Katy Perry Said It Was Liberating to Realize She Knows ‘Nothing’

Katy Perry has put out music for years and has reinvented herself in various ways for each release. She said she created the character of Katy Perry early in her career and used it as a protective shield. When she released her album Witness in 2017, though, she felt she was finally putting her true self in front of the public. With this vulnerability came a realization that she knew “nothing.”

Katy Perry said she started from scratch with her album ‘Witness’

After the 2016 election, Perry said she had an awakening about the misogyny she faced in her past. She said this made her want to dig deeper into the world around her and show a more authentic version of herself to the public. With these changes, came a number of revelations. A prominent one was that Perry began to embrace the idea that she knew nothing.

“Every day when I think I know something, the universe shows me that I need to learn another lesson,” she told The New York Times. “So I stand here today, more so than any other day, saying I know nothing. I literally know nothing.”

This realization wasn’t daunting to her. Instead, she embraced it.

“I feel very empowered,” she said, “extremely liberated, liberated from the conditioning of the way I used to think, spiritually liberated, politically liberated, sexually liberated, liberated from things that don’t serve me.”

She said she created a character early in her music career

Years before this, Perry said the idea of showing her true self to the world terrified her. To protect herself, she created a character to put distance between herself and the public.

“A lot of people are living in fear from something that happened in their childhood, or some form of PTSD they picked up along the way, and I created this wonderful character called Katy Perry that I very much am, and can step into all the time, but I created that character out of protection,” she told The Guardian.

She didn’t think people would accept her as she was.

“I was scared that if you saw me, Katheryn Hudson, the girl wearing the Bioré strip on my nose, you’d be like, ‘that’s not glamorous,’” she said. “It was me going, ‘OK, I’ve been upset my whole childhood so I’m going to show the world I am something, that I am going to do something and that I am enough.’”

Katy Perry is entering into a new era with an upcoming album

After years without putting out music, Perry plans to release her sixth studio album, 143, in September. Perry said she hopes the dance-pop album will promote feelings of love.

“I set out to create a bold, exuberant, celebratory dance-pop album with the symbolic 143 numerical expression of love as a throughline message,” she said, per Variety.

So far, she has released the single “Woman’s World,” which has fared poorly with fans and critics alike.