who barely reached my earlobe had rung my doorbell, stood on his toes, jammed his tongue in my mouth, and ran away, an encounter that I thought might mean I had a boyfriend but did not. That was the extent of my first two years of teenage experience.
I listened to Surfacing in its entirety at least once a day, every day for approximately two years.
It was during these greasy doldrums I learned via Sarah McLachlan’s perfect album Surfacing that it’s twenty-something-year-old girls who know the fuck what’s up. As Sarah (who has been my best friend since 1997, thus granting me the right to call her by her Christian name) sings in the track “Arms of an Angel,” the album’s “sweet madness/glorious sadness” was perfect for hiding in a bedroom atop a comforter from the Girls’ Bedroom section of a JC Penney’s catalog, teaching myself to smoke cigarettes bummed from a senior girl while my parents were at the casino, and conjuring up recollections of the faces of boys at school I’d never spoken to in my life and imagining them falling so in love with me that we just completely lost our fucking minds. On a late-night talk show, I remember a smarmy host asking Sarah if she was aware that American women had named Surfacing their favorite album to “make love” to.
But as an American girl, I wanted to make love to the album itself in order to get the passionate experiences described in Surfacing, of which I could gather the connotation if not the exact denotation, as fully integrated into my own body as possible. That is why I listened to Surfacing in its entirety at least once a day, every day for approximately two years.
Around 16, I began to have a taste of real-life experiences more closely resembling those I had gleaned the scent of while observing motionless in the corners of my sister’s slumber parties, then pitched into full-blown fantasies courtesy of my best friend Sarah. A shitty boyfriend who was violent before I had quite learned that boyfriends were not allowed to choke me, a best guy friend secretly in love with me waiting just off to one side making sure for a full year that other guy didn’t hurt me in any way that would last forever, trying and failing to make a move on a girl I thought might be into girls outside a rave, a life-alteringly magical four months with a sweet, beautiful, fucked up 18-year-old boy who would break my heart at least 473 times over the course of seven years before finally tearfully confessing he was marrying someone else. And as my life got dramatic, Surfacing became something I was embarrassed to admit had briefly consumed the entirety of my obsessive thoughts as a brand new teenager, akin to the shame of the childhood summer I spent hidden up a tree in my grandmother’s yard, thinking of nothing but One Life to Live’s Luna using her love and psychic ability to save Max from that cave.
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