Katy Perry went through an "emotional, spiritual, psychological journey" to help her come to terms with criticism.
The 35-year-old singer – who is currently expecting her first child with her fiancé Orlando Bloom – says she struggled to keep up her "self-love" persona when it came to facing her critics, because she found it hard to be confident without feeding on the "admiration" of her fans.
And to find true self-love, Katy embarked on journey to do some "heavy, emotional, psychological lifting", which allowed her to cope without constant "validation".
She said: "I had to go to some pretty dark places and face a lot of things I didn’t want to face. And that’s been a process for me for about two and a half years. I did some heavy, emotional, psychological lifting.
"It was unstable times because I was this girl that was all self-love. It was easy for me to say that when I had such admiration coming from the outside and then, when I didn’t get the same type of admiration or my life kind of shifted, even by a degree professionally, it was like a big seismic shift.
"The rollercoaster had only ever been up. And if you navigate a boat a degree different, you land on a different continent. It may not have been that big to everyone else. But to me it was like, ‘Oh God, this is intense.’ I basically had the rug of validation pulled from underneath me. And that was necessary to really go on this emotional, spiritual, psychological journey that I went through."
Although Katy has now come out the other side of her dark times, she is still learning how to "reflect" and to "appreciate" the simple things, which she credits the current coronavirus pandemic with helping her achieve.
Speaking to Zane Lowe on ‘New Music Daily’ on Apple Music, the ‘Daisies’ singer said: "I think it’s been a time to reflect and a time that we realise maybe we took a lot of things for granted and didn’t have the gratitude about certain simple things. And hopefully, when we all get out of this, we will appreciate and be grateful for our freedom. And we will go after life like never before knowing that it can be taken all away."
Katy Perry went on an ’emotional journey’ after losing ‘validation’
