Song commentary: Madonna - Intervention

For a long time, I considered Nothing Fails my favorite Madonna song. But as I was doing my scores for the Madonna rate, I realized that for as much as Nothing Fails has meant to me, Intervention has passed it.

The first Madonna CD I ever bought was True Blue, in December (maybe late November?) of 2010. Only a couple of weeks later, my mom went to the hospital after my dad and I couldn't wake her from her sleep of over 20 hours. And five days after that, she died, nearly two years after being diagnosed with cancer.

Now, growing up I was forbidden to listen to Madonna because she was too sexed-up - my mom was a very hard-line Catholic who thought everything from wearing a crop top to driving a gas guzzler was a sin. (My dad was a horrible hypocrite who confiscated my Kathy Reichs books for having sex scenes and F-bombs while he was hiding a porn addiction.) And so it was in the back of the superstitious part of my mind that maybe Madonna really was a horrible person, and by listening to her I'd somehow hastened my mom's death. But I remember going into the hospital that first day with I'll Remember running through my head (I'd bought Something to Remember by that time too). So I'd already begun to associate Madonna with comfort and grieving.

And she kind of gave me something to live for through the next several months - I had to cope with my mom's death, my first year of college, and a lot of other shit too, and having someone new to stan for was a welcome distraction.

Among that "other shit" was that when my mom died, the buffer she created for me disappeared, and my dad became emotionally abusive. He also decided to sell our house, the only house I could remember living in, which was also the house my mom and her siblings had grown up in. Add in that my mental disorders (depression, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, OCD, avoidant personality disorder, and borderline tendencies) were as yet undiagnosed and untreated, and you see... I was in a very painful, deeply unhappy period of my life.

And in the midst of that, the American Life album. It quickly became one of the three central albums of my life, the other two being Shakespears Sister's Hormonally Yours and Jenny Berggren's My Story. And though I still love the other two, they've lost some of their meaning for me, but American Life hasn't - it's still huge for me. No wonder it's my highest-rated album in any PJ rate. But anyway, at the time, I remember reading Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber, my assignment for my Literature of American Minorities course, and listening to My Story followed by American Life, and falling apart crying, because all of it was hitting home for me so hard.

The thing I found with the album was that no matter why I was upset - abuse, grieving, depression, career anxiety, academic stress - it had something to say to me. So I got in the habit of putting it on whenever I was having a hard time. For obvious reasons, the Nothing Fails / Intervention / X-Static Process trilogy struck a chord for me, big-time. For a long time, Nothing Fails was the big one for me, for reasons I'll explain when the time comes. But over the years, Intervention has overtaken it, I think because it's an even more universal message, and one that's really beautiful and powerful in its simplicity.

Right now, I'm going through an incredibly painful breakup - one that I hoped and thought I would never have to go through - and I originally turned to Love Spent as an expression of my anger, but now I'm listening to Intervention and crying at the lyrics. "I know the road seems lonely, but that's just Satan's game"... what a powerful sentiment, especially now as I struggle with being single again, but it's one that's empowered me for a long time. Because of my SA and AvPD, and to a lesser extent my BPD, I have a tremendously difficult time making friends and forming relationships and spent - still spend - a great deal of time feeling friendless and wondering what's wrong with me. That lyric has been a great comfort to me, a reminder that sometimes love is hidden, not absent, and that even when it's not enough, better love may be coming up for me, further down that road.

Intervention has given me so much comfort over the years, and at times it's even felt like a message from my mom herself. Through so many situations that I needed to escape, it's the one I've come back to, even more than the rest of the album - and literally every song on the album except for Easy Ride is one that's taken on a lot of importance for me at some point.

I know, I know, there is nothing to fear, and I know that love will take us away from here.

Wherever "here" is. Whatever I fear.

Thank you, Madonna.

Originally posted to Popjustice on October 24, 2015.