Nearly three months after Kim Kardashian asked President Trump to commute the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson, a non-violent drug offender who was set to spend a lifetime behind bars for her first offense in 1996, she’s now setting her sights on another act of clemency. Per Page Six, Kardashian is reportedly working with the White House yet again to pardon a man named Chris Young, who was sentenced to life in prison for marijuana and cocaine possession following a 2010 arrest.
Like Johnson, Young was a first-time offender, which makes his sentence all the more egregious in the grand scheme of the criminal justice system.
Kardashian announced her plans on Jason Flom’s Wrongful Conviction podcast, saying she spoke to the judge who issued the sentence. Interestingly, that judge, Kevin Sharp, would later resign in protest in regards to Young’s case, saying the state of Tennessee forced his hand in the sentencing. “Yesterday, I had a call with a gentleman that’s in prison for a drug case—got life. It’s so unfair. He’s 30 years old. He’s been in for almost 10 years,” Kardashian explained on the podcast. “I was on the phone with the judge that sentenced him to life who resigned because he had never been on the side of having to do something so unfair, and now he is fighting alongside us to get [Young] out.” She also said she’s frequently in contact with President Trump‘s aide and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who she described as “passionate” about prison reform.
Round two of Kardashian’s fight for justice comes after she visited President Trump in the White House earlier this summer, where she was successfully able to convince the president to commute Johnson’s sentence. “I think that he really spent the time to listen to our case that we’re making for Alice,” Kardashian explained after their meeting. “He really understood.” But not without the most bizarre photo op of the year:
Carrie Jones couldn’t climb out of the van. The ride between her former unit and this one hadn’t been more than a couple of minutes, but she was nauseated. Until then, it hadn’t all seemed so extreme, like such a break with what she’d become accustomed to over more than two decades in prison.
Sure, she’d had to pack up her stuff, but she’d done that “50,000 times,” she says. And true, she’d had to fill out some forms—that was fine, too. She’s more relaxed on paper, she tells me (with an ease that belies her claim.) A “ferocious reader,” as she puts it, she’s accrued more than 80 credits in the Wesleyan University Center for Prison Education initiative, despite the fact she had completed just her GED when she was was sentenced in 1997.
It was the van that set her off. Around her, women shouted and laughed. Jones was silent. “I couldn’t move. I was just sitting there, thinking, ‘I’m stuck.’” When the vehicle stopped, prison staff had to pull her from her seat. Jones had known that her routine would be different now; it’s the reason she hadn’t wanted to be part of the new unit at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. She liked her schedule, her books, her hours alone.
But staffers who had spent time with Jones were determined. When it was announced that the new initiative would be housed in a renovated unit and emphasize rehabilitation and personal achievement, Jones was pleaded with to consider it. When she brushed off (repeated) entreaties, one lieutenant waited for her post-shift and escorted her to an information session. The unit would be exclusive, open to just 19 women—some mentees between 18 and 25 and some older women, who would serve as mentors. The pilot was to be called WORTH, which stands for Women Overcoming Recidivism Through Hard Work.And it had some precedent; 50 miles from York, the Cheshire Correctional Institution had launched TRUE, underpinned with the same restorative justice values, in March 2017. (At the time, it was the first unit nationwide to focus on the needs of adults under 25 in prison. Its name, too, is an acronym: Truthfulness to oneself and others, Respect toward the community, Understanding ourselves and what brought us here, Elevating into success.)
At some point, Jones caved. She submitted an application and was accepted. In May 2018, arms wrapped around her TV, she ducked into the van.
Both TRUE and WORTH affect a minuscule population relative to the enormous problem of mass incarceration in the United States, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over two million people are now locked up in our prisons and jails. WORTH intends to accommodate 50 women, but that’s still a fraction of the female population at York, the lone prison for women in the state.
Even so, researchers believe the programs could have a disproportionate impact. In the battle to combat recidivism (or, a return to crime post-release) those under 25 have become a focal point—at once some of the most violent inmates and the most vulnerable. Studies can’t pinpoint the precise moment at which adult brains develop, but most research finds it doesn’t happen until at least 25. Meanwhile, the experiences of women behind bars receive far less attention, even as the number of incarcerated women between 1980 and 2016 increased seven-fold. Connecticut isn’t the first state to offer unique classes or non-traditional rehabilitation courses to those who’ve been sentenced to time in prison, but the new units are more holistic in their approach.
