Introducing May Starring Jewel

Jewel was photographed and interviewed by Alison Engstrom

Jewel this is such a pleasure, thank you so much for taking the time to do the shoot and now interview. Ever since your first album Pieces of You was released in 1995, your voice and lyrics have become a beacon of light for so many people. Have you ever thought about how awesome and powerful it is that your music has bookmarked people's lives and served as a dear friend, including my own, over the 27 years?

Music was always my medicine, I wrote it because I needed it. It’s always touching and an honor when something you write or create has the same effect for other people and other people need a song for the same reason. I remember early on, when I was singing in the coffee shops and I was still homeless, I had this phone number where you could call and leave me a voicemail. I could check it from a payphone and people would just leave me messages. I remember such heavy messages, this one guy said he was trying to get off heroin and he said he locked himself in the room and kept repeating my lyric, my flesh isn’t hell, my flesh isn’t hell.

That’s so powerful, wow. You have spoken a lot about your story but I think it bears repeating because so many of us out there are tied to our traumas, our betrayals, our losses sometimes so much that we don’t even realize it. You are someone with has an incredibly moving story who has overcome abuse, homelessness, panic disorder, and betrayal, and through it all, you now offer lessons of resilience, authenticity, happiness, and light. Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I think it’s especially inspiring to know we aren’t defined by our circumstances. In your book, Never Broken you wrote, ‘Our stories make us exceptional not damaged’, I love that. 

Healing is an evolution and you get to quit whenever you want; you get to settle whenever you want. You get to quit doing work on yourself whenever you feel like it, you just don’t get to complain anymore. So if you are not satisfied with how you are feeling then keep healing. I feel like it’s more of a spiral. I think we have a temptation to think that if I just focus on this one core wound or this one core issue, I can stop going to therapy or I can quit working on myself. The way I have experienced is that it’s this spiral, you’ll come back around to a similar issue over and over, but through a different lens. I have come to make peace that this is a lifelong practice and discipline, with real results. I feel way better, I don’t have panic attacks anymore; I don’t feel riddled with anxiety.

What would you say has been the hardest thing to heal in your life and how did you come to peace with it? 

It’s hard because I have had so much trauma and each one required a different skill set for me to learn how to heal it. I think the thing that was unique about what I went through was that it was alone. I didn’t have that support group or therapist. I was trying to find ways of healing myself by inventing tools and being behaviorally oriented. Each one of them taught me something different and it’s why I’m able to help so many other people. I have a youth foundation, Inspiring Children Foundation, where we work with suicidal kids and kids with anxiety disorders. I think it’s because I went through such a variety of things and I needed a variety of tools. The word resilience gets thrown around a lot and resilience is just multiple tools.

If you think of a forest and an ecosystem, there is a plant that does well in a draught, another that does well in a flood–you need multiple tools for multiple situations. I have always puzzled, we are not taught what to do with pain and that’s odd. I feel like somewhere between us leaving some type of village model and becoming urbanized, we built this altar towards our intellect but we have left a lot behind, a lot about healing, emotional, and holistic viewpoints of looking at a human. We splintered ourselves, we put our health in this building, it was not our minds by the way, it was just our organs; we put our parenting in this building, our schools in this building and we made ourselves fractured. I think we are paying the price. What we are seeing now is the accumulation of decades and decades of moving away from, dare I say the heart. If we need smart people, there are tons of smart people, we are the most advanced civilization in history, and we are killing ourselves at alarming rates. So, what do we do with pain, are some of these basic questions that people are the most hungry for.

You were very prolific at a young age when you were singing at bars in Alaska and you were wise enough to observe how pain can manifest. Most people are in their 20s, 30s–or even later–and they are trying to grapple with why they feel a certain way and begin to do some self-reflection or healing then. Did you start that journey when you were younger when you witnessed that emptiness and pain and didn’t want to go down that road? 

I’m dyslexic and I think that’s an advantage in a lot of ways because you see patterns in a different way, so patterns were something that stood out to me. For me, pain was a visible pattern, when I was singing in the bars,when I was eight, I saw people drinking, having sex, raging, and it was all to cover up pain, it was all to try to avoid pain. That seemed clear to me at the time and nobody outran it. I remember writing at the time, nobody outruns pain, so what do you do with it? Whenever you write, you notice things, you didn’t notice, you noticed in real-time. When you reflect on what you wrote later you start to see those patterns and the little dots connect. For some reason, I was terrified of drugs and alcohol because I obviously saw my dad drinking and everyone in bars. It would make me feel out of control, and me, being inebriated in the dangerous settings I was in wouldn’t be a wise thing.  It would make me more vulnerable, so I vowed not to drink or do drugs and figure out what to do with pain and that set me on a lifelong journey. 

