Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (7 page)

I made it to Anchorage and to my mother’s doorstep safely. Looking back, I think my mother was less than thrilled to see me. She would leave me alone, but not before telling me amazing stories about the power of our minds, one example being that one could turn lightbulbs on and off with enough concentration. I would stare at a lightbulb for hours, convinced I could turn that damn thing off if I focused hard enough. Sadly she failed to tell me about brownouts, and when the lights dimmed occasionally, I really felt I was getting somewhere! My mom would be so proud! When I couldn’t get them to turn off completely, she told me not to worry; if I focused hard, anything was possible.

To avoid riding home with the photographer, I took a “fisherman’s ride” back to Homer. It was a cheap service for fishermen who had been out at sea, a dirty van that piled everyone in and then stopped in towns along the way. Homer was the end of the road, the last stop, and so the return trip took twice as long easily, because the towns are so spread out. The men reeked of fish, but it was better than being in that sports car.

Sometime after that my father appeared in front of me as I was sitting on my bed, with tears in his eyes. He held an article in his hands that he had cut out from the paper. It said that the photographer had been arrested on suspicion of child pornography and molestation. Apparently he
had also been taking nude photographs of children. My dad said that from now on he would always trust my instincts, that he would never doubt me again. To his credit, he kept his word, in a way. He always trusted me to take care of myself when it came to men in the bars where we sang, though I wouldn’t have needed to if he’d done his part in scaring the guys off.

By fourteen I was considered fair game in that town, and the attention was flattering but a lot to handle. It did teach me to be very clear with my own sexual energy, to never be ambiguous, and to shut down advances in a way that kept the man’s ego (and temper) intact. Again, a skill that would serve me greatly in my future work in the music business.

My dad and I bumbled our way through my youth. On one hand, I was a very precocious, self-sufficient young woman; and on the other, when it came to my most intimate relationships, my parents’ influence made me doubt my instincts and myself. It wasn’t something they set out to do. It was collateral damage.

I remember being alarmed and scared because a sense of fullness and a sense of peace in my life began to really be lost. I was deeply unhappy. A wet and heavy fog settled over me that I could not shake. The joy was seeping out of life. And I began to show troubling behavior. I began to steal in fifth grade. Small things—a Popsicle from the cafeteria. I was trying to fill something inside, trying to find power in my powerless life. I also began to try to build myself up by exaggerating. I tried to make myself seem better than I was to people around me. Whatever I had actually done was not good enough—it had to be fantastic. If I was so lovable, then why did those closest to me seem to see fit to treat me so badly? I didn’t consciously draw these conclusions—it’s just the way a child internalizes abuse. I felt like the colors in my cathedral were fading. I felt lost. Like my compass was disappearing. In trying to regain that compass, I made a pact with myself when I was about nine that I would always tell
the truth when I wrote in my journal, because I had begun lying to other people. I began to split in two at that time in my life, and I didn’t know how to stop it. But thankfully, some part of me was wise enough to create a safe and sacred place, which became my writing. I allowed it to always be an honest reflection of myself, flaws and all. So while I was lying and exaggerating and shoplifting, I was at least able to watch myself do these things. That may not sound like a great gift, but it kept the lights from going out completely. And it allowed me to witness myself, to have an experience of myself outside of my bad behavior. Even though I was frightened and confused and sad and lonely and behaving in ways I wasn’t proud of, I could see myself do it. And if you can see yourself do something, if you can witness your behavior, that means you are something
other
than your behavior. And if you can see your behavior, there is hope for change. We can’t fix what we aren’t willing to see. I had no idea how to change. I didn’t even understand what was happening to me. For now all I could do was be willing to see.

I made another pact with myself around this time to abstain from drink and drugs, and in fact never touched alcohol until my mid-thirties. I was aware from watching drunks in barrooms that drinking further numbed and detached you from yourself, and I knew that if I tuned out my fear completely I would be in great peril, and that I couldn’t afford to put myself any more in harm’s way. These pacts didn’t keep me entirely safe. They didn’t keep me from making mistakes. They didn’t protect me from tremendous trauma and turmoil in my life, but they kept me alive inside. They gave me a breadcrumb trail back to my most authentic and whole self.

