Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (15 page)

I began to look at everyone around me, at other girls at school, at other parents and families, and what I noticed was there were other ways of doing things. Other systems, other ways of interacting. I knew I was an unhappy child. I knew I was scared and hurt and at risk of never finding peace or happiness. I realized that happiness was not some bird that landed on your shoulder by accident, but was a skill that was taught, or not taught, in certain houses and families.

After summer drew to an end, back at Interlochen, I took art classes all day long. I majored in visual arts and voice, with minors in dance and theater. I began carving marble and doing head busts about a year after I began writing songs, and credit sculpture for teaching me more about
melody than any other thing. I had grown up listening to great melodies by Gershwin and Porter and other Tin Pan Alley writers but had never sat down to study what makes a memorable melody. I had been turned on to Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. I loved listening to them, but never studied their songs’ structure or form. I was more of a storyteller and I knew what a chorus was and a verse was, but knew little else about writing a song. To get around my ignorance with the guitar, I began to experiment with tunings. I would work the pegs and drop strings to lower tones, or sometimes higher ones, until I found a harmonic combination that was pleasing to me. When I discovered my own open tunings, it freed my head musically and lyrically. Open tunings allowed me to find melodies and voice more complicated chords with much less work, and it was more aligned to my way of thinking, because down the fret board were lower chords, and up the fret board were higher chords, much the way a piano is laid out, I imagined. I told stories and wrote songs and fell in love with music without ever really thinking about the strength of melody, or breaking down intellectually what a great melody needs. We don’t always know why abstract shapes and patterns and colors affect us, but we know when they do. Melody has its own shape. The shape has to have focus, have movement, and evoke a feeling. Form is everything. It has to be clean, clear, recognizable. It has to have purpose. It has to have variance and contrasts to be interesting. I immediately recognized the similarity in melody and abstract sculpture. Simple geometric patterns always emerged from beneath the complexity and interpretation that was unique to the artist. It is melody slowed down to the point it is frozen in time. It communicates without language and affects the viewer with the emotion the artist experienced while creating it. Modigliani’s long necks. The exaggerated bend of Klimt’s necks. Brancusi, Noguchi, Lipchitz, even the painters who used geometric design within their paintings to create their compositions. As I studied the songs that became beloved
and popular for generations, I could see a spiraling melody. A melody that climbed to an apex, then back down to create a pyramid shape. Square shapes that went up, over, down, and back to the root like a square. The Beatles’ songs are great examples of this type of melody—deceivingly complicated ideas and forms wrapped in simple singsong-patterned melodies. And Joni Mitchell, while more complicated tonally and structurally, still adhered to the basic principles of a pattern—hers more like the mathematics of a bumblebee or hummingbird. Delicate, intricate, gravity-defying. I was fascinated by how much could be communicated with pure sound—by creating a strong shape with it that in and of itself communicated emotion before words were ever added. Then the layering of elements over one another. Juxtaposing a provocative lyric with a sweet melody, changing timbre from pure and crystalline to a growl and a snarl to portray irony, or anger laced with humor or a wry wink. Lay this on a bed of minor chords that might ascend to a major and yet more is communicated about longing and a hope of where you wish to end up. Nuance could be achieved in song the way visual artists use light, focal point, value, and color.

I made some very good friends my second and last year at school, and had a new roommate named Madella, who was from Mexico and a wonderful music enthusiast. I wrote “Don’t” this year, and I remember she loved it and encouraged me to keep writing songs. She was a very funny, larger-than-life character who I have such fond memories of. I began singing my songs and yodeling at open-mic night on campus. There were lots of guitar players, drummers, and pianists at Interlochen, but it was hard at first to find fellow musicians to jam with, because so many of them were trained in reading music but not in improv.

