Lady Gaga is opening up about a difficult time in her life due to struggles with her mental health.
In a new podcast interview with the New York Times, the MAYHEM musician revealed that she experienced an episode of psychosis around five years ago that had a major impact on her life, per the Huffington Post.
"I had psychosis, so I was not deeply in touch with reality for a while," she said. "It took me out of life in a big way, and after a lot of years of hard work I got myself back."
Gaga explained how her now-fiancé Michael Polansky helped in her journey to finding herself again, Entertainment Tonight reports.
"When I met Michael, I was in a much better place when I met him, but I remember him saying to me, pretty early on, 'I know you could be a lot happier than you are,'" she recalled. "It was really hard for me to hear him say that because I didn't want him to think that of me. I wanted him to think I was like this happy, totally together person and I wasn't really yet."
The "Born this Way" singer also shared how that period of her life is still difficult to look back on and is "increasingly harder to talk about" as she doesn't want to be defined by it.
"I hate feeling defined by it. It's like a ghost of yourself, that's what it felt like to me, like something I felt ashamed of," she said. "But I don't think that we should feel ashamed if we go through times like that. I mostly just wish to say, if you have been through something like that, it can get better. It did for me, and I'm grateful for that."