Open Book

Sometimes we are all so afraid to be honest with ourselves because we know that honesty will lead to somewhere.” I wrote this ten years ago. “Can fear walk us to something better?

Did he repeatedly stab me in the heart, or did I just keep running into the knife he aimed at me?

There are so many firsts to raising kids, and parents are told to catch them all. But they don’t warn you about the lasts. The last baby onesie. The last time you tie their shoes. The last time they think you have every answer in the world.

It didn’t make me cry, it made me mad. But he was breaking down in front of the world, and, again, I felt responsible. How many times are women made to feel responsible for the actions of men? I know now that

All of us are so much more alike than we want to accept.

Whatever you are going through, the sun will come out.

The look I was going for was sexy but saved. Come hither but leave room for the Lord.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” It’s a quote from Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology to describe what it takes to be a hero. I probably got it from one of the many, many self-help books I devoured back then, underlining points and dog-earing the pages that seemed to tell me a way out. I repeated that quote to myself for weeks, in the shower, on a red carpet, driving in my car. There was a life waiting for me, I told myself. I owed it to the people in it to be brave.

That’s the power of faith in action. It’s not about talking and judging. It’s about doing.

But then I remind myself that life is really just about one moment at a time. To not think about two years from now, but to think about right now. Two years from now will figure itself out.

I do like the romance of the hard stuff in life.

Press pause for a second on your life and ask yourself, What is my calling? What makes you feel passionate? If you don’t immediately have an answer, try broadening beyond something specific. My mom’s was specific—fashion—but mine was more broad. I like making people feel good. Whether I am doing that through music, which came naturally to me, or through writing, which is harder on me but brings a different reward, I’m driven by the same impulse. I think sometimes we get so caught up in the vessel of the work rather than what matters: the spirit that fills it.

It is so easy to notice things about people and tell them. I don't know why people don't just give out compliments every single day.

Hi, I’m Gale Norton,” she said. “Welcome to the White House.” “I’m Jessica,” I said, shaking her hand. I made a stab at small talk. “And what do you do?” “I’m the secretary of the interior,” she said. “Oh my gosh,” I said, waving my arm high to take in the room. “I love what you’ve done with the place. Everything is beautiful.” My dad pinched my arm, and she just walked away. I was trying to be nice and give a compliment, but that’s her Jessica Simpson story. Now I know the secretary of the interior manages federal land and national parks. Believe me, I beat myself up so much over that one that I could ace a test on it. At least I’d made it to the White House again. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

My husband, Eric, has a joke he likes to say: “Ask Jessica to sing about Jesus or America, and she’ll be there. Super Bowl, backyard cookout, whatever you got, she’s coming to sing ‘God Bless America.’ ” And he’s right. Growing up in Texas, I sang that song over and over. From Memorial Day parades to Veteran’s Day pancake breakfasts—I was your girl. When I sang it at the East Room of the White House, I finally found out I had been flubbing the lyrics all those years. I was there to kick off the USO holiday tour for troops fighting in Afghanistan. It was the first time they let celebrities in after 9/11, because, well, they were busy. It was surreal to hear President Bush speak, thanking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his service, the transportation secretary for keeping the airlines safe. And then he added, “I want to thank Rob Schneider and Jessica Simpson as well.” They asked me to sing “God Bless America,” and I gave it my all. President Bush was in the front row, right next to Laura, and I watched him quietly sing along, his mouth moving along with mine. Something went wrong after we got to the mountains, though. I said, “to the rivers,” just like I always did, and, well, he knew it was “the prairies.” I was so embarrassed that I apologized to him and Mrs. Bush after. “I swear all this time I thought it was rivers!” I said. “That’s okay, Jessica,” he said. “God blessed the rivers, too.

I also hope to be your friend. I am going to need you to hold my hand through some memories, and there may be times that I’ll end up holding yours as we confront similar things that scare us. I’ve come to recognize fear when I see it. It may show itself in different ways, but it’s a familiar face, isn’t it? I have a different relationship to fear now. I’ve learned that we grow from walking through it, and a lot of people don’t even know they have that option. You either conquer it, or you let it destroy you. So, let’s do this together.

I was like a lot of women who get their wish: I loved being a mom, I just didn't love being me.

She had mailed them a few days before she died, wishing everyone a great future. It was a powerful lesson in creating a legacy by choosing your words with intention. We are on this earth such a short time, cruelly short in Sarah’s case. What message did I want to leave behind?

Who was I if I had no one to blame for my life but myself?

Let’s just promise to be there for one another in our imminent and enduring times of trouble and thunder.” “Deal,” I said. He always talked like that. I would moon over him to CaCee, using that same lofty language.

