Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (2 page)

secure

I spent a lifetime being small

for those closest to me

but this is not the woman

my son will know

my son will see my new shape

my intuition speaking loudly

he will see a woman integrated

a businesswoman

an artist

a nerd

an intellect

a heart

for I am all things

I am woman

W

O

M

A

N

and

W

H

O

L

E

human.

foreword

I
should probably not be here today. I should probably not even be alive. Being alive, I should have become an addict, knocked up as a teenager, or stuck romantically in a cycle of abuse. If you look at my life at any stage you might’ve said,
This girl will never make it
, and you probably would’ve been right. What I had going for me, however, was that at a fairly young age I figured out what I wanted. Happiness. You have to know what you want to ever be able to have it.

Here are the broad strokes: My two brothers and I were raised by a musical family, and I spent my early childhood performing with my parents in Anchorage for tourists. When I was eight, my mother left and my dad moved us to the family homestead in rural Alaska, a log cabin with creek water to drink, no plumbing or most modern conveniences. My dad did the best he could, but handled the stress of being a single parent by drinking and perpetuating the only parenting style he knew—the one he was raised with—which was creative at its best, and abusive at its worst.

At age fifteen I was finally fed up, depressed, and worried that if I
didn’t make a break for it I would lose myself entirely. I decided to move out. Aware that by doing so, the probability of me becoming just another statistic was high. Kids like me end up doing the same thing we saw while being raised . . . there are rarely happy endings. I wanted to beat those odds, and I knew that to do so I would have to use all my logic, heart, wit, and talent to end up differently. To be different, I had to act different. Which left me with a problem: how do you act differently than the way you are taught? This question set me on a journey to learn a new way of being, so I could create a life with a different outcome, rather than just feel fated to repeat the cycles and patterns I was familiar with. I vowed to study myself and my life like a scientist, to see what did and didn’t work—how to get what I lacked and so desperately wanted: happiness.

So at fifteen I moved out on my own and paid my own rent on a one-room cabin by working several jobs. I got a scholarship to a private school at sixteen. I put myself through high school and graduated. I became homeless later that year. I was discovered by record labels at nineteen. I became a worldwide phenomenon at twenty-one, traveling the globe nonstop. I fell in love at twenty-five. At thirty, I found out that not only was all my money gone, but I was several million dollars in debt. The same year I came to feel that my mom, who was also my manager, was not the person I believed she was. And here I am today. Forty years old, newly divorced. I earned back a fortune, I’m discovering new ways to do business. Finally, there is my greatest success: I am lucky enough to be a mother. And I’m still continuing the journey, relearning how to be truly safe in the world, and it isn’t what I thought. It’s not by avoiding pain in life—that’s impossible—it’s by knowing that safety is in vulnerability, not in armor. It sounds counterintuitive but it’s true. Life takes each of us to the anvil, shapes us with fire and hammer, and some of us break while some of us become stronger, more able to face the day. Even happy.

The great myth is that you need money, time, love, education,
expensive therapy, a house, a fill-in-the-blank to get the happiness you want. I am here to tell you,
you need nothing other than what is in your heart.
How much do you believe that you deserve something, and how willing are you to do whatever it takes to achieve it? Personal growth, fulfillment, success, and even happiness—be it personal or professional—are not for the lazy, for the faint of heart, for the victim, for the one who passes the buck. Change is for the warrior. If you look in the mirror and say,
I am willing to be the one who is accountable and take responsibility for my own happiness and the shape of my own life
, then I welcome you as a friend on this journey. I believe in you. I believe we are whole, intact, and capable of claiming the quality of life we all deserve. This I know: our essential self cannot be erased no matter what we endure.

The truth is that no one can keep you captive. No one can keep you unhappy. No one can keep you abused. Our lives rise to the level we accept. I do believe we can rise from the screaming blood of our losses, of extreme pain, physically debilitating emotion, psychological neglect, and apathy, and not merely survive, but thrive. We do not need to let our histories or our losses define us except in the way we choose. We can use them as fuel to create real depth, beauty, connectedness, and compassion in our lives. Our stories can make us exceptional people, not damaged ones. If we choose to be truthful with ourselves. And if we choose to digest and release the pain rather than try to avoid it. This is how pain accumulates and creates more pain, leading to neurosis, pathology, and brittleness of spirit.

We cannot always control or avoid what happens to us, but we can control what it does to our spirit. And the quality of our spirit becomes the filter through which we see life. And as the philosophers say, reality is our perception of it. I believe those words. Our reality is what we believe it to be. What we believe informs our thoughts. Our thoughts inform our actions. Our actions build our lives.

My own life has been an exercise in challenging my beliefs so that I could reimagine my future. So that I could avoid becoming the statistic and instead become the architect who tried to consciously draw the lines of her own life, free of the heartbreak that birthed me.

When I first left home, I got a few jobs, singing locally and giving horse rides to tourists, and at night I would get out my notepad and pen to write. I called my journal “the happiness project,” and I had no idea that it would lead me not only on a journey of deep personal discovery, but would also lead me from the fishing village of Homer, Alaska, to songwriting, to the White House, to the Vatican, to the cover of
Time
magazine, and beyond. Most important, the exercise of writing and looking inward led me to myself, and to discovering my own definition of happiness. It is a journey I am still on today. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s start at the
beginning.

one

pioneer spirit

M
y name is Jewel Kilcher and I am an Alaskan. My grandparents on both sides helped to settle the state in the late 1940s, when it was a territory still. When my grandparents settled in Homer, it was a frontier town, a small fishing village with very few modern conveniences. It might as well have been the 1840s. My dad rode in a horse and wagon to town when the tide was low enough to give passage below the steep cliffs of Kachemak Bay. Living was hard, and those who were drawn to Alaska in these early days, before its statehood, were self-sufficient and idealistic, wanting to carve out a new existence in an untamed land. The women were incredibly strong, often raising kids and also running homesteads while the men were out hunting and on adventures. This meant killing and canning food, keeping livestock, shoeing horses, felling trees, hauling water, making jams, fishing, drying salmon, and keeping the precious sourdough starter alive and well in an icebox. Beheading and boiling chickens, preserving cooking fat in lard cans . . . the list goes on.

