Halsey rose from humble beginnings, finding solace and refuge in the arts — and becoming
a bona fide pop star. But while she's been an open book about her personal struggles,
there are still some things even her biggest fans might not know. Here's why Halsey's
transformation is seriously turning heads. Perhaps due in part to a relatively chaotic
childhood, by the time Halsey found herself in high school, she was a bit of a loner.
So she turned inward, throwing herself into nurturing her artistic talents. She told Glamour,
"I didn't have a lot of friends, and my family moved a lot. I was on Myspace when I was 14,
which was so inappropriate in retrospect."
Despite her young age, Halsey found real connections with other people
on the internet — even if it was just for the sake of venting. She told the outlet,
"I was putting my content out there, this projection of myself.
I didn't know what I was doing. I was just screaming into the void."
"I kind of cultivated my character throughout my adolescence. It was
kind of a life that assured me that I wasn't a complete weirdo."
Halsey's social media prowess would pay off in spades, down the road.
By age 17, Halsey already had a lot on her plate, with her ever-changing
address and difficulties at school. It was also then that she was diagnosed
with bipolar disorder — just like her mom had been, years before — after attempting
to take her own life and being committed to a psychiatric facility. She shared with Glamour,
"It was a lot of things happening at once, with a complete lack of direction."
"That's when I sat and went, 'I have no idea who that girl is.'"
The teen spent 17 days at the center, coming to terms with her reality. After that, she was put
on a Seroquel regimen and later, lithium — both of which she says she hated. She told Marie Claire,
"I was throwing up at school. I spent my whole adolescence medicated."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
One very real thing that Halsey took away from some of her darkest days was the importance
of making art, something that became a very fulfilling outlet for her. She told Glamour,
"I have obviously been given this massive privilege and responsibility to effect change.
At the end of the day, no matter how meaningless one person might consider my art,
it could have meant the world to somebody else."
"I was a weird kid. I had tattoos in high school. I shaved my head. But I think that
that's ok. I'm a person. I have dimensions. And I'm allowed to be different every day."
After she finished high school, Halsey was accepted into the prestigious art school,
Rhode Island School of Design. But tuition proved to be too costly for the budding artist,
so she enrolled in community college instead. Eventually she dropped out of school altogether,
calling the experience a quote, "waste of time."
After passing on the college experience, Halsey decided to try making it as an artist on her own
in New York City, but immediately found herself in a precarious situation. She told Glamour,
"I was literally living on the Lower East Side in a f------ heroin den,
like with all of these artists. It was 2014, the last year that New York was kind of bohemian."
"Before I found my way in music, I experienced a brief period of homelessness in New York."
While it was a productive time for her, artistically speaking,
Halsey's early years in the city were challenging for other reasons. She admitted to The Guardian,
"Thinking all my friends were going to die and being by myself and being terrified.
It was easily the darkest time of my life. The one thing I was doing was
maintaining my persona online. I never let anyone know I didn't have a home."
In 2012, after gaining momentum on social media, Halsey wrote and recorded the song
"Ghost" at a friend's studio and put it up on Soundcloud. She explained to Interview magazine,
"I wasn't in bands, I didn't have any representation, and I had no interest in
being a singer. It was just a cool song and I had some friends who were like,
'If you put this up and it gets popular, you can make a quick thousand bucks.'"
"I wrote it in one shot. Um, I wasn't thinking about, you know,
fitting a formula, fitting a pattern."
The track went viral, thanks in part to her social media fan base,
and caught the attention of five record companies the night she published it. She remembered,
"That's when all the pieces of the puzzle came together
and it dawned on me that it wasn't about making $1,000; it was about what I was supposed to
do. […] From that day on I've been an artist." After signing with Astralwerks in 2014,
Halsey dropped her first full-length album, the semi-autobiographical Badlands,
the following year. But despite the fact that she had hit the big time with her music,
Halsey was still struggling with her mental health. She revealed to Paper magazine,
"I was in a really, really, really depressed place when I was writing Badlands.
I wasn't sure how I was gonna escape that mentality because when you're depressed,
that becomes your identifier sometimes. You're the depressed girl."
"Our culture in a way has an obsession and a distaste for the crazy woman."
Although Halsey clearly needed to make some changes,
the notion of getting better was almost a threat to her identity at the time. She said,
"The idea of becoming happy — while it's nice — it's scary.
Because if you become happy, then who do you become? Because who you are, is depressed."
Badlands hit number two on the Billboard 200.
Halsey has been very open about her mental health, and so many other personal struggles, but there's
one thing that she deeply regrets revealing to the media. She told Paper magazine in 2017,
"I spoke out about a miscarriage that I had on tour to Rolling Stone about a year and half ago.
I did it because I have an interest in women's health. […] I came out about it because for me,
I needed people to know that Planned Parenthood is a facility for the people."
But what Halsey could not have anticipated was the immediate backlash she received from some
fans who thought she had actually had an abortion, not a miscarriage. She revealed to the outlet,
"I did a show in Toronto and a couple people came to the concert and held up a bunch of
bloody baby dolls in the crowd. And then my WhatsApp got hacked and people started
sending me messages with pictures of fetus parts and really gory, bloody disgusting [things]."
In 2017, Halsey released her sophomore album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom.
Inspired by repeat viewings of Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet,
the album chronicles two kids living in the underworld beneath the Badlands.