I couldn’t hide my sadness in Waco. Partly because the holidays always made me miss Sarah, especially when I was with her brother and parents. But I was also starting to feel detached from my real life, and seeing my extended family perform for the cameras made me realize how much I was playing a part. Nowadays, I see so many people performing their identities on social media, but I feel like I was a guinea pig for that. How was I supposed to live a real, healthy life filtered through the lens of a reality show? If my personal life was my work, and my work required me to play a certain role, who even was I anymore? I had no idea who I really was.

I know he accused Nick of making me dependent on him for everything, which is the pot calling up the kettle to have a long talk about being black. My mom loved Nick, but right or wrong, my parents had spent my life making me think that I couldn’t do anything without them. At twenty-one years old, I was still very much a child. I didn’t know how to write a check, but, somehow, I was paying for everything. I knew that I was making money, but I didn’t think of myself as the family breadwinner. I just thought my money was their money. Honestly, what I knew for sure was that it stopped my family from having as many fights, so I felt lucky that I could be the one to help keep the peace.

Smile bigger.” Now I know how to get through photo shoots, because I know every angle they need. I do this super weird thing for my friends where I just slightly move my face to do a speed round of each red carpet pose and photo shoot I’ve done. The big smile, eyes up and then down, the Mona Lisa, the chin-down-lips-parted, the “Oh hi!” . . . My friends scream because I look like a robot model shorting out. But let me tell you, it makes it easy on the photographers.

My great-grandmother read people’s fortunes and aligned her gardens with the stars. This was always said before a long, dramatic pause. Nana never wanted to talk about her. If I said anything about astrology or being a Cancer, my grandmother would go move quick to hush me. I heard different stories about my great-grandmother, cautionary tales about what could happen if you leaned in hard on that intuition. I don’t know the full story, but I also know that she was a card reader in Waco, Texas, at a time when that was not done. She was considered crazy by a lot of people in town. That buckle on the Bible Belt can come down hard and leave a mark. But I’d stare in the mirror at my brown eyes and high cheekbones, convinced I was Native American. More than that, we Simpson girls, my mother included, all seemed a little witchy. A nicer word would be intuitive. We had a good sense of people from the get-go and we often knew what was going to happen before it happened. Sometimes we chalked it up to our faith that God would provide, sometimes to just paying attention. But often it felt like we knew what was destined to be. Everything that happened in my life just felt preordained. Still does.

My stutter started soon after, and the doctors said it was from the head injury. My mom said that when I stuttered it looked like my brain and I were trying to say ten things at once. My voice just wouldn’t work. “You can’t focus on the one idea you need to talk about,” she told me. “Just say the one thing, Jess.” She is the youngest of three—the Drew girls of McGregor, Texas—and her middle sister Connie was a speech therapist. Aunt Connie advised her to get me to calm down. “Take a breath,” my mother would say, getting down to my level to look me in the eye. That only worked so well. If you want someone to calm down, try telling them “calm down” and see where it gets you. But Connie had another idea, something that worked with other people who stuttered. Singing. “What you’re trying to say,” Mom said to me one day, “sing it to me.” I turned the phrase over in my mind, smoothing the edges of its consonants and vowels until the words became the breaths of a song. A lyric I could control. “I want Cheeeeeeri-ohhhhs,” I sang. I can’t describe that release. The rush of simply being understood. “Yes, you can have Cheerios,” my mother yelled. “You can have whatever you want! You sound so beautiful.” For the next two years, singing was the only time I didn’t stutter. I sang for everything I wanted, like some Disney princess making a wish. Around four, the stutter became more pronounced and my parents took me to a therapist. He used art therapy and asked me to draw myself in the family. I drew my parents standing in front of our house, then put myself inside looking out from a window. He told my parents I had a fear of abandonment. Looking back, I know my parents never left me alone, and maybe I was even around them too much. But somehow, I still had a fear that they would leave me.

The fact is that I have kept journals since I was fifteen. I started the year my cousin Sarah was killed in an accident. Two years and three days older than me, she was like a sister to me. Sarah left behind a ton of journals, listing off the people she was praying for. When I read her journals, I saw that she had prayed for me. Every day. I inherited her purpose, and I still feel a need to see through what she had started in so many ways. As I wrote about situations in my life and the people I was praying for, the journals became a safe place for me to talk through things without putting any pressure on anybody

To get to this point, to talking to you right here in this moment, I had to really feel. And I hadn’t been doing that. Up until a few years ago, I had been a feelings addict. Love, loss—whichever, whatever, as long as it was epic. I just needed enough noise to distract me from the pain I had been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, “Just give him all your light. See if it saves him. . . .

Still, I was present. I kept a promise I made to myself a little over a year before to show up in my own life. To feel things, whether they were the result of bad memories, or good ones in the making.

I wanted to see who I was, without using another person’s love for me as a measurement of my value.

The kids are asleep, and my husband is reading in the other room. So, it’s just you and me. Every night after we put our children to bed, I come down here to the study to write. It’s cold here in Los Angeles, so bedtimes have been creeping later. My daughter Maxwell is six now and my son Ace is five, and they have the kind of energy that