My Relationship with John Mayer

He didn’t want me involved while the harassment was bad and everyone believed something wrong of him.

What do you with something that is so palpable between us when you know you’ve, of all your life, found this extreme beauty with someone that finally speaks right to you, to everything you always wondered if it existed, and it came as a natural knowing of each other at an intense moment, but also, you have little idea about personalities that are willing to do unfounded public and private personal attacks, calculated motives, just for personal gain and strangely wanting control over other adults and their lives–which was far beyond what John or I could fathom any human doing without basis or even personal relationship. That kind of behavior–abuse–was just not recognized or understood in his nature or mine, and at that time thirteen years ago, and neither of us had heard of patterns of personality disorders where some people’s actions are always calculated, from daylight to dark. I knew we both dealt in the very real of ourselves and took hard, deep dives to do that, so it was unfathomable to think someone could profit or willfully, intentionally bring harm who only had calculations in mind with no personal values. How could the very, very wrong win all the public approval? This person could sell John simply because of fame, passing his personal unwillingness to have a relationship and his professional boundaries as if she owned him, and that couldn’t be possible with all his beauty, intelligence, genius, talent, and hard work.

I was experiencing something similar that I didn’t understand at all, with all that I had dreamt of and finally found at 39, and because of taking this path and knowing I had to do it, that it was the very right thing for me to do, being ostracized by my own family because I had made this decision to love and support John’s decisions, even when they were very hard and I had to choose to support him, even when it meant me being alone to do it. It was a hard lesson in coming to understand what had happened to John by going through it myself personally when other people want control and ownership over a life that doesn’t belong to them. I wasn’t allowed the freedom to choose. I never dreamt of the cruelty that people were capable of as they do triangulation, etc, to set people against you and make life harder. That’s hard to say because I lost all my family over it, even a brother and a dad who both believed the lies told about me. So when it comes to something like a Reddit smear campaign about me, I say, “Listen, I lost everyone I thought loved me and Reddit can’t matter.” It can’t matter when you’ve had to face the very roots of trying your whole life to be loved and finally finding it only in one person who can see into you and give you companionship and encouragement when everything looks very dark. It’s absolutely devastating to the core, and then having to rebuild, as if from new, from there. I learned how to have compassion for how much I was hurting. It was the first time in my life I started to feel the comfort and care of compassion. Then I knew how rare it is. And so it was confusing and hard for John and I both and we both individually had to figure out the caused devastation.

One of the hardest moments of my life was giving up John to Katy Perry. I wanted to die. I panicked. I went back into the abuse of my family. It got worse and I ended up leaving the family permanently. I was completely alone. Taylor Swift was harassing John still endlessly because he didn’t shame her in return (and which would have given her more headlines with his name), so John went public with Katy to make it clear to her and everyone he was not in the least bit interested in a relationship with her or her sales or calculating personality. Katy became a dear friend of mine, from the span of our distances, and I knew she loved and cared dearly for John. She knew John and I loved each other and wanted to be together. She did all she could to make that happen. Public hate and hate created within a family are both unbelievable. You think, “But you know me, why would you even listen to it?” But to see it become a “reality” whereby people talk as if they know, it’s mind-blowing. It’s crushing. It’s confusing. It makes no sense whatsoever. One thing it does do is send you deeper into the path you’ve chosen. Very much deeper into the real to get away from the manipulations and lies being repeated.

When people fall away because of lies it leaves you in a very strange kind of hard freedom at first. I found in my dogs this first time of natural, calm, warm love that I knew I had been craving, starving for, all my life: peace, and joy, and love in the middle of huge bouts of crying my heart out. We became our little family, our togetherness, and that’s all that mattered. I started to grow into a person who valued this precious love more and more highly, coming to understand what a beautiful, beautiful gift it was. I could finally lay down all the hate and manipulations of me and love purely and take care of each other, take care of them and have these sweetest bonds. I became a mother to my dogs, loved being their mother, and it was one of the greatest joys of my life to make loving choices and care for us and to go to the woods on long hikes to heal. My dogs showed me a different plane of living. They forever altered me to know how real love is and how it fills the cosmos. They are completely now an alive part of me. I am who I am because of them. I hold on to their gentleness, their sensitivity, their true kindness, their sweetness as a way of Being. They breathe that in me. I choose that over hate. Every single day.

If you do not know of the patterns of Narcissistic abuse, I highly recommend listening to Dr. Les Carter on YouTube.

