Lizzo knows a thing or two about being “canceled” in the court of public opinion, and now she’s sharing what she’s learned with the rest of the class.
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In a Substack essay published Monday (Dec. 1), the hitmaker shared her thoughts on why “everyone should get cancelled at least once,” reflecting on the moments in her career where she faced overwhelming backlash that forced her to grow a thicker skin.
“I was raised in the Pentecostal COGIC church in Detroit, Michigan where the idea of hell was very real,” she began. “If you disobeyed God, or were considered a ‘bad person’ you were on a first class flight to eternal damnation in a lake of fire.”
With her strict religious upbringing as her moral compass, Lizzo explained that she spent most of her life trying to be as good as possible — just for the public to decide that she was anything but in 2019, when she attended a Lakers game wearing pants made to look like her buttocks were exposed. According to the Grammy winner, this was the first of many times she was canceled, with people falsely accusing her of running onto the court unauthorized and bombarding her with offensive memes and death threats.
“All those years of being a good person doesn’t matter to the internet,” she wrote. “The internet doesn’t care about what really happened to someone. It only cares about believing the hype.”
Lizzo went on to make a list of all the reasons she’s been canceled in the years since, including “doing a smoothie detox,” “crying/complaining,” “saying I make music for black women” and “unknowingly using the s*az slur in a song [Grrrls].”
But what has she learned from those experiences? “F–k it,” she wrote.
“You aren’t getting out of this thing without unintentionally hurting someone’s feelings,” she continued. “Sensitivity is at an all time high and because of personalized algorithms, any content you see that doesn’t cater to you personally feels like an attack on your identity.”
“Its left us in a state of paralysis, unable to make mistakes because the court of public opinion is always ready to be judge, jury and executioner,” she continued. “As the qualifications of being deemed a ‘good person’ narrow while the sudden increase in conservative morals skyrocket, who has lived a real life and is still considered ‘good’?”
The essay marks Lizzo’s second post on her Substack account, which she kicked off with a piece on weight loss written through the lens of someone whose own health journey has been very publicly scrutinized. The singer-songwriter has been open in the past about how her tumultuous relationship with fame and haters has affected her mental health over the years, though she’s now doing better than ever following the release of mixtape My Face Hurts From Smiling.
“I’m so confident, and I think the thing that I’m most confident in now is me, my vision and my creativity,” she told Billboard in June. “I kind of lost trust in myself for awhile, because when you get in the industry, there’s a lot of people that come in and think they’re the experts … I think when you’re seeing that glow, it’s that confidence that’s truly being proud of who I am and not hiding who I am in all the aspects of it.”
