Lorde has always kept it 100 with her fans, and in a brutally honest letter posted to her Tumblr on Wednesday (Sept. 20), she opened up about what she said has been a very challenging year. The long note delves into the physical and emotional pain the 26-year-old singer said she’s endured recently, including that she’s is “living with heartbreak again.”
Though Lorde didn’t go into specifics about the cause of the heartbreak, she explained, “It’s different but the same. I ache all the time, I forget why and then remember. I’m not trying to hide from the pain, I understand now that pain isn’t something to hide from, that there’s actually great beauty in moving with it. But sometimes I’m sick of being with myself. I eat chocolate to try and manipulate the endorphins, bring back the sweet happiness of Easter morning. I sit in the time machine and wait for it to move, but it hasn’t been invented yet.”
Lorde said she’s been in London since May, where “things feel clear,” despite her describing not seeing her friends and mostly spending her time swimming, working, taking the train, walking and eating meals in her kitchen, alone with her thoughts. “I go to bed thinking about what I’m making. I’m starting to miss my friends and family, like a vitamin I’m deficient in. Soon I’ll be going back to New York, and then home,” said the New Zealand-bred star.
She shared that her pain is also physical, detailing that her body is “really inflamed,” and that she thinks it is “trying to tell me something and I’m trying to support it but nothing seems to help and I get frustrated. My gut isn’t working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I’ve gotten sick half a dozen times. I realised earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it’s something I never really learned how to do. I’ve been trying to teach myself that this year, but it’s been hard actually, pretty confronting, has made me fully aware of all the times I ignored it or didn’t give it what it needed, shamed it for a fight or flight response, took a handful of pills and pushed through.”
Lorde said that she had “grand plans” to attend next week’s Paris Fashion Week festivities, but pulled out because, “I promised myself I’d never be one of the people in the light smiling if it wasn’t real.” The note revealed that earlier this year the singer “ate two handfuls of mushrooms” that she said gave her a lot of information “about what my body had been through in our time so far, what it needed, where God was and where God wasn’t; I felt in my bones how destabilising it is to leave home and start a new life the way I did. I also saw that my body is completely magnificent, and that hating it is as futile as hating a tree; that I truly, truly love doing my job, and that my life is like a beautiful tapestry, and every inch of it is precious and has meaning.”
And though she said she enjoyed her recent run of European tour dates — and the cool way fans seemed to notice how she had changed up the shows’ setlists and arrangements — Lorde also admitted that doing the things she loves is sometimes painful.
“It might seem funny or be easy to forget, but I make records because I need to,” she said. “The songs are spells; a spell to let go of something, a spell to unlock a door. Every time I put something into words just as I see it, set it to the right music, a knot comes loose in me. But it hurts too, confronting the knots. I’ve made enough records to know that this feeling of my skin coming off is part of it. I know I’m gonna look back on this year with fondness and a bit of awe, knowing it was the year that locked everything into place, the year that transitioned me from my childhood working decade to the one that comes next — one that even through all this, I’m so excited for. It’s just hard when you’re in it.”
Lorde teased two new songs during a headlining gig at the Boardmasters Festival in the U.K. last month, which fans have suggested are titled “Silver Moon” and “Invisible Ink,” signaling the first fresh tracks since her third studio album, 2021’s Solar Power.
Check out Lorde’s note below, including some luminous pictures from the European shows.
