Following criticism of her latest tour, new music and her trip to the edge of space on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin craft, Katy Perry has written an emotional message explaining how the public opprobrium has affected her. Perry wrote the message under an Instagram post by a fan group, who booked a billboard in Times Square to congratulate her on the opening week of her Lifetimes tour. Describing herself as a “human piñata” and the internet as “a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed” people, Perry told her supportive fans: “I can continue to remain true to myself, heart open and honest especially because of our bond. “Please know I am OK, I have done a lot [of] work around knowing who I am, what is real and what is important to me. My therapist said something years ago that has been a gamechanger, ‘no one can make you believe something about yourself that you don’t already believe about yourself’ and if I ever do have any feelings about it then it’s an opportunity to investigate the feeling underneath it. When the ‘online’ world tries to make me a human piñata, I take it with grace and send them love, cause I know so many people are hurting in so many ways and the internet is very much so a dumping ground for unhinged and unhealed.” She added: “I’m not perfect, and I actually have omitted that word from my vocabulary, I’m on a human journey playing the game of life with an audience of many and sometimes I fall but … I get back up and go on and continue to play the game and somehow through my battered and bruised adventure I keep looking to the light and in that light a new level unlocks.” Perry is currently on her Lifetimes tour, which began in Mexico on 23 April. Short clips from the tour have been mocked in some quarters online, for the choreography and staging. Perry was also castigated – arguably more than anyone else – for taking part in Blue Origin’s flight on 14 April, along with an all-female crew including TV presenter Gayle King and Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez. A Guardian op-ed described the flight as “the utter defeat of American feminism … indulgent and morally hollow”. Celebrities including Joe Rogan and Emily Ratajkowski criticised it, with actor Olivia Munn saying: “There are so many other things that are so important in the world right now.” Lily Allen was another of the critics, though this week she apologised to Perry. “There was actually no need for me to bring her name into it, and it was my own internalised misogyny,” she said on her podcast Miss Me. “It was just completely unnecessary to pile on with her. I mean, I disagree with what it was that they did, but she wasn’t the only person that did it.” Perry’s most recent album 143 underperformed, with none of its singles reaching the UK Top 40. The US leg of the Lifetimes tour begins on 7 May in Houston, followed by stints in Australia, Canada and countries across South America. A European tour begins on 7 October in Glasgow.