Lady Gaga Describes How She Dealt With Depression After Her ‘Joanne’ Tour

Lady Gaga’s Chromatica is a cathartic dance-pop album, but the road to it wasn’t easy. In a new Billboard profile, Gaga describes how she dealt with the depression she felt following her Joanne tour.

Gaga said that after getting off the road, she “used to wake up every day and remember I was Lady Gaga — and then I would get depressed.” She said she was reluctant to leave the house and had not yet dealt with her fame and “idea of her every waking move being available for public consumption” on an emotional level, saying, “I was peeling all the layers of the onion in therapy, so as you dig deeper, you get closer to the core, and the core of the onion stinks.”

The feature goes on to note, “Instead of working through the discomfort, she resisted it. She’d spend hours outside chain-smoking and crying, wondering why she couldn’t flip the switch inside of her back on.” Gaga said, “My existence in and of itself was a threat to me. I thought about really dark sh*t every single day.”

She noted that when friends tried to help her out, she pulled the “Lady Gaga card”: “It’s the one where you go, ‘I’m Lady Gaga, you don’t understand what it feels like, I want to dress how I want and be who I am without people noticing, why does everybody have to notice, I’m so sad, I don’t even know why anymore, why are you making me talk about it?’”

Gaga said songwriting was helpful for her, as there would be moments when she would see her old self: “I would cry and go, ‘There it is — hi! How’s it going? Why do you got to hide?’” This process gradually helped her find her way to a better place.

“If there’s one glimmer inside you, celebrate it,” Gaga said. “When you find another one, celebrate it. One more? Call a friend: ‘I did this today. I’m winning.’”

Read the full feature here.