I wrote a line in a song once: “We are never broken.” I believe that truly. It is a hard-earned belief, and rose out of many years of experiencing the opposite. I believe we forget who we are over time, and in our state of forgetfulness we struggle and employ all kinds of learned
behaviors that don’t necessarily help us or bring us happiness. Each of us has a self that exists undamaged and whole, from the moment we are born, waiting to be reclaimed. My life has not been about fixing what is broken. It has been about engaging in a loving and tender archaeological dig back to my true self. It is a process I unknowingly engaged in when I sensed I was getting buried alive in my life all those years ago. And it is something I continue to do to this day.

What is a spirit? Is it a thing, like a glass that can crack or a cord of wood that can be split? There is no real explanation for what a spirit is, just a sense of it, but I know that a spirit cannot be broken any more than water can be broken, or any more than air can be split apart. It can only be perceived as broken. And believing that we are broken is the same as being broken. It means we experience ourselves that way. That perception shapes our reality. It is an illusion we must strive to avoid, as great misery comes from such a
belief.

six

hard wood grows slowly

I
n spite of the turmoil, moving to the homestead was a dream come true for me. The land is priceless. Our outhouse had a better view than any mansion I have visited. My grandfather put the land in a trust, with guidelines for how the property was to be preserved into perpetuity. It can never be sold off or split up, though he allocated five-acre plots to each of his children on the homestead. All eight of them still sit on a family board and run the homestead as a group.

I felt blessed to have the serenity and beauty of the homestead to counter the darkness in my home life. Green meadows ripe with timothy bluegrass that gently rolled into the glassy gray waters of Kachemak Bay. Mountains like the Alps that climbed from the water right into the heavens just six miles across the bay, and glaciers that crashed back into their liquid self. Nature became my church, and as oppressive and tangled as life was inside the four walls of the saddle barn, nature was ever more expansive, pristine, and nurturing. Nature was the bosom that held me, gave me a safe place and received my tears. She heard my laughter and my
cry. My horse and I could escape that dark house and we would run so fast I felt drunk beneath the midnight sun, sleeping in the mountains by a stream until my heart mended enough to go back home. Nature was also my greatest teacher. To this day I calibrate my inner life to what I have observed in nature, and one of the most significant lessons it has taught me is that hard wood grows slowly. I know, not the flashiest phrase, but a profound one. I watched soft wooded trees shoot up in the spring and rot only a few years later. The harder woods became friends of mine. I played in their branches, told them my secrets, and confessed my sins to them for years.

There was a lone spruce tree, enormous, that we called the Pegas Tree. The family fable was that my grandmother Ruth had left her true love Pegas behind in Europe because he could not procure the visa he needed for life in a new land. My grandmother felt so strongly about escaping the war and having kids in a free country that she decided to leave and marry Yule and start a new life. Pegas came to visit, and the family story goes that they spent hours sitting beneath that idyllic tree. I have no idea if it’s true, but it was romantic to think about, although my main reason for being there was the fact that it was beautiful. I would daydream for hours, staring up through those thick branches, the weak sun sifting through in a kaleidoscope of yellow, blue, green, and white. I felt like a princess in a tower overlooking the most beautiful of kingdoms. I would lay on my back and give all my tears to the earth and let myself be held by her. Being starved for love, I played a game where I visualized love pouring out of every rock, I imagined love streaming into my heart from every leaf of every tree, I imagined the oxygen that left the branch of each tree entering the branches of my lungs, and then my breath leaving my body and entering the trees again. I imagined love from every salt cell in the sea, and from the glaciers with their heavy slow bodies, and from the birds that cried in the distance. And I felt truly loved there. I felt nurtured. I
told nature all my secrets and all my dreams and I let the hard stone support me like a father and the soft soil nurture me like a mother. I wanted to be like that tree. I didn’t want to grow more brittle with time, like my dad seemed to be doing. I wanted to become . . . what was the opposite of brittle? Strong? Not exactly. Big? No, that wasn’t quite it. As I looked at the roots digging deeply, spreading out, forming an interconnected base, I saw the hard wood as dense fiber, woven tightly, and that’s when it struck me: the strongest things bend. The opposite of brittle was bending.

