She Thought She Had Healed. Her Journals Told a Different Story.

There is a version of healing that looks a lot like survival. You get through the worst of it. You find your footing. You build a life that, from the outside, looks like evidence that you made it. And for a long time, you believe that too.

Dr. Jessica Turner believed it. She had survived depression and anxiety since childhood. She had made it through severe postpartum depression when her twin girls arrived in 2014. She had lost her veterinary school roommate to suicide. She had walked away from the only career she had ever imagined for herself, rebuilt her life around health and wellness coaching, launched a podcast, become a voice for mental health in the veterinary profession, and found, by any reasonable measure, the other side of the darkness.

And then she found her old journals.

Boxes of them, tucked away, holding the unfiltered record of a life she had been slowly rewriting in her memory. The words of her eleven-year-old self looked back at her from those pages — and what they revealed was not someone who had healed. What they revealed was someone who had learned, very early and very well, how to cope. How to perform okayness. How to fly just low enough that no one could see the cage.

That discovery became Blackbird.

The Book the Profession Needs Right Now

Named for the Beatles song that kept her company through the darkest nights of her life, Blackbird is Dr. Jessica Turner's most honest work yet. It is not a memoir of triumph. It is not a recovery story with a tidy ending. It is something far harder to write and far more valuable to read: a truthful account of what it actually looks like to live with depression and anxiety across a lifetime, told by someone who spent decades believing she had outrun it.

"This book is not about having overcome my darkness," Jessica says. "It is about facing what I had been avoiding — the patterns, the invisible threads, the coping mechanisms that looked like healing until I held them up to the light."

For the veterinary profession specifically, that message lands with particular weight. Veterinarians are trained to be the fixers. They are the ones with the answers, the ones who stay calm, the ones who hold it together in the exam room no matter what is happening inside. That identity, as Jessica has spent years pointing out, is one of the most dangerous things about working in this field. The very traits that make someone an exceptional veterinarian — the stoicism, the high standards, the relentless sense of responsibility — are the same traits that make it almost impossible to admit when you are not okay.

Blackbird gives those people permission to stop pretending. Not by telling them everything will be fine, but by sitting with them in the parts where it is not, and offering, as Jessica describes it, companionship in the darkness and practical tools for survival.

Your wings are waiting. But first, you have to face what has been keeping you grounded.

From Veterinarian to Lifeline

It has been several years since Dr. Turner made the most agonizing decision of her career, which was walking away from veterinary medicine in 2016. She never saw it coming. She had sacrificed years, money, and enormous amounts of herself to earn that DVM. The idea of doing anything else had simply never been part of the plan. She did end up going back to practice the end of 2023 and was able to fall love again with being a veterinarian.

But postpartum depression changed the plan. After a pregnancy complicated enough to require three months of hospitalization before the arrival of twin girls Adalynn and Annabelle, now joined by a third child, making Jessica a proud mom of three, she found herself rebuilding from the ground up. She turned to health and fitness not as a career move but as a survival strategy, a way of holding herself accountable during a period when everything felt precarious.

What she discovered was that when she talked about what she had been through, the PPD, the anxiety, the depression, the grief of losing a friend to suicide, people listened. Not just listened. They recognized themselves. They reached out. They told her she was describing their life.

That recognition became a calling. Over half of Jessica's coaching clients are veterinary moms, the population she describes as often hanging on by a thread, wishing someone would throw them a lifeline. She has made it her mission to be that lifeline, through her coaching practice, through her advocacy, and now through her book.

Living Well Comes to Vet Candy

Living Well with Dr. Jessica is exactly what the veterinary community has needed and rarely had: a space where mental health, physical wellness, and the specific pressures of working in this profession are treated as serious subjects by someone who has lived them from the inside.

Dr. Turner brings to the show something that no one else can replicate, credibility born from experience. She is not talking about veterinary burnout from a distance. She is a veterinarian who burned out, rebuilt herself, and came back to serve the people still in the fire.

To celebrate the release of Blackbird and honor the depth of conversation Jessica has been building with the Vet Candy community, Vet Candy Radio is hosting a Living Well marathon, a dedicated block of episodes from the show available now on our podcast channel. Whether you are new to Jessica's work or have been following her journey for years, this is the place to start.

Pull up the podcast. Pour something warm. And if you have been pretending you are already free, consider this your permission to stop.

The Mission Has Not Changed. The Reach Has.

When Jessica looks ahead, what she sees is not a quieter version of this work. It is a bigger one.

She is celebrating nearly four years of health and wellness coaching. She is serving mothers across the country, a significant portion of them veterinarians, many of them people who reached out because something she said made them feel less alone. She is mentoring other coaches. She is a published author. She is, by the measure of her own five-year vision articulated years ago, exactly where she said she would be.

Her father, an emergency medicine pediatrician who grew up poor in rural Louisiana, was told by family and teachers that he would never amount to anything, and graduated at the top of his medical class anyway, has always been her evidence that a way exists even when you are told there is none. His work ethic, his refusal to accept someone else's ceiling as his own, his steadfast support when Jessica decided to leave the profession: all of it lives in her work.

Her mission has always been the same. To share her story in a way that gives others hope for better days, permission to dream big, and a joy that holds even when everything around it is falling apart.

Blackbird is that mission in book form. And Vet Candy is proud to bring it to you.

Listen to the Living Well with Dr. Jessica marathon now on Vet Candy Radio.

Find it wherever you listen to podcasts and at myvetcandy.com

Blackbird by Dr. Jessica Turner is available here

Living Well with Dr. Jessica is part of the Vet Candy talk show and podcast family.  |  myvetcandy.com