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A Lesson in Survival

Halloween 2017

Ace was in the backseat, recounting an episode of Wild Kratts. At four, my son lived for his cartoons, and could reel off facts about all the animals he saw on the nature show.

“Did you know there are fish that can fly?” he asked us.

“Fish that fly?” I said.

“Yeah, they’re called flying fish.”

“That’s a good name for them,” I said. Eric was at the wheel, driving us to a Tuesday morning Halloween assembly at our daughter Maxwell’s school. I sat on the passenger side, absently practicing my “I have it together” face.

It was seven-thirty in the morning and I’d already had a drink. I always had a glittercup in reach at home. That’s what I called the shiny tumblers filled with vodka and flavored Perrier. At that time, the flavor was mostly strawberry, but by then I didn’t care what it tasted like. I just needed a drink every morning because I had the shakes.

My anxiety always kicked into high gear before school functions, and there had been a few performances since Maxwell started kindergarten in September. I knew how important they were, even if they made me nervous. All these five-year-old kids in their navy-blue school uniforms, learning not to be scared to perform in front of so many people. Maxwell was going to sing at the Halloween assembly, and I’d tried to get her to practice the song in front of me at home the night before.

“I want to surprise you,” she said.

“No, but, I really want to know what you’re doing,” I said. “I want to know if I can help out.”

“I got it,” she said.

That is my daughter. Maxwell is so like my younger sister Ashlee, and I love them both for their independence. I constantly find myself calling Maxwell “Ashlee” and vice versa. Maxi is in control, and I never want to be overbearing. It was hard for me not to try to protect her when she was too young to understand nerves yet. When she would say, “Why is my tummy upset?’ before a performance, I’d feel a sympathetic flip of my own stomach remembering all the times I had nerves before going onstage or doing an interview. Eric knew what that was like, too, that feeling right before he went on the field playing football at Yale or for the 49ers. That pressure of everyone looking at you.

I felt it then in the car headed to school. By then, I had engineered my life so the world mostly came to my house, a comfortable hangout place for my family and friends, and I had the ability to do almost all the business side of my collection there, too. I even had my own recording studio. I could be safe at home. It was almost a shock that morning to realize, God I have to put myself together. Put the pieces of the puzzle together from a memory of who people expected me to be. I knew I was falling apart, but I had to look like a good mom who was present for her children. Which I was—I am—but I was just never going to be the cupcake mom or the arts-and-crafts helper at school. Even then, when I knew I was operating at about fifteen percent, I knew I was a good mom.

We pulled into the lot and I spotted my dad’s new Mercedes. It was hard to miss, a bright-green, custom sports car I recognized from his Instagram. I had not seen much of my father since my parents split in 2012. They were married for thirty four years, and I had a hard time being around them together since they’d stopped loving each other. My father decided to tell me his plan to leave my mother when I was at Cedars-Sinai hospital, a week before I delivered Maxwell. No spotlight is safe around a Simpson—we’ll steal it every time.

I was blindsided by this news, which triggered his natural salesmanship. He pitched it to me as a positive thing. “You gave me the confidence,” my father added, quietly. “You gave me a way out.”

Great, I thought to myself, I broke my own heart. When he left the room, I broke down. I gave my father a way out of his marriage to my mother.

I didn’t want to be thanked. I wanted them to be grandparents. I wanted them to be there for me as I was about to have my first child. Eric had to hold me as I repeated over and over, “It’s not my fault.”

Five years later, my dad was inside waiting for us in the gymnasium at Maxwell’s school. The performances are usually in the school auditorium, but for some reason they switched it that morning. I had the feeling I did when I was just starting out. There would be a sudden venue change for a showcase, or you thought the stage would be higher—it just threw me. The seating was in the bleachers and I walked in to see everyone looking down on me. Sounds were ricocheting off every surface and the place was lit up so bright I wanted to put my sunglasses back on.

I hugged my father quickly, and we all made our way up to find spots in the bleachers. Dad sat directly behind me, and I was relieved my mother wasn’t there. Even choosing who to sit next to seemed to send a message about whose side I was on. Honestly, since the divorce, I’d chosen my mother, period. She was someone I dealt with day-to-day running the Jessica Simpson Collection. When I saw them together with Maxwell and Ace, instead of appreciating it I found myself mourning my old normal. The new normal sucked. The new normal was the role reversal of my parents coming to my house separately for the holidays like they were teenagers. This is what life is, I would say to myself. Forget what life was.