With healing often comes a need to forgive, otherwise, grudges and past hurts can weigh you down. What have you learned about forgiveness and ultimately set yourself free?

My relationship with forgiveness has evolved over time. In the beginning, I felt like forgiveness isn’t something you give somebody else, it’s a gift you give to yourself. I think the reason a lot of people don’t want to forgive is they don’t want to cut that tie because even anger toward somebody is a connection. Sometimes even letting that connection go leaves you alone with yourself and that’s a problem. What I’ve noticed about healing is most of our coping mechanisms are a distraction. We have to learn to go toward the pain and toward the anxiety; we have to learn how to bring things closer and be in relationship with them and not try to disassociate or distance ourselves from them.

Forgiveness, I’ve personally come to believe, is much more of a power trip than a genuine feeling. I don’t see forgiveness in nature, I don’t see animals or nature particularly having forgiveness as a thing so I find that very interesting. The more I’ve thought about forgiveness, I think it puts you in a tremendous sense of control, right, I am now in a position to forgive or not to forgive. When I stay so focused on forgiving and why can’t I forgive, why can’t I move on, but I want to, all you are doing is distracting yourself. I don’t think forgiveness matters, all I care about is, are you trapped in a prison of resentment? Can you heal? Can you dilate, open, and let that experience move through you so you can move beyond it? Sometimes when we are stuck in this forgiveness cycle, we don’t actually get to the real work, which is just healing that trauma.

Where do you think the work begins?

A couple of things, you don’t get to choose how life changes, you only get to choose how it changes you. I like accountability, I always look for what could I have done better, or was it my fault, but also sometimes, bad shit happens and you don’t see it coming. It’s going to happen for the rest of my life. Any energy I spend focusing on trying to control my environment is wasted energy. It’s just me trying to soothe my anxiety by staying busy. The best way to invest my energy is to focus on, how do I want this to change me. I have to deal with this, I am now in a relationship with a betrayal, whatever happened between me and my mom (editor’s note: Jewel has shared candidly in her book and other outlets that she lost all she worked for and went severely into debt and when her mom was her manager. They no longer communicate.). I can deal with the fact that I didn’t see this coming and I was betrayed, but how do I want it to change me? I think that’s where we have the most power, it’s where we have the most autonomy, that’s where the healing begins okay, how do I let this change me? It is going to change you; you are never going to be the same, but is it going to change you into a more forgiving, kind, loving, person, or will it make you more bitter, jaded, and more guarded. That’s what I call the second abuse. Hitting somebody takes a second; the moment I found out I was betrayed it didn’t last a long period of time. The second abuse is if it alters your personality and to be in the world in an unaltered way–that to me is the real abuse. That’s the one you do for yourself, it’s not pretty, for a lot of people healing is a gritty job; you have to look in the mirror and say, my happiness is up to me and nobody else.

It’s so simple in concept, but it’s so hard to fully grasp. You’ve spoken about perfectionism and anxiety and I think it’s especially hard for those who tend to be more creative and artistic. How have you navigated and tamed that need in your life and work to create your best work? 

Me and perfectionism go way back. It’s one of those great examples of that spiral. I have dealt with perfectionism over and over. When I was in high school, I went to a performing arts school in Michigan called Interlochen. It was high-level talent, probably some of the most talented artists in the country of children. I saw a lot of perfectionism in myself, and I was seeing it in everyone around me, and to me, perfectionism seemed like this rocket booster. It felt like if you invested in perfectionism, it was like a whip. It caused you to just rise above other people because you were pushing yourself harder. It seemed so rewarding and you get so rewarded for it–nothing is good enough, you drive, you drive, you drive. What I started to realize was it gets you up to the top of the mountain but to get into that rarified air, to hit a new stratosphere, it takes a tremendous amount of risk. You have to push yourself and it takes a lot of safety. You don’t want to take a huge risk when you are a perfectionist because you can’t psychologically handle the failure. That’s when I realized as an artist, I had to give myself a ton of safety and room to experiment, to say fuck it, try things to fail. Courage was much better than perfection. It didn’t necessarily carry over to my personal life, I still really loved perfectionism (laughs).

