THE VALUE OF NEGATIVE SPACE
LADY GAGA
When I was young, I prayed a lot. (Whether that implicitly means that someone should or should not read this book, however, is decidedly irrelevant.) It wasn’t because I was religious. It was because I was a deep and passionate thinker—who thought a lot—and was spiritual and creative even when I was very little. So if we substitute prayer with asking the universe questions about my life, this, to me, would be a more accurate way for you to understand the beginning of my story as Lady Gaga and why it is important to read and share this book with others. I always considered myself a theorist and would posture ideas constantly to myself and those around me. Who am I? What am I? Who are we as humankind? Then I began channeling this into inventions: music, characters in school plays, poetry, and writing. Needless to say, at some point, lots of people have found me to be very peculiar. Weird was a word I heard a lot. Why do you want to be a singer, actress, dancer, performer, artist, writer? was also condescendingly asked of me. And to be honest, it ultimately felt as though many relentless and quite mean children and adults around me were asking me why I existed. Because I never felt I existed without art.
Middle school acting headshot
Thus began my journey with bullying. I was even bullied in class for essays similar to the one you’re reading right now. Once I gave a dissertation my senior year of high school. I practiced it all night; it was about shock art and representations of Christianity in art throughout history, the latter being the point of my homework and the former being the conceptual twist I threw in to make all eighty pages of my thesis interesting to me. I distinctly recall a moment—one of many stories that made me who I am. I was delivering my thesis as a speech to my class, with poster boards I’d beautifully made to show the evolution of God in art from classical to contemporary, and my teacher was called out of the room for an emergency and asked me to continue my presentation. In the middle of my speech, my high school bully—in front of my entire class—loudly and rudely interrupted me and said, “Why are you still talking?” Now, because this is a book and not a movie or episodic show on Netflix, I can’t do an impression of her to truly do her justice, but let’s just say her tone was the equivalent of You’re annoying and dumb and Could you please spare me and this entire class of your idiotic attempt to care about this assignment.
I was upset that I actually did something I hadn’t done so openly before. I used to cry at home or in the school bathroom or the nurse’s office, but this time, I burst into tears in front of my entire class and sobbed uncontrollably with my hands over my face while everyone stared at me. When my teacher reentered the room, I very quickly composed myself and continued to share my project. The only thing worse for me in this moment than having a breakdown in public in front of my bully would have been my teacher catching on, asking me who bullied me, and then me having to lie or tell the truth—both of which would have gotten me in trouble, either in school or socially with the other students.
So that was that. And even as I type this, it reminds me of how flippantly my tribulations as a young person both came and went without anything to remedy them. They were over as quickly as that last sentence. Once I was thrown in a trash can on a street corner by a group of boys that were friends with my bully. (They were instructed to do so.) I distinctly recall the laughter and joy they took in humiliating me while shouting, “That’s where you belong!” When I was younger, I was also pinched in the hallway by older girls who would grip my arm tightly and whisper to me, “You’re a slut,” as I walked to class. They were jealous that the older boys at our brother school paid a lot of attention to me. Funnily enough, this impacted me so much that I even feel the need to clarify while writing this for you—I was most certainly not a slut.
I’m leaving out a lot because there’s so much to say, I would have to write an entire book myself. Having depression, anorexia, bulimia, anxiety, and masochistic tendencies that included scratching or cutting my arms with knives when I was in emotional distress. This went on from age eleven till rather recently in my early thirties, and I still struggle with some of these things.
I imagine my brain is like a pinball machine with uncomfortable marbles, and each one of my obstacles is a marble. Every once in a while, one or a few shoot out and I can either gain points for dealing with them using skills I’ve learned, suffer while they fall past the flippers into an abyss of panic, or just hope they roll back into the trigger slot and keep quiet so I don’t have to play pinball wizard with my mental issues. What I really wish to make a point of is: amidst all this, eventually I became a famous artist, but all of these things came with me.
Becoming a star does not fix anything. In fact, the demands of it made it all the more complicated. Imagine having an eating disorder and just after a segment on prime time news about the current state of the US’s attack on terrorism, there is a report that you have gained weight, with a photo of you onstage where you clearly have gained weight and a news anchor actually discussing and gawking at how unattractive you now are.
Fantastic. Cut to me in a hotel room somewhere on a world tour having a panic attack over a fear of my body image that I’ve had for so long I don’t know who I am without it.
I went on to achieve things beyond my wildest imagination, and I was still haunted and plagued by massive insecurities and mental health problems that emerged—PTSD being one of them. I’ve tried to understand my pain, solve it like a detective. I’ve driven myself crazy trying to even understand that once I became an adult, I was still not equipped to handle all I had been through, and that it made me even more prone to being controlled and bullied in my business. At least it didn’t control my art. I’m brave in some places, less brave in others. My trauma history is extensive; I’ve spoken about it at length, and in a semi-healed as well as semi-detached way, I can once again admit that I was repeatedly raped when I was nineteen by someone in the music industry and as I got sicker and sicker mentally on tour after my career took off, no one helped me until I essentially went rogue. I became so self-aware of how sick I was becoming, I locked myself in my apartment in New York and told everyone to leave me alone while I painted. Basically, this was code for Lady Gaga quits.
I grew up around alcoholism and developed a neuropathic pain condition—which is essentially, when I get stressed, I feel physical pain throughout my entire body. It’s so excruciating I can barely think. Yet here I am writing this to you. I think finally in my life, I have at least figured out the through line of all the things I’ve been through.
In every instance, there was
an absence of kindness.
In most instances, it was only when someone shared their painful stories with me that I no longer felt invisible and became less afraid.
So then I developed a theory of The Value of Negative Space. The currency of understanding the gravity of what can happen when kindness is absent. There was a moment of silence after I cried in front of my class when my bully made fun of me, and I’ve learned now that those moments of quiet, when we don’t always know what to do, should be filled with kindness. What I find to be interesting is, there are actually two negative spaces that possess value: one that is empty, quiet, and ignores the absence of kindness; and another that is filled with negativity. Filling this space is my life now. This is this book. This is what my bully taught me. Sure, being bullied versus being raped may sound like it has a clear winner if it were a kindness competition, but the truth is trauma is not a contest, and every story in this book is equally valuable.
It’s important to pause and think about what you’re doing, just in case you might hurt someone. And by someone, that includes yourself.
Don’t just respond with kindness: fill the empty with it.