Great survivors have the ability to yield, adapt, give. This stopped me in my tracks. My life was not teaching me to yield, it was teaching me to cover up, protect, harden. I felt a panic. Hardening was the opposite of yielding. I walked home deep in thought and wrote in my book,
things that don’t bend break
. This lyric has stayed with me my whole life, reincarnated in many songs. It made such an impression on my soul. Once I began to be punished for seemingly being alive, I knew it was no longer safe to be honest about who I was with the people closest to me. I showed the world and my family one face. Outwardly, I made myself as small and dull as possible. But inwardly, I was limitless and expansive, and my words on paper became the rings of my inner tree. The rings of stress and distress were there in black and white, but a feeling of calm came over me when I wrote about what I was learning from studying nature. Slow growth meant thoughtful growth. Thoughtful growth meant conscious choices. It was a ladder of thought that pulled me up over the years until I arrived at one of the mottos I try to live by: hard wood grows slowly.

If I wanted to grow strong and last, and not be brittle or broken easily, I had a duty to make decisions that were not just good in the moment but good for long-term growth. I would not let myself drink or do drugs because that was a quick fix to escape an uncomfortable feeling. The better thing was to get to the root of what I was feeling. It meant solutions had to be the right ones for long-term happiness—there were no shortcuts. I
could not use drugs to numb, I could not use anorexia or bulimia to lose weight, and it also meant not using cynicism to cover my real feelings of anxiety or vulnerability. In a world of cool, casual, hip, and snarky, I knew if I indulged in these feelings, I would sink to the bottom of my life like a stone. I had to respond to my life with vulnerability, sensitivity, and honesty, because they were my only real defenses in this dangerous endeavor called surviving life. I vowed to try to remember to take the time to grow slowly. To take the time to make notes and study. To stay in my body even when I was in pain. I have summoned this motto repeatedly in my life—later, it helped me handle my agoraphobia, crippling fear, and anxiety while I was homeless. It helped me have the courage to lose weight the right way even when the press dubbed me “the fat Renée Zellweger” at age twenty-two, and with countless other decisions that shaped not just the kind of artist but, more important, the kind of human I would become, as well as the kind of longevity I would have. It helped give me permission to discover and actively create who I was, not who I felt pressured to be.

seven

calm within chaos

W
hen I was in sixth grade, my dad moved us back to Anchorage so he could go back to school to get his teaching degree. We lived on the university property in campus housing. The house was dark and small, but I enjoyed having my own bedroom again. The backyard was also small, nothing like having the freedom of a horse and thousands of wild acres to escape into.

It was a new urban experience, and I had trouble fitting in with the city kids. Most of my clothes were bought secondhand, and I recall my snowsuit had “Roberts” written in bold black Sharpie down the arm, clearly the surname of the previous owner. I knew I was low on the totem pole when the nerdiest and greasiest kid in class began to tease me for smelling like horse poop. Someone had found out I lived on a homestead with an outhouse and that was enough to unify the group decidedly not in my favor. Every social group needs a common enemy to rally against. Every group needs to identify an “other” to define and unify their own identity, and I appeared to be it. The amazing thing was that I knew for
certain I did not smell like horse poop. I smelled like Irish Spring. All the time. That was the year of the Great Soap Decision.

Money was always tight, but perhaps tighter now that we did not have our own vegetable garden and beef we raised. We had to buy all our groceries now, and the strain in the house was obvious. I remember a tooth rotting, and one day it just crumbled into tiny shards in my mouth. I knew we didn’t have the money to fix it and worried about telling my dad. We did get it fixed, though I’m not sure how he was able to swing it. My dad came up with some ways to cut costs elsewhere. He announced that we were going to pick one soap for the house. All soaps and detergents were basically the same, he said, so why waste money on five different kinds? It was our decision, he said, empowering us with the mission. My brothers and I weighed our options. We could use shampoo for dishes and laundry. We could use laundry soap for dishes and hair and washing our bodies.
Or
we could use dish soap for everything, or a bar of soap. Bar soap it was. For whatever reason we settled on Irish Spring. Dad bought a pack of fifty bars the next day at Costco. I remember the first time I washed my hair with it, rubbing that bar into my long hair and making a foamy green lather that reeked of musky, manly scent. The result was clean hair, though the texture felt more like something one feeds to barnyard animals than the luscious locks my burgeoning preteen womanhood had hoped for. A bar was ever present by the sink for hand washing, and also to be soaked in a sink of hot water until it was potent enough to cut the grease on the dishes. Laundry was a bit trickier. We would cut flakes with a sharp knife, the soap peeling in buttery layers, and drop them in the washing machine. I got to where I hated the smell of that soap. And the teasing at school I seemed helpless to stop.