Even if I tried to be impartial, I could see how my mom was blindsided and hurt. Tina Ann Drew was seventeen when Joe Truett Simpson started working as the youth minister at her church in McGregor, Texas. He’d only taken the job out of desperation. The youngest son of a Baptist preacher, my dad had done everything he could to avoid following in his dad’s footsteps. But his scholarship to Baylor didn’t cover room and board, so he finally asked my grandfather to get him a job. His first night on the job, he went back to Baylor, told his roommate he met the girl he was gonna marry, and broke up with the Tri Delta sorority girl he’d been seeing. He waited six months to ask my mom out, and first checked with the pastor to see if it was possible. He told my dad he had to ask the permission of the youth committee chairman. Which happened to be my mom’s mother.

Nana said yes, which surprised everyone. My mom’s parents were strict—my Papaw was a principal and Nana was a librarian who required order in her life. Mom was the youngest of three girls and had the most drive to start a life away from home. And there was Joe, who believed that since all things were possible in Christ, why not dream big? They married right away, and along came me.

“Well, she was a busted condom,” Dad would say in my earshot when I set out to do something big. “So, she came with purpose.” My mom always told me I was the fastest swimmer. I was an accident, but it really did just reinforce the idea that God sent me here for a reason. During Sex Ed in school, they told us all to use condoms. “They’re ninety-nine percent effective.”

I stood up. “I’m the one percent,” I yelled, “so it can happen to you! Let’s be abstinent.” I was a witness.

I always felt that need as a preacher’s daughter. If I thought that was a lot of responsibility, try being a preacher’s wife. Mom was the first to tell me her life was all about business. The business of the church, and then the business of their children. And then it all ended, and she hadn’t seen it coming. She spent decades putting her brilliant business mind to work for our family behind the scenes. Dad had the ideas, she would fine-tune them and pull them down a bit from the stratosphere. Then Dad would sell it. He was the pitchman who could sell anything. If my dad can make people believe in God, I always thought at the start of my career, he can surely make people believe in me.

He did for a long time, but I had to fire him as my manager in 2012. He thought I was following my mother’s wishes, but he had made some bad deals for me. Just stupid stuff that people promised to him and he believed. Bridges were burned, and I didn’t know how many until I tried to cross them. It took about five times to really fire him before the message stuck. The first time I chickened out and did it in an email. I finally just said it to his face.

Now, in the gym before the concert, I realized my dad was talking to me. I turned to face him and answered, something about the performance. His face changed, and I realized he smelled the vodka on my breath. His eyes widened in surprise, and then narrowed in a look of concern or pity, I wasn’t sure. I turned quickly, glancing at two cupcake moms eyeing me. They sat next to each other and chatted through smiles as they went up from my shoes to my dress to my hair. I smiled back at them and they looked away. I wished I had a girlfriend here with me. I blamed myself for not making more of an effort to get to know other moms at school, but I also knew I was barely hanging on. I just wasn’t capable of small talk with strangers.

I leaned over Ace to whisper to Eric. “I feel like everyone’s staring at me,” I said through a closed smile that matched the cupcake moms’. He gave me a look that told me that was because they were. My husband can always tell what’s on my mind.

Finally, the kids started the performance and everyone cheered. Maxwell spotted us in the crowd, and I let out a “Whoop” when we made eye contact. I was so proud of her. It’s enough that this piece of my heart walked around outside of me, but to see her be so confident and happy was a blessing. I felt real joy. I was pulled into being present, forgetting everyone else around me. Just there. I wished it could be like that all the time.

When I performed, I was always present, but it had been years since I was onstage. My kids had never even seen me perform. The only time Eric had seen me sing in front of an audience was when I was promoting my second Christmas album in 2010, but that had been on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float surrounded by dancing muffins and gingerbread men. Eric couldn’t really get a sense of me as an artist in that setting. For about a year, I’d been writing and recording music in my home studio—raw and from the heart. It was music I was really proud of. But I still worried that to my family I was like a pop star in theory only.

