Camila Cabello Says She Had ‘Functioning Anxiety’
Camila Cabello, former member of the music group Fifth Harmony, discussed her career and what the journey to stardom was like. She also shared her experience with anxiety and how she got to a better place.
Camila Cabello’s parents recognized her talent at a young age
Cabello began singing as a child. Her parents knew right away she had a gift. However, she says she would become upset if her parents asked her to sing in front of people.
‘I would cry if my parents asked me to sing in front of their friends,’ she tells Cosmopolitan. “I don’t know if I knew I was a good singer, but I really liked to sing and, whenever I did, it didn’t get a terrible response, so I just kept doing it.”
When she was older, Cabello posted performances of herself singing covers of popular artists on YouTube. However, she would make sure her face couldn’t be seen, reports Cosmopolitan. She also sometimes deleted a video soon after posting it.
Cabello’s singing career took off after appearing on X Factor. Her former group, Fifth Harmony, was created from the competition show (with the help of Simon Cowell and LA Reid). The group proved to be wildly successful, but Cabello decided to leave the group in 2016.
Camila Cabello says she had ‘functioning anxiety’
Cabello says it’s important to have people around you that you can be vulnerable with and who support you. She says not having a strong support unit or having someone tell her that she shouldn’t have shared something would “break” her heart.
“The ‘vulnerability hangover’ is so real, which is why the people you have around you are so important,” says Cabello in her Cosmopolitan interview. “Because if someone were to say, ‘Yeah, you shouldn’t have said that; that’s really weird,’ it would break my heart and I would probably hide under the covers for a week. But that’s never happened before. Every single time I’ve been vulnerable, someone has said, ‘That’s not weird, that’s totally normal.’”
Camila Cabello shares her experience with anxiety
Cabello reveals she had bouts of anxiety during her teens and twenties. She says she tried her best to manage it, but she reached a point where that became difficult. She realized it was time to seek professional help.
“It was something I just lived with,” she tells Cosmopolitan. “I was used to having functioning anxiety that got really bad every half a year. Then I started opening up to friends.”
Cabello says talking about what she was experiencing showed her that she wasn’t weird because she was having an issue with her mental health. She finally understood it was OK not to be OK.
“I realized how much suffering and neuroses are normal, and that we’re all bats**t crazy in our own way, but when it keeps you from having healthy relationships and being more often than not in a relatively stable place, that I needed to seek out some therapy. Talking about it really helped me realize, “’Oh, I think this is making my life harder than it is for other people.”’
How to get help: In the U.S. and Canada, text the Crisis Text Line at 741741 to reach a crisis counselor for support.
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