SELENA SOUNDS SERENE
After illness fame, and Bieber
Selena Gomez admits that when Hailey Bieber appeared on a podcast last September and spoke about how cruel Gomez’s fans were to her for marrying Justin Bieber, Gomez’s ex, it sent her into a bit of a tailspin.
“Somebody made a comment and it involved me, and then for two days I felt bad about myself,” Gomez, 30, says in Rolling Stone’s December cover story.
But she tells writer Alex Morris that such an incident would have once set her off for months, and that now she’s better able to cope with whatever life — and the current spouses of former flames — might throw at her.
‘Started to get dark’
She was just a 7-year-old from a small town in Texas when she booked a part on “Barney.” But fame derailed her life.
A new Apple TV+ documentary, “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me,” out Friday, details the former Disney star’s struggles with stardom and mental health.
The film features raw footage of Gomez canceling her 2016 Revival World Tour amid a mental breakdown. The following year, she had to have a kidThis ney transplant due to lupus.
“When I started hitting my early 20s is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad,” she told the mag. Growing up, she thought she’d be married at 25, but instead she had messy romances with Bieber and The Weeknd. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near [marriage] — couldn’t be farther from it.”
In 2018, as she and Bieber were breaking up for the final time, Gomez started hearing voices. She’d spend weeks in bed, and told Rolling Stone she contemplated suicide though never attempted it. “I was scared she was going to die,” her mother says in the documentary.
Doctors have been able to successfully treat her bipolar disorder with two medications, but the meds mean it’s unlikely she’ll be able to carry her own children.
She tells Morris she’s cried over this. “[It’s] a very big, big, present thing in my life [but] however I’m meant to have them, I will.” Ultimately, she’s at peace. “I felt haunted by a past relationship that no one wanted to let go of,” she says in the doc, without needing to mention Bieber by name. “But then I just moved past it. I wasn’t afraid anymore.”