by Jewel
I was so earnest and eager to please, and my mom seemed to know this about me. What often seemed like deeply spiritual and even supportive advice always seemed to serve her best. Instead of going back to live with a parent after high school while I figured things out, I was paying rent on a house I could not afford, and after a few months of living in our cars, she went back to Alaska and left me in San Diego, where I fended for myself.
But none of this seemed weird. It was just my life. My mom seemed so caring to me, or at least I needed to believe so. I had no contact with my dad at this point. I was by myself, living in a car that broke down all the time. I was hitchhiking to get spare tires when one busted. I was often sick and couldn’t afford antibiotics. While I was able to find a few jobs, I lost them quickly by taking too many sick days, which I spent alone in my car waiting out yet another infection. I became agoraphobic and was gripped by terror if I tried to leave my car. I was absolutely convinced that if I stepped foot outside my car I would be seized by illness. It was irrational and totally paralyzing. I had never been afraid of being out in the world, and yet here I was with agoraphobia. It was debilitating. I rarely left my car, and when I did, it was to pee in someone’s yard or behind a bush, or to shoplift food.
The stealing began again with carrots, which apparently are the gateway vegetable, because soon it led to all manner of produce theft. I had quit stealing for a while, but now the need seemed to be back in full force. I was able to limit it to food until one day I saw a sundress that I really coveted. It was frilly and girly and I wanted it so badly. I went in the dressing room of the store to try it on, thinking about the best way to go about stealing it, but instead a strange thing happened.
I tried the dress on. It was ivory with forest green flowers and vines all over it, and smelled new and clean, like someone else’s life. Someone’s life that I wanted. I wanted to feel clean and new. If I could get it for myself, it would help me deny that I was destitute, in such dire straits that I could hardly eat, much less wash my clothes. I looked in the mirror, happily turning this way and that—the key to these things is not to think too much. Just do it. For some reason I looked at the price tag. Why on earth did I do that? If you’re stealing something, it doesn’t exactly matter what it costs. But I looked down at my grubby little hand wrapped around the pristine price tag and saw that the dress cost $39.99. I don’t know what it was about that moment, but a bolt of lightning hit me. When had I lost faith in myself? I looked in the mirror, the ridiculous frilly shoulder straps puffing up around my face, my stringy hair falling loosely over them. My proud Alaskan body and tan skin and biker boots underneath this white summer dress. I looked like a dog wearing pajamas. The dress wasn’t even me. I looked straight into my own eyes and stared. I had once been so confident. I had believed I could do anything I put my mind to. Hell, I had two jobs and paid rent at age fifteen. I put myself through private school and traveled around the country. When had I stopped thinking I could earn forty dollars for myself? I had never thought of stealing as being hurtful to anyone. It felt like getting even with life. It felt like I was in control, doing for myself what fate seemed always to leave out for me. It made me feel taken care of, to provide myself food or something nice to wear. But suddenly I saw that the only person I was cheating was me. I was showing a complete, utter, and total lack of faith in myself. I stared in that mirror, embarrassed, my pants half pulled up around the dress I was attempting to cover up with my clothes. I had been lying to myself. Stealing was not about evening the score—it was about the fear that I would never be enough or have enough. And it was a total stress response. I can look back at every time in my life that I stole (because the times came and went) and it was always directly related to a feeling of extreme duress.