The assembly ended, and my anxiety returned. Stronger now. Parents descended from the bleachers to greet their kids. The gymnasium seemed brighter, and even louder. I needed to get out of there.

Maxwell came over and we gave her huge hugs before the students needed to go back to class. Ace looked up at her, his eyes wide, and I remembered that no matter how well you know someone, seeing someone perform temporarily changes how you see them. I became very conscious of what I wanted to tell her. I’d read enough parenting books to know not to say what I’d heard as a kid from people who meant well: “You looked beautiful.” Or, “You were perfect.” Instead, I told her I loved seeing her perform. “You looked so happy up there.”

My dad started in, praising Maxwell to the heavens. I looked away. She and her friends headed back to her classroom, and Ace started pulling Eric to the door. They were going to throw around a football, and I was happy to cheer them on. But there was something else I had to do.

“Dad, come to the house,” I said. “I’ll ride with you.”

He has this way of cocking his head when he is excited, a constant movement that shows all the energy inside him. “Of course,” he said.

“I wanna play you some of my music.”

As we made our way to the house, I could barely talk. I got Dad talking about the new car and his photography hobby and business, which he could talk about for hours. It was how I negotiated a lot of conversations with people at that time. I listened to every word, but only chimed in now and again to keep them going.

For the past year, I’d both dreaded and dreamt of letting my dad hear this music. As my manager, my father heard every demo I ever made. He knew all my music before it was even produced. But I hadn’t told him I had been writing. And I had not just been making music about what I’d been through in life, there were songs about him.

We got to the house at about 9:30, and Dad had to navigate his Mercedes around the party rental trucks already lining up. That night I was set to host a Halloween party. Eric and I had become famous for our extravagant parties, especially on Halloween. Every year I posted a photo on my socials of the family in costume, and in 2011 I even announced my second pregnancy in a Halloween post of me holding my bump in a tight mummy costume. I put pressure on myself to make each year bigger and better than the last. My friend Stephanie, who I’ve known since fifth grade, is an amazing event planner and I asked her to put together a Halloween party that would also celebrate our friend Koko’s birthday. In our circle of friends, I have always treated every birthday as a sacred event. I always collected the candles they’d wished on, carefully placing them in a Ziploc bag to give to them to hold until the wish came true. My friends joked that they had drawers full of ungranted wishes, but if they refused to take them, I secretly held them for them. I couldn’t give up on their wishes.

As soon as my dad and I got into the house, I got a new glittercup going. There was comfort in the weight of a full tumbler, the slosh of the ice as I took sips. Liquid courage to go downstairs to the recording studio. Ozzy Osbourne had it built when he lived there before me. He was so sweet, but let’s just say we have a different design aesthetic. The studio was all black and scary when I moved in. I made it mine, lightening the room and overlapping pretty rugs to create a sound cocoon.

I took a rolly chair at the console, bending my leg to put one foot up on the chair as I absently swiveled back and forth. I kept catching eyes with the idols that I’d put up to inspire me. A blown-up Polaroid self-portrait by Stevie Nicks in the 1970s, wild-haired and wild-hearted, leaning into the camera to fix her lipstick. Keith Richards smirking at me in sunglasses, sitting on a private jet in L.A. with Ron Wood in 1979. An eight-by-ten of Led Zeppelin in 1970, the four of them just on the verge of becoming rock gods. What would they all make of a pop star afraid to even press play for her daddy?

He was quiet, as if he were afraid of changing my mind. In hindsight, I am sure I seemed petrified. I realized, within that year of writing, how much I went through without letting him know. His choice to leave my mother was like a bomb going off in my life, and I still found myself clinging to whatever I could hold on to. The feeling of displacement made my anxiety so much worse, and I drank more to quiet those thoughts. He didn’t mean to hurt all of us so badly, but I knew for a fact that he had realized his decision would have consequences. I know he knew that because that’s what he had taught me. But I had kept that from him. And now I needed him to hear that I was singing about him.

I cued up “Practice What You Preach,” which I saw as a direct hit at him. I was standing in judgment of someone who I felt had compromised his values. As he listened, the blood drained from his face until it was ashen. What have I done? I thought. He nodded, and started crying, which got me crying.

