Lorde is telling the truth about how she’s really been — and it isn’t pretty, nor authentic to the neat long letter she previously wrote to fans.
The 26-year-old, who launched her career with the 2012 hit “Royals,” said, “I ache all the time,” and shared her relationship status and how she feels stifled by social media, and revealed her decision to break up with a certain medication she has been taking for more than a decade.
“I chose my words well, but I didn’t tell the truth. So I’m starting again, gonna type and not look back, and send what comes out,” the singer-songwriter wrote Wednesday in a cryptic newsletter updating her followers on her physical and mental health. She got real about her feelings, creative doldrums and feeling lost in the daily grind, relaying that work and fame had been taking a toll on her. She also shared recent photos, her current reads and plugged the Kindness Institute, a mental health resource for Maori youth that recently lost government funding.
But she attempted to end the somber check-in on a positive note.
“Hope you’re taking care of yourself. Don’t worry about me, I still laugh every day, it’s all moving, even when it goes slow. I’ve accepted the mission — I have a self to recover,” she concluded the update.
Fans interpreted the singer’s bittersweet candor as a tease to new music, even though she didn’t explicitly announce any forthcoming projects.
The New Zealander, real name Ella Yelich-O’Connor, said she’s been living in London since May but missed home. And she’s “living with heartbreak again” after apparently breaking up with Justin Warren, 42, whom she had been dating since 2015.
“[The heartbreak is] different but the same. I ache all the time, I forget why and then remember. I’m not trying to hide from the pain, I understand now that pain isn’t something to hide from, that there’s actually great beauty in moving with it. But sometimes I’m sick of being with myself,” she wrote.
The two-time Grammy Award winner said she eats chocolate to try to “manipulate the endorphins” and bring back “the sweet happiness of Easter morning.”
“I sit in the time machine and wait for it to move, but it hasn’t been invented yet,” Lorde wrote, adding, “My body is really inflamed, it’s trying to tell me something and I’m trying to support it but nothing seems to help and I get frustrated.
“My gut isn’t working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I’ve gotten sick half a dozen times,” she continued. “I realised earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it’s something I never really learned how to do. I’ve been trying to teach myself that this year, but it’s been hard actually, pretty confronting, has made me fully aware of all the times I ignored it or didn’t give it what it needed, shamed it for a fight or flight response, took a handful of pills and pushed through.
“The little yellow pill I took every morning for thousands of mornings since I was 15, I stopped taking it 5 days ago. Gonna see how it goes,” she added.
The “Team” singer then turned her missive to the trappings of social media, looking at the “beautiful people” who sing to her and those toting “the right bag, the right sunglasses.”
