Jessie J has spoken candidly about her 2021 miscarriage and the loneliness she felt in the days after.
The 34-year-old singer announced that she had suffered a miscarriage in November 2021 in a since-deleted Instagram post, in which she described her sadness as “overwhelming”.
“Yesterday morning I was laughing with a friend saying ‘seriously though how am I going to get through my gig in LA tomorrow night without telling the whole audience I am pregnant.’ By yesterday afternoon I was dreading the thought of getting through the gig without breaking down,” the singer, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, captioned the photo of herself holding a positive pregnancy test.
In the post, which she shared on stage prior to her performance at The Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles on 24 November, Jessie said that she had learned of the miscarriage after going for a scan and being told there was “no longer a heartbeat”.
The singer has since reflected on the “dreadful” experience, and her feeling that something was wrong, as well as the loneliness she felt afterward, during Monday’s episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast.
According to Jessie, she was still early on in her pregnancy when she woke up one morning and didn’t feel “right”.
“I still had very intense nausea, I just knew something wasn’t the same,” Jessie recalled, adding that she hadn’t yet chosen a doctor in the US, but was able to make an appointment with a doctor that day.
She then reflected on the “dreadful silence when you first have a scan and they kind of don’t say anything,” with the singer revealing that she’d urged the doctor to tell her what was wrong.
“I was like: ‘Just tell me the truth, what’s going on?’ and she said: ‘Your baby’s heartbeat is very low,’ and there’s this, like, ring,” Jessie said. “And I was like: ‘Well, what does that mean?’ and she said: ‘It often means that the baby will have some sort of disability or deformity.’”
According to the singer, she decided to get another opinion the same day as the concerning scan, at which point she was told by a second doctor that there was “no heartbeat”.
“That was within three, four hours of the first one,” she remembered. “I had two scans on the same day, and within the first scan and the second scan, the baby had passed.”
Jessie then recalled “not really processing” the experience, and instead focusing her attention on getting ready for her show the following night. Once she’d gotten on stage, the singer shared the announcement on Instagram.
“I posted it because I didn’t have anyone to break on,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone to just fall apart on and that’s what I needed, that’s what I wanted.”
However, Jessie acknowledged how difficult it was to talk about the “physical painful” and “emotional painful experience,” noting that “you almost don’t want to talk about it”.
According to Jessie, the hardest part of the experience wasn’t performing her show, but rather when she was alone after the show.
“It was when I got in the car after the show by myself, and I got home, and I opened my front door, and I closed the door, I fell to my knees,” she recalled. “That was the worst moment of the whole experience, was me realising that, other than my career, being a mother and having a child has been the biggest excitement of my life.
“I felt like I’d been given everything I’d ever wanted and then someone had gone: ‘But you can’t have it.’”
The singer then revealed that she’d “never felt so lonely” as the nights after the miscarriage.
“When I got home that night and I lay there, I’ve never felt so lonely in my life... I just remember laying there, knowing it was still there, but it wasn’t there. That went on for over a week,” she recalled. “It was just the saddest thing.”
According to Jessie, who previously said she’d “decided to have a baby on my own,” the experience has made her believe that she “wasn’t supposed to do it alone”.
“I knew that the reason it happened was because I wasn’t supposed to do it alone,” she said. “Like I know that I’m supposed to find someone that wants this as much as I do.”
The singer also discussed the “silver linings,” as she said that she is “grateful” she got to “experience being pregnant,” and said the experience “opened the door for me to love myself deeper”.
While she acknowledged that she is still “processing” the miscarriage, and still has “moments of intense sadness and grief,” she said she also has “moments of excitement knowing that I won’t do it alone”.
During the podcast, Jessie also spoke of her decision to archive the Instagram post announcing her miscarriage, with the singer explaining that she did so because she wasn’t ready to post again, but was “tired of going back to [her] page and that being the thing that people saw”.
“I wasn’t in that space, but I wasn’t in a ‘Hi guys, I’m going to sing you a song!’ space or a random caption and a picture of me in an outfit,” she said. “So I just was like, ‘I’m not as sad as that, but I’m not anywhere near, say, the few posts before it yet, so let me just archive it and go back to zero.”
Jessie’s candid comments come after she recently asked that people stop commenting on her weight and asking her if she is pregnant.
The singer addressed the comments in a post to her Instagram Story in April 2022, in which she urged people to “stop commenting on people’s weight,” before revealing that she had gained weight and “[felt] good”.
Jessie then revealed that someone who “knew of what I went through last year,” had recently asked her if she was pregnant, before reiterating that it’s “not cool to just say or comment on anyone’s body”.
“Unless they/I tell you or ask your opinion, it’s not one that’s needed or helpful,” she said.
