Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story

by Jewel

  It’s also important to look at different types of therapy. A breakthrough experience for me came just recently at a wonderful place called Onsite in Tennessee. They use some different modalities and do retreats that can create a real life-changer for participants. The Living Centered Program is my particular favorite, and their new facility for those suffering from trauma is very good. It was very useful in helping me process and find tools to deal with things that trigger trauma in me. I like to call it human school. Therapy is expensive, and often the best facilities and practitioners are not covered by insurance, and so mental health becomes a luxury. I think that’s a shame, but there are still resources for anyone unwilling to accept unhappiness or emotional pain. No one in need of help deserves to feel like the answers exist solely beyond their own skin. Our happiness and fulfillment can be achieved with or without traditional therapy, with or without a supportive spouse, money, or a family we feel safe with. It is our birthright.

  It has been important for me each time I faced betrayal to spend as much time visualizing my new happiness and new life as I have spent replaying and mourning the loss of the happiness and life I thought I had. It’s important to examine our hurt, our loss. It’s natural to feel rage and anger and to fantasize our perpetrators coming to a perfectly devised end, but it is very important to also spend as much creative energy imagining a life for yourself beyond your current pain. New neural pathways need to be built. Let the addictive nature of our brains work for us—spend time visualizing what you want, instead of what has caused pain. Taste it. Smell it. Imagine the love you want. Get specific about how you want to be treated. Imagine your life in a new house or at a new job. This is the groundwork required for creating a place of happiness. It begins in believing it’s possible. Then we take steps to bring it into our lives. Do the things that lead to the happiness you want. Make sure your hands carry those thoughts out into the world and do not serve your negative thoughts. Discipline is key. Change one thing about your life when you wake up. To have a different life, you have to behave differently.

  Brilliant resilience. We have all heard of coping mechanisms. When we hear the phrase, we think of negative ways of coping with difficult times, like turning to a medicator to help numb our feelings—be that work, drugs, sex. Medicators can take the form of compartmentalization, or disassociation. I can see now that many of us also find brilliant ways to cope—ways that don’t harm, but serve us. With time, however, they can also limit our ability to feel and experience fullness and joy. Our greatest strength can become our greatest weakness. This happens when we harness one of our natural gifts to get us through hard times, but after time it becomes an armor we use to protect ourselves, and ultimately it can cut us off from our ability to feel joy. We need to examine where that gift stopped working, and then ask it to kindly step aside where it has calcified and hardened us a bit. Peel it back to where it is in balance and working for you again.

  I will give a few of mine as an example. Independence. From a very young age, I made it work for me. It made me feel safe, and in many ways it kept me safe. But after a time, I didn’t learn how to accept help. After a while it was isolating. My independence got me to safety but it didn’t teach me to connect once I was there. Once I identified it as an area I wanted to improve on, I chose small, safe ways to let myself accept help from those who genuinely offered it. I don’t recommend diving right into the most intimate parts of our lives where there is a big emotional risk by reaching out in a new way. I started with letting a door be opened for me when someone offered. I started with letting a friend bring me soup when I was sick.

  I realized that often we get into relationships we are historically familiar with. I wanted to be self-reliant, and so I ended up in a relationship with someone who needed me to be also. This felt comfortable. I didn’t know the side effect of this meant that intimacy was impossible. For it to be possible, two people have to be willing to be vulnerable in order to connect. Renegotiating midstream in a relationship is tricky. Both partners have to be willing to change the script. You have to start inside yourself. To start saying, I am worthy of being cared for. I’d like to be cared for. Start taking baby steps to build your courage and comfort with the concept of changing your emotional language.

  Another bit of brilliant resilience that served me for a long time was the notion of being a fixer, and that I was not a quitter. I have grit. I have never looked at short-term solutions and commit to whatever I do for the long haul. As a young woman, much of my self-worth was derived from this notion of being capable of fixing things. I was rewarded for it. I would dig in, examine a situation, make a plan, execute it. This can be an act of self-love and love for others, but unless it is informed by a genuine and deep sense of self-worth, it can be a mechanism you use to try to prop up your own ego and to get love for. It helped me to cover up a deep fear that I was not lovable just for existing, that I had to do things to earn love. And this set me up to be the fixer in every relationship I was in. It took decades for me to realize it was not all mine to fix, especially in a relationship, where it’s up to the other person to decide how much work they are willing to put in. Sometimes we have to step back and stop fixing, because being engaged in constant fixing limits our ability to say, This is not all mine to fix. I love you enough to let you fix what is yours, and I love myself enough to leave if you are not willing or able to meet my needs. Sometimes fixing is a desperate attempt to resuscitate something that should die. I did not want to feel the grief and pain of the truth about my mom, and so I “fixed” everything I could right up to the bitter end. Saying I was done and that there was no more fixing to do was a frightening prospect indeed. I am learning to believe I am worthy of love just for being alive, whether I am perfect or not. I am saying this at age forty. This is not something I understood at thirty when I left my mom.

