Jess Danel: Episode Transcript

This transcript follows the spoken episode and has been formatted for readability.

Episode Transcript

Jess

How did you stop talking? I didn't stop talking in general. At school, I was the same person I've always been. But at home, I just did not want to be a part of my family. They did not treat me very good. They always told me, you know, can't wait till you leave. They were not nice. Every time my mom and I would fight over something so silly, and it turned out to be a cussing match with my dad threatening to, you know, hit me.

Heather

Before we get into today's story, I wanted to let you know that this episode will include descriptions of family conflict, A school shooting, and harmful actions to a child. Please take care while listening. Welcome to Change Happened, Then What? I'm your host, Heather Holt. If you're new here, welcome, and if you've been here for a while, welcome back. And hey, if you haven't followed the show yet, please do so. It helps independent podcasts like this get noticed in a sea of amazing shows out there.

I am so grateful you have chosen to come along this journey with me. Today, we're gonna dive right in because Jess Danelle came into our conversation ready to tell me stories, lots of them, and she warned me about that almost immediately.

Jess

And you'll have to, like, interrupt me because I might get going on a talk, so. Okay, sounds good. You won't be missed for material on this one.

Heather

She wasn't kidding. Jess is fast, She's funny, and one memory leads to another memory, which reminds her of another story, which might remind her of something in her book. But early in our conversation, I noticed something. Jess knew how to tell me what happened. What I wanted to understand was why. And sometimes one small question can change the meaning of an entire story. Long before Jess became a writer, podcast host, business owner, wife, or mother, she was a little girl growing up in a small farming community in Northern California.

And some of the stories Jess knew about herself started long before she could possibly have known them for herself.

Jess

My mom and dad, when they were going to deliver me, you know, they— they— a black cat crossed in front of them. My mom always made it a big point to say that a black cat crossed their path on the way to the hospital. So like, these are stories that I grew up with about, you know, me. I was born with a lazy eye, and so I was teased a lot. I was called Popeye, and I, you know, I leaned into that in into the book, and I, I call myself the Popeye Girl.

Heather

Popeye Girl. It's funny when she says it now. It became part of the language she eventually chose for herself. But being a child who looked different wasn't particularly funny when she was living in it. She had surgeries when she was 5 and again around 7, and she remembers them as being scary.

Jess

I, I went through a bunch of surgeries. They were— it was traumatic for me. My mom had just broken her back, and, um, like an hour and a half surgery turned into like 3 hours. They accidentally got the first surgery— they botched it. And so then the guy that created my surgery, that wrote the book on it, came out of retirement to give me my second surgery for free because he felt so bad that I was going to be this little girl with this ugly face, you know.

And my literal beauty was in his hands, like how I was going to turn out was like, you know, in his hands. And he did a good job. I mean, some people can tell, some people cannot. I can, I can hide it with makeup.

Heather

There is a lot packed into that memory. A little girl, a face she already knew other children noticed, adults trying to repair something. And an idea that would follow Jess for years: how other people saw her mattered. Because sometimes she wasn't sure how the people closest to her saw her at all.

Jess

I didn't feel very loved growing up. I actually tried to run away when I was in the 3rd grade. You know, my parents don't really— they've never said that I— they never— I can never remember them saying I love you very much or ever. Um, I thought I was adopted. Isn't that funny? You know, I wasn't feeling very pretty either, so I tried to run away. I got 10 miles in the 3rd grade. I was like 8, so I got about 10 miles away, which is pretty far. On a tin thief, my sister's tin thief.

Heather

8 years old. 10 miles. On her sister's bike. The details sound almost like one of Jess's funny childhood stories, until you remember why she's saying she left in the first place. She didn't feel loved. And there were other things happening inside the house also. Jess's mother experienced significant health problems, and as she grew older, more responsibilities like cooking and cleaning fell on her. And she recalls the discipline she would receive could be physical.

