Lorde gets emotional about pain in raw open letter to fans: 'I ache all the time'

Lorde is opening up about the emotional and physical pain she says she's been feeling in a letter she shared with her fans.

The New Zealand singer-songwriter penned a lengthy note posted to her Tumblr on Wednesday, sharing she's "living with heartbreak again" and hinting at a potential breakup.

Starting off simply with "Hey," the singer said she wants to address her audience with honesty. "I just finished writing you a long letter, catching you up on how I've been," she writes. "It ended neatly, tied with a little bow. I chose my words well, but I didn't tell the truth. So I’m starting again, gonna type and not look back, and send what comes out."

She said the heartache she's been living with is "different but the same."

"I ache all the time, I forget why and then remember. I’m not trying to hide from the pain, I understand now that pain isn’t something to hide from, that there’s actually great beauty in moving with it. But sometimes I’m sick of being with myself," she wrote.

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Her pain also extends beyond emotional to physical, she writes. "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.

The singer said her "gut isn't working properly, my skin is worse than ever, I've gotten sick half a dozen times. I realised earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it's something I never really learned how to do. I've been trying to teach myself that this year, but it's been hard actually, pretty confronting, has made me fully aware of all the times I ignored it or didn't give it what it needed, shamed it for a fight or flight response, took a handful of pills and pushed through."

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The singer also divulged that she "ate two handfuls of mushrooms" earlier this year, which she said gave her "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."

Lorde, who skyrocketed to fame with her 2013 hit "Royals" from her debut studio album "Pure Heroine," said she's been living an isolated life in London since May. "Things feel clear here. I haven't seen many friends; mostly, I'm alone with my thoughts. I go swimming, I go to work, I walk home or take the train, I eat in my kitchen, I go to bed thinking about what I'm making," she wrote. "I'm starting to miss my friends and family, like a vitamin I'm deficient in."

And despite her "grand plans" to attend the upcoming Paris Fashion Week, Lorde said she pulled out of going. "At the start of my career I promised myself I’d never be one of the people in the light smiling if it wasn't real." The singer did, however, embark on a European festival tour this summer, sharing behind-the-scenes and onstage photos in her post.

"It might seem funny or be easy to forget, but I make records because I need to," wrote the singer, who released her most recent album "Solar Power" in 2021. "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. 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."

The singer wove in some advocacy into her letter as well, promoting Māori mental health organization The Kindness Institute "that has recently lost government funding." Acknowledging that "pop stars asking people to donate sux," she suggested "if you work at a good sized company maybe you can wrangle a donation from your employers?! I’m gonna email my record company about it."

Lorde, real name Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, asked her fans to take care of themselves, signing the letter "E."

"Don't worry about me, I still laugh every day, it's all moving, even when it goes slow. I've accepted the mission — I have a self to recover."

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