Since moving from Barcelona returned to Miami about a year ago, Shakira has traded tennis for water sports, Gap sweats for Amiri silks, and even rediscovered bits of her Caribbean accent. It's all part of an important process of rediscovery, he says Rolling rockwhich she has suffered since the end of her relationship with former soccer star Gerard Pique.
“When you leave a relationship of many years, there are things about yourself that seem to have been lost along the way,” says Shakira. “There are things in yourself that you change for the other person or give up. When that relationship breaks down, you feel like you have nothing left and you have to heal, search for yourself and travel back to the center of yourself.”
During her 11-year relationship with Pique, Shakira mostly resided in Barcelona, where she played soccer. During those years, she says she focused on her relationship and raising her children, with her personal life and career taking a back seat. “I was wearing a sweatshirt in Barcelona!” laughs. “In Barcelona, I was wearing Gap sweatpants with my hair in a bun.”
While Shakira put pieces of herself on the back burner during those years, she stressed that some sacrifices – such as her commitment to motherhood – were “non-negotiable”: “Sometimes it's hard to strike a balance, right?” she says. “How much time do you devote to yourself, to your work, to the children? But the children always come first and that's what eats us the most.”
She was also eager for her two children to watch and learn from her own struggles and successes. “I think they've seen their mother cry. I think they saw her celebrating. I think they've seen her laugh. I think they've seen her work tirelessly,” he says. “And this is it: I want to show them that life is not linear. It's not what people imagine it to be in the movies. Things don't turn out the way we want them to and you have to deal with the disappointment. This is part of the human condition. That's why we're here.”
Shakira says that after searching for those lost parts of herself, she finally found “Perspective. The ability to differentiate what is important from what is not so important.”
And also, she laughs, “My accent! My Caribbean accent is back now that I've left Spain.” Noting that the costeño lilt of her native Barranquilla, Colombia, had been muted during her time in Barcelona, she adds: “Now I'm hanging out with Barranquilleras from my kid's school and surrounded by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians. Yes, my accent is back, thank God.”
And with all that, Shakira says, she found two more essential things. “More theft. I got my steal back. And I got the sexiness behind me.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/shakira-rediscovery-divorce-gerard-pique-1235038598/