Jess

Growing up, my dad, um, I was the only one out of the 4 kids that my parents did this to. I would be hit with the belt, the hand, or a hanger. My dad would ask me how I wanted it. The belt Is how I usually would take it. But the hand— my dad was a big dude, and the hand, you know, he'd always smack me until my butt was the right shade of red. The belt, because sometimes he would accidentally kind of miss and it would wrap around my legs, but I would cry and make it seem as though, oh, that really hurt. So I wouldn't say I was abused in a way where I was fearful for my

safety, but when my dad would lay down the law or give me a lesson, You know, I was the one that was treated this way. Nobody else was.

Heather

I want to leave Jess's wording exactly where she left it. She gets to describe what happened to her and what language to use to describe what she went through. But what really matters to this story is what she understood growing up— the feeling of being singled out, Wondering whether she belonged. And by the time she reached high school, the talkative little girl had begun doing something very different at home. She got quiet.

Jess

When I stopped being talkative is when my parents said, oh yeah, she's on drugs. I've never done drugs in my life, never even to this day have ever done drugs, but of course my parents thought I was on drugs. So back in 1991, I think it was, they took me to a drug rehab and dropped me off. And so I ended up— I ended up spending 4 days there. When the drug test came back negative, of course, my parents came and picked me up.

Heather

That's the story Jess knew how to tell. She stopped talking. Her parents assumed drugs. They sent her to rehab. All the tests came back negative. She came home. Except I kept thinking about the first part she said. The part when she said she stopped talking. So I interrupted her and I asked her, why did you stop talking? And here's what she said.

Jess

I didn't stop talking in general. At school, I was the same person I've always been. But at home, I just did not want to be a part of my family. They did not treat me very good. They always told me, you know, can't wait till you leave. They were not nice. Every time my mom and I would fight over something so silly, and it turned out to be a cussing match with my dad threatening to, you know, hit me.

Heather

Same teenager, completely different story. Jess had not become quiet everywhere. At school, Jess was still Jess. She ran cross-country, played basketball. She was a school photographer and worked on the yearbook. She held student office and describes high school as some of the best years of her life.

Jess

I had the best high school experience. I always look at people when they say, oh, you know, I didn't like high school and it was terrible, and I'm like, man, that was best years of my life. It's— I'm like Al Bundy in it. Here I am, I'm the, um, the cross-country superstar of my high school. I played basketball and I was on the track team, and I was the only really good long-distance runner our school had. And so, um, I did that. I was the school photographer.

Um, I was the— in journalism and wrote for the school newspaper. And I was on the yearbook committee, did all— helped with that. And I was an ABA officer, so I was the rally commissioner for my high school. Every year I was doing something like, you know, every year I was an officer of something.

Heather

The girl who had supposedly stopped talking was writing for the newspaper and leading rallies. She wasn't disappearing from life. She was withdrawing from one place. Home. And after rehab, there was another consequence.

Jess

I did sports all 4 years except for the time my parents put me in a drug rehab. When I came out, their punishment because of having to put me in a drug rehab was taking basketball away from me. And so they took my last year of basketball away from me, which sucked. I mean, you want to get kids out of drugs, not on drugs. You put them in sports to keep them out of drugs, not to be on drugs. It was crazy.

Heather

Adults get things wrong sometimes and make decisions with incomplete information. But what I keep thinking about isn't simply that the adults around Jess got something wrong, but it's the way she looks back on the way she was raised differently now.

Jess

I always really had a negative opinion about how my parents raised me. And now that I look back, you know, they didn't have internet or peer groups or, um, you know, a lot of pamphlets to look through. Right. And so, um, you know, they just did the best they They could.

Heather

She can have compassion for what her parents did not know and still tell the truth about what it felt like to be their child. Both things can exist in the same story. But eventually she did what she had tried to do at 8 years old. This time she was 18. There were roommates, couch surfing, Times of even going back. But going back didn't always mean she was allowed inside the house.