My little green car had been recently stolen, my guitar and all my belongings along with it, which sucked. But at least I hadn’t been in it. I was faced with sleeping on the beach or crashing at people’s houses as I met them. One guy at a coffee shop said I was welcome to shower at his place while he was at work. He gave me a key and seemed nice enough. I made sure he told me where he worked and what his hours were. I stopped by his job, which was walking distance, just to make sure he was there when he said he was. After a few weeks of showering at beach rest stops, a proper hot shower called to me. I took the key and went to the address he had given me. I let myself inside and saw that I was not alone after all. There were several women in the living room of his tiny apartment. After a slightly awkward hello, one of them asked if I was waiting for a job. No, I said, just here to shower, and walked briskly to the bathroom. I looked around the place for any cameras. None that I could see. As I undressed and bathed I kept wondering what she had meant. I washed out my underwear in the shower homestead-style, dried it with a hair dryer, put on my dirty clothes again, and went out and struck up a conversation with the girls. They were older than me, in their early twenties. One was lying on the couch hardly moving, complaining that she felt like a tractor was parked on her chest. I learned she had just gotten a boob job and came back here to recover from surgery. Another girl was waiting for a call. Apparently this kind stranger ran an escort service on the side. Ah. It was all coming together now. One of the girls asked if I danced. I said I had studied in high school, though I knew that wasn’t what she meant. They danced at a local gentlemen’s club as well and said that it was great money and I should try it. The girl with the imaginary tractor on her chest said she wasn’t going to do it forever, just until she got through school. I asked how much they made. A thousand a week. Gosh. A thousand a week sounded good. And easy. I just could not imagine dancing onstage in my skivvies.
I loved talking with the girls about what their lives were like when I came by to shower—they were generous in sharing the details of their work with me, and I listened to them like a writer does, paying attention to the details, without judgment, but I did not listen like an apprentice. I had seen girls my whole life who gave up just a little of themselves only to see it was a slippery slope—the line they said they would never cross kept moving farther and farther away until they hardly recognized themselves. I sensed this would happen to me if I gave up that little piece of myself. It felt dangerous, not that I didn’t consider it. It was an option. But for whatever reason there was something in me that just would not bend on this subject.
In the dressing room, I had to face myself. No more kidding myself. This was not an amazing adventure. I was not doing well. The terror and hopelessness were going to drown me. Jail, disease, or death were certainly in my future if I did not get a grip, get serious, and turn things around for myself. I looked back down at my hands, that forty-dollar price tag still clutched between my fingers. I looked back at the mirror.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked myself.
I answered. “That I’m always going to be alone.”
I choked back silent sobs. What else? That I don’t know how to take care of myself. What do you know how to do? Write. And learn. Do that then, until you know what else to do. Remember, do no harm. Hard wood grows slowly. No shortcuts. Fear exists in your mind. Master your mind. It’s all you can do. It’s literally all you have. I took the dress off, hung it back on its hanger. I was shaking with fear. It was as if only at that moment the reality of all I was facing actually hit me.
Unsure what else to do with myself, I walked to the public library and thumbed through Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of my favorite works. It invited me to engage my imagination, intellect, and creativity in understanding my world and my perceptions. It felt comforting. I remembered what Buddha said: Happiness does not rely on what you have or who you are. It relies on what you think. If this was true, then what did I think? On the outside, I was a fairly optimistic kid. If you met me on the street, you would never know I was homeless, really. If you met me on the street, you’d think I was upbeat, outgoing, and friendly, with a smile on my face. But the anxiety and fear that seem
ed to be controlling my inner life and thus my actions became untenable.
Again I looked back through all my journals to get a better picture of what my real feelings and thoughts were. My journals were my prize possessions, and the only things I had managed to hang on to over the years. I carried them in my tattered backpack everywhere I went. I wrote my poetry, thoughts, feelings, and lyrics in them. I opened the cover of one I’d finished recently to see my familiar dyslexic scribble, as thoughts tended to pour out faster than I could write. I was shocked by the pattern I could see laid out there clearly in black and white. I was not an upbeat, optimistic kid. I was deeply negative. I was living in the past and projecting it all on my future and I was being completely robbed of the opportunity that lies in the now. Even in my honest writing, I wasn’t being honest with myself. I had hidden my terror. Every action I took—writing and stealing alike—was for the sake of avoiding reality. Where my feelings were, I was not.
Looking back now, I recognize that the disconnect between the negativity and fear in my writing and my happier day-to-day appearance to other people was sheer compartmentalization. I didn’t learn that word until recently, but it was a survival skill that worked for me, almost too well. Compartmentalization is what kept me from experiencing real fear when I did dangerous things like hitchhiking, whether to see my mom or busk through Mexico. I had become so used to stressful, high-risk situations that they felt normal to me.
