thirteen

internal permission

I returned to my hometown and drifted between my aunt Mossy’s place and my dad’s cabin-in-process. All I remember is writing a lot. And gardening and hauling water up and down the hill on the homestead. I slept in the unfinished basement while Dad and Atz Lee stayed in the small outdoor shed. I helped my aunt with horse pack trips in the mountains and I stayed by myself a lot at her remote cabin at the head of the bay and wrote and read. I hung with Lee and his friends, who read and traveled and were trying to figure things out, like I was. I was glad to be away from the drama of high school girls and boys. I could relax a little around my Alaskan friends, who were self-sufficient and engaged in the adventure of life. I wrote “Little Sister,” “Can’t Take My Soul,” “Billy,” “Money,” and many songs that summer and played them for the group that hung at Aunt Mossy’s farm.

Mairiis (Mossy) was my dad’s eldest sister. She was part surrogate mother, part boss, part pixie. I’d worked at her bed-and-breakfast and taken tourists on pack trips from about fifth grade onward. Being her helper was pretty fun. She was chipper and upbeat, always a song on her lips, a spry woman of infinite energy that was at odds with her years. She is to this day the embodiment of the Alaskan can-do pioneer woman. Every bit my grandmother’s daughter. She built her own houses and shod her own horses. There were always campers in tents in the fields (at five bucks a night), tourists in the B&B, and long-term renters in tiny cabins along the long dirt road. I changed sheets, saddled horses, and packed saddlebags. Her farm was called Seaside Farm and it was closer to town than the homestead, though still pristine and lovely. The barnyard was a happy place teeming with baby colts and fillies, calves, goslings, and one bunny named Caramel. There were no other bunnies, so Caramel was raised with the chickens. The chickens loved that bunny, and Caramel grew up as one of them. She would sit on their nests and hatch eggs for them. She would line nests with her soft fur, and hop around herding up baby chicks as they wandered this way and that. She even ate like a chicken, stabbing her head forward and sort of pecking at feed and grass. This delighted me to no end as a child—an orphan bunny who found love with a different tribe. It also made me think—what if I were a bunny being raised by chickens? How would I ever know my true nature?

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.