We all think we have control, right?

Yes, it was a massive coping mechanism, again, it helped me with my anxiety, and it distracted me from working on what I actually needed to work on. It gave me something to focus on which was just this constant perfectionism. Now with perfectionism, I’ve come to understand it as an isolator. When you are in a relationship with perfection, you can’t be in relationship with anything else. It’s isolating and it’s faithless. I’ve been thinking much more in terms of harmony. Being in harmony with the moment, what does the moment call me to do? What am I being asked of in this moment? When it comes to parenting, what am I being asked of as a parent? Parenting is a good example because you have to be humorous one moment, encouraging the next, stern the next. Parenting is going to ask you to switch a million times during the day because the moment is calling for it. Our lives are doing that too, but perfectionism is a preconceived notion and you are trying to impose your will. It’s power over, which is abuse, power with is creation. So can we join the moment and can we come into harmony with the moment?

That’s an incredible way to look at it. It’s like you kill the idea, song, project, etc in your head before it’s even manifested, it’s many things including being exhausting.

It’s also joyless. So much of my career I wasn’t able to celebrate because it’s never good enough, that’s perfection’s thing. Even when I sang Hands in front of the Pope at the Vatican, it was joyless. I couldn’t figure out how to feel happy afterward. I was like, okay, what’s next. It was such a sad thing. What I’ve learned about celebration is it’s a psychological reset; it’s really important, psychologically, to celebrate because it helps our psyche know, okay, we did it and now we are going to start a new cycle. It’s like hunger, when you eat a bag of potato chips and you don’t have that biofeedback saying, I’m full, but you keep eating. If you don’t celebrate, you don’t have that biofeedback to gear up for the next thing.

Singing in front of the Pope though, that’s pretty incredible, I didn’t realize that. 

It was a trip especially because I was singing a song I wrote when I was homeless: are my hands my own, will I be responsible for myself and my happiness if no one is coming for me, am I willing to come for me, and not be a victim. I wrote it at such a desperate time in my life, it was definitely one of those moments where you pinched yourself.

Did you ever struggle with feeling like you belonged when you reached such high places like singing for the Pope, selling out arenas, or receiving Grammys, since your life shifted pretty tremendously? 

I have never had imposter syndrome, per se, as I have heard people describing it. Belonging is a different issue. I worked my ass off, I did thousands of shows. I played on stage alone; I had to figure out how to make people who are drunk and hear for the Ramones to listen to me. I was so processed-oriented and it wasn’t an accident how it happened to me. It felt like a fistfight (laughs). For me, belonging was much more personal, it wasn’t really about my career. I was neglected my whole childhood, I moved out at 15, and I lived on the road for my entire life. So rooting, feeling like I belonged, and had family was a much different thing and it definitely affected a sense of belonging.

When you say belonging, I was thinking of your great song, Becoming, on your 0304 album. 

I love that one, no one brings it up. My worst embarrassment on my death bed would be looking back and saying, my artwork has been my greatest art, I want my life to be my best artwork; I want me to be my best artwork and songs are part of it. In the song Becoming, we become ourselves over time, I want to become more of myself over time, I don’t want to become less myself and that goes back to I choose how life changes me. Will I get rid of the facade? Will I let life carve away the rough so I am my most essential self? It’s a super intentional thing and we have to fight for that and that’s why people get more afraid of love as time goes by or more skeptical, that’s a sadness and I don’t want that to happen. The thought of becoming is this perpetual artwork.

I think so often people like to pigeonhole artists and keep them in a certain bucket.

I think it was evolution, it was something that Bob Dylan and Neil Young pushed into my head—you have to be fearless in following how you want to grow and develop. You have to value your growth more than you value popularity. You hope that over the trajectory that washes out. I was ambitious, when I was 18; I wanted to be one of the best singer/songwriters of all time. You have to get practical and have a plan. I looked at the environment and the singers and songwriters who had a plan and had an iconic career and still sold tickets, they are men, they are Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul Simon, and that type of thing.  The women, who are luminaries, Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, and Carol King are not selling as many tickets, even though I think they are still making brilliant records. The only women who have done that iconic career trajectory have been on the pop side, like Madonna and Cher and they were into transformation–a new look or sound—where Joni, Neal, and Bob are doing it from the inside out. So for me, that’s been something to solve, how do I figure out how to have a 60-year career as a mom and as a single mom, which is something that no one talks about. We lose all of our female musicians as they become parents; this job is antithetical to staying at home when your kid is in school. Men have the real advantage as they can leave their kids, go on the road, and the wife takes care of that stability. It has caused me to make different career decisions than my men counterparts would.  That’s why I did the Masked Singer, and the reason I did it was because I am a practical mom and I can’t go on tour for a year or on a month press junket. 