An experiment in restorative justice, the units test a radical premise: What would happen if we decided that the gravest punishment we could dole out was the revocation of a person’s freedom? What if we believed that to be the harshest sentence—and understood that once we separated people from their homes, their families, their communities, our sole purpose was to prepare them for some eventual return? To the wider populace, the notion sounds lax; prison isn’t a vacation. But what if it were more like rehab? At least 95 percent of all incarcerated people will be released at some point. When the state does so, don’t we want them to be as prepared as possible?
The seeds for TRUE and WORTH were planted in 2015. That summer, the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit that studies and hopes to shape criminal justice reform, invited Connecticut State Commissioner of Corrections Scott Semple and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy to join an on-site tour of German prisons, which bear little resemblance to those in the United States. For one, facilities there house far fewer people; just 78 out of 100,000 residents. In the United States, the number is close to nine times that, at 655. But the entire German approach to incarceration differs, too. Vera took stakeholders to prisons in which incarcerated people dressed in street clothes, lived in one-person cells to preserve their individual space, and cooked their own meals in a communal kitchen.
“Wet cells,” or those in which metal toilets are installed next to beds and dressers, are considered inhumane, Vera Research Director Ryan Shanahan, PhD, explains. In a report from the Marshall Project, the nonprofit news site focused on criminal justice, one attendee described a similar trip Vera held in 2013 in terms of revelation: “It almost smacked me in the face when they said that public safety is a logical consequence of a good corrections system, and not the other way around.”
PHOTO: Jack Duran
A bulletin board at WORTH includes the names of unit supervisors.
After, Semple reached out to Vera for some numbers. He has a bottom line and victims’ families to answer to, some of whom chafe at perceived “amenities” in prison. It costs 1.6 times more to incarcerate someone in Germany than it does in the United States, according to the Marshall Project. But Shanahan and the staff at Vera showed Semple that incarceration and recidivism rates in the United States were much higher; an investment now could mean fewer people behind bars and reduced costs down the line. “If we could have an impact on young people earlier in their time in prison, we might able to stop cycles of justice involvement,” Shanahan says. What started as conversations between Shanahan and Semple became a formal contract between the State of Connecticut and Vera in July 2016. Over the next six months, Semple oversaw the gut renovation of a former segregation unit and “moved mountains,” as Shanahan puts it, to “rip cages off the walls, paint cells, retrain staff, and teach them to ‘unlearn’ pretty much everything they thought they knew about corrections.”
When TRUE opened, Shanahan and her coworkers at Vera “waited with baited breath” for the first violent flare. People under 26 (and thus all of the mentees in TRUE) are involved in a quarter of all reportable incidents in prison, despite the fact that they make up less than a fifth of the total prison population. “We said to the staff, ‘It will happen,’ and how do we prepare them for when it does?” No one is more surprised, insists Shanahan, jubilant, than the Vera team that 19 months later, there hasn’t been a single fight. Guards are more at ease. Families feel better, knowing that their loved ones are less likely to end up in solitary confinement. Semple noticed too. He reached out to Vera once more; he wanted a unit for women.
It’s been six weeks since Carrie Jones climbed out of the van and into her new space when we meet. A roundtable event at York has been scheduled, and advocates can now see WORTH for themselves. Still, the moment in that backseat feels raw and fresh. “I was 19 when I walked through those doors, labeled a violent, horrible, criminal person,” remembers Jones, who was convicted on felony murder and robbery charges. “I was never to be looked at again. No parole. No good time…. I didn’t deserve another chance. I’m sitting there in that van, and I realize I was chosen to do something good. But was I good enough?”
