Washington DC-based Kiwi creative Emma Ghaemmaghamy (AKA. Emma G) had 24 brain surgeries by age 10 after being diagnosed with the debilitating neurological disorder hydrocephalus. Growing up, she struggled with depression, anxiety and isolation.
Today, she uses her passion for performance to show rangatahi and adults they aren’t alone, and that music is truly an open door and a great way to open minds and hearts.
From the living room of her US home, Kiwi musician Emma G tells me something that strikes a chord.
“I believe if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
This open-minded determination and thirst for learning has helped her through some of the toughest times in her life, with music acting as one of the driving forces.
From her humble Waikato beginnings and health struggles, to being a two-time TEDx keynote speaker, Ghaemmaghamy hopes her songwriting stories and coaching can help people navigate the worldwide post-Covid mental health crisis.
Growing up with hydrocephalus, a condition where fluid builds up in the brain’s ventricles causing them to enlarge and put pressure on tissue, wasn’t easy, she says.
Headaches, memory loss and multiple other side effects made living a “normal” childhood a challenge, but it was something she’d learned to live with, and songwriting helped her cope.
“I think I grew up a lot faster than everybody else around me, which made things difficult to kind of relate to my peers in a lot of ways,” Ghaemmaghamy says.
“Music has always been the thing that helped me be normal and connect with people in a way that didn’t feel ostracising.”
She first put pen to paper on her 5th birthday with a song titled School is Cool and hasn’t stopped since.
A prominent member of Kiwi band Static Era, Ghaemmaghamy also placed sixth on the New Zealand version of hit show The X Factor. She won the New Zealander of the Year Local Heroes Award in 2014, which was about the time she decided she wanted to head overseas and start using her creative outlet differently.
“Chris Yong [of the band Tadpole and formerly Static Era] helped me realise that music didn’t just have to be about staying stuck in my muck,” she says.
“It was also an opportunity for me to start writing a future and writing my way out of the chaos, the pain, the overwhelm, the depression, the whatever it was I was going through. That’s when I started to really begin learning about how therapeutic music can be for self-expression, depression and anxiety.”
In 2019, she was contracting to a multi-million-dollar company in the US, writing their theme songs and doing their performances, when another opportunity struck.
“The woman who ran the company, her son wanted to do what I do, so that’s when I started doing Youth Empowerment through songwriting coaching. I started helping young people learn how to express themselves through songwriting and singing.”
Ghaemmaghamy now has multiple clients, has toured the US, and has been a keynote speaker for TEDx on two occasions.
“I have always had this kind of idea that your growth happens outside your comfort zone, so I don’t like to live in my comfort zone,” she says.
Taking all her knowledge, experience and connections, the time soon came for a natural next step: compile her thoughts into a book.
Mental Health Sounds Like This, in Ghaemmaghamy‘s words, describes her process of what it looks like working with her clients and the exercises she uses, while also linking to her own musical journey and experiences.
And while she’s well behind the science of how the brain works and cites in the book studies on the positive impact music has, she’s not interested in being a therapist or dishing out therapy.
“Therapy’s job is to look at the past and how it plays into our present, a coach’s job is to look at the future and help bridge the gap between where we are at the moment to where we want to be,” she says.
“My hope is that this book sort of bridges the gap and fills in some of those blanks when it comes to how we understand our brains now, as it pertains to healing and mental health.”
Giving advice, Ghaemmaghamy says, can sometimes cause more harm than good because everybody is learning and evolving in different ways and with different personal circumstances. Music, she says, with its wide avenues and opportunities, creates a platform for expression.
“We’re constantly finding unhealed parts of ourselves, which can then be healed. There’s always another page or there’s always another song, right?”
Mental Health Sounds Like This releases tomorrow, July 27.
Mitchell Hageman joined the Herald’s entertainment and lifestyle team in 2024. He previously worked as a multimedia journalist for Hawke’s Bay Today.