Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (35 page)

It has been important for me each time I faced betrayal to spend as much time visualizing my new happiness and new life as I have spent replaying and mourning the loss of the happiness and life I thought I had. It’s important to examine our hurt, our loss. It’s natural to feel rage and anger and to fantasize our perpetrators coming to a perfectly devised end, but it is very important to also spend as much creative energy imagining a life for yourself beyond your current pain. New neural pathways need to be built. Let the addictive nature of our brains work for us—spend time visualizing what you want, instead of what has caused pain. Taste it. Smell it. Imagine the love you want. Get specific about how you want to be treated. Imagine your life in a new house or at a new job. This is the groundwork required for creating a place of happiness. It begins in believing it’s possible. Then we take steps to bring it into our lives. Do the things that lead to the happiness you want. Make sure your hands carry those thoughts out into the world and do not serve your negative thoughts. Discipline is key. Change one thing about your life when you wake up. To have a different life, you have to behave differently.

Brilliant resilience. We have all heard of coping mechanisms. When we hear the phrase, we think of negative ways of coping with difficult times, like turning to a medicator to help numb our feelings—be that work, drugs, sex. Medicators can take the form of compartmentalization, or disassociation. I can see now that many of us also find brilliant ways to
cope—ways that don’t harm, but serve us. With time, however, they can also limit our ability to feel and experience fullness and joy. Our greatest strength can become our greatest weakness. This happens when we harness one of our natural gifts to get us through hard times, but after time it becomes an armor we use to protect ourselves, and ultimately it can cut us off from our ability to feel joy. We need to examine where that gift stopped working, and then ask it to kindly step aside where it has calcified and hardened us a bit. Peel it back to where it is in balance and working for you again.

I will give a few of mine as an example. Independence. From a very young age, I made it work for me. It made me feel safe, and in many ways it kept me safe. But after a time, I didn’t learn how to accept help. After a while it was isolating. My independence got me to safety but it didn’t teach me to connect once I was there. Once I identified it as an area I wanted to improve on, I chose small, safe ways to let myself accept help from those who genuinely offered it. I don’t recommend diving right into the most intimate parts of our lives where there is a big emotional risk by reaching out in a new way. I started with letting a door be opened for me when someone offered. I started with letting a friend bring me soup when I was sick.

I realized that often we get into relationships we are historically familiar with. I wanted to be self-reliant, and so I ended up in a relationship with someone who needed me to be also. This felt comfortable. I didn’t know the side effect of this meant that intimacy was impossible. For it to be possible, two people have to be willing to be vulnerable in order to connect. Renegotiating midstream in a relationship is tricky. Both partners have to be willing to change the script. You have to start inside yourself. To start saying, I am worthy of being cared for. I’d like to be cared for. Start taking baby steps to build your courage and comfort with the concept of changing your emotional language.

Another bit of brilliant resilience that served me for a long time was the notion of being a fixer, and that I was not a quitter. I have grit. I have never looked at short-term solutions and commit to whatever I do for the long haul. As a young woman, much of my self-worth was derived from this notion of being capable of fixing things. I was rewarded for it. I would dig in, examine a situation, make a plan, execute it. This can be an act of self-love and love for others, but unless it is informed by a genuine and deep sense of self-worth, it can be a mechanism you use to try to prop up your own ego and to get love for. It helped me to cover up a deep fear that I was not lovable just for existing, that I had to do things to earn love. And this set me up to be the fixer in every relationship I was in. It took decades for me to realize it was not all mine to fix, especially in a relationship, where it’s up to the other person to decide how much work they are willing to put in. Sometimes we have to step back and stop fixing, because being engaged in constant fixing limits our ability to say, This is not all mine to fix. I love you enough to let you fix what is yours, and I love myself enough to leave if you are not willing or able to meet my needs. Sometimes fixing is a desperate attempt to resuscitate something that should die. I did not want to feel the grief and pain of the truth about my mom, and so I “fixed” everything I could right up to the bitter end. Saying I was done and that there was no more fixing to do was a frightening prospect indeed. I am learning to believe I am worthy of love just for being alive, whether I am perfect or not. I am saying this at age forty. This is not something I understood at thirty when I left my mom.

My assumption that I don’t have all the answers has also served me at times. I believe this is common for many. We do not believe we know it all, and so we are often in a great position to learn. We will buy books, and we will accept we might need help. It’s a natural humility that is genuine, and no one grows unless they begin with the premise that there is room for it. Where it quit working for me is when I lost touch with my
sense of knowing
anything
. This was a very lonely place to operate from and it got me in a lot of trouble. I let my mother be my moral compass and assumed she knew what was best for me. I did not see it at the time, but I would do this to myself again. I would make Ty my new moral compass instead of reclaiming my own. I was so ashamed and embarrassed that I could be so thoroughly subjugated by my mom that I lost what little trust I had for myself. I asked Ty to be my eyes and ears for a while, not realizing that was the same thing I’d trusted my mom to do. No other person can replace our own sense of right and wrong.