Aptly named, WORTH hopes to restore incarcerated women’s sense of personal value, which some research has shown can lead to less crime over time. Moreover, Vera touts German and Danish prisons’ commitment to “human rights-based” justice, a focus that Shanahan and Vera Project Director Alex Frank, MSW, insist the United States lacks. “The fact is that prisons are set up now to warehouse,” Frank says. Some officers are responsible for some 200 inmates on each shift. It’s impossible for them to learn people’s names, let alone develop a genuine rapport with them. “We need to be honest about the realities of mass incarceration. Even as we seek to end [it], we need to find a way for people to live that is humane.” Frank prompts me to “think about a term like ‘feeding time,’ which is the language that is used to refer to breakfast, lunch, and dinner in prisons. Real people do not eat at ‘feeding times.’” She gives me a hard look; animals do.
At TRUE and WORTH, Shanahan and Frank are enthusiastic promoters of a new lexicon, despite some initial pushback. “When we first came in, a warden or a line staff person would be like, who are these people from New York, telling me what to do?” says Frank. She laughs, then mimics their horror. “Like, these feminist social workers?” But the women prevailed. One of their preferred language tools is to discuss the people that “live and work in prisons” to collapse the rhetorical divide between inmates and staff. Once, in a presentation months into their collaboration, Shanahan and Frank heard Semple mention the people who “live and work” at York. Across the room, the duo stared at each other in awe. “It was like, ‘Yes, it’s working.’”
PHOTO: Jack Duran
At WORTH, mentees and mentors are encouraged to decorate their dorm-like bunks with photos and personal touches.
Each detail at WORTH is so intentional, meant to prod both officers and incarcerated women toward a deeper appreciation of each other’s full, complicated human-ness. A hallmark of Vera’s work is its use of discrete, purpose-driven spaces. At WORTH, that means separate rooms for sleep, activities, classes, and recreation. It also means unrestricted access to the outdoors. Once, in the middle of a downpour, Carrie Jones went out and washed her hair in the rain. Her feet hadn’t touched grass in 22 years. On walls in common areas, women put up pictures and postcards. People need to share themselves, Frank adds, because so much of prison has stripped them of their identities. (She and Shanahan never ask incarcerated women what sent them to prison. “We want to know everything else about them,” says Shanahan.) Without context, without their roots, the women are reduced to their cruelest contours. Prison tells them “who they are—a criminal, where they come from—from prison, what their value is. It’s not much.” WORTH has upended that.
“The point is to know that you aren’t your last mistake,” says Robin Ledbetter, a resident and a mentor at WORTH. “You can better yourself in this environment. You don’t have to just sit here. You can motivate yourself into getting better so that you don’t have to walk through these doors again.” It’s a lesson that Ledbetter is in a unique position to impart; at 14, she was sentenced to 50 years in prison, a term she began serving in a juvenile facility. “I learned a lot there that I’ve utilized since then,” Ledbetter tells me after the roundtable at WORTH. “It was treatment-based, and the staff seemed to care about me and what happened to me. I clung to that.” When she heard about the new unit, she wanted in. “People who become incarcerated are good people. It’s possible to change.” But those who come in “broken” need to be mended, not shelved until their release date. WORTH has healed her, too, she adds. “I had gotten to the point where…I don’t want to say I was dying, but just existing. Now I’m living and I’m living with a purpose.”
Days at WORTH vary, but all start with a community circle in the morning. An inspiring quote is shared, and correctional counselors facilitate a conversational “check-in” to discuss issues, low moments, triumph—whatever comes up. One of them, Colleen McClay, MS runs a “voices group” that is even more open-ended. Treatment for addiction is routine. Staff is welcome to make suggestions, too, which Correctional Officer Charles Campbell took as license to screen Black Panther. After, Campbell facilitated a discussion that parsed the differences between restorative and retributive justice, themes he felt the film dealt with well. Incarcerated since she was 17 and slated for release in the fall, Yaminah Graham smiled when she recalled the female warriors—resplendent and smart: “It showed us that women are leaders, too. We don’t have a lot of that.”
