While many of us know Lizzo to be ~100% that bitch,~ she didn’t always feel that way about herself. In fact, it was quite the opposite growing up.
The 31-year-old exudes confidence now, but it was a journey for her to get there. “I had an insecurity about what a star looks like, or what a front-person looks like,” she told ELLE for their October issue. “I felt like I was inadequate; I felt like I wasn’t enough; I felt like people didn’t want to look at me and listen to what I had to say.”
The “Truth Hurts” singer often uses her platform to encourage fans to accept themselves as they are because she wishes someone who looked like her had done the same when she was a kid. “I take self-love very seriously,” she told the outlet. “And I take it seriously because when I was younger, I wanted to change everything about myself. I didn’t love who I was. And the reason I didn’t love who I was is because I was told I wasn’t lovable by the media, by [people at] school, by not seeing myself in beauty ads, by not seeing myself in television … by lack of representation.”
“My self-hatred got so bad that I was fantasizing about being other people,” she added. “But you can’t live your life trying to be somebody else. What’s the point?”
The chart-topping artist also confessed that she would distance herself from her loved ones as a way to cope. “I was the worst communicator, emotionally, when I was younger. I would stop talking to my family; I would stop talking to my friends,” she said. “I would go deeper and deeper into that dark place, and the deeper I went, the harder it was to reach out of it.”
However, that’s no longer the case, especially since Lizzo uses music to shine a light on what matters to her. You go, girl!