Camila Cabello says she struggled with a 'vulnerability hangover' after getting honest on her latest album
Camila Cabello isn’t hiding her mental health struggles.
The “Bam Bam” singer, who released her latest album Psychofreak in April, spoke to Cosmopolitan U.K. for its August cover story, online now, about learning to manage her anxiety and OCD symptoms, which began when she was a teenager.
“It was something I just lived with. I was used to having functioning anxiety that got really bad every half a year,” she told the magazine. “Then I started opening up to friends, and I realized how much suffering and neuroses are normal, and that we’re all bats**t crazy in our own way, but when it keeps you from having healthy relationships and being more often than not in a relatively stable place, that I needed to seek out some therapy.”
The 25-year-old said that talking about her anxiety made her recognize that it was making her life “harder than it is for other people.” Now, Cabello “loves therapy.”
“I think pretending is a form of psychological torture and brings the most anxiety,” she said. “We do that so much in our society and culture. We’re constantly hustling and putting on a smile when we don’t feel good.”
Though Cabello is open with her therapist, she said she still stressed over how vulnerable she is with fans through her song lyrics — though ultimately, she learned she doesn’t need to be so worried about how people will perceive her.
“I’d just said all these crazy f**king things like, ‘When we’re making love, I want to be there.’ I said so many other things that didn’t even make it into the song. I thought, ‘Is everyone going to think I’m a weirdo?’ The ‘vulnerability hangover’ is so real, which is why the people you have around you are so important,” she recalled of making her latest album. “Because if someone were to say, ‘Yeah, you shouldn’t have said that, that’s really weird,’ it would break my heart and I would probably hide under the covers for a week. But that’s never happened before. Every single time I’ve been vulnerable, someone has said, ‘That’s not weird, that’s totally normal.’”
Cabello has spoken about telling her truth before. In an interview with Wondermind, the Cinderella actress sat down with co-founder Selena Gomez to discuss how talking about mental health issues can be healing.
"When you talk about it and people are like, 'Oh yeah, that makes sense,' it's like, Oh wow, there's no big secret to hide,” the Fifth Harmony alum shared. “Once I opened up, these people didn't leave me. That was the most healing thing. Then, from having the songs come out and me being able to talk about those things in interviews, it feels like they don't hold so much power for me anymore, whereas before they really held all the power in my life.”
She added that it’s time to shut down old stigmas about struggling with mental health.
"I feel like it [the stigma] exists even more in the older generations. People like my parents' age have such shame about needing therapy or feeling anxiety. The stigma around saying that you need help is something that frustrates me because sometimes people can be like, 'No, I don't need that, I just need free time,' or whatever," she explained. "Obviously that's valid, but just because you're in therapy doesn't mean something is more wrong with you than other people. We all have things that we could work on, we all have tools that we could learn, and it doesn't mean that you're 'crazy' or ill."
Want lifestyle and wellness news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Life’s newsletter.