At fifteen I set out on this journey, trying to find happiness and avoid becoming a statistic. I thought diligence would help me avoid the pitfalls of life. I avoided some while finding others. The one thing that kept me safe was not my hypervigilance, it was the attitude with which I faced my trials. The point is not to avoid pain, it’s to learn and let go.

Another exercise that worked for me was learning to recognize and dismiss my internal critic. One of the most pernicious aftereffects of abuse is that our abuser’s ghost lingers and speaks to us still. We can hear them run us down in our minds as if they were there watching over our shoulder. We often internalize them so thoroughly that we become the critic, inflicting self-abuse once they are gone. I cannot stress enough how important it is to listen to those voices and make distinctions between self and other here. We would never be so unkind to a child as to call them stupid, fat, an idiot, or worthless, and yet we find it entirely permissible to say these things to ourselves. I really had to slow down and pay attention to what I was saying to myself, and when I noticed that critical voice, I would tell myself,
I can practice self-love and still effect the change I need in my actions without running myself down
.
I don’t need to be cruel to myself to give me the motivation to change. Shame only paralyzes me.

People often talk of regrets. It’s tempting to bravely say, “I have none. Each thing has shaped me into the human I am.” I feel that way about
most hardships in my life, but not all of them. I have one regret that haunts me. It happened at a fork in the road I did not see at the time. If I had a time machine and could change one single moment, it would be the day I went to a pay phone and made a collect call to Homer, to tell my mom that record labels had come to see me. If she had never come back down, if she had never been involved with my career, I am confident I would have been better off. I would have continued to build my inner compass, my relationship with myself, and learned to make my own mind work for me. I would have built on what I learned while living in my car. Instead I took one hell of a detour. I climbed to great heights anyway. But I can’t help wondering sometimes how much higher I may have gone, or how much happier I might have been along the way. Spilled milk.

Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

It’s four in the afternoon

I’m on a flight leaving L.A.

Trying to figure out my life

My youth scattered along the highway

Hotel rooms and headlights

I’ve made a living with a song

Guitar as my companion

Wanting desperately to belong

Fame is filled with spoiled children

They grow fat on fantasy

I guess that’s why I’m leaving

I crave reality

So goodbye Alice in Wonderland

Goodbye yellow brick road

There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

I did not find paradise

It was only a reflection of my lonely mind wanting

What’s been missing in my life

I’m embarrassed to say the rest is a rock and roll cliché

I hit the bottom when I reached the top

But I never knew it was you who was breaking my heart

I thought you had to love me

But you did not

Yes a heart can hallucinate

If it’s completely starved for love

Can even turn monsters into

Angels from above

You forged my love just like a weapon

And turned it against me like a knife

You broke my last heartstring

But you opened up my eyes

So goodbye Alice in Wonderland

Goodbye yellow brick road

There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

That was not love in your eyes

It was only a reflection of my lonely mind searching

for what was missing in my life

Growing up is not an absence of dreaming

It’s being able to understand the difference between the ones you can hold

And the ones that you’ve been sold

And dreaming is a good thing cause it brings new things to life

But pretending is an ending that perpetuates a lie

Forgetting what you are seeing

For what you’ve been told

Ohh truth is stranger than fiction

This is my chance to get it right

Life is much better without all of those pretty lies

So Goodbye Alice in Wonderland

And you can keep your yellow brick road

There is a difference between dreaming and pretending

These are not tears in my eyes

They are only a reflection of my lonely mind finding

They are only a reflection of my lonely mind finding

I found what’s missing in my life

twenty-seven

life as a country song

T
he years 2004 and 2005 were spent deprogramming, reclaiming my mind, practicing self and other. I recorded
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland
with producer Rob Cavallo at Eldorado in the Valley. Everyone in the business said I had to stay pop, but my inspiration took its own turn, and I couldn’t contrive something to capitalize on the momentum of
0304
. I’m sure that would have been smarter but my music was coming out the way it came out. I loved giving birth to songs like the title track, the dulcimer “Where You Are,” which I wrote for Ty, and “Long Slow Slide,” which was about the strange place I was climbing out of. “Good Day” was about the hurt I was dealing with, but also my sheer determination to wake up and say I was going to have just that. They were all laced with a need to believe I was going to make it a better day.

It was my last record under my Atlantic contract. I loved Atlantic dearly, and owe them so much, but formats were changing. Radio was changing, the business was changing. If I wanted to be a storyteller with song, I felt my future would be in country music and country radio.

When I started out, I considered myself a combination of folk and country. I listened to Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn as often as I did Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. I loved their strong perspectives and willingness to speak from the mind and heart. To be played on country radio I would need a label built for it.

I never saw it as the change that others did—I wrote all the songs.