If you are not present, you are unable to have an effect on that unique, fleeting moment called now that truly determines what happens next. Now is the only creative moment we have. Fear was causing me to project my past into my future, never allowing me to engage in the now. Worry and fear are thieves that rob us of our ability to change. I was simply surviving each day, running scared, sure that yesterday’s hurt would be tomorrow’s pain. Change was not possible like this. I vowed to try to stop the cycle I had fallen into.
I invented a new exercise to tackle my agoraphobia. I focused on what my biggest obstacle seemed to be: fear. I shut my eyes and tried to sit in my body and just feel the terror. To really feel it. Study it. When it overtook me, I shook and cried, gripped by paralysis. It crashed over me like a wave and I was at its mercy, swallowed in its infinite yawn, until I found myself on the other side, exhausted and spent. I had to find a way to interrupt this cycle. Next time I tried to move toward the oncoming wave with awareness. By choice. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, using some of the meditation techniques I’d learned as a child. I tried to visualize what terror looked like. It looked like a knot, real and concrete and impossibly tight. I felt the knot in my body. In my stomach. I felt nervous. Edgy. Jittery. Hmm, jittery. When I got nervous just before going onstage as a kid, I would get butterflies in my stomach—it was a jittery feeling, but exciting. Maybe I could work with this. Maybe I could pretend my fear was actually nerves, the kind you get right before doing something hard but exciting. I decided every time I had an overwhelming feeling of terror, I would consciously force myself to flip a switch and pretend it was excitement. I liked the idea of a switch to flip. I painted one in my mind’s eye—a giant white light switch. I practiced looking at the knot of terror and then seeing a light switch, and when I flipped it, I imagined the knot turning into a thousand butterflies that fluttered away. I felt my body relax. It felt odd and strange to play this game, like pretending—and it was. But the terror was imagined as well. This was a conscious choice to choose a different experience. To be in the moment and to use that moment to influence the next one.
At first I had to flip my imaginary light switch about a thousand times a day. Before I knew it the knot would be back. Flip. Butterflies. Knot. Flip. Butterflies. Knot. But after some weeks of practice and mindfulness I was able to see the butterflies more and more, even follow them and watch where they went. What was I excited about, anyway? If I wasn’t using my energy to imagine and plan for bad things happening, what could I redirect my energy toward? What good things might be possible? As creative as I was at that age, I was so hampered by fear that I could not imagine one good thing happening. Not one! After all, what good could happen to a homeless kid? People walked away from me on the street. People looked at me like I was subhuman. I looked dirty and lost, and frankly I was. Flip the light switch. Follow the butterflies. Imagine them outside going into blue sky. Where did they go? What did they want to do? Maybe I could follow them outside. Maybe I could street sing for some food money. Maybe I’d make someone smile. Maybe they would smile at me. Slowly I expanded my comfort zone, and after that made my way to a street corner, where I sang a song that I’d written. Some skater kids came by, three young guys about seventeen or so. They stopped and listened and I looked them in the eyes as I sang. They gave me five bucks and one kid said, “You sing good. Thanks for making my day a little better.” I was floored. I had manifested something good in my life! It was almost magical. How quickly I had forgotten that I was capable. Here I had focused on something in my mind and I had made it happen! And it was something positive and not destructive. I continued to work hard at flipping my light switch, at forcing myself to see things as opportunities and putting my nerves to work for me.
At first it seemed impossible to notice my thoughts—they came and went too quickly and I was not attentive enough to slow them down and assess them while they were happening. Instead I watched my hands. My hands were the servants of my thoughts. They carried out the physical impulses going on unseen in my mind. I spent several days trying to be present and just witness what my hands had been doing. They had been stealing. They had been writing about all the bad things that had happened to me and that would surely happen again. They were hypervigilant in predicting the next bad thing that might happen, so that I might somehow avoid it. They obsessed over when I would become sick again. They dwelled on all the belongings I did not have. They were not engaging in the opportunity that lies in the present moment. If I couldn’t change my thoughts, perhaps I could reverse engineer the process. If I changed what my hands did, perhaps that would force me to change my thoughts. I began to notice and write down how many doors I had opened for others in a day. Then I tried to open more doors than I had the previous day. I found myself holding a door open for strangers even when I wasn’t going into the building. I began to notice and look for others who needed help. Helping others helps you get over yourself and your own problems. Instead of staring down at my feet I would look someone in the eye. This would force myself to remember we were all connected and help me let go of the illusion that I was alone. These were all practices in being present.