I had the same bifurcated sense that I was doing really well while also not doing well at all. I gained fifteen to twenty pounds from stress eating and was horribly upset that I could not control my diet. I had heard about
twelve-step programs from my mom. She told me she had gotten into a twelve-step program and was learning to make amends. I asked her if she was an alcoholic and she said no. I’m not sure why she was in the program. I forgave her, of course, just as I had forgiven my dad when he came to school with the bagged lunches. It seemed so vulnerable and honest to come to your child like this. I went to the library at Interlochen and found a book there on twelve-step programs, and saw that there was a group specifically for eating disorders called Overeaters Anonymous. I read the book at night when I was done with my schoolwork. It was like reading my diaries, the uncontrollable binge eating, the comfort eating, the euphoria followed by the intense shame and self-loathing. And I knew I didn’t have the worst case—not yet—but that something was wrong with me. I didn’t want to wait until I was a hundred pounds overweight, rather than twenty, to do something about it. When I couldn’t find an OA chapter to join, I decided to start one at school, with the help of a school counselor. There was a running joke on campus that after lunch you could hear every toilet in the dancers’ dorm flush from so many girls purging. Our first meeting was quite small, and it never really grew much. I remember one very nice young girl in the group—there were only three or four of us. She was anorexic and said she wore black to the meeting so she would look thin. There was a sixteen-year-old boy, a dancer, who was bulimic, and he felt so much shame that he had a “girls’” disorder. Brené Brown, the author of
Daring Greatly
, describes the issue beautifully as the web women are trapped in: “Be pretty, but not threateningly pretty. Be a go-getter but don’t threaten anyone or be a bitch. Caught in this web of contradictions, we have to be everything for everyone and we lose the ability to explore who we really are.” She goes on to describe the trap society sets for men as a box, where they must be strong and brave but unemotional and shutdown. For the first time in this support group, I saw that these dynamics play out over and over in everyone, as girls and
boys, men and women, try to break free from unnatural confines and live as whole humans—to give ourselves the
internal permission
to be as emotionally conflicted and confused, and as strong and confident, as we are at any given time. We had all been judged by the outside world, and all of us had learned to internalize that critic and use it against ourselves. We all indulged in acts of self-hatred to gain feelings of control in our efforts to build self-worth.

This was about the time I really began to think about the fact that I had to be a good parent to myself. I had loathed how my dad criticized and emotionally abused me, and here I had begun doing it to myself. I’d relabeled it “perfectionism,” instead of abuse, which seemed kind of sexy—I got results, I told myself. I pushed myself hard and expected a lot, and it worked for a while, until the internal critic eclipsed everything else and I floundered rather than flourished. I’ve often thought of this dynamic, especially as a professional years later. High standards are great in many ways. Challenging yourself and expecting a lot is great. But perfectionism gets you results only to a certain altitude. It propels you up a mountain, but if you want to move around in the rarified air of the summit, it takes creativity and freethinking—and you can only be genuinely brave in your ideas and vision if there is enough safety to take risks in your thinking and push your art. Negative self-criticism is an iron chain that will never let you ascend to real greatness. I had been hard on myself since I moved out. It had gotten me pretty darn far. But now it was crushing me. Nothing was enough. I lacked the ability to be proud of anything I’d accomplished. I knew I had to start practicing something I had never been given or shown in my family. Kindness. Patience. Tolerance. Being allowed to mess up without feeling that my self-worth would go down the tubes with one poor performance. Or that love would be taken away if I did not behave just so, or to the standards of my caregiver.

I didn’t know it at the time, but between my panic attacks, the need
for control over my life, and my self-defeating behavior, I was experiencing what it is like to be a trauma survivor. Something would trigger a memory of a past trauma, my fight-or-flight response would kick in, and I would freeze, gripped in terror much the way a soldier experiences PTSD. The reaction never matches the stimulus. Sometimes I felt my body being transported back to a time, adrenaline flooding my system with terror. Sometimes it was a wave of fear as I froze, feeling helpless. I had to learn to trust it like the tide—the episodes would come but they would pass. Sometimes the tide was just out, but nature dictated that it would always come back in.

