Camila Cabello is getting real about how therapy changed her life.
The “Havana” singer recently sat down in a candid interview with the Daily Pop’s Justin Sylvester, speaking about struggling with severe anxiety following her split with Shawn Mendes, and how it was beginning to threaten her artistry before she found help.
“My life was so bad and so painful that I was like, ‘If you tell me that eating s—t off the ground will make me feel better, I will do it,'” Cabello said. “I was like, ‘Yes, of course, therapy. All of it.'”
“There was a time where my anxiety felt so bad, I was like, ‘I don’t feel like I can go in the studio. I don’t feel like I can work. I don’t know,'” she added. “And so, the only way for me to go to work every day was to be honest and be myself. And if I didn’t go to work and was just waiting for myself to feel better before I did that … it’s just a paralyzing feeling.”
Cabello’s third studio album, Familia, drops on April 8. As she explained, writing the album was an opportunity to turn all that pain into music.
“I just felt so vulnerable, it was so hard talking about those things,” she said of writing the album. “It was like the first time I talked about those things that I’d only ever talked to my mom and my therapist about.”
Writing aside, the singer has never shied away from speaking her mind.
Earlier this week, Cabello spoke about how she still struggles with body insecurities when being photographed in a bikini. She also called out body-shamers in a lengthy note on Instagram.
In the note, the singer said being photographed in a swimsuit has always left her feeling “super-vulnerable and unprepared” — feelings that came bubbling up when she was recently photographed by paparazzi on a Miami beach.
“I held my core so tight my abs hurt and didn’t breathe and barely smiled and was so self-conscious of where the paps were the whole time I couldn’t let go and relax and do what we’re meant to do when we go out in nature,” she wrote, adding that she also avoided eating “anything too heavy” before hitting the beach.
“I tried to pretend they weren’t there but I couldn’t and I held my breath from my sun chair to the ocean,” she continued. “I knew I looked ‘good’ in the pictures and thought I would feel accomplished and yet I’ve never had a worse time at the beach. I felt the emptiness and sadness of our culture’s thoughts that became my thoughts.”
