Lizzo practices “self-love” to help keep depression at bay.
The 31-year-old rapper and singer has been open about her struggle with her mental health on social media in recent months and says her key to battling dark days is to tell herself she’s “beautiful” every day and to make sure she “communicates” with her loved ones.
She said: “I practice self-love. I look in the mirror and say, ‘I love you. You’re beautiful. You can do anything.’ Tell yourself that on your happy days so that you have the strength to tell yourself that on your darker days. Reaching out to people when you’re depressed is really hard; I would shut myself away from friends and family. So I’ve been working on communicating with the people who love me.”
Lizzo’s mental health took a turn for the worse in 2017 when she first released her single ‘Truth Hurts’, as she says the lack of response to the track – which was released over a year after she signed a major label deal with Atlantic Records in 2016 – left her wanting to quit her career.
She said: “The day I released ‘Truth Hurts’ was probably one of the darkest days I’ve had ever in my career. I remember thinking, ‘If I quit music now, nobody would notice. This is my best song ever, and nobody cares.’ I was like, ‘F**k it, I’m done.’ And a lot of people rallied; my producer, my publicist and my family, they were like, ‘Just keep going because this is the darkness before the dawn.’”
But in April this year, almost two years after the release of the track, ‘Truth Hurts’ rocketed into the Billboard Hot 100 after it was used in the Netflix rom-com ‘Someone Great’.
And now Lizzo says she’s managed to turn her “darkest days” into her “brightest triumph”.
She added to People magazine: “Who would have thunk?. What a moment in a movie can do for an artist is crazy. I had everything else: the hard work, the good music, touring – but then there’s that extra-special magic that nobody really knows what it is that can really change your life.
“Now the song that made me want to quit is the song that everyone’s falling in love with me for, which is such a testament to journeys: Your darkest day turns into your brightest triumph.”
Melissa Viviane Jefferson born on April 27, 1988, known professionally as Lizzo, is an American singer, rapper, and actress. The multi-talented act made it big when she performed on the BET Awards 2019 stage in June. The Detroit native is expected to appear in two movies Hustlers set for release later in 2019 and UglyDolls which came out in May.
