Bea kept a poster she had drawn of her beloved fictional land in her desk at school. One day, she returned to the classroom after a violin lesson to find that her teacher had pinned the drawing onto the whiteboard for her whole class to see. And in a peak dickhead move, the teacher seemingly decided to join in with the bullying. 'Do you have anything to say? Do you have anything to tell us?' he asked. 'Beatopia?!' his class laughed. Ashamed, she promptly shut the doors on Beatopia, never speaking about it again.
"It was ridiculous," Bea recalls of her teacher's cruelty, before moving on to something more philosophical. "Everything happens for a reason."
That reason wouldn't be uncovered until Bea reached her early 20s. With nothing to do and nowhere to go during lockdown, she had the time to finally process all the trauma of her life – from a breakdown at 11 to being expelled from school at the age of 17 thanks to both poor grades and poor behaviour – and their accompanying emotions. "I had all this time to revisit those feelings and finally accept them. I would never talk about them and get stuck in a cycle."
This cleansing process of self-examination when writing would eventually lead to a full-length second album, and (more importantly) a far healthier mindset. Once again, the catharsis of creativity had done her a world of good.
"I tend to be in my head a lot," she begins. "That's where [my] dependency on music comes from. It's shaped me as a musician but that's all the shit I write about. I'm a very emotional person and I have to talk about my feelings or else they take over my brain. I journal all the time – I write pages and pages every day."
But the work isn't done yet.
"I'm still on the road to full self-acceptance," Bea continues. "It's been really hard, but I think you really need to take advantage of the help you receive. Then you start to understand that the way you act or the way you see yourself can be from something that you don't even necessarily think of straight away. Once you talk to a therapist about that, you can piece the puzzle together and understand why you feel this way and why you act [a certain] way. That's really helped me understand and accept myself."