Charli XCX talks living with anxiety during the coronavirus lockdown
Charli XCX has spoken candidly in a new interview about living with feelings of anxiety during the ongoing coronavirus lockdown.
The artist will release her latest project ‘How I’m Feeling Now’ on Friday (May 15), which has been written and recorded during the lockdown and includes the recently shared track ‘I Finally Understand’.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe recently about the making of the album, Charli talked about how she’s been faring mentally during the coronavirus crisis.
“It’s been up and down like most things during this time: especially the first two or three weeks I was very focused, really happy. I’d found my purpose in this time,” she said in reference to her new record. “I’d found something that I loved to do and I desired to do the second I woke up.
“And then like week four and now I feel anxious, and overall I just realised this quarantine time has kind of reconfirmed something that I already knew about myself, which is that I am a workaholic… I love my job, I want to do it all the time, but [with] a self-punishing [mentality] of like work-myself-into-the-ground, can’t sleep at night, punish myself if I don’t complete things that are on my list… get angry if things don’t go the way I want.”
Charli continued by saying that she’d been “extremely happy” to make the album as it had brought her and her fans “extremely close together”, but added that the process has left her questioning whether she will “ever be able to truly relax and switch my brain off”.
“And that probably doesn’t sound like that big of a deal to some people, but it’s really stressful because I wake up with a ball of anxiety in my chest most days, especially these past couple of weeks,” she said. “And I want to know: will that ever go away? And then also can I be happy without experiencing the flip side of what happiness is? The stress, the sadness, the rage.
“Can I balance myself out and just feel neutral? Or do I have to experience the highs and the lows? And I think that’s something that a lot of people are probably always going through, but particularly going through during this time. But yeah, that’s what I’m feeling, basically.”
The video for ‘Claws’, the first single from ‘How I’m Feeling Now’, was released earlier this month. Co-directed with Charlotte Rutherford, the clip utilises a green screen to create new worlds from the artist’s basement.