Whether it’s a trick or not, I managed to gain some power over my sense of perception—I could experience myself feeling in control of my life, feeling capable, not being a victim. And the more empowered I felt, the more empowered I allowed myself to be. And the more my confidence bubble grew—from a street corner, to maybe a couple blocks away, to maybe surfing during the day, to allowing myself to look at the blue water and say, I’m okay, right now this very second, I don’t know what will happen an hour from now, but in this moment I’m okay and have all I need. I learned that if I could get through second by second, if I could allow myself to experience that right here, right now, and then just to sink into that moment and expand it, and let myself feel that, let the energy of that move through my body, let my tension and my tightness melt away, I actually felt some joy. Real joy.
I began to document what I was learning in a song. Worry was wasteful. My hands being my own, no matter what life was throwing at me. Neither God nor anyone else owes us. I owed myself. And in the end, only kindness matters. I called it “Hands,” and it would become a hit for me on my second album. This song was a gift for me, not only in the moment I wrote it but years later. In 2001, my husband, Ty, and I were camping for a week in the mountains of Northern California. We came back to civilization on September 14 to see the flag at half-mast on the ranch where we were staying. The flag at the next
ranch was at half-mast. We saw handwritten notes along the side of the remote dirt road that said, “God Save Us,” “God Bless Our Country.” When we finally had radio reception and learned that a few days earlier the country had been attacked by terrorists and that the towers had fallen, we sat in complete disbelief. Then the DJ dedicated this song I had written at such a dark and pivotal time in my own life to everyone in America experiencing the same. It was a genuinely surreal and humbling moment.
sixteen
safety in vulnerability
I couldn’t hold down a normal job because I kept getting sick and then getting fired for taking too many sick days. Medicaid was difficult—the appointments I had to keep were too far for me to walk to, and I had learned that hitchhiking in Southern California was just not an option. Having no address and no money and fielding all the suspicious questions was so demoralizing that it was more trouble than it was worth. I decided to try to get a gig in town—maybe I could do cover songs in a coffee shop or a local bar. I walked into several coffee shops in Pacific Beach where I had seen musicians play. After speaking with one manager, I found out that musicians generally played for free or for tips. That seemed absurd to me; I had been raised with the notion that bringing in patrons or entertaining them deserved pay.
One day a friend named Gregory Page invited me to play a solo acoustic gig with him. I was excited because he was the bass player in the Rugburns with Steve Poltz, and I knew that the band got paid. I got to the coffee shop—I forget the name now—and it was packed. A man stood at the door taking a cover fee just to get in and listen. We both sat onstage and swapped turns singing original tunes. I was an unknown with no following, but Gregory had quite a few fans from his Rugburn shows, and the night went well. I saw that the tip jar at the foot of the stage was fairly full of ones and fives by the time we got off. I was excited to finally get paid and get some warm food, and headed toward the owner to see how the split with the door money went. I was stunned when she informed me that she kept it all. “But they came in to see the music. How about we split the door money in thirds?” She said no, flat out. “Okay,” I said. “You keep the door money. Gregory and I will split all the food and coffee sales.” She looked at me with an incredulous smile on her face. Gregory seemed like he wasn’t too worried about the money. I turned back to the proprietor, and she said, “You and Gregory split the tip jar. I keep the coffee sales, and the food sales, and the door money.” I was dumbfounded. “The reason all those people came tonight was to see music. And I need the money. I don’t have another job.” She looked at me, unmoved. An anger rose in me and suddenly I found myself at no loss for words. I put my small finger in her face and said, “You are stealing from the people who are helping your business thrive. You’re not a nice person. Your business will fail. Mark my words. I’m going to tell every musician I know to boycott this place because you are willing to cheat the very folks who are putting food on your table. Your greed will end up starving you, not me.” Then I added, “I’m going to find a place to sing that lets me keep all the door money. You can keep the tips from tonight. You’re going to need them.” She didn’t seem too worried as she said, “Good luck. This is how every coffee shop operates.”