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先日のNew Zealand Heraldの記事を更に詳しくした内容です。 |
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Hayley's private hell MY SECRET BREAKDOWN AND EATING DISORDER |
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先日のNew Zealand Heraldの記事を更に詳しくした内容です。
人生色々です。
Hayley's private hell
MY SECRET BREAKDOWN
AND EATING DISORDER
A TORTURED SOUL WAS HIDING BEHIND THE PURE VOICE
Until recently, Hayley Westenra was known simply as the rather demure classical singer with a sweetheart face. There seemed always to be something very old-fashioned about her, something conventional.
She was signed to an international deal with Universal Records when she was just14, and moved backwards and forwards between Britain and New Zealand. She took on chadty work. She smiled sweetly. Her voice soared effortlessly and she seemed just like her album title, Pure.
Having an album called Pure may well have been a marketing man's dream. For Hayley, it was a bit of a nightmare.
Her teenage years saw her either posing sweetly for magazines or featuring in the occasional paparazzi shot where she hated the way she looked. And that sent her into an inward spiral. Typically she didn't talk about it or confront it - she grappled for control by deciding to control her food, i.e. not eat very much of it.
“In the past, I never liked to talk about myself," she begns. She now realises that this might have made her seem boring. But she wasn't ready.
A series of events led her to change her mind about that. And it all started when she was aware that her relationship with food was potentially destructive.
There have been two significant occasions in her life. Once when she starved herself dowon to a US size zero when she was about 18, and again at the beginning of last year when she was 22 and began binge-eating.
BINGEING BEGINS
The first time, she'd just finished a world tour and was completely exhausted. She'd had bronchitis and pushed herself to keep going. By the time she got back to NZ for Christmas 2009,she was wiped out and felt she did not want to continue.
"I became self-destructive and it was a vicious cycle. You're tired, you eat really bad food, you feel worse, then you eat more. I wasn't sleeping. I was more tired. It was exhaustion. When I get exhausted, I get depressed. I had to perform while I was ill, pushing myself through it, working myself into the ground. I turned up for a sound check in Manchester and barely had a voice.
"I thought, 'There's no way I can perform like this,' so I cancelled the rest of the tour. I thought, 'I don't want to go back on stage, I want to eat ice-cream and chocolate biscuits.'
"Usually, if I'm ill, I would eat healthy food. It was as if I didn't want to get better."
She was once voted PETA's most sexy vegetarian. But instead of making an effort to go down to the local health store, she says, "I might actually have partaken of some McDonald's, Not too much because that would require me to go out to get it. Most of the time I I was walking round the house, hoodie up eating all the naughty things. I couldn't help myself. I couldn't stop.
"Perhaps I'd been extreme the other way before. I used to not eat dairy because I was told dairy was bad for your voice, I was superstrict on myself..." Hayley doesn't finish the sentence, but she's saying she rebelled,
'MY BREAKDOWN'
At this point, her career hung in the balance. There'd been a lot of touring, being away from her friends and siblings. She was lonely and exhausted. She calls her depression a kind of breakdown. "That's what I thought I was going through. I told my family, 'That's it, the end'."
Her new-found celebrity status in 2009 was cashed in on by the marketeers and charities. She became vice president of the Vera Lynn Trust, helping children with cerebral palsy. She visited troops in Basra. She also did several trips to Ghana as an ambassador for UNICEF.
She felt lucky. Perhaps even unworthy, so it became terribly important "to have the opportunity to give something back". But trips to Ghana were gruelling. "It's hard to comprehend - I'd been given this life and they'd been given that."
So she suffered because she felt she couldn't do enough. It all culminated when she cancelled her tour, came home to Christchurch, deciding if she couldn't do everything, she would do nothing. "I'm an all or nothing girl."
Hayley continued eating bad food, and not getting out of the house.
"I got really depressed. I convinced myself that I could never go back." And then? "I guess something must have happened. New dates were confirmed and I thought, 'This is it. Now or never.'
