Jewel on her mental health journey: 'I really realized I had three choices: kill myself, stay how I was or change'
Jewel is quick to introduce herself as not simply a singer and songwriter; she's a mental health advocate, too. She launched the Inspiring Children Foundation in the early 2000s to give at-risk youth struggling with financial hardship and mental health issues resources to therapeutic practices, mentoring, schooling, sports and more. Jewel is also now settling into her new role as an ambassador for the mental health and brain health nonprofit One Mind.
She says her panic attacks started after she left home at 15 and grappled with the stresses of paying rent and "trying to hold down jobs" for the first time. At 18, she became homeless and started shoplifting, at which point her anxiety "hit a whole new level." She began experiencing agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder in which a person avoids places and situations in which they feel helpless or fearful.
"And so it was then that I really realized I had three choices: kill myself, stay how I was or change — and I wanted to change. And so my entire life has been: All right, I don't want to kill myself. Now what? What am I going to do different today than I did yesterday, so that tomorrow can be different?"
She took a "studious" approach to improving her mental health, taking notes and experimenting with practices that, over time, she's built into an emotional fitness "curriculum" which she now shares on her Never Broken website.
"My goal was to have a better life, have a better experience," she says of developing techniques to help her cope. "And so I needed to find things that I could practice, because mindfulness won't change your life. Meditation won't change your life. It just builds the muscle of being consciously present."
Video Transcript
JEWEL KILCHER: We can't choose what happens in life. We do get to choose how it changes us. I want my life to make me more loving, more kind, more resilient, more generous, instead of the opposite. That's my choice. That's my active practice. I'm Jewel, and I am a singer, songwriter, and mental health advocate.
When I moved out at 15, I had left an abusive environment. My panic attacks really began about that age, and then I became homeless when I was 18 and hit a whole new level and became agoraphobic.
I wondered if happiness wasn't taught in my home, was it too late for me? I really realized I had three choices, kill myself, stay how I was, or change, and I wanted to change. I was so uncomfortable in my body and my thoughts that I just wanted to escape all the time. I always just wanted to disassociate.
To me, real self-care actually has to be, how do I create a life that is so in agreement with me that I'm not wanting to escape being in my own body? Having practiced survival techniques is what rewires your brain. I practice meditation for about an hour a day. Even if you're not meditating, writing is one of the best mindfulness exercises.
I do think it's important for people to make time and space for a relationship with yourself. We'll spend time on our job, or we'll spend time with a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a partner, but we don't cultivate a relationship with ourselves, making it that important to where you have a friend to come watch your child for a half-hour or your partner, even if it's two minutes to sit and breathe. It's time for me to cultivate that relationship with myself.
One of the things that a lot of kids with suicidal ideation struggle with is, of course, this feeling of this is forever. I can't live the rest of my life this way. One thing is to realize nothing is permanent. Everything changes in the universe. Your terrible feeling, even your depression, can't last forever. That got me through a lot of bad moments in my life. I call it buckling myself in. I just had to buckle myself in and sometimes just wait it out. I started to develop tools that would help me wait it out and maybe might help it pass sooner.
What do I do with anxiety? One of the best things you can do is actually very simple. Take 10 deep breaths, and there's a lot of science behind what it does. So breathe with me.
[DEEP BREATHING]
I took notes on it. I was studious. I practiced things. I experimented, and those things actually got turned into a curriculum, now that helped hundreds and thousands of people. I wanted to start my Youth Foundation to share the things that I had learned in my life, to help other kids that were falling through the cracks, that didn't have access to traditional support systems, so that they could get happy.
I'm also on One Mind champion. I'm on their board. Our goal is to create services so that people struggling with any mental health issues can have a healthier and more productive life.
We have to talk about it. We have a brain. It's like, nobody is ashamed when they get a cavity. Why are we ashamed when we're struggling with negativity or anxiety or bouts of depression? We can help. We can teach. We can learn, and you can definitely make a huge impact on it.