One of the aspects that comes through with your songs and writing is that you are speaking from your authentic self.  You write from a place of truth. How did you hold onto that as your career evolved and were you ever getting pulled in different directions? 

When I was 18, homeless, and singing in coffee shops, I was really lonely. When I started being around more people and had supporters in the coffee shop, who were genuinely kind, I still felt really lonely. I realized it was because no one really knew me; I didn’t really tell the truth, I hid in plain sight. At the very beginning, three people would come to see me, but I decided to start telling the truth about myself, everything I put in the notebook that I had never read to anybody I started saying it out loud and into songs. It was a risk because it felt scary to feel so vulnerable, but at the end of that show, these three surfer guys were crying and they said, I didn’t know anyone else felt this way. It was a real connection. I felt actually seen because I let someone actually see me—it wasn’t cute what I was saying about myself. I guess they felt seen because someone put words to what they were feeling. From that point forward, I realized safety was in honesty and vulnerability and that when you lie about who you are that is dangerous. So when I got signed, I made myself a promise that I was going to beat everybody to the truth because it always gets figured out. I think that’s how you get imposter syndrome, it’s when you are being a version of yourself that isn’t really authentic, it’s the version of yourself that you hope other people will like. I get why people do it, it’s such a tempting thing because you want to be liked, especially for me, I didn’t want to end up in my car again. I had just dealt with that prison, the hell of inauthenticity and once you taste the freedom of, oh, I steal, how do we feel about that, it’s such a liberating feeling.

I was lucky, my first album got accepted. I led with my flaws and my imperfections and that allowed me to grow. I was discovered really young, at 18, but I never had to be a Disney kid who had to grow up because I was flawed from the beginning. An interesting thing about authenticity that people don’t get is only you know when something is truly authentic. Only you know when you are not selling out. I’ve had times in my career when people thought I was selling out and I wasn’t. I’ve had times when people thought I was being very authentic and I didn’t do something as honestly or grittily as I could have. My pop record, 0304, everyone thought that was a sellout, and it was funny to me because if I wanted to sell out, I would have done You Were Meant For Me .2—repeating myself is a sellout, that’s how I’m wired.

It’s so interesting because i did not think that was a pop album either! Do you ever reflect on if you came up during this time of social media? do you think you would have fared better or worse?

I would have loved it; there is actually a college textbook written about me. I didn’t know this but someone pointed out to me that I was one of the pioneers of internet grassroots marketing. The only reason my career broke was because of the internet. I was so against what the industry thought should work, I was laughed out of every radio station–it was the fans who created these lists. They’d create bootleg shows–I would let them– and to this day, they built this culture and I think it’s what’s sustaining me.

I remember being in 8th grade and your website was the first website I went to in my computer lab!

They all formed this tight-knit community from all over the world and they had this common goal of being sensitive, figuring life out, having courage–it was this value-based thing–and my music was a soundtrack to it. I love TikTok, I think it’s fun. It lets me have a direct relationship with my fans and I don’t need a snarky journalist to be a filter between me and them, I control the dialog. It’s no different than fame, if you are going to let fame ruin you and if your songs are popular, you have all the reasons in the world, pre-social media to let it ruin your life. It ruins many people’s lives. You have to learn to develop a secure sense of yourself and a compass so if it gets liked, you know why you are doing it. 

It’s not letting that all define your self-worth. It’s tricky, I struggle with social media.

That’s why we engage in perfectionism, we are trying to become performative to deserve love. God forbid you get famous or have a platform, you will use that job to be so perfect and performative. Any time you take your self-worth out of yourself and give it to someone else, where they get to take it away by not being liked or popular, and that self-worth suddenly disappears, you are in a really bad position. I think social media is such great practice–does this affect me, am I using this for my own well-being, am I getting a hit off it?

One of the things I have loved you talk about is how nature has been a great source of healing–in your book, you talk about hard wood grows slowly, which is powerful. What would you say is one of the greatest lessons you've learned through it that you wish everyone else could know? 