"Two friends had just died within weeks of each other. One in NZ, who crashed his car. And another in Croatia. He crashed his motorbike. They were the sweetest people. None of it made any sense.
"I had to re-evaluate everything. Funnily enough, I rediscovered my passion for performance. I realised how important singing was for me. To do a show, to get the applause.
"When you lose a loved one, it makes you live each day to the full- be aware of what you're saying to people, never go to sleep on an argument. But really it reminded me of how fragile life is. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. You expect to see them and they aren't there. I haven't been able to take their names out of my phone book. So the tour deadline came up and I thought, 'That's it, I'm going to get my act together'."
How much weight did she gain with the bad food diet? "It was only a couple of months of bad eating. I definitely gained weight, but not that much."Today, she's slim, and curvy in all the right places, about a size 10.
ELIMINATION DIET
She talks about the time she went too far. It was when she first started seeing pictures of herself in the papers. "Initially, I thought it was healthy. I wouldn't have dairy, I wouldn't have sugar. I thought I looked full of puppy fat in one magazine.
"When travelling, I'd always look for health stores - I'd go to the States and buy fruit, some salad and almonds, and be eating nothing really. It's terrible, but you get used to it after a while.
"I was eating just boiled vegetables, nuts and seeds. I just got into the habit of saying no to things, no to food. I get confused with US sizing, but I think I would have been a US size zero. I look at the clothes and I think, 'How did I fit into this?' Now I'm a size 10, which is curvy for this industry, but it's normal."
Nobody suspected anything was wrong because Hayley never once complained. Everyone thought she was a girl with a sweet voice who never had any problems. But one wonders just how those child/woman photo shoots affected her - being separated from her family, being home-schooled, having one parent travel with her to the other side of the world while the other stayed at home to look after her younger sister and brother.
"At the time, it didn't cross my mind as out of the ordinary. This was the way it worked."
Her band was all guys. "I'd be quite alone. It's not healthy. You need to spend time with people your own age - hang out and gossip."
The wake up call came when she began touring with the group Celtic Women.
"Suddenly I was around other girls and they were eating normal food. So I started eating the same and started putting on I weight. I was happier being around girls and having company. I was in a better place.
"In the past, I'd be in my hotel room all day. Now I force myself to get up, have breakfast, be around people. One of the girls from my management travels with me, so we'll go for a walk, check out shops or do a bit of sightseeing. Whereas before I would have watched TV or stayed on my computer."
When Hayley's in London, she lives in the west, in Chiswick. "It's where I'm very happy. I'm not very good at decorating because I'm used to everything being like a temporary camp. I find it hard to think, 'Let's make this a permanent home'."
Her boyfriend, Frenchman Arnaud Sabard, 32, has certainly changed that, helping her erect the flat pack furniture. And he is another person to stop her being alone on tour because he is her sound engineer.
"Arnaud's seen me when I'm down, and that's important. And he really is a lovely boyfriend. He encourages me to be healthy. He's a good cook and he's always telling me it's important that I have a good meal."
Her latest album, Paradiso, is a collaboration with Ennio Morricone, and she sounds different. Sometimes her voice is even gravelly with pain, and with many different moods of love.
"Maybe it's therapy, maybe it's this music that brought the emotions out of me. Maybe there's anger that I didn't know was there. Ennio made sure I didn't run away from anything. In real life I'm the peacemaker. I don't like confrontation."
She once said she wouldn't mind being a recluse. "Did I say that? I'm really enjoying not being a recluse. Catching up with my friends. Going out dancing, or just to the pub. I'm the complete opposite, I'm enjoying being social!"
At the beginning of our interview, Hayley ordered tea and biscuits, saying she needed the sugar to counteract jet leg. But, during the conversation, she'd nibbled only a tiny corner off one. She doesn't finish it.
"I have a photo shoot tomorrow..." she says.
