Sheryl Crow lost "faith in humanity" after being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Sheryl Crow
The 57-year-old singer was dismayed at the way people seemingly wanted to see her at her "lowest moment" when she was told she had the disease, just weeks after ending her engagement to cyclist Lance Armstrong.
She said: "When I was diagnosed and my relationship fell apart, people were camped outside trying to get that picture of Sheryl Crow at her lowest moment. I just lost all faith in humankind.
"But I licked my wounds. I started feeling like, 'I'm at a point in my life where I need to manifest something more realistic.' "
After entering remission, the 'All I Wanna Do' hitmaker relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville, where she adopted her sons, Wyatt, now 12, and Levi, nine, and feels more herself than ever.
She told People magazine: "Now I have a place to come home to. I feel like everything in your life presents itself as a means of helping you remember who you are. There are so many times along the way that you forget who you are, and that's when you find yourself the loneliest.
"In the last 10 years I have come into contact with the person I was born as before all of this craziness, and I feel more in touch with the small-town girl from Missouri."
And Sheryl feels more at home in Tennessee than she ever did in California.
She said: "I remember having a New Year's Eve party [in L.A.] -- there were 700-800 people in my house, and everywhere you looked there was a celebrity. But I never felt like I put down roots there. I was always on the trajectory of my career; it was all business.
"Now I drop my kids off in the school drop-off lane, I pick them up after school, and I'm perfectly content. I feel so much more alive and young than I even felt in the 20 years of living in L.A. I love my life. ... I was normal before I made it, and I'm pretty normal now."
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