Jess

Of course, you know, I found adulting difficult. I would have a roommate and then they would leave because they couldn't afford it or lost their job, moved back in with their parents. So I was constantly having roommate problems. I ended up going back to my mom and dad a few times, but instead of letting me stay in the house, they made me stay in the garage, even though they had a room. And, you know, I made the best of it. And I would stay there for like 3 months and then get another roommate and move out. And I moved all over California.

Heather

I made the best of it. That sentence could sit over a lot of Jess's life. She worked at finding things out. And in 1992, not long after leaving high school, something happened back in the community she loved. Jess got into her car after work and heard there was a gunman at her old high school. Her younger sister was still a student there. She still had friends there. And people she knew— they were there too.

Radio

Apologies for this interruption, but we have some breaking news.

Jess

And I hear on the news that there is a gunman at my high school. And so of course the first thing I do is I— because my sister, my little sister was still going to school there, and all my friends. And so I go to the school. Come to find out, yes, there was a gunman. They didn't coin the phrase active shooter until after, I think, Columbine.

Heather

The Lyndhurst High School shooting left 4 people dead, others wounded, and students held hostage. Jess knew the people inside that story. But the part of her response that I want to stay with is much smaller. Because faced with something enormous that she could not control, Jess looked around for something she could do.

Jess

And so my mom was sitting with Beeman's mom when she got the news that he died. I went to the school. I brought Kentucky Fried Chicken and blankets because there was a big crowd of people and it was May. And so I went around the neighborhood and I got blankets and I went to KFC and they gave me like 10 buckets of chicken. And I went back and helped everybody just like get some food in them and some blankets.

Heather

Food, blankets, something useful. She kept moving, and eventually that movement took her to Palm Springs, where she walked into a nightclub during the day and asked for a job.

Jess

And the guy answers, he's like, what do you want? He's all scruffy. And I'm like, give me a job, I need a job. And he goes— he laughed. He's like, all right, come on in. And so I got the job, and little did I know I was really good at this job. I was a hustler, and I would make so much money just as a cocktail server. But my husband was a bartender there, so that's how we met. Um, one month after I started working there, we started dating, and we've been together ever since, 28 years.

Heather

They've built a life, and eventually they moved to Bakersfield. Her husband became a physical therapist. Jess returned to something she already knew— children. She started with a daycare in her home, and then the thing she spent so much of her life doing informally, figuring it out, became something much bigger. We'll be right back. One thing Jess's story reminds us is that we don't always get to choose what life puts us through, but we can choose some of the ways we care for ourselves along the way. And sometimes that care begins with something small. That's why I'm happy to have Pure Energy Apothecary supporting Change Happened Then What. This Vermont-based, family-operated company creates small-batch skincare, herbal salves, and aromatherapy products using thoughtfully chosen plant-based ingredients.

Because taking care of yourself doesn't always have to be complicated. Visit pureenergyvt.com. And use code PURECHANGE at checkout for 20% off your order today. Pure Energy Apothecary— a little every day can go a long way. Now back to Jess's story. Jess had worked in preschool education for years. She started a daycare at home. She expanded. She moved to a church. And eventually someone offered her something much bigger, and Jess had to figure out what to do with it. So she did what Jess does— she figured it out.

Jess

Somebody I used to watch, their kids said, I'm gonna have a commercial property and a preschool would be perfect in the back corner. I can give you a 10,000 square foot shell and a 30,000 square foot You just have to fix the inside and fix the backyard, you know, the play yard, fence it up, the whole thing. I didn't know how to do a business plan. And yeah, I didn't have a degree. I had to go online and Googled how to make a business plan.

Heather

She Googled it, built a plan, applied to the Small Business Administration, and secured a loan. But this isn't just any loan.

Jess

And I put together a business plan, and I was approved by the Small Business Administration and got a 7-figure loan. $700,000 loan, built the inside to look like a magazine. It was beautiful. And then the backyard was beautiful, like it was grass, it had the play structures.

