Avril Lavigne Talks Managing Lyme Disease: ‘I’ve Gone Through So Much’ but ‘I’m in a Good Place’

After nearly four years out of the spotlight, Avril Lavigne is back — and ready to tell her story.

Happy and healthy after a devastating battle with Lyme disease, the pop star, 34, reveals how the medical crisis changed her life in the new issue of PEOPLE.

“I’ve gone through so much,” says Lavigne, whose struggles inform her new album Head Above Water (out Feb. 15).

“It gave me a purpose,” she adds of her journey, “and made me find myself all over again.”

As she exclusively revealed to PEOPLE in an April 2015 cover story, Lavigne had been quietly suffering from Lyme disease after disappearing from the public eye in the fall of 2014.

Earlier that year, while on tour, Lavigne began feeling weak, but doctors at first cited dehydration and exhaustion. Months later — as her symptoms worsened and she struggled to even move — she visited a Lyme specialist who diagnosed her with the disease, a bacterial infection contracted from a tick bite that causes symptoms ranging from moderate fatigue and muscle pain to debilitating dementia.

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Avril was out at a pre-Grammy Awards party in LA last night, looking happy and excited for the big album release week!

Avril talks to Ellen K and confirms that the album will be out February 2019, and will be called “Head Above Water”. Listen below!

At Home With Avril Lavigne, Who’s Finally Back (And Totally Ready to Party)

The motherfucking princess is in her motherfucking castle.

The princess is Avril Lavigne, who anointed herself on her 2007 No. 1 single “Girlfriend.” The castle — a Tudor home in an illustriously ZIP-coded L.A. neighborhood — is the only thing Lavigne has presided over since a tour that ended in 2014.

A few weeks before the release of “Head Above Water,” her first single in four-and-a-half years, Lavigne sits under the cathedral-high ceiling of her home studio. It is the room where, over the course of her public absence, she recorded much of the album she plans to release in early 2019.

Lavigne’s many songs about partying — and the Jack Daniel’s lawn jockey who greeted me at the door — suggested that we’d wind up drinking whiskey, or at least the rosé her publicist suggested I bring. (Avril Lavigne drinks rosé?) But Lavigne is sipping Emergen-C-spiked electrolyte water, combating seasonal allergies. From her seat on a massive gray sectional (Avril Lavigne owns a sectional?), she reveals that she painted much of the art displayed in the expansive foyer and shows me the pink devotional journal gifted to her by her mother. Under the daily prayers topping each page are guitar tabs and ambitious to-do lists written in Lavigne’s bubbly handwriting: Complete album. Choose single. Shoot video. Dentist.