If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Manhattan plastic surgeon with a scalpel in one hand and a guitar in the other decides to rewrite her entire life at 57, the answer is JeLa, an artist who proves it’s never too late to reinvent yourself or finally chase the dream you’ve been quietly feeding for decades.
Between running a busy surgical practice, raising three kids, and refusing to be defined by anyone’s timeline but her own, she has somehow found the time—and the nerve—to dive headfirst into the music career she’s been building in the margins of her life for twenty years.
Her new single, “Oh, Honestly,” arrives as the latest chapter in a story that’s equal parts resilience, reinvention, and emotional triage. Inspired by therapy sessions, late-night relationship panic spirals, and that very specific brand of “Did I just sabotage my own happiness again?” chaos.
The song is indie-pop to its core, testing love because you never learned how to trust it. JeLa treats emotional wounds the same way she treats physical ones, with precision, empathy, and an uncanny ability to locate the tender spots before you even know they’re bruised. Of course, JeLa didn’t become a healer overnight. After surviving a deeply abusive childhood, she carried the fallout well into adulthood with CPTSD, an eating disorder, self-harm, and the kind of invisible injuries no surgery can stitch shut. Music became her first real instrument of survival, a place to put feelings too sharp to hold and too heavy to ignore. And unlike the medical textbooks she mastered, songwriting didn’t demand perfect knowledge, just five guitar chords and the courage to tell the truth. In her thirties and forties, as she began reckoning with childhood trauma, those songs became her way back to herself.
This is exactly where “Oh, Honestly” stands, at the intersection of emotional scar tissue and the possibility of something better. The track captures the fear of safety, the urge to test loyalty, and the shock of realizing someone stayed anyway, a moment many trauma survivors know too well. It says healing isn’t always graceful; sometimes it looks like a tear-stained apology, sometimes like a partner who doesn’t flinch, and sometimes like finally admitting that staying can be just as brave as leaving.
As JeLa continues releasing new music, including the upcoming “How to Love,” she keeps making a place for herself in the music scene. Part surgeon, part storyteller, but in the end, fully human. She isn’t limited by age, trauma, or the expectations of anyone who thinks dreams have expiration dates. In her world, healing is holistic; sometimes it comes from a skilled pair of hands in an operating room, and other times it comes from a voice telling you the truth you weren’t ready to hear. “Oh, Honestly” is exactly that truth with a force that feels redemptive and grounding, something you can lean on while you find your balance
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