There are so many; nature taught me how to be human. One that might be relevant today, and since I work in the mental health field and with so many suicidal kids, is the idea of impermanence, emotional impermanence. Life is change, the culmination is change, everything in the universe is always changing. When we don’t know our feelings will pass–those depressions, those dark moods, the desperation–those are in intolerable feelings. If you had to feel like that forever, I would see why you’d consider ending it. It isn’t forever. For me, when I was sitting one day feeling very sad, I was watching the tide in Alaska, which is huge. I sat there for like eight hours watching it go in and out. I realized that sometimes the tide is just out, that’s what I still tell myself. I call it buckling myself in–I just have to stay in my skin long enough. It’s going to change; it would be wildly arrogant of me to think that I am the only thing, in all of the universe, that will stay static (laughs).

It’s beautiful, I think when we are feeling so much pain, sadness, or stuck we do think, when will this get better or go away?

Yes, and it will in like ten minutes, two weeks, or a month–when you start getting experience with it like, okay, the panic attack just passed, and once you get through it a couple of times you realize it’s true. They are super intense but they do pass and that starts to help you.

Your website, Jewel Never Broken, offers a wonderful toolbox for managing mental health. The world is aching and it’s such a powerful site. Can you talk more about your mission as it has grown and evolved? 

I want to see more and more tools be made that give people change. Meditation won’t change your life; it just helps you build the muscle of being constantly present. That’s what mindfulness is; my definition of mindfulness is conscious presence. Meditation is a bicep curl for my brain and for my neurological system to say, nope, come back to the breath. A lot of people think they are failing at meditation because they are really anxious when they meditate–just because you are present doesn’t mean you are going to like what you are feeling. You are going to be present to notice it. I liken it to a car, if your body is a car, your brain isn’t the driver, it’s just the steering wheel, but it can go on autopilot. So if we aren’t present, we are going to go on a neurological autopilot, where our brain is in charge and we are going to repeat every pattern we were ever raised with. 

If you want to change, you have to get present and realize you are the observer. If I can observe that I’m sad, I am something other than sad, I am the observer of it. It forms a relationship and as Descartes said, I think therefore I am, I would change it, ever so humbly to, I perceive therefore I am. I perceive my thoughts, I perceive my feelings, I perceive my actions. So now let’s say I am angry, I notice it, because I have built the muscle to figure out how to be present. In real-time, I notice I am upset right. I’m going to stop and breathe, create a gap, and I am going to be curious. This took me off neurological autopilot, and I put the car in neutral, but neutral won’t change your life. You have to put it into a new gear to go somewhere new and that’s where tools need to come into play. I call it mindfulness in motion.

All of the tools I have created throughout my life, and for teaching people, are all around that second part. It’s teaching people to be consciously present for longer and longer periods, but then you have to give them a new behavioral tool, something they can practice and that’s what’s on Jewel Never Broken. What I’m building my company around is creating this curriculum that works without therapy, not that I’m against therapists. People need tools that aren’t expensive and that are offered to us the same way we are being taught math and English. We have to figure out how to regulate our nervous system; how do I not be angry and do something new to have a different result, because I know what happens when I get angry, I’m alienated and I feel betrayed and I want a different outcome. So instead, I am going to try inserting a new tool, say, talking, or doing something kind for yourself and then taking action. That’s my goal moving forward is to create scalable tools that really do help rewire you neurologically. I launched it after the book, Never Broken, because I got a lot of feedback from people saying, well, what are you talking about.

How do you set yourself up for success, mentally, physically, and emotionally? Do you have any rituals or practices to frame your day? 

I spent two years saying no to everything, I didn’t do one thing. I stayed home. I said yes to everything, especially after my divorce because I was trying to rebuild and trying to build something outside of music. I was tired, I had been exhausted my whole life. I said no for one year and then the pandemic hit so I have been saying no for a long time (laughs). What I learned, and something that will be in my new book (editor’s note: Jewel is working on a new fiction book about change), when you tolerate the intolerable, you become emotionally ill. I was tolerating a lot of intolerable stuff by saying yes to a lot because I didn’t know why to say no. You should only say no when something is so sacred to you that to participate in something would harm what’s sacred to you. There shouldn’t be too many things, it’s parenting, my health, love, protecting my passion, and my creativity–for me, my alone time to write and create is really important to me, so it’s a hard no for those things. When you compromise that no, it’s when you get sick. I think it’s an important thing to learn in order to have the discernment on why I say no and why I say yes, so I can protect what is sacred to me so I don’t become overwhelmed.