“Jess, it’s beautiful,” he said. I thought he was bluffing. I played another song, “Rolling with the Punches,” his story set to my music. Again, my voice filled the room as I said nothing. “I see a little kid crying in you,” I sang on the track. “I see the little kid dressed in his Sunday best.” I went right into “Party of One,” which is about how abandoned I’d felt by him and my mother choosing the very moment I needed them most, becoming a mother, to go off and start their new lives. I’d never been brave enough to tell him I was mad at him. I watched his face as he listened, eyes closed. I don’t know what I expected from him. Anger? That he would leave? He didn’t. He got up and put his arms around me until I shook with tears.

“I am so proud of you,” he said.

For the first time in my entire life, he was responding to something I created not as a manager, but as a father. “You’re not mad?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I’m sad I’m not the one promoting it.” I waited for him to start with a business plan, some pitch to lure me back in. Instead, he just said, “I love you.”

A weight, one I didn’t even know I was carrying, lifted. I’d gotten so used to it. The sense that my father wouldn’t love me if he wasn’t managing me. The certainty that I did something wrong. But instead of relief, I felt untethered. Who was I if I had no one to blame for my life but myself?

The edges of my memory begin to blur here. I know I led him upstairs, and he talked about coming back for the party later. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

I held it together until he was outside, then I leaned on the closed door. Slowly, I fell to a sitting position, put down my glittercup, and slumped down to lay on the cold, pale, white stone floor of my entryway. On my back, I looked up at the vaulted ceiling, focusing on the chandelier as tears fell. I lost him, I thought. Even though he loved and accepted it, I experienced the pain of him not being my manager for the first time. I had been so frustrated with him that I never mourned the loss of his guidance. How was I ever going to be successful without him? And why in the world would I ever be so judgmental of my father when I wasn’t true to what I said in my life? Forget what he preached. I was a fraud. I took all the pressures in my head and blamed them on my relationships with other people. Instead of it being my relationship with myself.

I felt nekkid. Not naked, nekkid. Truly bare, with no one else to blame anymore but me.

I wasn’t drunk. Trust me, two was not doing it at that point. All the feelings I had been suppressing washed over me in a rush, and I was drowning in them. My world was rotating around me so fast that I didn’t have any clue as to how to control it. I tried to talk to God, because we had always worked things out together, no matter how lonely I felt in life. He would tell me, “Get up, Jessica,” and give me the strength to do it.

Nothing. I heard nothing. I still knew He was in control, though. He was doing this to me so I understood I couldn’t live like this anymore. That I had to change. And then a voice did come.

“Are you okay?”

It wasn’t God, it was our house manager Randy. He was my dad’s best friend when I was a kid. His wife, Beth, was my dance teacher in fifth grade, then my choreographer on tour, and now she helps run my clothing line. When I love you, I want you to stick around.

I didn’t answer at first. It was a real question. In my entire life, whenever someone asked me if I was okay, the answer was a reflex: “Yes.” Because, no matter what, I always wanted it to be true.

“I am not okay,” I said, surprising myself. I said the words again, differently each time, like an actress trying to get hold of a line, seeing what it felt like to admit I needed help. “I am not okay. Randy, I am not okay.”

He went to get other people. I don’t know who. There’s always a lot of people at my house. The entryway is a high-traffic area, and people literally had to walk over me to get the house ready for the party. I had always been the boss, always in control, so I guess they thought I just needed a minute.

There was a flurry of texts. My friends freaked out and called Eric. I always joked to them that I was a mess, but the girlfriend bat signal had gone up for real: “Jessica’s not okay.” I was ashamed, and more so because it was Halloween. I had to be a mom that night. I had to take my kids trick-or-treating. I had to be here for the eighty people who were coming over. And now I was stuck on the floor—

Ace would see me like this, I thought. At any moment he would walk in with Eric. That’s what got me up. I needed to hide.

I got another glittercup. By then my close friends started arriving to check on me. I greeted everyone the same way: “I’m not okay.” Not as an apology, but a baffled realization. I couldn’t fix it. The car I drove at a hundred miles per hour was out of control with the steering wheel locked, and I could only turn to the passengers and say, “Well, this is bad.”

