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Rihanna learned the reality of life in a hard way at the vivacious age of 20.
“It gave me guns,” the pop star, now 24, says of being beaten up in 2009 by Chris Brown in the May issue of Elle. “I was like, well, they know more about me than I want them to know. It’s embarrassing. But that was my opening. That was my liberation”.
She said, the strain of trying to keep her personal troubles private was itself a form of imprisonment. “The more people know about me, the more freedom I have”, she says. “One less skeleton in the closet, one less burden, one less secret; now you know that, so you can say what you want about it. I don’t have anything to hide”.
The Barbados-born singer worked through the flameout with Brown through music; her album, Rated R, was released in November 2009. She said, “I didn’t want to be dishonest, I was going through the hardest time of my life.
I was angry, sad, confused, torn. I was still in love. And I needed to talk about it. That was the only way I could get peace, because it was in my head, and I couldn’t leave it there.”
Rihanna and Brown have actually been collaborating on music again recently. Rihanna said, “I respect what other people have to say, the bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.
It’s very hard for me to accept, but I get it. People end up wasting their time on the blogs or whatever, ranting away, and that’s all right. I don’t hate them for it because it doesn’t stop me from who I am. I’m still going to do what I want to do.”
Looking ahead, Rihanna says she’d love to have kids – “It could be tomorrow. It could be 20 years.”