I have people who run my different businesses and if it becomes unmanageable I wouldn’t do them because parenting is a legit full-time job. I don’t look at my phone, I don’t do any real work after 4 pm so I can be with my son until bedtime. My spiritual practice is very important to me, I practice for at least an hour a day, and what Joseph Campbell would say, where I find my bliss. It’s when I meditate and contemplate in my room and participate in my inner life. Nature is a great grounding mechanism for me, just being outside and exercising.

Congratulations on your newest album ‘Freewheelin’ Woman’, which came out at the end of April, your first in 7 years. I love the name and how it sounds like old-school jewel. Can you share a bit more about the backstory of how the album came together, and what inspired you to release a new one? I personally love Almost and When You Loved Me, they are really beautiful, wow. 

This is the first album I have written from scratch. The other albums I have pulled from my back catalog. It was very hard, I see why a lot of middle-aged artists do a lot of drugs to find a new sound and it’s so hard to not be contrived trying to find a new sound. To deeply go to a place that’s new and uncomfortable, but very authentic, you have too many things in your head and you see old versions of yourself that you have to rip away. I found it physiologically fascinating and a difficult process for me to get to a deeper level. I think I wrote 200 songs to get to the 12 I liked for this. It has a more soulful feel; I wanted it to be an empowered record. I feel like when women get to my age, there aren’t many of us that stay in the business. We are always trying to look super young and hot and I get it. But I’m so proud of who I am, I fought so hard to be me, and I am really proud of who I am. I’m proud of being 47, and how I have taken care of myself against a lot of odds. I’m writing better than I have ever written, I’m singing better than I have ever sung, and I wanted this record to reflect a sense of empowerment and confidence. It’s a battle-tested confidence that only comes from walking through the fire. I hope that’s the vibe it gives people. 

What are you the most hopeful about in this very moment? 

I’m funny about hope. I think when you say, I hope I do great on this test, you are saying, I’m afraid I won’t. I think we have to be super practical and grounded. Being aware of something you are up against, being wide-eyed and not kidding yourself and saying, I am going to do something different today than I did yesterday and I’m going to see if it’s a different result that’s a practical thing. It’s a great place to apply your energy.

Hoping something works out, it isn’t real. You need a plan. You need a dream, that to me has to be tied to a balloon so you have a vision–vision might be a great word–a vision of where you hope your life or even humanity goes and then to tether that in, what am I going to do about it? What am I willing to put on the line every day? The thing I am oddly the most encouraged by is how much pain everyone is in. The only reason I say that is because the only time you are willing to change is when you are so uncomfortable that you’d try anything. I think the only silver lining that we are in as a culture is that people are looking for tools. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been in mental health my whole life. Running the foundation for 20 years, we used to just get laughed out of buildings, like mental health, what are we going to do, talk about our feelings? Now I have CEOs of major companies calling saying, my employees are all depressed and I am going to lose all of them if I don’t figure something out. I don’t want people to be in pain but I think it’s where we get the most conversion. These times teach us the most, they make us the most willing to try something new. When we are comfortable we aren’t willing to do anything new (laughs). 

Do you think if you hadn’t been through so much in your life that you would be as empathetic, profound, poetic, and helping the world like you are?

Maybe I would have been poetic, but I don’t think I would have developed into the human I am. This could have gone either way, that’s the thing about pain. It can ruin you, or it can make you better. Our hearts are all destined to be broken, it’s what we do with the pieces that make us extraordinary. I believe every single one of us will break our hearts, I don't’ think that’s bad. It must be part of some larger plan because it happens to all of us. How do we turn the pieces into something beautiful instead of a huge wall we hide behind? I’ve tried to make something worthwhile, I wish I didn’t go through half the shit I went through, I’d like to think I’d still be a good person, but it’s a privilege to realize, I’m in pain, now what? Because I kept asking that question, I’m grateful I get to be in a position where I can help other people who are asking the same question and that feels worthwhile.

Thank you Jewel, this has been a gift.

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Jewel is wearing vintage denim and jewelry from her line Songlines by Jewel .

A special thank you to Jewel, Lee, and the Shorefire team.