Behind the Music Part 2

It's more than a new sound...

There is a specific reason why I'm sharing music and not keeping it to myself or just playing for friends and family anymore.

Throughout my life, I've dealt with depression and anxiety leading to multiple suicide attempts at 16.

This shocks most people because, on the outside, I had it all. I was a star student, president of every school club, lead in the plays, and well-liked...

It spiraled so out of control at that time it was unbearable. After an amazing summer, it was the night before junior year. I was reading the first of five books I was supposed to have read over the summer and that morning I saw that I had gained five pounds. This, to me, was life or death. I was always overweight and to me, it meant whether I was worthy of being loved or not.

So I decided it would be God’s choice. I took a bunch of pills, continued reading Atlas Shrugged, and went to bed. If I woke up, I was meant to be alive. If not, I had the answer.

Well, after a long night, I woke up. I went to school. I couldn’t see straight. I told a friend, who told her parents, who told my parents, and when I was woken from a nap after school, they were all standing around me in my bedroom. I entered a psych ward for adolescents. It felt more like jail. There was only me and one other intellectually disabled boy who was there because he tried to rape his sister. Ironically, talks with him healed me the most. But that was just the beginning of a 5-year journey to healing.

For the most part, I’ve kept this to myself over the years out of shame and embarrassment. I never knew how it could benefit anyone else and I was always afraid that it would look like I was trying to get attention.

But when I turned 42 (yes, 42!) I felt like I physically hit a wall. I huge block went up in front of all the other areas in my life where I was trying to accomplish something, mainly my corporate career. I had suddenly not been able to take one more step through this drudge I had created, a facade to live a “normal” life.

You see, 42 was the number of pills I had taken. 42, “The answer to life, the universe, and everything.” I promised myself that, if I hadn’t already, I’d share my story by 42 because deep down I felt like I had been given the extra time because this was my real mission in life. And music was the gift I was given to communicate it.

I remember that time vividly, and thinking “No one could possibly understand how I feel…” Not my friends, not my parents. I was Jessica at the bottom of a well, and I didn’t have anything to grasp onto to get out.

I don't want anyone else to feel that way. 

I sing so that others know they are not alone.

Music has a powerful way of getting deep inside our souls and the more I talk to people, the more I understand that it may be the most powerful tool we have as humans to make change.

Why Jazz?

But I understand that the music has to be good first. It has to invite people in to listen. The music, without the words, has to make you feel something. It has to be flexible because no person and no environment are the same. How you hear music on a rainy day is different from a sunny day, and so is the way we play it. That’s why jazz is the perfect medium.

At its heart, jazz is about improvisation.

Improvisation requires an artist to be in the moment – the moment when everything else disappears.  

Living in the present moment eliminates depression and anxiety – because one (depression) exists in the past, while the other (anxiety) in the future. 

I’ve struggled with both all my life. And I’m on a mission to show how music has saved me – and can save others.

Today, her music is a way of expressing what I couldn’t say out loud then and now, that critical inner monologue that rules our lives. 

And the music comes liberally sprinkled with that Broadway feel-good vibe that helps us not take our darkest moments too seriously – the message is often delivered with a dose of humor to remind us that our problems aren’t the only thing that exists in the world (even though it feels like it). 

To be continued….