"I watched Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet every day, for weeks."
Halsey told Vulture of her own concept,
"They're born into this prophecy that they don't know about. And there's a
fountain in the center of the city and in it there's two fish — koi fish actually."
As the artist tells it, the fish in the fountain symbolize the two lovers. She added,
"They've been swimming around, chasing each other for as long as anyone can remember,
and the prophecy goes that as soon as they catch each other, true love will finally
be able to exist. But they never caught each other, so it's called the hopeless fountain."
Hopeless Fountain Kingdom debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard 200 and went platinum in 2018.
If there's one thing that makes Halsey feel more alive than anything else,
it's performing in front of her army of fans. She explained to Vulture in 2017,
"I love playing live shows more than anything in the world. When I'm not on tour, I'm depressed as
f---. I can't do anything. It's physical, because it's serotonin and adrenaline and dopamine."
"Whenever I'm being hard on myself and I don't feel
confident or I don't feel loved or worthy of love, all of that goes away when I get back on tour."
But it's not just those feel-good brain chemicals that Halsey thrives on.
It's also the very real love that she shares with her fans. She said,
"It's also emotional because it's validation. It's feeling like I matter.
It's feeling like I care about these people and they care about me. It's also
outrageously arrogant. It's like being a preacher or a dictator or something."
"They find some sort of solace, and some sort of relatability and some sort of collective
in my music." As Halsey has evolved over the years,
she's become increasingly more focused on advocating for women.
In 2017, she said at the Capitol Congress conference,
"I spent my whole life being the person who's like 'I f------ hate girls, I only want to hang out
with boys; girls are so annoying.' And now I'm in my 20s and I'm like 'I love women!' […] I'm
surrounded by amazing women and I love how strong and beautiful and incredible they all are."
Halsey has also clapped back at haters who've tried to slam her credibility
because she once posed for Playboy. In response, she posted on Instagram,
"Yeah it's crazy. I can show my t--- in Playboy, perform at the Nobel Peace,
speak at the Planned Parenthood Gala with Hillary Clinton, shake my a-- on 300 stages,
give a speech at the United Nations, do 150 shots of tequila, get a #1 album, and march
in the streets of D.C. all in just ONE year! Newsflash. A woman can be multidimensional."
Halsey has already accomplished more in her career than most artists could ever dream of doing.
So what's next for the star? She told Marie Claire,
"I've played Madison Square Garden. I have a number-one album. I don't have very many
bucket-list things left besides carrying a child. It's a personal goal and a weird one."
In a fortuitous turn of events, Halsey is now closer to reaching her dream,
after managing her endometriosis. Reportedly, her doctor even told her
she no longer needs to consider freezing her eggs. Halsey told Rolling Stone,
"I was like, 'Wait, what did you just say? Did you just say I can have kids?'
It was like the reverse of finding out you have a terminal illness. I called my mom, crying."
"I put my foot down, and I got really aggressive about seeking treatment,
and had surgery a year ago, and I feel a lot better."
In addition to releasing solo material, Halsey has had the opportunity to collaborate
with other industry favorites like The Chainsmokers, Khalid, and, of course,
G-Eazy. She also collaborated with the South Korean powerhouse BTS in 2019, telling Cosmo,
"It was really awesome to work with them and go to Korea to make a music video with their team.
Someone else would maybe focus on the language barrier,
but there isn't much of one when we're spending time together."
"It was obviously a very intimidating thing,
getting involved with BTS, because you know the power of Army…"
"I'm like, 'Hi, we're doing a collaboration, please don't kill me.'"
Since recording together, Halsey and the members of BTS have maintained their friendship.
"Whenever anything big happens for the both of us, we congratulate each other.
We're really looking forward to the time we can hang out again."
2020 started off with a bang for Halsey, when she released her third studio album,
Manic, that January. But while she was in the recording studio, she was experiencing a manic
swing — which, of course, bled straight into the music. She told Rolling Stone of her newest work,
"It's soooooo manic. It's literally just, like, whatever the f--- I felt like making;
there was no reason I couldn't make it."
"I think I've just taken a new approach with making this album where, like,
I just didn't think about the genre."
While the artist's previous albums were both highly conceptual,
Manic is a raw glimpse at her innermost thoughts. She added,
"There's a lot of exploration of […] 'the call of the void.'
It's that thing in the back of our minds that drives us to outrageous thoughts."
Back on the Billboard 200, Manic debuted at Number 2, making it her third album to top the charts.
While Halsey may have found enormous success as a writer and musician, she hasn't forgotten
where she came from. She certainly knows what it's like to struggle in poverty and experience
homelessness. And while it's never far from her mind, Halsey sees people every day in situations
that also trigger her own thoughts of her past. While stopping by The Daily Show, she explained,
"I witness a […] dichotomy living in L.A., because it has some of the most successful, comfortable,
richest people, and then some of the absolute most impoverished and displaced and un-homed."
"A lot of these young people aren't in this position because they did something wrong.
They're not in this position because something is wrong with them. It can happen to anyone."
While the artist is reportedly worth an estimated $16 million herself, in order
to do her part to help those in need, Halsey rolled up her sleeves and began volunteering
at My Friend's Place — a resource center for displaced youth. She explained on the show,
"I think it's about keeping yourself immersed in your
communities and interacting with those people, instead of […] only interacting
with people who are of your class or of your race or of your creed."
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