I have heard stories of the larger city of Anchorage during this time,
when women and young girls and boys were not allowed on the streets after 9 p.m. for fear of rape. The streets were mud, and citizens carried firearms openly. It felt as lawless as the much older Wild West depicted in the movies. The people were spirited, with flint in their eyes and dreams in their hearts, looking for gold claims or just an escape from the rest of the world to live the way they wanted to live.

I owe much of my success to the pioneer women of Alaska. Today they are still strong and self-sufficient, not wilting flowers waiting for a man to help. They shoe their own horses and peel logs and build homes and get anything done that needs doing. They are feminine and wild as a mountain meadow. I owe a tremendous debt to the women I was raised amid. My paternal grandmother, Ruth, was a supreme example, and she and her husband, Yule, taught each of their eight children everything that was necessary to survive. While women in Alaska certainly knew they were physically weaker than most men, it never meant they weren’t clever enough to find a way to get the job done. My aunts used chain saws and axes like an artist’s chisel to build furniture and cut lumber. They operate their own businesses, travel the world, run cattle, and are Marine Corps colonels and chefs. I was so lucky to be raised believing in some part of myself—believing that if I put my mind to something, I should be able to figure it out. My parents did not coddle me, and I was allowed to explore my mind. I read books by great authors and never assumed my mind had a sex, much less a weaker one. It wasn’t until years later, as I traveled the rest of the world, that I realized this was something unique. This is not a message many young girls hear during their childhood, and we do them a great disservice. I was not a child who had a lot of self-esteem, and had little else working in my favor. Often I felt broken and insecure, ugly and odd, but this one core belief was a tremendous blessing that gave me the courage to face my life and take it on my own terms. The fabric of my very being would become so threadbare, but when push came to shove, this
belief was enough at times to pull me through. It is at the core of my character, and something I can take no credit for.

I also owe much of my adventurous spirit to the spirit of Alaska. It is a big, untamed country that has much to offer for those willing to fight for it. The land provided for us, but it was never a simple give. The rivers are cold and strong, full of glacial silt that will fill your boots and drown you. The bay is full of fish, but the weather can turn quickly and a mere five minutes of exposure to that gray, cold water is enough for hypothermia to set in. The mountains are full of glaciers, fresh water, game, and berries, but navigating them is exacting and they demand grit and respect. The summers are full of daylight—the sun never sets at the peak of summer solstice—providing a short but productive growing season for those willing to weed gardens and fields of potatoes. The soil is black and rich, full of minerals from glacial runoff. The grass is stout and keeps livestock in good flesh. I remember riding my horse all day at the head of Kachemak Bay, where the three glacial rivers meet and where we would graze our cattle for the summer. It was open-range grazing, no fences, and it was a truly beautiful sight to see cattle and horses roaming free in the large grass valley, the Sheep, Fox, and Swift Rivers cutting like silver blades through the thick green. I would spend my days alone up there on my horse, chasing eagles on the beach. I would climb cottonwood trees to see if I could peek inside their nests. One evening, when I was about fourteen, I remember returning home as the sun was just turning golden, and I was unfathomably starved. I looked at the clock in the cabin to see it was 2 a.m.—I had been out all day and most of the night, my biological clock fooled by the long hours of daylight.

Jasper Jewel Carroll, my maternal grandfather, was the thirteenth child of coal miners, and his mother, knowing he would be her last, decided to name him after all the precious stones that line the path to the gates of heaven. Everyone called him Jay. My maternal grandmother’s
name was Arva. They were among Alaska’s first settlers, living in a log cabin with a dirt floor in the beginning. They were Mormon, dating way back, and had six children. Their eldest daughter, Nedra Jewel Carroll, is my mother.

Jay was a bright young man and good with mechanics. He built a snowmobile out of spare parts before anyone had seen one around that part of the woods. He built his own plane and then taught himself to fly it, eventually becoming a legendary bush pilot. He was known for treacherous landings in remote mountain regions, to find game for hunters or to take adventurous souls to untamed land. He was also something of a drunk, which is how he lost his left leg. He was flying half-lit in a blizzard with a client, who was also half-lit, I can only imagine, and they crashed into a mountain. They hiked to a small cabin and were rescued eventually, but not before severe frostbite and gangrene set in.

I knew my grandfather only years later. He was sober by this time, and had yellowing gray hair that was slicked back with thick pomade, the way I imagined sailors wore it in the ’50s. He chain-smoked wherever he was, indoors or out. He wore thick glasses and polyester pants. I remember watching with great curiosity as he sat down each morning in his La-Z-Boy recliner to put on his socks. He had a large, hard, round belly that protruded like a melon from under his wool flannel shirt, and he had to strain to bend around the thing to reach the socks to his toes. His prosthetic leg was smooth flesh-colored plastic and disappeared quickly beneath the sock. He hardly ever said five words, and those words were usually commands. “Jewel, hand me that remote.” “Arva, ’bout time for lunch.” “I’m headed out for a drive.”