Then the hair and makeup team arrived. A glam squad for a breakdown. The plan for my Halloween costume was to dress me up as Willie Nelson, my friend and spirit animal ever since we worked together in late 2004 on my first film, The Dukes of Hazzard. We still call each other by our character names, Daisy and Uncle Jesse. He and his wife are my role models for marriage. My own marriage was collapsing during that movie, and on set I hung out in his trailer, let him see through the happy face I put on for people. Now and then through the years, just when I needed it, he would text me a simple, “I love you, Daisy. Love, Uncle Jesse.” I needed it every time.

Me dressing up as Willie was Eric’s idea. We were in our study, where I have a big picture of Willie with his friend Waylon Jennings on a shelf, right below Eric’s 49ers helmet. He looked at the photo and decided it would be hysterical if I went as Willie and Eric as Waylon.

I zoned out while the team went to work for hours, gluing a gray beard to my face and helping me into a wig of Willie’s signature long braids and an American flag bandana. I stared at the mirror, relieved not to see me at all.

Eric came in and I made like I was in character. It saved me from being honest. He asked if I wanted to help the kids get ready. I didn’t answer. I let it seem like I was too busy, when he knew that kind of stuff was always a joy for me. Maxwell was home, he said. I was terrified of letting her see me in that shape. She was going to be Belle from Beauty and the Beast, while Ace was going to be a cowboy. I am ashamed to say that I don’t know who got them into their costumes that night. I was the mom who set the alarm an hour early if my daughter wanted a French braid for school. Usually, I would a hundred percent be there for a moment like a Halloween costume. I wasn’t.

But I needed the picture to post. Eric and the kids didn’t care, but people expected it, I told myself. Through the window I saw Eric, who in his black hat and vest looked more like Kevin Richardson from the Backstreet Boys than Waylon Jennings. My mom gathered Maxwell and Ace for the photo, and I finally joined them outside. People had already started to arrive, and there were so many kids. I strummed my guitar as Willie would, holding it out to keep people at arm’s length as they laughed at my transformation. Ace looked uncertain, but I was relieved when I realized it was because he didn’t know who I was in my beard and braids. Perfect, I thought. This broken person is not your mother, my sweet son. Nothing to see here.

So, I went through the motions and got the photos, like every mom does on special occasions. Just get the damn photo so we can create the memory. Then I can go back to real life. Then I could go back inside and hide. In the photos, Eric has his hand on the small of my back. He is smiling, but I know he is scared for me.

As I turned to go inside, Eric announced we were all going trick-or-treating. All the kids at the party yelled in excitement, and I shrank. I forgot this had been the plan. We’d rented golf carts to take everyone out around the gated community where we live.

“Eric, I can’t,” I whispered.

“What do you mean, you can’t?” he said. He had been shouldering much of the party hosting on his own that day. There was frustration in his voice. “We’ve got like twenty golf carts.”

“I can’t.”

“Just get on the golf cart,” he said. “We’re going to go trick-or-treating.”

“I’m just gonna sit down for a while.”

I turned and went upstairs to my room. I could hear guests tooting golf-cart horns and kids laughing. I started peeling off the beard, but found it was stuck. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. I didn’t care if I had a house full of guests. I felt broken, undeserving of even being around them. I always put so much pressure on myself to have these parties. Now, it all felt so pointless. I would spend weeks choosing the perfect wrapping paper for people’s presents, and it would be ripped up in a minute. Nobody expected this kind of extravagance, it was just me imagining that they did. Now it was worse than not being enough—I couldn’t even show up for my own party.

I took an Ambien. Maybe two. It was a security pill to me—no matter how tired I was, I was terrified of being awake in bed. I knew exactly why I was always so afraid, but that didn’t mean I was ever going to do anything about it.

My housekeeper, Evelyn, found me crying in my room. She had been with me fifteen years and was like a second mom to me. She sat next to me and held me. I felt like I swam for hours, and barely made it to shore. She laid me back, stroked my forehead lightly, and I was gone. I welcomed oblivion.

HERE I WOULD LIKE TO TELL YOU THAT I GOT UP EARLY THE NEXT DAY AND got my kids to school. I did not. I slept in, afraid to see them and hoping that Eric would tell them I wasn’t feeling well. I had failed them. No matter how much of a mess I had been, I thought that I had always shown up for them. The fact that I wasn’t present for them, even for just one night, was unacceptable.