Now 23, Graham is hesitant to leave. “We have so much support, and I don’t want to lose that.” At WORTH, the staff listens to her, teaches her to build a responsible budget, reminds her to breathe. Officers don’t send her to her cell or write her up when she gets frustrated. It’s not unusual at WORTH for someone to notice she seems down and offer to help; a standard response in the outside world, but unheard of in prison. Next to her, Campbell nods. “Our interactions with the inmates here—we almost stop seeing them as just that. We start seeing them as the people they are.”
Campbell came to WORTH from York—the same compound, but a universe apart. When a woman in the general population had a problem, Campbell admits he brushed her off. “‘Go talk to that person.’ That’s it. It wasn’t really about helping them.” He’s invested now. Still, both Campbell and Graham know that once she’s released, the deck won’t be stacked in her favor. “Once you get a number, everyone thinks you’re going to come back.” But Graham has faith: “I believe we are all worth it. That’s our motto: ‘I am worth it. You are worth it. We are worth it. And together we will make a difference.’”
PHOTO: Jack Duran
Each morning, correctional counselors lead a community circle in which a word, quote, and fun fact are read.
That difference depends on whether or not WORTH can survive partisan skirmishes. Malloy has put prison reform at the top of his legislative agenda. Since his election, the male prison population in Connecticut has fallen by about 20 percent and the female prison population (which is smaller) has fallen by seven percent. But a revolution has costs, and statewide financial woes have forced Semple to eliminate some of the same staff who could oversee program expansions. Plus, a gubernatorial race looms; a new administration will be elected in November.
At WORTH, I sat down with Connecticut’s First Lady Cathy Malloy—colored-paper flowers planted in a styrofoam vase between us. She’s well-known around York, a place she’s visited since her husband’s first months in office. At WORTH, several of the women call out to her when she passes; “Cathy! Hi, girl!”
“This is how all prisons should run,” she says. “There’s such momentum. But we need the statistics, because there will be a new administration at some point, and the state senators tell me that all the Republicans care about is the cost.” Perhaps, but the state’s economic concerns are real, and Dannel Malloy is one of the nation’s least popular governors, with a disapproval rating hovering around 70 percent. “We have the numbers on how much safer this program is,” Cathy Malloy continues, her passion evident. “We think it will lower recidivism and crime. But it’s about financials for them, so we need to deliver that piece. To them, it’s cold cash.”
At Vera, Shanahan has pioneered a method that demands that the first people researchers meet with to collect data are the incarcerated people themselves. Her policies upend traditional notions of “expertise,” which she and Frank hope becomes a discipline-wide corrective to a toxic historical pattern. For centuries, incarcerated people have been experimented on and demonized; in America, a disproportionate number of them are people of color. Vera restores to them a measure of power; at WORTH, the women are the experts. Over lunch after the roundtable at WORTH last month, Shanahan tells me that German prisons are built with an awareness that the last time the nation locked up swaths of people, six millions Jews and millions of others were murdered. Officials there have seen where dehumanization can lead. But the United States has never grappled with the legacy of slavery or Jim Crow in quite the same fashion. “What would we think if 70 years after the Holocaust, 60 percent of the people in German prisons were Jewish?” Shanahan wants to know: Even if we had all the documentation in the world to prove their crimes, wouldn’t we question the laws that locked them up? Or at least how those laws were put into effect?
In 2016, African Americans made up 12 percent of the U.S. adult population, but 33 percent of the sentenced prison population. (Whites represented 64 percent of adults, but just 30 percent of prisoners.) We don’t need an explanation; we have it. What we need is a solution.
In Germany, 15 years is considered a life sentence. In the United States, people can end up with sentences double or triple that that for nonviolent offenses. “The idea that we think that people who make a mistake, even a terrible mistake, should go away for their whole lives or half of their lives to make us feel safer or feel like the punishment will make us feel better, I don’t think that’s true,” says Shanahan. “The potential that we are throwing away in people who are 20, 22 years old, it’s cruel and it hurts our communities.”
Frank, who served time at 19, remembers how her experience as a white woman behind bars awakened her to the fact that a nation built on the ideals of fairness and justice had developed an unfair and unjust legal apparatus. When she was released, she earned her bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in social work from NYU. At WORTH, at least three women tell me what they plan to study when they get out. (Yaminah Graham wants to major in history and religion.) “If you haven’t been affected, you can be isolated from the harsh realities that are under your nose, that deeply impact you, too,” Frank says. “But once you know, there’s no going back. You can’t go back to unknowing that.”
