In the two years since Lorde delivered her third album Solar Power, she’s done what most pop stars do in similar situations: toured the world performing her music. That long jaunt wrapped in March, so she’s got some time to update fans via email about what’s going on, as she likes to.
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This week, she sent a letter that delved into her own health as well as the rough outlines of some upcoming creative pursuits.
“My body is really inflamed, it’s trying to tell me something and I’m trying to support it but nothing seems to help and I get frustrated,” she writes, as preserved online by a Lorde fan Tumblr account. “My gut isn’t working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I’ve gotten sick half a dozen times.”
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Notably, Lorde also mentions a medication she’s taken for the last 11 years — since she was a teenager — and how she’s only recently gone off of it: “The little yellow pill I took every morning for thousands of mornings since I was 15, I stopped taking it 5 days ago. Gonna see how it goes.” She didn’t go into detail about specific diagnoses.
Lorde devoted a good portion of the update, sent from London, to talking about her relationship to her body and her wellness.
“Earlier this year, I ate two handfuls of mushrooms, solid doses that tasted like green dirt. I got 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,” she wrote. “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.”
As for when she might be gearing up to release music, there’s more of a holistic answer to that one. “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,” she wrote.
“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.”
