When Vancouver indie musician Sarah Jickling started singing with the band The Oh Wells, handing out cupcakes at shows and soaking up the spotlight, it sustained her for a while. But it was honesty, transparency, and being open about her firsthand experience with bipolar disorder that sustained her in the long run.
“I let go of who I was and the kind of musician I thought I was going to be,” says Jickling, whose debut solo album, as Sarah Jickling and Her Good Bad Luck, When I Get Better is all about learning to live with the mood disorder.
“As my bipolar disorder progressed I felt less and less like that happy person that I was pretending to be on stage. Everything kind of fell apart; my band fell apart, my life fell apart,” says Jickling. “I was unable to go to work; I was unable to really maintain any relationships. And that’s when I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to need to get help.’”
Jickling is now in a relationship, performing the music she wants to perform, and advocating for mental-health awareness. She is the recent recipient of an award from Anxiety BC’s Writing and Multimedia Contest (in the multimedia/24-to-29-year-old category) for the album’s title track. That makes sense, considering the subject matter of the album.
“The writing of the album just came really naturally,” says Jickling. “It’s a way that I can deal with stuff that’s going on that seems insurmountable.”
Jickling says that writing and performing is beneficial to her in many ways, including on a therapeutic level.
“It was a very natural transition from accepting my mental illness—saying, ‘Okay, I have this and I’m going to get help’—to ‘I’m going to write songs about it and start talking about it,’” she says. “The moment I accepted it, I wanted to share, because that’s how I process it.”
Jickling combats the darkness in her world by writing about her experience; there is nothing more tranquil for her mind than getting ready to take the stage when it comes time to perform.
“It’s one of the things that calms me down. It’s a very strange thing,” she says. “I always say that I have off-stage fright. There’s something about being on stage that takes away a lot of my anxiety. If I start crying for some reason, it’s part of the show. And that’s why people are here. They’re here to see me do me. My performing strategy is not ‘let’s do a perfect show.’ It’s more ‘I’m going to be myself, I’m going to be a human, I’m going to show my flaws and sing my heart out.’”
Sarah Jickling
7:30 pm, Saturday July 15
$10, The Copper Owl
copperowl.ca