The year 2020 and all that came with it upended the lives of a lot of people, and popular Christian recording artist Lauren Daigle is no exception. Riding high on success that year and beginning a huge tour, Daigle was not prepared for the pandemic and the cancellation of her tour and all the dreams she’d worked so hard to achieve.
What followed was a season of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, which Daigle says had her life “spinning out of control.”
She told PEOPLE magazine, “When I was 16 I had this vision of that tour, and I could see the crowds, the lights — everything. Then it all dismantled. You combine the disappointment with grief and loss and the state of the world… I felt like I didn’t know myself anymore. I started developing panic attacks.”
In a raw and honest YouTube interview, Daigle explains that she sought help from a therapist and a neurologist to get her mental health back on track and combat the loneliness and isolation brought on by the pandemic. With additional support from family and friends, she was able to move forward and turn her struggles into material for her new album, the self-titled Lauren Daigle.
She said that she learned so much from allowing God into her lonely and broken places, and that now she wants to help others out of those same hard valleys.
Eradicating Loneliness
“I want to be someone who is known as helping eradicate loneliness,” she said in the video clip. “Because I remember, before I was ever doing music, being in high school, being in junior high, l would look for the lonely person in the room. For whatever reason, God highlighted loneliness to me.”
Lauren also says she was inspired by scripture to categorize the songs on her new album as either for the soul or for the spirit, telling PEOPLE: “There’s this Bible verse that says, ‘The word of God is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. It can cut through bone and marrow, soul and spirit.’ And I’m like, ‘The soul and spirit, they’re so intertwined. Once this started to happen [as I was writing], I was like, ‘That would be a song that I would write from the soul for the soul, and this is a song that I’d write from the Spirit for the spirit; these songs of heartache and longing and difficulty and joy and newness and all that, they’re coming from this soul lane, but there’s these other God songs that are also me as well.”
As someone who deals with an anxiety disorder every day of my life, I truly appreciate Lauren Daigle being open about her mental health struggles, about seeking professional help, and about how God walks hand in hand with any of us who have mental illness. Even when we feel alone in it, we aren’t. All the best to Daigle with her new album and tour. May her message of combatting loneliness reach all who need to hear it.