In many ways I was a grown-up, navigating grown-up things, but in other ways I was so young and I desperately wanted to belong. I had parents who I called home to, but they were not like normal parents. I wanted them to love me, I had some connection to them, but they didn’t function like normal parents. Not like other kids’ parents. I just started to handle things on my own. When I got letters from my mom, I read and reread them so many times the writing began to fade. I remember one in particular where she said she admired me, and that we were twin flames. She said we were not just alike, but the same soul in two different bodies. For a lonely girl, it was music to my ears, and made me feel that I belonged, and that she wanted me. I was able to explain away all the reasons she was not in my life with those few words. We were the same soul in two bodies. How I wanted to believe it. Her words set a trap, though—when your soul is tied to another’s, you feel responsible for them. You feel their will by an extension must also be your will. Her values and desires in many ways became
mine.

fourteen

the wisdom of silence

W
hen I graduated from Interlochen, my parents came to the ceremony, as well as Atz Lee. My dad made a memorable entrance, dressed as a sourdough, wearing steel-jaw bear traps slung over his shoulder, a hat with a bullet hole through it, a flannel shirt, and Carhartt pants with the legs rolled up to reveal rubber boots—the Alaskan cowboy boot. He came rolling into the lobby with a hunched-over posture and began to sniff the fine ladies in their pastels and pearls, saying, “Where’s that girl?” He made a rapid pass through the lobby, sniffing the air and different folks, repeating, “Where’s that girl?” When he saw me, he said loudly, “I wanna see what an educated girl smells like!” Everyone already thought I was some wild animal, and now they could see I came by it honestly. It probably would have embarrassed most teenagers, but I thought it was hysterical. The horrified looks on the faces of the well-to-do families was fairly priceless, and I appreciated my dad’s flair for drama. I have fond memories as a child of my dad involving me in elaborate skits he planned for girlfriends. He would dress as the Birdman from
The Magic Flute
, his wings made of odds and ends we’d bought at the secondhand store and sewed to his shirt, a beak made of construction paper, and he would serenade his beloved with an aria. Another time he dressed as Caesar and stood in the airport with a wreath of leaves we had sewn for a crown, while reciting some improvised oratory. My dad was creative and spontaneous, and I learned a lot about taking risks from him. He never wrote a set list, opting instead to read the crowd—still a habit of mine today.

I worked feverishly to finish my final marble carving right up to the graduation ceremony. I could hear that the ceremony had started and I waited until they got to calling for the kids whose last name started with
H
before I threw my gown on over my clothes, which were covered in marble dust and sawdust, and pulled my cap on over my messy hair and ran for Kresge Hall. I remember being a bit embarrassed by the attention of walking onstage and accepting my diploma. It was very hard for me to feel proud of myself, and I think I threw the diploma away as soon as I got offstage. It was just a piece of paper, and the school was much more than that for me. Plus it didn’t fit in my backpack, and I had a strict policy: if it didn’t all fit in there, I didn’t keep it. I was brutal about that, and didn’t save any of my student art. Instead I took pictures of it and threw the actual art away. I had no home lined up and didn’t want to ask my dad to keep it in a shed somewhere. I decided philosophically that it was better to just keep things light and avoid clutter. Part of me still believes this, and I subscribe to the less-is-more theory to this day. On a subconscious level, though, it was a way to protect myself because I knew I was not in a position to be able to have much, and this made that harder reality seem like it was my choice. I didn’t have money to buy a yearbook, and while I secretly longed to have one, I reasoned away the mixed emotions about graduating and the uncertainty of my future with a laissez-faire attitude.

All the other kids had plans to go to amazing fine arts colleges like
Juilliard, and I was planning on nothing, really. For some reason it just didn’t dawn on me that college was in the realm of possibility. No one had ever mentioned it to me. Counselors at school didn’t bring it up. I didn’t think about music being an option beyond how I always had—bar gigs and getting by. I would have loved to pursue something in the visual arts, but I never really felt I was talented enough to go further, much less obtain another scholarship to a college. Not to mention I felt the reason I got a scholarship to Interlochen was because of Joe’s suggestion and help. I didn’t have an “in” anywhere else. Applications and the like were still a mysterious world that I knew very little about. I’m sure if I had asked, someone would have helped. Perhaps my parents thought the school handled that stuff, and the school thought my parents handled that stuff. I did have one promising proposition. My vocal teacher mentioned she would like to mentor me if I wanted to pursue classical singing, and while I was flattered and really enjoyed singing classical music, I loved the freedom of writing my own songs and singing my own melodies without the structure and rules. Knowing there was nothing left there for me, I was ready to leave the rigidity of school and the difficult social navigation and just get back on my own and be free again. Into the great wide open. My dad could not bear to see me throw away my marble carving and bought it from me for two hundred dollars to give me some cash.