It’s no secret that Ariana Grande has gone through a lot of pain and heartbreak over the last few years. Especially after her ex-boyfriend, Mac Miller, tragically passed away from an accidental overdose in September 2018. Now, the “Thank U, Next” songstress just opened up about her past relationship with the rapper and how she’s coping with his devastating death, and we are seriously amazed by her strength.
As fans know, the former couple dated for two years before calling it quits in May 2018. And when fans started to blame the 26-year-old for Mac’s behavior after their split, she stuck up for herself on Twitter. Now, Ariana explained that there was a lot that went on behind-the-scenes that fans didn’t know about, which is why she had to speak up.
“People don’t see any of the real stuff that happens, so they are loud about what they think happened,” she told Vogue in their August 2019 cover story. “They didn’t see the years of work and fighting and trying, or the love and exhaustion. That tweet came from a place of complete defeat, and you have no idea how many times I warned him that that would happen and fought that fight, for how many years of our friendship, of our relationship. You have no idea so you’re not allowed to pull that card, because you don’t f–king know. That’s where that came from.”
The singer revealed that she spent years consumed by worry about the rapper. She would stay up all night, desperately tracking his whereabouts to ensure he was safe.
“It’s pretty all-consuming,” she continued. “By no means was what we had perfect, but, like, f–k. He was the best person ever, and he didn’t deserve the demons he had. I was the glue for such a long time, and I found myself becoming… less and less sticky. The pieces just started to float away.”
The former Victorious actress admitted that after his sad passing, it was hard for her to accept that he was really gone.
“I have a lot that I still need to process myself and will probably never be ready to talk about,” she explained to the outlet. “For a long time I didn’t want to talk to anyone about anything, because I didn’t want to think about anything. I kind of just wanted to bury myself in work and not focus on the real stuff, because I couldn’t believe it was real.”
But it was making her newest album, Thank U, Next, that really helped her face her pain and start to heal once and for all.
“I think that this is the first album and also the first year of my life where I’m realizing that I can no longer put off spending time with myself, just as me,” Ariana added. “I’ve been boo’d up my entire adult life. I’ve always had someone to say goodnight to. So Thank U, Next was this moment of self-realization. It was this scary moment of, ‘Wow, you have to face all this stuff now. No more distractions. You have to heal all this s–t.’”
And although the Nickelodeon star is doing a lot better now, she still goes through constant ups and downs.
“I have this idea of what I’d like to be. I can see this stronger, amazing, fearless version of myself that one day I hope to evolve into. Sometimes I try to be that for my fans before I actually am that myself. I think I’ve been avoiding putting in the work,” she concluded. “I’m a person who’s been through a lot and doesn’t know what to say about any of it to myself, let alone the world. I see myself onstage as this perfectly polished, great-at-my-job entertainer, and then in situations like this I’m just this little basket-case puddle of figuring it out. I have to be the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest, for sure. I’m walking this fine line between healing myself and not letting the things that I’ve gone through be picked at before I’m ready, and also celebrating the beautiful things that have happened in my life and not feeling scared that they’ll be taken away from me because trauma tells me that they will be, you know what I mean?”
We are super proud of Ariana.
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