After weeks of planning, Kim Kardashian will reportedly meet with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner at the White House Wednesday to discuss the case of Alice Johnson, a 62-year-old grandmother who has been serving a life sentence without parole for a non-violent drug offense.
Kardashian has been an advocate of Johnson, who has been in prison for 21 years, since coming across her story through a video published on Mic.
“I’ve been in communication with the White House and trying to bring her case to the president’s desk and figure out how we can get her out,” Kardashian told Mic. “That’s such a huge step from where we started with that not even being on their radar.”
According to a person familiar with the meeting, Kardashian will ask Trump to pardon Johnson, who was imprisoned for drug conspiracy and money laundering, Vanity Fair writes. Johnson’s story has resonated with many criminal justice reform leaders; she’s previously shared that she became involved with drug dealers after losing her job, her son, her home, and her marriage. According to Mic, she did not sell drugs or make deals, but became an intermediary who passed along messages to those involved in the drug trade. She was featured in an ACLU campaign to end mass incarceration, and her story went viral after multiple outlets picked it up.
“I felt like a failure,” Johnson told Mic. “I went into a complete panic and out of desperation, I made one of the worst decisions of my life to make some quick money. I became involved in a drug conspiracy.”
Kardashian tweeted about the Mic story back in October 2017, writing “This is so unfair.” In November, she brought in a team of lawyers to examine Johnson’s case. According to Vanity Fair, she also reached out to Ivanka Trump and was connected with Jared Kushner, who has been supportive of prison reform. According to reports, he’s been trying to pass a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that has co-sponsorship from lawmakers, including Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Sources say Kardashian will not bring the Keeping Up with the Kardashians camera crew or her publicist to today’s meeting.
Kardashian’s trip to the White House comes after her husband, Kanye West, released a string of controversial statements and tweets about supporting Donald Trump. Kardashian reportedly supported Hillary Clinton in the last election and has never publicly embraced Trump, but has suggested she is willing to work with his administration for Johnson, despite facing backlash on social media.
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“I’m just focused on criminal-justice reform and helping one person at a time. And so far, the White House has been really receptive to my calls, and I’m grateful for that,” she said. “And I’m not going to stop that because people personally don’t like Trump.”
Kim Kardashian’s advocacy efforts have also included Cyntoia Brown, a young woman serving a 60-year prison sentence for killing a man she says solicited her for sex at 16.
“Where I’m at in my life right now, just like, to go and spend my money buying material things just doesn’t satisfy me the way that it used to,” she said. “To save someone’s life and do that once a year, then that would make [my] heart fuller.”
Former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar has been sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.
On Wednesday Judge Rosemarie Aquilina who has been presiding over the entirety of the Nassar hearing since its inception, made the announcement in a Lansing, Michigan, court on Wednesday after hearing statements from more than 150 women and girls who have come forward with sexual abuse allegations against Nassar over the past two decades.
“I’ve just signed your death warrant,” Judge Aquilina said, while delivering the former Olympic doctor’s sentence. “I find that you don’t get it, that you’re a danger. That you remain a danger.”
Despite the staggering number of accusations and the overwhelming evidence against him, Nassar has throughout the trial vehemently defended his practices. According to a letter he wrote to the court last week, parts of which Judge Aquilina read aloud in advance of today’s sentencing, the doctor maintained that these accusations were unfounded, and that his accusers were merely lying for media attention in the expectance of financial payoff.
“I was a good doctor because my treatments worked, and those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over,” he wrote in the letter. “The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The judge tossed it aside.
The victims of Nassar’s heinous crimes—many of whom were minors at the time of assault and had been scheduled to seek Nassar’s “treatment” due to various sports-related injuries—include some of the most famous Olympic gymnasts in American history, including gold medalists Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, who read her victim statement at Nassar’s hearing, as well as athletes at Michigan State University and from USA Gymnastics.
