Meghan Trainor is flying high with her confident new single, “No Excuses,” but the last few years have been a struggle for the newly minted pop star. A serious problem with her vocal chords threatened to derail her career for good, triggering an extensive bout with depression and mental illness. In a new interview with The Sun, the 24-year-old opens up about her long road back to the top.
“I thought, ‘My God, is it going to be over for me forever?’” she says now of her health woes. “I fell into a crazy, deep hole of depression and anxiety.”
At their most severe, Trainor’s mental health battles lead to her withdrawing into her home for extended periods. “I was the poster child of ‘I’m brave and I love who I am and I’m here,’” she says. “And [now] I was the opposite. I was crumbling in my bed, like, ‘I want to stay here and get through.”
She says that some of her episodes would last for three days on end. “I was crippled and had this pain. Eventually I was going to doctors, psychologists and therapists and I was like, ‘My back feels like someone has a flame to it, I’m not sure if I’m going crazy.’ And I’m feeling like I’m crazy, losing my mind.”
She detailed even more troubling moments, including sensory hallucinations — including one that occurred while in line at a drug store.
“You know, moments like that I had, dissociation with your body and you think you’re schizophrenic — you’re seeing things. I was sitting in my bathroom and the lights turned yellow. In those moments, you’re terrified, you feel alone. You feel like there’s something wrong with you and you’re embarrassed to talk about it. No one can help you. It’s your brain. It’s chemicals.”
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Trainor recalls that her rock bottom occurred one night when she visited an emergency room for what she thought was a food allergy. Complaining of tightened throat and breathing problems, medical personnel informed her that she was in the midst of “a full-blown panic attack.”
“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘This is your brain tricking you, telling you that your throat…’”
It was then that she realized that the problems were, in a very literal sense, in her head. “You feel like you have the flu. You’re like, ‘How is my brain doing this? How does it have that much power over me?’”
She credits her therapy, and the love of her fiancé, Daryl Sabara, with helping her through her troubling spell. “I took time off. I took time for me.”
Article source: http://people.com/music/meghan-trainor-deep-hole-depression-anxiety-health-woes/