Lady Gaga Still Struggles with Feelings of Low Self-Worth

I’ll admit I was never the biggest Lady Gaga fan, although I did like a lot of the songs off her first album.

This feature on MSNBC by Courtney Garcia made me like what she represents more.

I’d kind of fallen into the camp who felt she’d been overplayed and that she was just all about being over-the-top to get noticed, but i really hadn’t ever read any interviews with her.

To learn that she experienced bullying as a youth and is open to talk about it gave me newfound respect for her.

Appearing Sunday night on “Oprah’s Next Chapter” on Winfrey's OWN network, the singer discussed being bullied as a kid and the impact it’s had on her self-esteem and personal call-to-action as a celebrity activist. The singer says schoolmates threw trash at her and called her a “slut,” and those memories inspire her to promote empowerment through her music and to further anti-bullying initiatives.

“All the praise you receive, something inside of you is scarred by those experiences,” said the 25-year-old singer. “Sometimes I feel worthless.”

The fact that a success like Lady Gaga can still experience feelings of low self-worth even after all she has achieved tells me a lot about how important our early experiences are in making us who we are.

There is something so cathartic about looking at the stories of our lives from the place where we are today. Some artists do their digging through memoir or songwriting and singing or visual arts or dance.

It doesn’t matter what venue or genre we choose to examine our lives—it just seems to matter that we open ourselves to all our stories, both positive and negative—to really come to peace with ourselves, even as we may still struggle with less than perfect feelings about ourselves at times.