I hid until they left, then drank. I felt emotionally hungover, and thought I needed it to recover. I needed to be normal for when my friends came over for our weekly meeting. There’s a core three who help me take care of business: My publicist Lauren, who is way more my friend than my publicist to be honest; CaCee, my friend since I first signed with Columbia in 1997; and Koko, who is not just my assistant but one of my best friends.

Koko. I had bailed on Koko’s party. I had a huge cake for her and everything. I wondered if they’d even brought it out. It was another failure.

That day was supposed to be special, because I’d flown my hair colorist Rita Hazan in from New York. She’s an artist and has been doing my hair since 1999. She packs everything she might need into Burton snowboarding suitcases for an at-home process that takes about an hour. She is so chill and cool with her light Brooklyn accent that I never mind her hearing anything. The girls would be here while I had my hair done. Multitasking.

CaCee and Koko arrived first, finding me still in a panicked state as Rita readied her station in my home. Koko was obviously hurt, and I immediately started crying to her. I blubbered with apologies as Rita left the room to get something.

“I . . . missed . . . putting . . . the . . . candles . . . in . . . the . . . Ziploc . . . bag . . .”

“It’s okay,” Koko said meekly.

“But I feel awful.”

Stephanie walked in. She was there to load out the party she had put so much work into and that I had missed. She took in the tension right away.

CaCee gave me a sharp, direct, “Why do think you feel awful?”

“Because I wasn’t present?” I said, like I was guessing at a math problem.

“And why weren’t you present?” she said.

I knew that one. “Because I probably drank too much?”

“Probably?” CaCee asked.

Stephanie, the good cop to CaCee’s tough one, cut in with her sweet Texas lilt. “Jess, maybe you should—”

Rita came back in, and I was so relieved. She ran her hands through my hair, letting it catch the light to better examine it, and asked what look I was going for.

I sighed. “Bleach it,” I mumbled. “Just completely bleach my hair and make me look like Andy Warhol.” Suicide by hairstyle.

“What the hell are you talking about?” yelled CaCee, shaking her head “no” at Rita, her head of blonde curls swaying with her anger.

“I just want it all off,” I said.

“Jess, why do you think you drank too much?” asked CaCee. “Do you think you’ve been drinking too much a lot of days?”

“Yes,” I blurted. “I need to stop. Something’s gotta stop. And if it’s the alcohol that’s doing this and making things worse, then I quit.”

Stephanie sighed, as if CaCee had pulled the right plug to stop a time bomb at the last second.

But CaCee didn’t relent. She grabbed my face, holding my chin in her palm. “You better not be lying.”

The chin grab was CaCee’s signature move. The first time I had to go onstage alone after leaving my husband Nick in 2005, I stood frozen backstage, convinced no one would accept me on my own again. She grabbed my chin, and said a firm, “Get out there.”

“Jessica,” she said, as Rita looked on. “This is your rock bottom. This is it. Do you want to change?”

“Yes!” I said. “Like, right now. Yes.”

I know my limits, and I had gone beyond them. I was allowing myself to be taken away from moments that I should have been in. Now I needed to turn inward. To live in the moment and not live in the lie anymore.

I breathed in, breathed out, and looked around. “At least I can say my rock bottom had pretty pillows,” I said. “A soft landing.”

The girls gathered me up in a group hug, and from the center I called out to Eric.

He came in. “Babe, I’m gonna stop drinking,” I said, just like that. As if I said, “I’m going to the store. Need anything?”

He looked right at me. “Then I will too,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. We’re in this together.”

“Okay, can you make me one last drink?” I asked.

“What?”

“Just the last one to say good-bye.”

I know, I know. I hear the record scratch, too. But I said I’d be honest with you. I had one more glittercup.

But CaCee wasn’t going to let me weasel out of my promise. She immediately texted Lauren, who was still on her way. “Dude get your people moving. She’s ready.”

And then, as Rita wrapped foils around my hair to dye it a sane color, Stephanie, CaCee, and Koko explained that they had been planning for this moment for more than six months. Lauren already had a doctor lined up, one who specialized in getting celebrities in-home treatment for addiction. It’s a company town, after all. Lauren had pulled over and was already on the phone, getting a time for me to talk to the doctor, who would then dispatch a therapist specific to my needs depending on what I said on the call.

I had the nerve to be offended. “You were all talking behind my back?”

