Jewel’s newly-cut bangs peep out from underneath her cowboy hat, her braided pigtails fall over the brown-and-white animal-print blouse she’s wearing as we greet each other over our video conference call.
As a parent to 12 and 14-year-old boys, I chat with her about the challenges of balancing screen time with them; a topic she’s all too familiar with as a mom of a teenager herself. “This idea of balance, I think is a fallacy and it sets us up for pain, when really, if we just double down on being present and addressing what happens in real-time, we’ll be fine,” the award-winning, multi-platinum singer-songwriter tells me. “You actually have to exert a ton of control in your environment to try and keep things balanced. What if you just let go of that concept?
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Bravely public about her own mental health challenges, Jewel co-founded the Inspiring Children Foundation over 20 years ago. Its mission is to revolutionize education by providing an ideal model of youth development, co-created by children, for children, that includes mental health programming in underserved communities.
To help raise money for her foundation, in October she launched her third annual #NotAloneChallenge. The challenge—presented by Dr. George Rapier III & Villa Bibianni—which extends through the new year, is a social media–driven campaign that provides free mental health resources and aims to remind people they’re not alone during the holidays.
Earlier this year, Jewel created an interactive art experience “The Portal,” which explored the intersection of music, mental health, technology, and art. The experience also featured an outdoor, 200-piece drone show synced to a 10-minute spoken mental health meditation she wrote and recorded.
We chatted with Jewel about the #NotAloneChallenge, her visual art and new EP, The Portal, and why mental health advocacy is so important to her.
Walk me through the #NotAloneChallenge. Who’s it for? How do people sign up?
I started a youth foundation about 22 years ago. The idea was to see if we could come up with a solution that helped kids with complex trauma—PTSD, suicidal ideation—without traditional one-on-one therapy. I’m not against therapy. It just isn’t accessible to everybody. Misery is an equal opportunist. It doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor or black or white. It’s very efficient. But if you’re going to learn a different way of being…it’s quite expensive in our country. So we set out with this mission. We now, amazingly, are one of the most successful in the world at helping kids, again, without one-on-one therapy. And so we designed the #NotAloneChallenge to help us fundraise; also because I feel like raising awareness isn’t enough. A lot of mental health foundations raise awareness, but I think raising awareness around the issue, but not offering help, is actually kind of mean. Not that people are trying to be mean, it’s just we’ve built a culture where we’re able to more easily talk about having mental health issues. But what do we do about it? The best patient-to-therapist ratio in the country is like 156 to 1, and that’s the best. So we really have a bottleneck in the wellness field and the wellness industry. And so the #NotAloneChallenge is designed to help with that bottleneck; to democratize access to wellness tools that work for people. I call it a mental health desert, people who live in places where they don’t have access to help.
What kind of resources are available to people who join the #NotAloneChallenge?
If you go to inspiringchildren.org/notalone, you’ll see a page of resources. So it’s a social media challenge. People post videos about the #NotAloneChallenge. They nominate other people. There’s auction items where people can go to participate. And then there’s also just a page of free tools, and so you can see them there. It’s everything from CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] to DBT [dialectical behavior therapy]. Everybody needs different types of help. So people of color are going to want different help and different types of therapists. They’re going to want people that look like them and talk like them, and making sure that we have a broad array of tools and different modalities that people can access that also make them feel comfortable.
You’ve been involved with mental health advocacy for over two decades. Talk about why this is such a personal issue for you.
I moved out at 15, left a dad that was in a cycle of alcoholism and cycles of abuse. And I knew that statistically, moving out doesn’t make that go away. I get away from my dad, but it doesn’t mean my outcome will be any better. You know, statistically the movie for kids like me doesn’t end well. And so I wanted to see if I could create a better outcome for myself. And so I realized as much as I had a genetic inheritance that gave me a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease, I had a predisposition that was emotional. I had an emotional inheritance that gave me a predisposition to cycles of abuse or addiction and many other things. And so what I really had to learn was a new emotional language, a new emotional way of relating to the world. And it really dawned on me that I could go to school to learn Spanish, but there’s nowhere to learn a new emotional language. And so I set off to try and teach myself or make up my own. And it led me on an epic journey throughout my life. It’s always been my interest and my fascination and all of my writing, my music, my art, everything has been a side effect of that journey.