Heather

Before the doors even opened, she was walking parents through an unfinished building and showing them the rooms that existed mostly in her head still, but they loved the vision.

Jess

I pre-sold our school a whole year before we opened. Day 1, we had 140 students, 28 staff members, and I opened the door and it was like, I better knew what I was doing. And I did. I had everything mapped out. Every minute of the day was mapped out how everything was going to go. It was, it was awesome. It was a rush. It was like every daycare person—

Heather

There is an obvious way to tell this part of Jess's story. She overcame her childhood. She worked hard. She became successful. End of story. Except, that's not what happened. Because life doesn't respect the ending we planned for a chapter. She opened the school in 2008, and if any of you remember 2008, the economy, Collapsed. The school was struggling. Jess put money back into it, and her baby had been in the NICU and would need heart surgery.

Jess

And it was doing well. And then 2008, that's when the economy took a big dive. And then by 2010, you know, it wasn't doing so great. People were losing their jobs left and right. And they did not need daycare. So if Daddy lost his job, Daddy was home watching the kids. So we went from— our top was like 188 students to 88 students. And then my daughter was born with a heart condition called Tetralogy of Fallot, and she was going to need open-heart surgery in 5 months.

And this is all happening at once. Wow.

Heather

Then the owner of the building made Jess an offer.

Jess

So, um, when the landowner— because I leased the building from this guy— um, asked me to sell him the business, I said okay. And he ended up not paying me what he owed me, and we were in arbitration. It was really terrible. It was like it was stolen from me is what I feel like. Um, but I gave it all up so that I could stay home With my daughter and be there for, you know, what was gonna come, which was terrifying.

Heather

Here's the other story hiding inside that sentence: I gave it all up. Because when we talk about choosing family, we can make it sound clean, noble, obvious. But Jess had built that school. She had imagined it, sold people on an empty building, found the money, created jobs, opened the doors, and watched something that had existed only in her head become real. Then she let it go while preparing to hand her baby to a surgical team.

Jess

If you've never had your baby pulled from your arms to be taken to surgery, It's a feeling that you can hardly describe, but I did my very best. I'm like, they had to take her from our kung fu grip because we basically would not let her go.

Heather

Her daughter made it through surgery. Life kept moving, but the business Jess had once thought might define what she could accomplish was gone. So the question came again, now what?

Jess

In my book, I say life goes on. You've got to basically pull up your big girl panties and decide what's next. You know, I got— my business went away, and what did I do? Well, my daughter had to go to special preschool, and during that time, um, I would go to school in the morning, and then I'd go pick her up And then I'd go to school at night when they went to bed, while my kids were asleep. So I went to school, it took me 4 years, and I got my bachelor's degree. And then COVID, I got a job in broadcast media. Then I went during COVID and got my master's degree in project management and marketing.

Heather

There is determination all over Jess's story. She'll tell you that But I don't think the degrees are the ending. Neither was the preschool or the job, because eventually Jess did something different with all of those stories she had spent carrying around for years. She wrote them down. Her memoir became Bucket List from a Redneck Girl. She She started writing fiction too, and she would go on to start a podcast called Jess Saying.

Jess

And that's what my podcast is called, Jess Saying with Jessica Donnell, because I say that a lot. If you've not noticed, I say, I'm just saying. And I, I did— it's funny because I was going to call my podcast Just Saying, and it took me a few minutes to realize, like, well, duh, my name's Jess. Like Jessica, like, duh, it's Jess Saying. And so that's how that came about.

Heather

Of course it did, because after a childhood where other people had so many ideas about who Jess was, the name of her podcast basically comes down to this: Jess Saying, Jess Talking, Jess Deciding What Gets Told, and Jess Has a Piece of Advice. for people who have stories of their own.

Jess

If any of you out there have a story in your back pocket, I urge you to put it down on paper because, one, you can share it with your loved ones and your kids, and two, it'll be very lethargic. You'll, you'll, you'll learn so much about yourself and you'll have some revelations. It's the best therapy you'll ever pay— not pay for, you know. The other thing is, is that You— domination by determination. You, you can do whatever it is you want to do.

