March is Women’s History Month and is an important time to honor and celebrate many influential women of the past and present.
My personal role model is Ariana Grande, who I’ve been supporting and idolizing since 2012.
Ariana is extremely talented and successful, being one of the biggest pop stars in the music industry and has broken countless Guinness World Records.
Despite her musical success, Ariana Grande is incredibly strong and resilient after all that she’s been through in the past few years.
On May 22nd, 2017, Ariana’s concert was bombed by a terrorist in Manchester, England, killing 22 innocent angels. This was extremely traumatic for Ariana and all of her fans. The suicide bomber was clearly motivated to attack this specific event at the Manchester Arena because of the sheer fact that the majority of the audience at Ariana’s concert are women, children, and gay people. Despite being diagnosed with a severe case of PTSD and anxiety, Ariana continued her Dangerous Woman Tour and even performed a benefit concert at the Manchester Arena two months after the incident.
A year later, Ariana made the difficult decision to leave her toxic relationship with Mac Miller, due to his worsening drug addictions. She quickly jumped into a relationship with Pete Davidson, and within two weeks, they mindlessly got engaged. On September 7th, 2018, however, Mac Miller passed away to a fatal drug overdose — the start of Ariana’s lowest point in life. Because Mac was still deeply in love with Ariana and passed away under the impression that she was going to get married to someone else, the entire internet turned to her to blame for his death. So, while she was mourning the death of her ex-lover, she was also being blamed and shunned by millions of people for Mac’s unfortunate death. Ariana cut things off with Pete Davidson very quickly after that and was dealing with so much guilt and depression following these incidents.
All of this pain led Ariana to release the iconic, record-breaking hit, “thank u, next” and the beginning of the self-love and healing era known as the thank u, next era. She dropped the “thank u, next” album in February of 2019 and went on tour shortly after that, despite revealing that she might not be able to have the strength to go on tour again just a couple of months back.
The thank u, next era is representative of her strength and resilience despite the multiple hardships and pain she suffered through in the past few years. Ariana’s ability to bounce back even after the most traumatic of events, as well as be able to put on an entire world tour for 9 months, all while in the process of healing and learning to love and forgive herself is an extremely admirable quality. This is why I chose Ariana Grande as my idol for Women’s History Month, because she showed me that it is possible to get back up again even after the hardest of falls.