You have a new single, “The Portal,” but you also had an art experience earlier this year. Can you talk about how those two projects align with the #NotAloneChallenge?
I’ve always had three areas of my life. I’ve focused on behavioral health, visual art, and music. Everybody knows about [my] music. Quite a few people know about [my] behavioral health. Nobody knew about my visual art practice. I’ve never shared it. And so I finally wanted to put these three things together so it wasn’t me separating myself in three separate areas of my life. And so I designed a three-month experience for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art that combined my visual art, music, and behavioral mental health practice. I did it by creating sculptures, paintings, a drone show, and holograph art, as well as curating the museum’s contemporary wing around this idea that mental health is a side effect of being able to navigate through three realms of reality. We each navigate these three realms of reality every day. Whether we know it or not, we’re navigating our internal life—thoughts and feelings. We’re navigating the seen physical world—jobs, finances, families, nature. And then we’re navigating the unseen, whatever that means. For some people, it’s like a defined spirituality. For other people, it’s what makes them feel a sense of awe and [inspiration]. I think that mental health is a side effect of navigating them and having them talk to each other, being integrated, right? If I can articulate what I’m thinking and feeling to my partner, and if my partner can hear me, and then if we can change behavior based on that, that feels really good. If I feel like I was put on the planet for a reason, and that’s my job, that feels really good. And the adverse is true. If I never articulate the truth of who I am, if my life is a lie, if I have no purpose in my sense of work, we suffer. And so the entire experience was designed to help people understand what these three realms mean to them. And then there was a journal with behavioral health questions that helped them navigate and understand them.
You’ve talked about your ability to change yourself so that you can learn a new way of being and create a different life for yourself. What’s your advice for someone who wants to do the same thing but doesn’t know where to start? Because that could seem overwhelming to somebody.
It is overwhelming. I get it. I’m 50 looking back at my life and in a lot of my interviews, I think it gives the false impression that this was a tidy process for me. It was not a tidy process. It was messy. But my life was going to be messy anyway. This was committing to having a possible better outcome. Healing is hard work. It’s hard. It’s painful. But being dysfunctional is exhausting and painful. So my dysfunction leads to no different outcome. I know exactly where that’s going to go and it’ll probably get worse if I don’t intervene. But healing, the pain can be used toward good. The struggle can be used toward good because there is light at the end of that tunnel. It does get better. Every year gets a little less messy. You start to understand things. And so really, I would say, if anybody wants to do this, it’s just a commitment to saying, “I’m willing.” For me, my life changed when I looked in the mirror and I said, “Nobody’s coming for me. Am I? Do I think other people are going to save me? Or am I willing to do it?” And when I took on the mantle of that responsibility, my life began to change. And again, it wasn’t cute. It was still a lot of messiness. But it was that daily commitment to saying, “What could I do? Is there something I could do? How did that make me feel? Did it feel any better? Oops, I got really angry. I better make amends.” It’s just a commitment to yourself, and that commitment will take you on a very magical journey.
But it’s never just one and done. It’s something that you always have to work on.
I feel like a lot of my growth and spirituality, for a long time, I think was really just me trying to figure out how to game life. I thought if I was perfectly spiritual or could heal perfectly, I’d never have another bad thing happen to me. I had to learn to accept the fact that life is changing all the time and it really is out of my control. Sure, I’ll get wiser, I’ll get more discerning. But bad things can happen still, and that is the risk that we all live with. And so it’s an illusion of control to try and control my outer world because I don’t get to choose how life changes. But I do get to choose how it changes me.
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