Since moving from Barcelona back to Miami about a year ago, Shakira has traded tennis for water sports, Gap sweats for silky Amiri ones, and even regained bits of her Caribbean accent. It’s all part of a major process of rediscovery, she tells Rolling Stone, which she’s undergone since the end of her relationship with former soccer star Gerard Piqué.
“When you leave a relationship of many years, there are things about yourself that seem to have been lost along the way,” Shakira says. “There’s things about yourself that you change for the other person or give up. When that relationship breaks down, you feel like you’re left with nothing and you have to heal, search for yourself, and travel back toward the center of yourself.”
During her 11-year relationship to Piqué, Shakira primarily resided in Barcelona, where he played soccer. During those years, she says she focused on her relationship and raising her kids, with her personal life and career taking a backseat. “I was in sweatpants in Barcelona!” she quips. “In Barcelona, I was wearing sweatpants from the Gap, with my hair in a bun.”
While Shakira put parts of herself on the back burner during those years, she stressed that some sacrifices — like her commitment to motherhood — were “nonnegotiable”: “Sometimes achieving a balance is difficult, right?” she says. “How much time do you dedicate to yourself, to your work, to the children? But children always come first and what consumes us the most.”
She was also eager for her two kids to watch and learn from her own struggles and successes. “I think they’ve seen their mother cry. I think they’ve seen her celebrate. I think they’ve seen her laugh. I think they’ve seen her work tirelessly,” she says. “And that’s it: I want to show them that life isn’t linear. It’s not how people picture it in the movies. Things don’t turn out the way we want them to, and you have to deal with disappointment. That’s part of the human condition. It’s why we’re here.”
Shakira says that after searching for those lost parts of herself, she ultimately found “Perspective. The ability to differentiate what’s important from what’s not so important.”
And also, she says with a laugh, “My accent! My Caribbean accent is back now that I’m out of Spain.” Noting that the costeño lilt of her hometown of Barranquilla, Colombia, had grown 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. Yeah, my accent is back, thank God.”
And with all that, Shakira says, she found two more essential things. “More swag. I got my swag back. And I got my sexy back.”
