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This has been a year of major self-reflection for Miley Cyrus. Over the past few months, she’s set new boundaries around her personal life, adjusted her perspective on the judgment she received in her early twenties, and registered her own comfort as a priority over returning to a grueling tour life. On her TikTok series “Used to Be Young,” the singer revealed a pivotal moment that has since informed her need to put herself first: the day she decided to end her 10-year relationship with Liam Hemsworth.
“I have to slow down because this is actually serious,” Cyrus begins. “Glastonbury was in June [2019], which is when the decision had been made that me and Liam’s commitment to being married really came from, of course, a place of love first — because we’d been together for 10 years — but also from a place of trauma and just trying to rebuild as quickly as we could.” The pair married in December 2018 and were officially divorced by December 2019.
“The day of the show was the day that I had decided that it was no longer going to work in my life to be in that relationship,” Cyrus explains. “So that was another moment where the work, the performance, the character came first. And I guess that’s why it’s now so important to me for that to not be the case — that the human comes first.”
Cyrus opened her Glastonbury performance with “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” her collaboration with Mark Ronson released earlier that year. The pair also played a brief rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black.” But her set also featured performances of her Black Mirror alter ego Ashley O’s single “On a Roll.” There might have been some release through the music, but it wasn’t the healing she needed. It was her commitment to finishing the show that prevailed. At the time, that had become standard for her.
“Every bit of trauma in my life — when my grandfather, who I was really close with, died when I was on set, I finished the scene and dealt with that later. During Black Mirror when the house [she shared with Hemsworth] was burning down, I finished my work, and I dealt with it later. On Glastonbury, when that happened, I finished and dealt with it later,” Cyrus expanded in the next segment of the TikTok series. “Now, I don’t have that anymore, because of the pandemic. I’ve always been able to work, literally, through everything. Now the only thing that I know to do in a traumatic experience — like the world shutting down for a global pandemic — is to create a show that can keep me performing for my fans.”