“We, this group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time, are now a force, and you are nothing,” Raisman said during the trial. “The tables have turned, Larry. We are here. We have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.”
In January, songwriter Julia Michaels made her debut as a solo artist with the hit song “Issues.” Since then, the song has gone triple platinum, Michaels has received two Grammy nominations (Best New Artist and Song of the Year), and she’ll be joining Shawn Mendes, Niall Horan, and Maroon 5 on their upcoming tour. But it hasn’t been an easy journey—here, Michaels opens up about living with anxiety.
I started having anxiety for the first time when I was 18. I’d just signed my first publishing deal, and I felt so much pressure to perform that it sent my mind and body down something that felt like a never-ending spiral. I thought I was dying. Most days, I couldn’t breathe or leave the fetal position. I would rock back and forth, tapping my feet on the floor because I thought if I stopped I would pass out. I became afraid of everything. Going out. Eating. Driving. Writing. My life became a string of, “What ifs?” What if I eat this and I’m allergic to it? What if I’m driving and get in an accident? What happens if I stop moving? I became consumed. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had completely isolated myself—even from the things I loved. This continued heavily for the next few years.
Anxiety feels like an earthquake shaking your entire body and can last for minutes, hours, or sometimes days. It makes you feel like you were just in sunny California and teleported to winter in Chicago. It’s a lot like that friend who says they’re happy for you but secretly roots for you to fail. It’s always waiting to ruin you and make you feel small. It’s like you’re in a prison with yourself, like there are a thousand bricks weighing your body down. What’s really terrifying, though, is when those bricks start to feel comforting.
It’s scary what your mind and your body can get used to.
Because of this I’m very open about having stage fright. On one occasion, for example, I was performing at Logo’s Trailblazers Honors with the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus. Normally when I perform, my throat gets dry, my hands shake and sweat, my body starts freezing, and I have to assure myself that this feeling isn’t going to last forever. But on this day, I was the most calm I’d ever been. I actually panicked because I wasn’t panicking. It’s scary what your mind and your body can get used to.
The first time I performed “Issues” on television was live for the Billboard Music Awards. At the end of the performance, everyone commended me for being so open. But in reality, I had a massive panic attack on stage. The hug you see me go in for to my keyboard player was actually me turning to her saying, “I can’t breath!” I walked off stage and crumbled into a ball in a backstage hallway. I was so afraid that people could see me. I was so afraid what they would think. So afraid that I had hit all the wrong notes. That I wasn’t ready. Or, even scarier, that I was. So many thoughts in milliseconds streamed through my head. My manager sat with me on the floor and held me until I was able to stand again.
It got to a point where I was having panic attacks every day. I had to sit in a ball and rock myself until I was back to “OK.” I remember thinking, If this is how the rest of my life is going to look, I can’t do this. I can’t live with this constant broken feeling. This constant grey cloud sending out hurricanes every chance it gets onto my skin. I called my manager and told her it was time I see a therapist. My first couple sessions, all I did was cry and panic. I didn’t realize how much emotional duress I was holding inside of my body. How much childhood trauma and avoidance account for anxiety. How the less you talk about how you’re feeling, the more it builds—until you’ve created an over-populated city in your head of everything you’ve suppressed your whole life. I learned that the more toxicity I surrounded myself with, the more toxic my mind became. The more therapy I did, the more the panic became less and less. I learned that for each thing to have anxiety about, I had an association to link it to. For example, when I get anxious before I go on stage I think to myself “Why?” And then I think to myself, “Oh, it’s probably because that one time when I was 12, someone really close to me told me I couldn’t sing, and I’ve held on to that. But that was a long time ago. I’m OK.”
I started weeding out a lot of negativity and things that constantly made me feel emotionally tiny. I am learning every day that those moments will forever be a part of me, but they are not who I am. I am not other people’s projections of their own insecurities. I am my own. I have learned many coping methods and there are different ones for everybody. Rationalizing with myself has been the one to calm me down the most. When that doesn’t work, I do something called grounding, where I take my shoes off, no matter where I am, and plant my feet on the ground. It makes me feel centered, stable, and less confined.
