‘The saddest, loneliest thing’: Jessie J on her solo fertility journey and the isolation of miscarriage

Just a couple of months ago, performer Jessie J shocked fans when she played an intimate concert over in LA, just 24 hours after learning that she would miscarry her unborn baby. Recently single after her split with Channing Tatum, the singer decided to try and have a child alone, and “by a miracle it worked for a little while” she told concertgoers. Shortly later, doctors told Jessie the sad news that she wouldn’t be able to carry the pregnancy to term and she found out she had lost her baby at her third scan appointment. 

“I reacted in work mode,” Jessie admitted upon reflection. “It’s safe to say I sometimes pour more energy into creating an unhealthy process of my own pain in front of a camera, than I do acknowledging it behind one in real time. ‘The show must go on’ mentality reacted before the human in me did,” she wrote on Instagram in December last year. “Truth is, I just needed to f*cking cry and fall into someone’s arms and sob. But at the time I was alone. I hadn’t processed anything.”

“I have never experienced physical pain or trauma or felt loneliness like it,” she continued in the heart-wrenching post. “This has changed me forever. In the most heartbreaking, but beautiful way. It’s put life into perspective in a way nothing else ever has.”

Addressing those who have ever gone through something similar directly, Jessie’s message was loud and clear; it’s ok to allow yourself to feel all of the emotions that come with losing a child. “To anyone who may not have been told this, you are allowed to be broken. You are allowed to cry. Allowed to be weak. Allowed to be exhausted from the pain and the bleeding and the grief that barely has space to exist. You are allowed to do this however YOU need to. Sometimes life just calls us to be human. We know there will be sunshine, but we can’t avoid the rain,” she concluded. 

Several weeks on, Jessie says that she is in a much better place now. “So, I was pregnant but not anymore,” she told the audience during a concert over in London this week. “I am probably in the happiest place I have ever been, believe it or not. My perspective on life has changed completely.

“The day it happened a man came up to me in the street. I was by myself and crying. He said, ‘I don’t know you and I don’t know what is happening with you right now but I know you should share it with other people.’

“That is why I do what I do. So, to anyone who has been through that, or near someone who has, I am so sorry. There is no other way to explain it than just the saddest, loneliest thing.”

Also speaking about the need to destigmatise conversations about miscarriage, Jessie later added that “no one talks about it enough”. “What we talk about isn’t what really happens. I am grateful I was raised by two incredible people who taught me to find the blessing in the pain. I am grateful for the perspective I have. Every day we just have to live and live harder,” she urged.