They each shared their intervention plans, making it clear they did so because they were afraid I was going to die. Stephanie, for one, had planned to talk to my mother.

“My mother?” I said. “Oh God, no. Steph, if my mom told me to stop drinking, I would drink more.”

Another plan was to have Linda Perry talk to me. She’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and I had recently been working with her creating music. Linda had already reprimanded me about writing under the influence. “I don’t want that drunk stuff,” she said. “I need sober writing.”

“I would have been so insulted,” I said. “She’s known me three months.”

“See?” Said CaCee. “We had to let you—”

“But why would you never just come to me?” I said, trying to stay still for Rita as she worked on my hair. “Say, ‘This is too much, Jess. We’re gonna have to take it to the next level.’ Because I would do that to you guys. For you guys, I mean. Why would you be scared to talk to me? I’m not gonna be mad at you.”

“Like now?” asked CaCee.

“I mean, I am out with all y’all in different places, ordering drinks and you’re ordering drinks, too,” I said, on the defensive. “Why wouldn’t you just be like, ‘Let’s not drink tonight.’ ”

They were quiet. A long beat.

I broke the silence. “I mean, I would have probably laughed at you . . .”

Everyone laughed, even Rita. “But then I would have known it was worrying you.” It didn’t break my heart that I was such a mess that they wanted to intervene. It broke my heart that they felt they had to go behind my back. But they were right. I had deeper problems than alcohol, and I couldn’t resolve the problem until I threw away the crutch.

“Guys, I think we should pray,” said Stephanie. She has been with me since we were kids going to Heights Baptist in Texas. She knew what faith means to me.

I stood, foils still in my hair, and the four of us held hands.

“Lord, she’s giving this burden to you,” Stephanie said. Koko gripped my hand tight.

“I’m giving this to you,” I said. “I am your humble servant and—”

A ding went off. Rita’s timer.

“Okay, you gave it to God,” Rita said. “We gotta wash that stuff out now. Or you will look like Andy Warhol.”

She rinsed me out, just as Nikki and Riawna arrived to put in my extensions. They are the co-owners of Nine Zero One, a big salon in West Hollywood. I know, this story only gets more over-the-top, but so was my life. We were getting set up in the wooden chair in my study when Lauren came in.

I was crying, tears pouring from my eyes, and we just exchanged a look that said it was time. She told me she lined up the call with the doctor. “She’s ready now. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, looking up at Nikki and Riawna. They nodded. I didn’t hesitate for a second. I trusted them and I knew now was my time. Besides, I didn’t care who heard my truth. I was tired of letting shame dictate my actions. And do you know how hard it is to schedule Nikki and Riawna?

Once I was on the phone with the doctor, I started in with a complete play-by-play of all my life’s traumas. The sexual abuse I suffered in childhood, and the abusive, obsessive relationships I clung to in adulthood. I was crying, the women doing my extensions were crying, and my friends were a mess. Still, I reeled off everything in a matter-of-fact manner, connecting dots about why each event had contributed to my anxiety, finally ending with, “So this is why I need help and why I can’t do this on my own.”

I paused to breathe.

“Wow,” the doctor said.

My eyebrows shot up. Was I that bad?

“First of all,” she continued, “people don’t know themselves that well. And the fact that you don’t know me, and you’re telling me all this on the phone tells me you are desperate.”

I wasn’t trying to get an A in breaking down. She said a lot of people who use alcohol as a temporary coping mechanism generally aren’t aware of what they’re covering up, so the abuse becomes permanent. Knowing what I had to face was a good sign for me.

She lined up a nurse and another therapist to come over that very night. In the meantime, we moved every drop of alcohol out of the house, but we didn’t really need to bother. I had no craving for it. I was mad at it. I was starting to feel. Like, Oh, this is what it felt like to be living.

The therapist came and hesitated in the doorway like the exorcist coming to cast out the demons. The house was dark, and I led her to my study, right where I am writing to you now. I thought she was stiff at first and spoke so softly I could barely hear her, but she was just getting the lay of the land. Eric had the fireplace going for us, and we sat across from each other.

“So,” she said, “let’s talk about what’s brought you to this point.”

And the work began. To walk forward through my anxiety, I first had to look back to understand what pain I was running from, and what I was trying to hide.