You just have to break it down into steps and take one step forward every day and work really, really hard.

Heather

I think Jess meant cathartic there, but we'll leave the lethargic right where she put it because this is Jess we're talking about, and the point isn't perfect language. The point is getting your own language onto the page. She told me about taking an early copy of her manuscript to the local print shop. She expected them to just print it and bind it. When she returned, 3 employees admitted they had started reading it. One was on chapter 3, another on chapter 5. And the other woman had something to say to Jess.

Jess

And the girl goes, I'm loving it. She goes, and I— she goes, you're writing about me, is what she said. And I thought to myself, I'm like, these are all 3 different people. There's like an older dude, a younger dude, and a girl, and they all liked it. And I was like, that's crazy to me. I couldn't believe it. I was like floored. And she says, she goes, I swear you're writing about me, is what she said. And I thought, yeah, that's what I want. I want people to find a piece of themselves in my words because we've all had these insecurities. I was the Popeye girl, but everybody felt ugly when they're a certain age in their life.

Heather

At the end of all of these conversations, I ask everyone the same question: What keeps you smiling today? After everything Jess had told me, her answer was beautifully ordinary.

Jess

Not having to cook dinner, right? Today is a fend-for-yourself night because some nights Mommy cannot do everything. But if I don't have to cook, if we're going out to eat, oh yeah. And we go to hockey games, our time to get away, and just him and I have date night. That's what brings me joy currently.

Heather

Not cooking, hockey, a date night after 27 years together. Yep, I'll take it. And when I asked Jess to look at the life-changing moments in her story, she talked about determination, about building something she only had once imagined, and about doing the next thing before she necessarily knew how.

Jess

I think building a business from scratch and no one holding your hand You're making something and you're providing jobs. Domination by determination. You, you can do whatever it is you want to do. You just have to break it down into steps and take one step forward every day and work really, really hard.

Heather

When Jess was a little girl, she looked at the photographs in her family. Her brothers and sisters seemed to have more. She had fewer. And in the mind of a little girl who already felt different, she came up with an explanation. Maybe she was adopted. Maybe she didn't quite belong. Maybe there was a reason she wasn't as visible in the record. She was 8 when she tried running away, 16 when adults interpreted her silence for her, And decades later, Jess sat down and began writing.

Page after page. Memory after memory. Not because writing changes what happened. It doesn't. And telling your own story doesn't mean everyone else will agree with your version. They may remember it differently. They may even tell it differently. But Jess can look back at herself now and see her parents with more context than she could when she was a child living inside their decisions. But I think there is a difference between understanding someone else's perspective and surrendering your own. Maybe that's the change in Jess's story. The little girl who once looked at the family photographs wondering why there weren't more pictures of her eventually stopped waiting for someone else to put her into the record. She put herself there, in a memoir, behind a microphone,

inside stories that are messy and funny and sometimes painful, in her own words.

Jess

I want people to find a piece of themselves in my words, in my words, in my words, in my words, in my words, in my words.

Heather

And now they can, because Jess is the one telling Thank you, Jess Danelle, for trusting me with your story. If you want to learn more about Jess, you'll find all of the links and the resources related to her story in the show notes and at changehappenedpodcast.com. Thank you. Hey, and while you're there, answer the What Changed Me question to be entered to win some super cool Change Happened Then What merch. And if this episode stayed with you, share it with someone who might find a piece of themselves in it too. Stay tuned for next Tuesday's story with Mia Hanks, I Can Choose My Own Day. I can choose my own day.

And don't forget to hit that little follow button so you don't miss an Change Happened, Then What? is written, edited, and produced by me, Heather Holt, at Holt Hill Studios, alongside the Boys of Interruptions, Waylon and Dalton. Woof, woof, woof, woof. Until next week, change happens. Then what?

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