Jewel says her top songs were ‘medicine’ amid mental health issues. Now, she’s helping others

Jewel was 9 years old when she learned an important lesson about pain that would follow her for the rest of her life.

While she was a child performing in bars with her father, she watched the adults around her turn to alcohol, drugs and unhealthy relationships as coping mechanisms, observing that none of it seemed to make them feel any better.

“I remember I wrote down in my journal you can't outrun pain,” Jewel tells USA TODAY. “About a month after that, I learned that the buffalo is the only animal that moves into the heart of a storm, and it just hit me that the quickest way is through. It made a world of sense for me that rather than avoid my pain, I should move toward it.”

This realization shaped how the Grammy-nominated singer navigated her own life. Years before therapy and mental health became part of the mainstream cultural conversation, Jewel was developing ways to understand her emotions, confront difficult experiences and change how she responded to them.

Now, at 52 Jewel has spent more than 25 years trying to share what she learned with other people. That work continues this year with the second annual…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/life/