Anabela Atijas: It is a weight I carry on my back
Speaking on the Montenegrin coast, the singer talked openly for the first time about what it costs her to meet the public expectation that she always look flawless.
Anabela Atijas has spoken to Grand about the pressure she lives with because audiences expect her to look flawless at all times. She gave the interview while the show’s crew was working on the Montenegrin coast. What the public has been handing her for years as a compliment, the singer now describes as an obligation she carries around.
“I am not being modest, but that is very hard to live up to. You have to endure it, you know how it is when someone keeps imposing something on you. For me it has become a weight on my back.”
It is a short line, but it shifts the register in which she is usually written about. For years she has been the subject of stories about how she looks, rarely about how she feels.
Why does Anabela Atijas keep up her appearance?
She says she trains and looks after herself for a reason that has nothing to do with the comments under her posts. The motive, she insists, is health first, everything else second.
“I do it first of all to be healthy and to feel good in my own skin. One day when I decide to ease off, what will people say: ‘Look at her, she has aged and put on weight’.”
That second sentence contains the whole problem she is describing. She already knows, word for word, what the comment would be if she ever dropped the routine, and that comment is more familiar to her than any praise. Atijas is in her sixties, and she has been on the scene for more than three decades.
Social media, in her words, is a necessary evil
The second half of her remarks touches on what put public figures under constant surveillance in the first place. She called social platforms a necessary evil rather than a tool she cannot work without.
“People message each other more than they meet. I am afraid we will get used to it.”
This is where her own biography explains the statement. Atijas started out in the 1990s, when a performer and an audience existed for each other only in person: at a concert, at a record promotion, in a television studio. A remark about her looks came from someone she knew or from a newspaper column, and it ended there. Today it arrives without pause, from strangers, under every photograph taken by the sea. Her line about messaging is therefore not a general observation about modern life but a description of a change she has lived through at work.
In the same conversation she covered several things at once:
- the pressure to look the same as she did ten and more years ago
- her reason for training, which she reduces to health and feeling good in her own skin
- the comments she already imagines if she ever eases off
- social platforms and the fact that people meet in person less often
She then offered what she considers the remedy for all of it.
“We should try to nurture and love the child inside us. I think that is the recipe.”
It is the only line in the whole conversation she delivered in the plural, as advice. Everything else she said about herself, in the first person, without softening it.
Serbia’s pop scene rarely admits to this kind of fatigue. Appearance is treated as part of the job, and staying in shape as a private choice nobody discusses in public. Atijas has now called that choice a burden, and she did it not after some pile-on online but in the middle of the summer season, at the seaside, in a conversation that started out light. The next time a photograph of her from the coast appears, the comments underneath it will read differently, because she has already said what she thinks of them.
