“Music is that magical medicine that soothes and opens us all. But music was not really what turned my life around.”
Jewel Explains Her Lifelong Struggle With Mental Health—And What Has Saved Her
I recall the moment clearly. I was 15 years old, I had just paid the first month’s rent ($400, I believe) on a new home, and I was standing at the front door. This wasn’t just the door to a ramshackle one-room cabin with no electricity or plumbing. It was a magical threshold. I was leaving behind my childhood at a tender age, but truthfully it had been abandoned long before. I reasoned that I could either live in a cabin with an abusive father, or I could just...live in a cabin. I chose the latter.
I opened the door full of anticipation, but as soon as the hinges gave way, I felt dizzy. I peered inside, but didn’t see the bare floor, nor the two paint-splattered saw-horses spanned by a plank of plywood, creating a makeshift table. I saw a stretch of darkness yawn before me. The dizziness began to bloom darkly in my mind: Is my future my own? Is my fate sealed? Is it already over? Happiness was not taught in my house; was it still a learnable skill? Was it too late?
I crumpled where I stood on the porch of this unkempt cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. The enormity of what I was taking on hit me, and I felt small, powerless to redirect a life that, it seemed, had already been set on an irrevocable course. It was simple: How I was raised was how I would live. I saw it all in a terrible, illuminating flash. Just as I had received a genetic inheritance, so did I receive an emotional one. The anger. The abuse. The isolation. The alcoholism. It didn’t take a genius to see that kids like me became a statistic.
Don’t get me wrong, I also inherited the good, and I saw that: I come from a creative, bright, adventurous, philosophical, and loquacious people. My childhood was full of self-possessed capable aunts who cut their own timber and built their own homes and ran their own cattle businesses. I had a father who let me work horses rather than cook, because there were no gender-assigned roles in Alaska. Everyone wrote their own music and poetry, played a variety of self-taught instruments, and painted and sculpted with impressive proficiency. I am certainly not the only “talent” in my clan. And sometimes bitter fruit grows alongside the sweet.
My dad’s childhood home, which he described with heartbreaking beauty in his own memoir, Son of a Midnight Land, was not a safe one. Abuses were doled out regularly, but worst of all, at random. When he was drafted and went to Vietnam at age 18, my dad told me he found it relaxing. Back home and married, he vowed to do better than his dad. But unless a carpenter is taught a new trade, he will keep using a hammer. My mom left. Dad was suddenly a single father. He began drinking. And the family cycle began to repeat itself. Hurt people hurt people. For 15 years I’d been raised, spoken to, and educated in the damaging emotional language of my family, and I was fluent in it.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Jewel
