By Rajie Kabil, Collective Evolution, November 4, 2015
I’m sure that I am not alone in saying that the music industry has always seemed a bit off. The way that some artist’s music is so fabricated, and their ‘look’ so seemingly over the top that we can’t help but feel like that’s not who they truly are. The camera and the online world share a similar quality… both can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. That feeling is further confirmed with Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, AKA Lady Gaga, speaking out about how her life in the music industry was feeling so shallow that she almost quit altogether. She speaks about how she got in touch with the root cause of her unhappiness.
Lady Gaga is presumably someone who ‘has it all.’ Fame, money, friends, fortune, legacy and more, yet she is still unhappy. Why is that? In her talk at Yale University’s Emotion Revolution Summit, which was organized by the Born This Way Foundation and the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, she expresses how promoting fragrances she didn’t like, going to parties and shaking hands with people she really didn’t care about, and making money for others while being overworked was so damaging to her passion and creativity, that she was losing her sense of self. There is SO much pressure put on music artists’ to do these things that have nothing to do with their talent and art but because it ‘just comes with the job’ it’s suppose to be OK? Gaga thinks not.
Recognizing this, she started doing something so simple to get herself back in alignment with what she truly wanted. She started saying “No.” By turning down photo opportunities, not going to events, refusing to be connected to causes she truly didn’t care about and more, Lady GaGa has slowly made her way back to who she really is.
She said, “…slowly but surely I started to remember who I am. And then you go home and you look in the mirror and and you think YES! I can go to bed with you, every night!” This is not an easy thing to do in general, but becomes even more daunting when one is being inauthentic in their life. Saying one thing but then doing another. It can create so much inner conflict that manifests in a number of different ways. For Lady Gaga, maybe it was her inability to feel good about who was being reflected back. Her main message speaks directly to how fabricated our lives can seem, especially on social media. This is the message I personally believe that Lady Gaga is trying to get across.
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