Katy Perry is opening up about a difficult time in her life following a brief split from her now-fiancé, Orlando Bloom, in 2017. In a new interview with SiriusXM’s CBC Radio One, the pregnant singer admitted that after her breakup and the underwhelming reaction to her album Witness just a few months later, she struggled with her mental health.
“I lost my smile,” Perry said. “I don’t know if my smile was fully authentically mine, but I was riding on the high of a smile for a long time, which was, you know, the validation and love and admiration from the outside world and then that shifted.” Having the “smallest shift” in her upward career trajectory felt “seismic,” the singer continued.
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“I had given so much out, and it literally kind of broke me in half,” she said. “I had broken up with my boyfriend, who is now my baby daddy-to-be, and then I was like, excited about flying high off the next record and the record didn’t get me high anymore … well, the validation didn’t get me high. … And so I crashed. I just crashed.”
Looking back now, the American Idol judge thinks this difficult period was a “necessary brokenness” she had to overcome to stop living life like “a thirsty pop star.” Now, she relies on gratitude to deal with her negative emotions, she explained.
“Gratitude is probably the thing that saved my life, because if I didn’t find that, I would have wallowed in my own sadness and probably just jumped,” she said. “But I found the ways to be grateful. … If things get really, really hard, when I’m in a s—y mood — which, I can swing — I just walk around and go, ‘I’m grateful, I’m grateful!’ Even though I am in a s—y mood, I am grateful. And that’s been my light at the end of the tunnel.”
Perry told Vogue India in January she had been doing a lot of “mental, spiritual and emotional work” since that time in her life, explaining, “The biggest lie we’ve ever been told as artists is that we have to stay in pain to create. I don’t want to be in emotional pain my whole life in order to write songs.”
She also praised Bloom as a “sage” in their relationship, which is different than all the ones she previously had. “It’s exhausting, but we really hold each other accountable,” she said at the time. “I’ve never had a partner who was willing to go on an emotional and spiritual journey like Orlando. It’s challenging because you’re facing all the things you don’t like about yourself. It’s like a never-ending cleanse.”
If you or someone you know are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741.
