I wrote “Effortlessly” before I had ever come out about the fact that I had self-harmed. I was really nervous when I was writing the song, because I wasn’t sure, when it was released, if I was going to have had talked about it or not. That scared me and intimidated me a lot. So, I decided let’s just write about it — and hopefully, either I’m gonna have talked about it publicly by the time the album drops, or I’m not and then that’ll be the way I’ll start talking about it.
There’s lyrics in “Effortlessly” that are like, “I hold my breath to breathe, I hurt myself to feel.” It was just kind of my way of talking about self-harm, and I was really scared to do that. But then I did it, and I really like how it came out. As I said, that’s one of my favorite songs. So there’s a lot of things that if you listen to it closely, you’ll be able to be like, “Okay, this is what this is, what that is,” and so on and so forth.
One of the things I wanted to ask you about is, as someone who’s been very open about mental health, why it’s important for you to be so candid?
It’s very much a multifaceted answer I would give you. There’s a lot of talk about false perceptions on social media and how it can affect people negatively. I think there’s a lot of hyper-fixation on appearance, people are very hyper-fixated on the outside. Well, I think that a really big flaw.
A problem with social media is that we only put out what we think we want people to see. So, you know, I’ll scroll through my Instagram and I’ll see a couple that I’m friends with and they post this photo of them kissing, being so cute — and I’m like, I was literally watching you guys throw fucking plates at each other’s heads two days ago. You have to just remember it’s all nonsense at the end of the day, people are all putting on an act, and everyone would love to make their life seem perfect online, even though it’s not.