John and Katy stayed together for I guess three years, and during that time I took the deepest dive of my life into writing what became Coyote Weaves a Song: A Mythological Song from the Beginning of Time. It started out as separate essays I was writing privately published on-line. When my beloved baby Moonbeam, my Bichon Frise, suddenly passed in 2015, it sent me even deeper. To even survive another day I got up and wrote for as many hours as I could, then my little Yorkie, Vanilla Custard Pudding, and I would head out to the woods. (I was doing marketing and photography to live.) We became completely different Beings together. This little one-foot tall creature would lead me bravely through the woods and I could feel pure joy in just watching him–the one joy I could have and he became my soul. He looked everywhere for his brother Moonbeam, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so together we both had broken hearts, but together, still taking the path and finding a deeper and deeper very real bond in this miracle of each other. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. He was the very best thing to ever happen to me. He opened my heart completely to love. He put aside his fears and grew into the most loving creature I’ve ever known.

Up until about 2019 John and I neither one understood the narcissistic patterns. You always hope the people will just stop being horrible people and gain some sense of decency, but that doesn’t happen, nor do they want that to happen because they would lose power and control. And so, after all the deep dives, you finally have to come out and say I’m going for the golden in this. I’m going to take this to a new level, a new plane of existence, and there’s nothing that person or group of people can do to hurt me more or stop me. Once you understand the roots of the pain happened long, long ago, and set you up for that kind of pain again, and you can look back and say, “I’ve been hurting from this my whole life and it’s time to love like I’ve always longed to do,” then you still have to fight through the dark, but you know you are dealing with the real gold.

And so in John’s release of Born & Raised, we were setting out on this journey of being committed to the right decisions, even apart, no matter how dark everything had become. I knew he loved me. He knew I was barely hanging on and that I loved him dearly. He could see the writing was keeping me going and he kept reading. I wrote to him to show him the wonder, to keep him going, too. I wrote to him of what would become the miracle of Dead and Company, and he followed that out, beyond all my dreams, to making that path a reality in 2015. I hated being left out, but we were in constant communication.

There were many, many times I did not want to go on living. Especially after my dogs both passed, I felt like I had given all there was to give to humans. But I kept writing the books, following this path, writing what I could see. I have come to know things beyond even my own imagination by following it out. That’s why I say with complete certitude that I live on a different plane than the mundane, the hate, hard people who want to manipulate to get their way. I have no doubts about that. There’s a wonder to it. I think I’ve finally proven it in the writing and what has come out of it. But as I was writing before, the point is to bring it to fruition, not just write about it. That’s just the process.

Despair, hopelessness, and helplessness, I came to see, are what I felt as a child but couldn’t face. I kept trying to work my way past it without giving up. And so now I think I had to come to look directly at it in an expanse of time in these last few years with that subconscious despair, isolation, desperate loneliness, and feeling like I couldn’t do anything to change the people around me. I aimed for the bigger things without stopping to feel how horrible and desperate it felt in those situations. Now I understand and have the power to bring love to wrap myself in, wrap all of us in, in order to take on the tough tasks including the ones I still have to do.

And so my intent here is to speak to what I could have said in 2010 for John before he went through a living hell, and now to try to express in the best and most beautiful way possible what should be said. I look at his beauty now and I’m overwhelmed by the man he has grown into so far past this very cruel public false accusation–and her holding to the lies all these years for control and more manipulation. John isn’t that in the slightest. And he’s grown so far past that moment of deepest hurt by all that happened to him that now his beauty astounds me. He did it the honest way, by following what he knew was true and what he could do about it.

I also want to give golden space to what Katy did and does. She is pure loving kindness with a goddess vibrant and golden heart. She is strength in the most beautiful of ways. She transcends the trouble by bringing forth more strength and beauty, and I know she always will. That’s who she is. She won’t be daunted, even because she has an immensely sensitive heart.

Falsely creating and continuing to generate that hate in the world is not a good thing. I know it has to be said. Beyond the genuinely well-meaning or the Flying Swifties (using a term from narcissism), I’ve seen even Deadheads continue to generate hate when their very premise is “Are You Kind?” and “Maybe the dark is in your eyes” because they aren’t aware of the miracles that have happened, aren’t open, aren’t soft enough for life itself.

Yes, soft enough.

We all cross paths with hard personalities all the time, hardened people, people willing to cause hurt. Hard people get harder over time, not softer. And so there’s still a task ahead for the true path of art and music to continually break open. I know the right hearts are in the right jobs there. I know John to be pure of heart and the most loving man I’ve ever met. I love him so. He is an immense gift. His Solo Tour just isn’t a thing of the old world. I watched in Madison Square Garden us all have a special relationship with him. I was amazed.

It’s quite a gift.