Ed Sheeran Opens up About 'Turbulent Things' in His Life That Sparked Recent Instagram Absence

02/03/2023 12:02 pm EST

Ed Sheeran is back on Instagram after taking a two-month break from the social media platform amid "turbulent" times in his personal life. The "Shape of You" singer, 31, returned to Instagram Tuesday with an update after realizing he hasn't "been that engaged in my social media or my fan base online over the last couple of years."

"The reason I'm making this video is, just being totally honest, I've had some turbulent things going on in my personal life so I just didn't really feel like being online and pretending to be something I'm not, when I wasn't feeling like that," he continued. "And I know that sounds weird." Now that things are "looking up," Sheeran joked, "Weird s- is gonna start being posted."

The "Perfect" singer didn't go into detail about the difficult personal things he's been dealing with, but there's been no shortage of major milestones going on in his life as of late. In May 2022, Sheeran and his wife, Cherry Seaborn, announced they had welcomed a second daughter. "Want to let you all know we've had another beautiful baby girl. We are both so in love with her, and over the moon to be a family of 4 x," the musician wrote on social media at the time. The couple is also parents to daughter Lyra Antarctica Seaborn Sheeran, who was born in 2020.

Sheeran also decided to take a year off after two years of touring, admitting in 2021 that he had considered stepping away from music for good after the birth of his firstborn. "Music is entirely me as a person," he said in a SiriusXM interview at the time. "And then I had my daughter – well, my wife had our daughter, but I'm a parent. And then I was like, 'That's it, this is me, I'm just going to be a dad, I'm not going to play music anymore.'"

The Grammy winner continued that he was feeling "directionless" as he struggled with the expectations and pressure from people to continue his career's skyrocketing trajectory. Ultimately, Sheeran decided to use his daughter as inspiration to go back to his music. "I suddenly was like, I think it's more important for my daughter to grow up knowing that her parents have the work ethic and her parents love working hard and love creating and enjoy their jobs and seeing that rather than, like, looking at your dad as technically unemployed," he reasoned.

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