SZA recalls her experience of being bullied as a teen.
SZA is currently riding high on the success of her new album “SOS” which is looking at her fourth consecutive week at #1 on the US Billboard charts. Speaking to People, the TDE star recalls being bullied as a teen, which made her who she is today.
“I was bullied because I wasn’t quiet and I was awkward at the same time,” she said. “I wasn’t this tiny sad victim, but I was more so attacked just because it was giving ‘What is wrong with you?’ energy.”
“I always thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I’ll never have the approval of anyone in life, this must be my defining factor, this must be the bottom line,” she adds.
“I realized that all the things that made me feel so lame were actually what made me into who I am,” she says. “It’s like, I didn’t go to prom because I didn’t have any friends and I had no one to go to prom with … [and now] it’s so weird that my life turned into [having] a bodyguard while traveling to parties.”
She continues, “All these things, if I had such a fulfilling existence and experience in high school, I would’ve felt validated to the point where I didn’t need to do anymore. [So] I just had to do more, I had to be more because I was like, ‘This s—ty experience can’t be the end of it because if it is, I am cooked.'”
“Everyone who experiences bullying, that just s**ks, but it’s going to lead you to something, it has to,” she added. “If you could hold on and just wait until high school is over because 10 years from now, I promise you, none of those people will matter.”
SOS made its debut at the top of the US Billboard 200 chart, with 318,000 equivalent album units sold in its first week. The album also set a record for the most on-demand streams of an R&B album in a single week, with 404.58 million streams, and earned the second-highest streaming total for a female artist’s album in its debut week. The album was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) shortly after its release.
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