I love it when super successful people admit how crappy they feel. I know, that must sound awful. I am not taking pleasure in their pain, of course; I just like when the illusion that money and fame equate to happiness 24 hours a day, 365 days a year gets shattered. We all fall into the trap of assuming celebrities’ lives are perfect and the endless access to their filtered (both in lighting and picture selection) Instagram feeds only serves to further aggravate our misconception.
So when Lady Gaga was super honest about her daily battle with anxiety and depression in the pages of Billboard magazine, I applauded her. (And you know she loves it when we do that.) She points out what I think a lot of us learn in early sobriety when we can no longer numb our emotions with our drug of choice: feeling depressed, anxious, or any other emotion with a negative connotation on a regular basis is a common human condition.
Grammys and Good Deeds
Lady Gaga is already an entertainment powerhouse but add mental health advocate to her resume, too. Her 2012 brainchild, the Born This Way Foundation, was created with the intention of helping teenagers in pain. And it seems like it’s “pain” in the broadest sense of the word, from kids who suffered sexual abuse to those who are struggling with gender identity. The idea was to speak to the fans who would ask her how she powered through despite her own personal demons and also to let them know they weren’t alone. There was even a Born Brave Bus tour which, according to Billboard, served as “a pop-up resource center that drew 150,000 visitors in two years.” Now the foundation is partnering with both Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and Elton John’s AIDS Foundation to expand its purpose.
Dropping the Poker Face
Both with her foundation and as an artist, Lady Gaga’s mission has become two-fold. Yes, she is helping those with certain identifiable issues but she’s also acknowledging the overall “compare and despair” culture our society has manifested and how it it only serves to not only make us feel worse but then to also make us feel weird for feeling worse. Gaga told Billboard, “They [kids]don’t understand why they’re so sad. There are scientific reasons, which the foundation researches, why you feel sad when you look at your phone all day.” Honestly, I don’t think adults understand it either.
So many of us have it instilled from a young age that if you don’t feel good all the time, something’s wrong. And when we see what everyone we know is doing through our phones, we have this warped perception that their lives are amazing and ours are shit. What I think is interesting is, EVERYONE I KNOW FEELS THIS WAY. Yet we all keep doing it. It’s like we’ve all collectively decided to make each other feel inadequate through this unspoken social media life tapestry. Facebook has become a virtual, judge-worthy resume for artists and a public scrapbook for baby makers.
It’s not just social media of course. The whole Internet is kind of a cesspool now. Checking the news in the morning is a sure fire way to get the negative head space up and running for the day. My favorite quote from Gaga about this? “The internet is a toilet. It is. It used to be a fantastic resource—but you have to sort through shit to find the good stuff.” Sing it, Lady G. (No, seriously, can your next single be called “Alejandro: The Sewage Sifter?”)
Just Dance…Into All Our Heats and Minds
Say what you will about her fashion choices (which have toned down considerably as of late): the woman makes good points. And her music speaks to all of it. When asked about the boundaries for an artist’s social responsibility, Gaga basically says that there are none. Social advocacy is sort of part of the artist’s job description in our current climate.
What I really love is her decision to keep it real. She is trying to open up the public conversation about mental health by throwing her own “crazy” hat into the ring first. I am a 32-year-old woman with years of self-help books, therapy and anti-depressants under my belt and I still wrongfully assume on my worst of days that it would all be okay if only I was richer, prettier and more successful. When a worldwide mega star of Gaga’s level essentially says, “Nope, not true” it gives me an odd sense of relief. Hopefully, with icons spewing this truth to people still young and impressionable, it won’t take them as long to believe it.
Photo Courtesy of proacguy1 from Montreal, Canada [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons (resized and cropped)
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