By Sipora West

Edited by Jessica Yi and Alloe Mak

An introspective tribute to Alanis Morissette’s musical masterpiece. 

I, Sipora West, believe that Alanis Morissette wrote Jagged Little Pill both for and about me. 

Critics will claim this is impossible, seeing as I was born a decade after the album’s 1995 release. This criticism ignores the possibility that when Alanis entered Westlake Recording Studios in 1994, she was approached by a futuristic apparition, foreseeing my teenage years. The fates must have known that Alanis’s emotive vocals were the perfect instrument to emit my inner thoughts. Inspired by the trials and tribulations of my teenage relationships, heartbreaks, triumphs, losses, depressions, and desires, Alanis created a catalogue of alternative rock anthems embodying teenage angst. 

As much as I fear the celebrity status I shall receive when the public learns that Jagged Little Pill presupposed both my internal and external life, the time has come to reflect on the intersection between Alanis’ lyrics and my own moments from teenagehood.

All I really want is some patience / A way to calm the angry voice 

• All I Really Want

Patience is a virtue that I lack. Billy Joel’s Vienna is a fictional tale. Time’s inherent finitude is an ever-present omen in my teenage years. I am repeatedly told by adults that I am living the best years of my life; however, at age eighteen, I have yet to achieve greatness or even normalcy. My mind is a carousel of reminders: Natalie Portman portrayed Padmé Amidala when she was sixteen, Sophie Turner played Sansa Stark when she was fifteen, Britney Spears released Baby One More Time at sixteen, Greta Thunburg addressed the United Nations at sixteen, Terry Fox ran across Canada with cancer and an amputated leg at eighteen. My mind is a cacophony of rage directed toward myself: if I am not special then why can’t I at least be average? Why have I been to fewer house parties than I have fingers, why is making friends too complicated, why is maintaining friendships even more so? Every day is a battle of wills between my need for cultural recognition, my need for the so-called teenage dream, and my desire to just relax and let events unfold in due course. I have whiplash from remaining so static. 

I’m frustrated by your apathy

• All I Really Want

Detachment is a political stance for the privileged. I was a fool to expect that those who grew up in ivory towers would ever lift their noses from the safety of theory and take a—perhaps meaningless in the vastness of human history but at least tangible—action in the real world. 

And what I wouldn’t give to find a soulmate / Someone to catch this drift / And what I wouldn’t give to meet a kindred

• All I Really Want

Love, heartbreak, and friendship are not guaranteed in teenage years—solitude is all that is guaranteed. For those, like me, who have experienced all of the above—loneliness is most prevalent. I search for the kind of connection that understands the inexplicable parts of my psyche. Yet I have only found temporary friends and lovers who offer sweet promises to understand what they can and accept what they can’t, but who always leave or drift away. People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me, wrote Søren Kierkegaard. How isolated I must be to relate to Søren Kierkegaard more than anyone in my physical life. 

Is she perverted like me / Would she go down on you in a theatre?

• You Oughta Know

Few people are privy to my real sexual inclinations. Admitting one’s perversions is, I believe, the most intimate one can be with another person. Which is why there is something so carnally painful in wondering about the sexual perversions of an ex-lover’s new lover. Could they be enacting my sexual fantasies, but with more electric chemistry? Could this new lover have introduced a new fetish to my ex-lover, expanding my ex-lover’s appetite? These thinking patterns apply to current sexual partners as well. Did my current partner have preferences in previous relationships that they are simply uninterested in performing with me? Is my sexual performance disappointing? Satisfactory? Does it exceed expectations?

And every time you speak her name / Does she know how you told me you’d hold me until you died?

• You Oughta Know

When I date someone, I too date all of their exes. It is impossible for me to ignore that romance involves repetition; for every time a lover finds me beautiful and tells me so, they have said and meant the same to another. This knowledge is simultaneously unnerving and neutral. Permanence is absent in romance. I wish we could lie here forever, unsure where my flesh ends and yours begins, is a transient statement. I feel more love for you than I have ever felt love for anyone, is an ephemeral truth. I embrace lovers with the knowledge that their desire for our embrace mimics their desire to embrace their last lovers and their next. To paraphrase Céline Sciamma, all lovers feel like they’re inventing something. I often wonder if the lovers who came after me consider that I invented lust and romance with their partner too. 

And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it / Well can you feel it?

• You Oughta Know

My reflections so far have been rather tame and introspective. I hesitate to expose the full extent of my jealousy, but Alanis’s embittered tone speaks to me for a reason. I admit that, sometimes, I fantasize about ex-lovers walking in on my current lover and I, my ex-lovers seeing all the spots my current lover touches me, my ex-lovers observing the tenderness and sensuality of our connection. I am terrified of the inevitable moment when an ex-lover looks at me and harbours no lustful fantasies. I am terrified of being forgotten as an object of desire. 

I’m green, but I’m wise

• Hand in My Pocket

Eighteen is a liminal age. You’re so mature for your age, how are you only in high school, I assumed you’re in your twenties, are common refrains. Then it is declared that I am being taken advantage of, that I am just a child, that I am too naïve to know what’s right for me. I balance on a tightrope between adultification and infantilization; perceived however is convenient for others. 

I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone

• You Learn 

Strangers make the best muses, especially when you loved them once. 

You already won me over in spite of me / Don’t be alarmed if I fall head over feet

• Head Over Feet

I am in an objectively terrible position to fall for someone. In three months, I am leaving Toronto for good — interrailing across Western Europe in the summer, moving provinces for university, and hopefully kickstarting a life of immersing myself in cultures around the world. As a pleasure-seeker, I sought a short-term fling to satiate me for my remaining few months. I thought I had found the perfect person, someone who I could enjoy without feeling deeply for, but it turns out that my heart cares not for the constraints of time. Against all better judgments, I welcome butterflies back into my stomach. I find that mundane objects remind me of them. I find that when I read philosophical essays, my immediate desire is to talk to them about my ideas. I find that the days in between seeing them exist in parentheses. I refuse to label what we have, to limit the suffering when our ticking time bomb explodes. Our mutual understanding of our temporality stirs me. A relationship that will exist in memory, unblemished by the disfigurement of fighting time, is a rare occurrence. I resent time for introducing us now instead of four years down the line, and I recognize the treachery of that thought pattern. When they read this piece, they will know it is about them, and unlike Carly Simon’s muse, they won’t be vain for thinking so.

I am sure you will all be shocked to learn that I, Sipora West, was not actually the muse behind Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Still, the earnesty of my connection is real. As my psyche develops, Jagged Little Pill narrates my experiences in freshly unique ways. Teenagehood is profoundly isolating; but the universality of angsty art, the viscerality of Alanis’s music, offers a liberating reprieve.