Singer Lady Gaga (New York, 39 years old) has stood out in the music industry, not only for her voice, but also for being unique and different. But his quirk wasn’t always celebrated, he suffered bullying at school, to the point that her classmates created a Facebook group with the name “Stefani Germanotta (her real name), you will never be famous”, to humiliate her. Years later, when she began her career, Gaga was raped at the age of 19 by her music producer, according to what she has said in the past. In addition, he suffers from fibromyalgia, a disease with no cure that causes intense pain throughout the body. Despite this, the singer and actress has become known for speaking openly and raising awareness about mental health issues. Recently, in a magazine interview Rolling Stone published this Thursday, revealed one of the most difficult moments of his career, in which, as he himself describes, he faced mental health problems: “I recorded a star is born under the influence of lithium”. Lithium is a very thin alkaline metal that has proven effective in the treatment of mania and depression, i.e. as a mood stabilizer.
While Gaga was in one of her best professional moments – she was chosen to head the halftime show at the Super Bowl and awarded multiple Golden Globes and an Oscar for her film with Bradley Cooper – her mental health got increasingly worse. It was between the end of filming the film and the world tour of his album Joanne, which began in August 2017, when he realized he needed help and says he experienced a psychotic break. “There was a day when my sister told me: ‘I don’t recognize my sister anymore,’” she says in the interview. “And I canceled the tour. One day I checked myself into hospital for psychiatric treatment. I needed a break. I couldn’t do anything… I completely collapsed. It was really scary. There was a moment when I thought I wouldn’t be able to recover… I feel very lucky to be alive. I know it sounds dramatic, but we know how it can end.”
The singer and actress now feels good, considers herself “a whole and healthy person” and attributes much of this to her boyfriend, Michael Polansky, who sees her not as the great Gaga, but as Stefani. “Being in love with someone who cares about the real me has made a big difference,” says the former boyfriend of actor Taylor Kinney. But what really helped her was self-discovery: “How do you learn to be yourself with someone, when you can’t be yourself with anyone?” he reflects.
The artist is neither Gaga nor Stefani, but a fusion of both and has learned that, although “suffering is good for art, it is not good for art at all”. “Lady Gaga is the person who created Lady Gaga,” and explains, “I think I feel more relaxed about all of this. I mean, I’m Lady Gaga. You know, that idea that it has to be something specific? I think that’s an old story that I’ve told myself. And I don’t care what they call me anymore. I’m just me,” she concludes in the interview.
Last March he released the album chaos, an album that was nominated in seven Grammy Award categories, including album of the year. This was Gaga’s most personal work, and this is how she explained it on her Instagram profile: “This album was my way of understanding how to breathe in the middle of a storm – actually, you just keep inhaling all the wind while praying for the storm to end. CHAOS “It is my personal chaos, born of intuition, sometimes clear and other times completely broken, but always created with the desire to strengthen my voice,” she shared with her more than 60 million followers. And he added: “I’ve talked about it a lot CHAOS like a collection of gothic dreams and, in a way, Lady Gaga was the first of these. It has always been an expression of my human reality. What does it feel like to feel like you’re floating away from yourself? What does it feel like to re-enter your body? What if I just want to fade into someone else to heal everything and maybe never come back? What if I don’t want to define myself? What if I tried?”