  My assumption that I don’t have all the answers has also served me at times. I believe this is common for many. We do not believe we know it all, and so we are often in a great position to learn. We will buy books, and we will accept we might need help. It’s a natural humility that is genuine, and no one grows unless they begin with the premise that there is room for it. Where it quit working for me is when I lost touch with my sense of knowing anything. This was a very lonely place to operate from and it got me in a lot of trouble. I let my mother be my moral compass and assumed she knew what was best for me. I did not see it at the time, but I would do this to myself again. I would make Ty my new moral compass instead of reclaiming my own. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I could be so thoroughly subjugated by my mom that I lost what little trust I had for myself. I asked Ty to be my eyes and ears for a while, not realizing that was the same thing I’d trusted my mom to do. No other person can replace our own sense of right and wrong.

  At fifteen I set out on this journey, trying to find happiness and avoid becoming a statistic. I thought diligence would help me avoid the pitfalls of life. I avoided some while finding others. The one thing that kept me safe was not my hypervigilance, it was the attitude with which I faced my trials. The point is not to avoid pain, it’s to learn and let go.

  Another exercise that worked for me was learning to recognize and dismiss my internal critic. One of the most pernicious aftereffects of abuse is that our abuser’s ghost lingers and speaks to us still. We can hear them run us down in our minds as if they were there watching over our shoulder. We often internalize them so thoroughly that we become the critic, inflicting self-abuse once they are gone. I cannot stress enough how important it is to listen to those voices and make distinctions between self and other here. We would never be so unkind to a child as to call them stupid, fat, an idiot, or worthless, and yet we find it entirely permissible to say these things to ourselves. I really had to slow down and pay attention to what I was saying to myself, and when I noticed that critical voice, I would tell myself, I can practice self-love and still effect the change I need in my actions
without running myself down. I don’t need to be cruel to myself to give me the motivation to change. Shame only paralyzes me.

  People often talk of regrets. It’s tempting to bravely say, “I have none. Each thing has shaped me into the human I am.” I feel that way about most hardships in my life, but not all of them. I have one regret that haunts me. It happened at a fork in the road I did not see at the time. If I had a time machine and could change one single moment, it would be the day I went to a pay phone and made a collect call to Homer, to tell my mom that record labels had come to see me. If she had never come back down, if she had never been involved with my career, I am confident I would have been better off. I would have continued to build my inner compass, my relationship with myself, and learned to make my own mind work for me. I would have built on what I learned while living in my car. Instead I took one hell of a detour. I climbed to great heights anyway. But I can’t help wondering sometimes how much higher I may have gone, or how much happier I might have been along the way. Spilled milk.

  Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

  It’s four in the afternoon

  I’m on a flight leaving L.A.

  Trying to figure out my life

  My youth scattered along the highway

  Hotel rooms and headlights

  I’ve made a living with a song

  Guitar as my companion

  Wanting desperately to belong

  Fame is filled with spoiled children

  They grow fat on fantasy

  I guess that’s why I’m leaving

  I crave reality

  So goodbye Alice in Wonderland

  Goodbye yellow brick road

  There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

  I did not find paradise

  It was only a reflection of my lonely mind wanting

  What’s been missing in my life

  I’m embarrassed to say the rest is a rock and roll cliché

  I hit the bottom when I reached the top

  But I never knew it was you who was breaking my heart

  I thought you had to love me

  But you did not

  Yes a heart can hallucinate

  If it’s completely starved for love

  Can even turn monsters into

  Angels from above

  You forged my love just like a weapon

  And turned it against me like a knife

  You broke my last heartstring

  But you opened up my eyes

  So goodbye Alice in Wonderland

  Goodbye yellow brick road

  There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

  That was not love in your eyes

  It was only a reflection of my lonely mind searching

  for what was missing in my life

  Growing up is not an absence of dreaming

  It’s being able to understand the difference between the ones you can hold

  And the ones that you’ve been sold

  And dreaming is a good thing cause it brings new things to life

  But pretending is an ending that perpetuates a lie

  Forgetting what you are seeing

  For what you’ve been told

  Ohh truth is stranger than fiction

  This is my chance to get it right

  Life is much better without all of those pretty lies

  So Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

  And you can keep your yellow brick road

  There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

  These are not tears in my eyes

  They are only a reflection of my lonely mind finding

  They are only a reflection of my lonely mind finding

  I found what’s missing in my life

  twenty-seven

  life as a country song

  The years 2004 and 2005 were spent deprogramming, reclaiming my mind, practicing self and other. I recorded Goodbye Alice in Wonderland with producer Rob Cavallo at Eldorado in the Valley. Everyone in the business said I had to stay pop, but my inspiration took its own turn, and I couldn’t contrive something to capitalize on the momentum of 0304. I’m sure that would have been smarter but my music was coming out the way it came out. I loved giving birth to songs like the title track, the dulcimer “Where You Are,” which I wrote for Ty, and “Long Slow Slide,” which was about the strange place I was climbing out of. “Good Day” was about the hurt I was dealing with, but also my sheer determination to wake up and say I was going to have just that. They were all laced with a need to believe I was going to make it a better day.

