I’m So Lucky:
Halsey’s the great impersonator and sick girl selfhood

Lucy Ryan

In the single ‘Lucky’, from their upcoming album, The Great Impersonator, Halsey, one of this generation’s least easy to pigeon-hole popstars sings; “I shaved my head four times because I wanted to / And then I did it one more time ‘cause I got sick. / And I thought I changed so much, nobody would notice it, and no one did.” And as I watched her peel off her wig and utterly crumple under the weight of both fatigue and fame in Gia Coppola’s music video, a pitch-perfect pastiche of early 2000s fame, I felt my throat close.

What Halsey is confessing, obliquely here (and in more explicit detail in the heartbreaking single ‘The End’), is that she has recently survived cancer, and now has a diagnosis of lupus, a brutal autoimmune disease. What I am experiencing, hands gripped tight around my phone, is a feeling of vicious, almost painful resonance. I have been sick for the vast majority of my life, and this year alone I spent six months slowly starving whilst I waited for stomach surgery, getting thinner and frailer as everyone around me watched, powerless to help. To people who didn’t know I was sick, my thinness and sudden style pivot to oversized clothes was a typical reinvention, my flamboyant dress tendencies running off without me. And indeed, my flamboyant dress sense is not a coincidence, but a feature of my sickness. It’s a way to control the shell of my body when I have lost that control over the innards, a concept plastered all over Halsey’s new record.

This theme of hiding sickness in plain sight is practically the thesis of Halsey’s album rollout. Its title, The Great Impersonator, speaks to the way the singer is trying on different personas as a way to reckon with and reclaim her body and life after sickness, something myself and other sick creators and artists know all too well. As I salivate over the various alternative covers for the album, each one featuring Halsey reimagined as a star in a different time period, I think of the way I have written dozens of surreal short stories about women with disobedient bodies; often the most honest way to speak about the unspeakable is to dress it in different clothes.

In the aforementioned ‘The End’, the first single from the album to be released, Halsey—otherwise known as Ashley—recounts the fears of losing someone you love because they’re driven away by the extent of your sickness. This is the kind of conversation about sickness and disability I have rarely seen in the mainstream but one that thrives in online communities like instagram’s sicksadgirlz, where young women and queer people are given free reign to frankly discuss how sickness affects them. The kind of conversation I can constantly feel clawing at my throat, but I am too afraid of being unpalatable to my able-bodied friends to voice in the real world.

The lines “I don’t like the lie I’m living” and “I’m doing way worse than I’m admitting” from fourth single ‘Ego’ also capture a sense of online-ness; in rather the opposite direction. All of us wear a social media mask, but for those of us with disabilities who don’t want to be patronised or infantilised, we often wear them closer and tighter than most. Even when I do speak openly online about my health, it is caveated—but I’m fine, I can handle it, I have survived this long. Of course this is a lie, I’m decidedly not fine, but I am also hard-wired to be resistant to accepting help, lest I fall into the category of burdensome, and fulfill the very fears touched on in ‘The End.’

Indeed, Halsey’s status as a uniquely online star who rose to prominence on Tumblr at its peak in the mid-2010s, makes this affinity all the more apparent. A notoriously confessional artist, sometimes to their own detriment, Halsey is truly a child of the internet like so many of their fans and in some ways that makes them a perfect mouthpiece for this kind of frank discussion. When I see myself in the lyrics of these songs, it’s not simply because I have had similar experiences, but because Halsey and I are of similar ages, because we both came of age on Tumblr obsessing over aesthetic photos and the music 2000s emo bands, and as such we both have the same tendency to be referential when trying to explain our less palatable experiences.

Creating patchwork mood boards and collages of photos, film stills and other media to point to when trying to explain oneself may have been co-opted by various tiktok ‘core’ aesthetics, but that skill was honed on Tumblr, and you can feel it all over the singles and the imagery surrounding the album.

Circling back to ‘Lucky’ which samples the Britney Spears song of the same name (my favourite Britney, for what it’s worth), I don’t think it’s an accident that Halsey uses Britney as an avenue to discuss her illnesses. Britney is of course one of the most towering icons of the late 90s and early 2000s, but she’s also one of the most brutally mocked and maligned pop stars, whose own health struggles were parodied and silenced for years, particularly on the internet.

There’s something beautiful to me about this reappropriation of the song, often pointed to as a grim look into Britney’s future, to become a confessional, complex look at illness that ultimately reads as triumphant. Note the change of pronoun from “she’s so lucky,” to “I’m so lucky,”—Halsey might be lucky to be alive, but we are just as lucky to have her. And in much the same way she has used different points of references to tell the story of her sickness and survival, I know I will be using this album to do the very same for years to come.