On Monday, April 4th, Mikel Jollett joined Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience Charles A. Nelson III for an informal fireside chat on “Trauma and Creativity.” With the presence of a rockstar, the wisdom of an academic, and the caution of a survivor, Jollett shared his story. With every word he spoke, he was strikingly honest—and at times, haunting.
Born into Synanon, a commune based out of Santa Monica, California, Jollett was raised in a reality entirely different from what most Americans experience—a childhood he describes as a mystery. Brought up in “the school,” the central space for raising children in Syanon, Jollett failed to experience many parts of childhood, including what it felt like to have a true mother. Instead of being raised by his mother, he was raised by the cult as a “child of the universe.” Explaining his feeling after escaping Synanon, witnessing alcoholism, drug addiction and violence, Jollett shared that it “seemed like nothing was ever going to be good ever again”— all at the tender age of five. Jollett recalls his brother and him being “treated as these ancillary things that had nothing to with [his parents] story.”
Despite being raised in what he described as the “wreckage of a cult,” Jollett later went on to graduate with Honors from Stanford before becoming a professional musician, as frontman for band The Airborne Toxic Event.
Jollett seemed both pained and accepting in his discussion of such profound and poignant topics. He smiled and laughed through our discussion of his rather traumatic childhood—perhaps, and as Jollett admitted, another form of coping mechanism. This normalized his trauma, and made it seem approachable, mundane even.
Today, Jollett actively expresses his emotions through his art, describing music as the only vehicle to accurately convey his feelings. Trauma “creates something inexpressible, an alienation from the rest of the world,” Jollett said, asserting that there is no veritable language for certain inexplicable emotions.
These “wounds … require a language that doesn’t exist,” Jollett continued. Music, Jollett described, is something “primal to who we are, beginning back from when we told each other stories around fires without the benefit of eighty-page novellas.”
For Jollett, the most powerful songs are those that can consolidate an eighty-page novella into a four-minute song. Listening to him, it became apparent that his storytelling could be condensed into a single word: loneliness. Despite having a nontraditional lifetime trajectory, the common theme Jollett’s trauma is rooted in loneliness — a sentiment felt by everyone.
Although he is now in the rock band The Airborne Toxic Event, Jollett did not begin publishing music until the age of thirty. Before that, his music was something strictly personal; a way to acknowledge the parts of himself that were hidden both from the world and from himself.
“I think for me, it was just like I’d sit down and write, and I would start to play a melody and I’d be like, oh, that’s how I’m feeling right now,” Jollett said. “And then it felt like a relief and I’d start to sing about it. And something about the process of singing. And a lot of them were sad songs, which made the sadness feel a little bit better.”
Music and melody allowed Jollett to truly process emotion and joining a rock band satiated the part of him that craved performance. Describing himself as “always loquacious”, Jollett admitted that he learned to become a performer at a young age, constantly competing for the love of adults. The feeling that there was only a “finite scrap of love in the world” urged him to become a “super child,” pursuing the status of a poster child — obtaining straight A’s, competing as a track star, and becoming an active community member.
Jollett conveyed a feeling he has had his whole life, and one that many Harvard students can resonate with: bouncing between the persona of someone “incredible” and someone who is “an absolute piece of garbage.”
It was fascinating to hear Jollett describe how he viewed himself, fabricating an identity from one out of his control to a version of himself he wanted the world to see. Identity today does not just mean who or what one physically sees themselves as, but also who they are to the entire virtual world that exists across social media. Jollett called Instagram the “magazine of our lives,” constantly displaying only a select version of our authentic identities. And no matter how hard we try, it will be scrutinized and interpreted beyond our capabilities.
He continued by blaming social media as the core driver of today’s generation’s anxiety, depression, and discontent. When asked for advice on how we can channel emotion like he did and improve our relationship with the trauma we face, Jollett expressed his belief in the importance of “listening to your own voice, following your own instinct.”
Jollett left the audience with poetic words, fitting for a musician. “If you are broken and you have a crack, you can see the beauty of the world. But people without a crack can’t see the beauty because they didn’t need to appreciate it the way you did.”
Jollett made the world seem so daunting and so approachable at the same time. Jollett moved the audience in Gutman Hall—a mix of Mind, Behavior & Brain students, parents, and adults both young and old. Jollett moved me. It was clear that through his brute honesty, he was able to create a connection with every person in the room by making such extraordinary trauma so universal. Trauma and creativity, as Mikel Jollett demonstrated, not only exist together, but are necessary for one another.
Alice Khayami ’25 (alicekhayami@college.harvard.edu), can’t stop reading Hollywood Park.