Sofia Essaïdi achieved success very quickly almost 20 years ago. Even a little too quickly. It is with season 3 of the star Academy that she became known to the general public when she was only 19 years old, but it was with the musical Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt of Kamel Ouali in 2009 that it really imposes itself in the artistic environment. The pretty brunette won two NRJ Music Awards for this role, including the prize for the best French-speaking female artist of the year 2010. So praised and solicited from all sides, she hopes to have the opportunity to release her first solo album. But not everything will go as planned and Sofia Essaïdi will then slowly sink.
In the new issue ofSunday in the countryside with Frédéric Lopez broadcast on October 30, she returned to this very complicated period. “It’s the moment when I want to make music alone, that’s it, I want to make my album. And then I realize that the people I work with don’t care who I am or what I want to do. They just want to train me, surf on success“, she explained. And to clarify: “This means making songs that are rather accessible, easy, formatted. And I’m struggling at that moment, I’m lost. I can, I can say, really feel a depression inside. It’s really the artist’s depression misunderstood, unheard (…). I didn’t show it, because I hadn’t worked on myself yet, I didn’t want to show that I had flaws“.
Thus, Sofia Essaïdi adopts a role on a daily basis, which only worsens her descent into hell. “I suffer, I cry at home, but on the other hand in front of people I have a perfect smile and that’s exhausting. I really fell into a painful depression. Until the moment when I said: ‘it’s no longer possible to live like that’. I can’t live a lifetime like this, stressing myself out, putting pressure on myself to be the best. (…) I could cry for a week because I had not succeeded in a casting that I wanted and then be in ultimate joy… I had to find a happy medium, a balance to bear the joys and the disappointments and be less dependent on the outside“, she eventually understood through therapy sessions.