Lindsey Stirling has been busy.
The dancing violinist received the "Top Dance/Electronic Album" award for her album "Brave Enough," at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards, which were held at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas last weekend. Stirling appeared on the broadcast to present the award for "Top Social Artist" but her own award was announced before the show, which Stirling previously accepted from a bathroom stall.
Stirling explained more about her victory and acceptance in an interview with Billboard.
On the album, Stirling collaborated with other popular artists including Christina Perri and Andrew McMahon. Below is the music video from Stirling and McMahon's “Something Wild,” which was part of the soundtrack to Disney’s Pete’s Dragon in 2016.
Stirling also created a YouTube Red Documentary about her experiences as a musician that was released May 17. The documentary, originally intended to show the positive aspects of being a musician, took a different turn than Stirling expected.
“I wanted it to show that in the music industry, you can have a very healthy and happy and optimistic lifestyle,” she told Billboard in the video. “But then my life actually kind of flipped upside down . . . and so it's a lot deeper than I had anticipated,” she continued, stating that she was very introspective and vulnerable in the film.
But Stirling is no stranger to being vulnerable on camera. In her “I’m a Mormon video,” Stirling discusses her struggles with anorexia and self-image during her college years.
“I started to find most of my value in the fact that I was thin,” she said. Although it took several years to realize she had become anorexic, Stirling recognized that she needed to improve her quality of life. “Anytime there’s a change to be made, you have to realize that there’s somewhere else you want to be, and I wanted basically to be happy,” she said in the video.
Stirling revisited those memories in a video released Wednesday by Child Mind Institute on YouTube. In the 2-minute video, Stirling offers advice to her younger self explaining the eating disorder that consumed her.
“This all came about because I was incredibly insecure, and I wanted to be accepted,” she told viewers, saying she learned that popularity and acceptance aren’t everything.
“Numbers do not create happiness,” she said. “Relationships do. And it’s not about how many likes you have or how many friends you have. It’s more about the quality of those relationships.”