  It was my last record under my Atlantic contract. I loved Atlantic dearly, and owe them so much, but formats were changing. Radio was changing, the business was changing. If I wanted to be a storyteller with song, I felt my future would be in country music and country radio.

  When I started out, I considered myself a combination of folk and country. I listened to Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn as often as I did Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. I loved their strong perspectives and willingness to speak from the mind and heart. To be played on country radio I would need a label built for it.

  I never saw it as the change that others did—I wrote all the songs.

  The funny thing is, I felt radio had changed more than I had. When I started in the ’90s, country was more pop than I was, I felt. Mutt Lange helped Shania Twain blow up with slick and polished cuts that exploded on the airwaves. They were pop brilliance with a country twang. Shania and Faith Hill were dressed in fashionable clothes with amazing glam teams. I was a fan of both, but my simpler approach was certainly not where country was at the time. I’d only been able to get a foothold in pop thanks to the alternative movement, which was a wide-open format where there were no rules. I think that if “You Were Meant for Me” came out today, it would never have been considered for pop radio and gone directly to country. Country also allowed me to keep instruments up in the mix that I naturally favored, like steel guitar and banjo, which I’d had to turn down in my pop songs.

  I had been around the western culture my entire life, yet knew I would have to start over as far as the business was concerned in order to pull it off. But the fans were my people. I knew the dignity of working the land, and the indignity of seeing the lifestyle made fun of on TV and in movies. I knew I would have to work hard to earn the trust of the gatekeepers and program directors at country radio. But I never had a doubt that the fans and I would get along just fine. That’s something the industry sometimes forgets—a fan will buy a Johnny Cash record and a Bob Dylan record. My fans and Lady Gaga’s fans are similar in the sense that they love to be encouraged to be themselves. We both built our fan base on a sense of inclusion rather than exclusion. I still feel labels miss big market shares by not understanding the core values of their artists and trying to market to fans who hold the same values in nontraditional ways. But the Internet of course changed that all. Artists and fans find one another because they have an intuitive sense of shared values.

  Before the power of radio blew records up, bands toured a lot, and their music was the soundtrack to what they stood for. Fans bought into the culture of what a band was more than anything. They wanted to dress like them, talk like them, and walk like them, and they blasted their music proudly so that others might know who they were and what they stood for. Records were complete projects, and every track was good. DJs were allowed to play what they wanted and songs became hits by word of mouth. Fans listened to entire records over and over, and they were not disappointed for parting with their hard-earned wages. Every track was good. Soon label heads realized that a band didn’t have to have a good record, or even play well live—they just had to have one song that sounded good on the radio. As technology advanced, producers were able to make any singer sound good, and make a hit that would explode on the airwaves. Arti
sts, labels, and managers all played along—everyone stopped thinking about longevity and started chasing the short dollar. Labels threw twelve different acts against the wall to see which one stuck. They could afford not to develop acts or invest big in unknowns, because when an act did pay off, it offset the costs of all the other failures. Artist development fell by the wayside. Bands who had never toured, and more important, hadn’t established who they were and what they stood for as artists, were suddenly on the radio and playing huge venues. And making records with only one or two good songs. Fans would show up to hear artists that were not good live, or would buy twelve songs only to find out they really only liked the two they’d already heard. They were getting ripped off. The Internet put the power back in the hands of the fans. With the digital age, they could pick and choose the songs they wanted to buy. A new generation of fans had no idea what it was like to actually buy, much less expect to enjoy, a whole CD. Labels and acts saw an amazing shift as the money began to dry up. There were acts that were huge on the radio but wouldn’t sell a single song or ticket. This is when the industry missed its mark and played songs that tested well for radio, but elicited no passionate response from fans when it came to separating them from their hard-earned money. I chalk this up to the fact that many bands had no authentic message. Pure ear candy, but stood for nothing. Fans don’t spend money unless they are inspired. Labels quit tending to their roster like a farmer does, and I think this hurt them. There are short-term cash crops in farming—produce that grows quickly and sells quickly—but a good farmer will also be working on longer-term crops that will pay off down the road. The industry needs to look at flash-in-the-pan, popular, trending, and novelty singles, but for the health of the whole business, they also need to identify and champion the acts they think have the legs and the talent to sustain a long career. These artists need to be allowed to develop, write, grow, and change. They need to be supported over a long period of time, when there are ups and downs. There have to be artists who have a strong identity and specific set of discernible values, who are supported by managers and agents and labels so they can do so. They need to bet on a horse, not just a race.