"How Will I Know?": A Voice and a Message Live On
Whitney Houston had the voice, and the face, and according to many who knew her best, the heart of an angel. Her death has touched the nation and caused many to ask, what, if anything, could have preserved her life. At the time of this writing, no one knows for certain what killed her, but I believe it can be said with certainty that her extensive experiences with substance abuse did not make her body stronger.
Discussing Houston’s life and death with television host Martin Bashir on MSNBC, Georgetown University Professor of Sociology Michael Eric Dyson pondered how people who are close to a performing artist with a substance abuse problem could know when that person has gone too far. His underlying premise was that it can be the nature of, and possibly necessary for, a performing artist to have personal demons like substance abuse with which they wrestle. As I pondered this question myself, the words of Houston’s hit “How Will I Know,” played in my mind.
Dyson made some important observations, the most important of which I believe is that measures must be taken so performing artists can carve out protective boundaries for themselves. To be up there at the top, alone before the crowds, requires that a person have privacy in areas where they want privacy, space for healthy relationships, unselfish guidance and structure for support, rest when rest is needed…. One only need think of the grueling schedule Michael Jackson was looking forward to when he died. Mega artists may be superstars, but they are not super humans. They have all the same needs the rest of us have, and many of those needs are strained more than we may ever know.
However, when it comes to Dyson’s assertion that substance abuse is at any point essential to creativity, I have to part ways. It is always easier to emulate a person’s weakness than their strength, and such myths may prove damaging to the impressionable. Yes some artists, black and white, male and female, have abused drugs. But the overwhelming number of successful artists do not abuse drugs, and the overwhelming number of people who do abuse drugs are not artists. Some are good people. Some are bad people. But I have never met a human being whom drugs made better.
Some African American female performing artists, like Billy Holiday and Etta James, had personal histories marked by the tragedy of drug abuse, and this may have created a mystique around drugs in the African American community. Such a mystique can make drugs seem attractive or even essential to young people who don’t know better. But I would argue against drug abuse being essential for their creativity, or Houston’s. When Houston began her career she was perceived as the “good girl.” Some see that image as having changed during her relationship with Bobby Brown, whom she married in 1992, after three years of courtship. If a person in Houston’s situation were to ask me, to borrow from the words of her song, “How can I know if he really loves me?” I would answer, “If he gives you drugs, he doesn’t really love you.” He may have feelings of love for you, but “love” is also a verb and if he is introducing you to things that could potentially harm you, he is not loving you—no matter what warm and fuzzy feelings (love as a noun) he may be holding inside for you.
This brings me to Professor Dyson’s question. How will you know when a person you love has gone too far when it comes to substance abuse? My answer to Professor Dyson’s question is as simple and direct as my answer to the preceding question. If a person is using an illegal substance, with all the risks that implies, or using a legal substance in a way it has not been prescribed, then the person has gone too far. It’s time for an intervention.
I strongly disagree with Professor Dyson’s premise that a substance abuse problem indicates a personal or inner demon, or is in any way a necessary part of the creative process that needs to be given rope. The rope it is given will form a noose that strangles the creative process. There are enough joys and trials in life for a creative person to transform into art without adding to these the ups and downs of drug use. Heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and anxiolytics are external substances that once taken begin to make physical and psychological changes to the person who has taken them. Ultimately, if abused, these substances will lead to the person’s undoing. Some may be more susceptible than others, but the person taking these drugs does not necessarily have personal or inner demons to begin with. The demons, if you want to call them that, come from the drugs themselves.
In addition to the chemical changes substances can create within a person, a person’s outward behavior may change in ways such that the person begins to construct a new narrative for their life, a new personal history, a new identity. Temporary effects of substances can cause people to be late, or to get into an accident, or to otherwise disappoint the people in their life and themselves. If by nature they are a good, caring, considerate person then these failures will likely cause guilt. This is not a sign that the person has an inner demon. To the contrary, it is evidence that the person is not a sociopath. Unfortunately, once a person has been introduced to the quick emotional fix of substance abuse, they are more vulnerable to trying to numb the pain of guilt with more substance abuse. Add to this the physiological changes in the person’s mind and body that take place with continued abuse, along with the agony they are likely to feel during withdrawal once they have become addicted, and it becomes very difficult for a person who has started down this path to turn around and go home to the person they once were.
But the process I am speaking of is due to the introduction of a destructive influence into the body and the life of an otherwise healthy person. I consider it quite possible that had Houston not been introduced to drugs, she would not have wrestled with “demons.” Sure, she would likely have had to deal with anxiety, loneliness, sorrow, and all the emotions with which we all have to deal—magnified to astronomical proportions given her position on the planet. But when you think about it, prior to taking drugs, Houston was performing in front of huge crowds, touring, and in her greatest successes she was facing down attacks to the core of her identity from those who would say she wasn’t “black enough.” I’d say she dealt with all of this better than just about anybody.
So why did Houston become involved with Brown and drugs? I don’t know. Maybe she was bowing to criticism and trying to be “more black”—whatever that means. If that is the case, than all the more reason to break through the mystique of the tragic, drug addicted black artist here and now. Houston’s artistry was not contingent on drug use. I think we can all agree she performed better without drugs. Maybe she was simply given something before a show or after a show to deal with the pressure behind the drive to be the best in the world at what she did, and wrongly started to connect being the best with use of the drug. Maybe she was given something in a moment of intimate bonding, and the heightening effect of the substance on the sex, made the sex seem more than it was. There are people who have never had sex without the concurrent use of a substance, and cannot even image sex without the use of a substance. Maybe she was with such a person who brought her into his world. Maybe she confused the intensity of the feeling with love.
Houston’s voice lives on, as does the message of her untimely death. When I was a little girl, every year I would watch repeats of Judy Garland in The Wizard of OZ. It was a high point of the year for me back in those days before VCRs…. As a young woman Garland was wide-eyed, healthy looking and in command of her space, like Houston at the same age. When, Garland got her own variety show, I became familiar with the person she became as an adult. She appeared skinny, and shaky, and lost. I would not have recognized her. When she died at age 47 my mother told me she had died from pills and liquor. There was no mystique of the artist stated or implied. Just a talented woman with a problem that killed her. My mother made a reference to how Garland had looked on the variety show and said Garland had been abusing pills and liquor for a long time. I made the connection that there was nothing romantic, artistic, or appealing in any way about addiction. Addiction was destructive. It was to be avoided. It is my hope that little girls who grew up watching Whitney Houston will celebrate her phenomenal talent, her generous heart, her indomitable courage that kept rising up again and again and again—and I hope they will hold in mind that everything that they love and admire most, possibly even the woman herself, could be destroyed by something as superfluous to her greatness as substance abuse.
** Nothing connected with this blog or this website should be considered counseling or treatment. **