To people who don’t have it, anxiety can seem so foreign and burdening. I once had a boyfriend who would get mad at me every time I had a panic attack. At first, he would try to comfort me, but when I wouldn’t “snap out of it” right away, he would get frustrated. He made me feel even worse than my mind was already making me feel. My dad went through a similar phase with me as well. He would say, “Julia, you’re fine,” to which I would respond, “Please don’t leave.” He didn’t get it until one time we were back in Iowa for the holidays and decided to take a family drive to Illinois. All of a sudden, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I took off my sweater and started screaming. My cousin pulled the car over and opened the minivan doors. It was 40 degrees, and I had stripped myself down to leggings and a bra. My dad had never seen it so severe before. It was the first time he didn’t look at me like I was crazy. That’s what anxiety does: It comes out of nowhere and causes chaos just for fun.
That’s what anxiety does: It comes out of nowhere and causes chaos just for fun.
There’s one time my anxiety turned into a positive, though. I was asked by Ed Sheeran and producer Benny Blanco to come to a house in Malibu and work with them and a few of Ed’s favorite collaborators. It was beautiful, and the people he surrounded himself with were just as beautiful. One day, I was writing in the courtyard with singer/songwriter Foy Vance when these cameras that were following Ed came to see where we were at with the progress of our song. I became so overwhelmed that I discreetly walked away and ran into Benny’s room. I curled up in a ball on his bathroom floor and hyperventilated. Benny left the room and came back in with ice. He had me hold it in my palms tightly to distract my brain from my thoughts and to focus on the cold cubes in my hands. He told me this is one of the methods he uses when he has panic attacks. He stayed next to me and talked me through it. It was the first time someone had stood in front of me and understood me. He knew exactly how I was feeling. It was the first time I didn’t feel so alone. I will never forget that, and I will always have a love and appreciation for him because of that day. For the next two days, we just worked together. We went through a few ideas until I sang the start of a melody that turned out to be “Dive” on Ed’s album. I had laid down the chorus melody and left. The next day, when I came back, Ed loved the idea and wanted to finish it. Knowing I was surrounded by genuine people that day made such a huge difference. It still does.
This year, I’ve made so much progress with my mental illness. Even seeing videos back from where I started to where I am now, I feel an amazing sense of growth and accomplishment. When you’re stuck in that vicious cycle it’s easy to think that you may never get out. And when you realize that prison has an escape door, that Chicago winter suddenly starts to feel like summer again.
I believe I stayed a songwriter for so long because of my anxiety. I was scared I wasn’t good enough. Scared I wouldn’t be accepted. I was scared of not hiding anymore. I was scared of reaching a level of potential I had never reached. I was scared of myself. I convinced myself I didn’t want to be a performer. What if it goes horribly wrong? What if it goes right? I tried to weigh out so many pros and cons for something that I can’t control. But once I’ve made up my mind about something. I go all in. So the day I made the decision to become an artist, there was no going back. I wanted this, and it was time to face my fears.
All it takes is one person to listen. To care. To make you feel like you’re not crazy.
When I see people sing “Issues” with me, it’s the most incredible feeling in the world. When we sing it together, we understand each other. We understand that everyone and everything is flawed, and it’s the thing that connects us the most. When we sing “Issues,” we sing it hundreds of different ways for hundreds of different reasons, but we do it as a whole. We lay all our insecurities out on the table. This is what I’ve always wanted. To be understood, to be heard. To be seen. Just like so many others struggling with mental illness. This year has been a crazy long journey and everyday I’m learning something new about myself. I’ve always found my power and confidence when I write; now, I’m finding it every single day as an artist. I may not know a lot, but I know one thing for sure: This is the most alive and free I’ve ever felt. Pouring out these emotions, facing my fears, and confronting these things I’ve never been able to before is making me stronger everyday.
People with anxiety often don’t talk to others because they think they’re are burdening them with their problems. But all it takes is one person to listen. To care. To make you feel like you’re not crazy. I wouldn’t be making these huge strides every day without the incredible people I surround myself with. Without the help of therapy, my friends, my family, my fans, and my colleagues, I wouldn’t be on this journey. And I’m so glad I am.
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