Halsey, the 24-year-old pop star with 2 Grammy noms and 10 multiplatinum singles to her name, covers the October issue of Cosmopolitan. Inside, the imperfect pop star gets candid about her bipolar disorder and how music has helped her focus her energy.
Quotes:
On being “pretty regular”: “I’ll sometimes look at other artists who seem so larger-than-life and wonder, Am I not supposed to be here?”
On being an open book about her past: “I shared a lot about myself, assuming the world would be kind. And that hasn’t quite been the case.”
On being questioned -“Are you a crazy, rambunctious bad girl, or are you an activist, political, fund-raising philanthropist?”: “Like, how f*cking immune are you to the human experience? Sometimes I want to have really good sex and sometimes I want to save the world, and sometimes I might try to do both in the same day!”
On being a Libra and wanting everyone to love her: “That’s the problem: I’ll do what I want, knock down everyone in my path who says I shouldn’t, and then when people don’t like it, I’m like, ‘Why?!’”
On not being a picture-perfect pop star: “But I love that, because I wake up every day wild-eyed and spongy, trying to do things better than the last time.”
On how music has helped her manage her energy: “I have bipolar disorder, and I get bored of shit really quickly. Music is this thing that I get to focus all my chaotic energy into, and it’s not a void that doesn’t love me back. It’s been the only place I can direct all that and have something to show for it that tells me, ‘Hey, you’re not that bad.’ If my brain is a bunch of broken glass, I get to make it into a mosaic.”
On her identity as a poet: “It’s ironic having to explain to people that I’m a poet. It’d be like talking to Michael Jordan about baseball and saying, ‘Oh you’re gonna try basketball?’”
On the moment that zapped her back to life after her messy split from ex G-Eazy: “I was doing Good Morning America and I’m in a blonde wig and white patent-leather outfit, twirling around while I’m going through a heinous breakup. I look down and there are these two girls, one with pink hair, one with blue hair, septum piercings, cool as f*ck, still loving me, probably knowing what a weird time I’m going through. I looked at them, looked at myself in my sparkly Britney Spears outfit, and went, Ohhh no, they deserve better than this. If those girls can be that brave in who they are, then I owe them better than this homogenized bullshit. But hey, if the worst thing that’s happened to me so far is I wore dumb clothes and dated a shitty dude, I think I’m doing alright.”