Selena Gomez In ‘My Mind & Me’ Doc: ‘Knowledge Eliminates Fear’
Selena Gomez is bearing it all to the world tomorrow with her mental health documentary, My Mind and Me. Speaking to Rolling Stone prior to the release, Gomez revealed to the publication that the rawness of the doc almost made her back out of the release.
“I’m just so nervous,” she said. “Because I have the platform I have, it’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose. I don’t want that to sound dramatic, but I almost wasn’t going to put this out. God’s honest truth, a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure I could do it.”
The Only Murders In The Building star reveals she has been to four treatment centers, telling the publication. “I think when I started hitting my early twenties 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.” Her highs and lows would last weeks or months at a time and she wouldn’t be able to sleep for days.
“It would start with depression, then it would go into isolation,” she says. “Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. My friends would bring me food because they love me, but none of us knew what it was. Sometimes it was weeks I’d be in bed, to where even walking downstairs would get me out of breath.” She never actually attempted suicide but spent a few years contemplating it. “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there.”
Gomez, 30, has struggled with a lupus diagnosis that almost resulted in her death, public breakups and a diagnosis with bipolar disorder — just to name some of her major hardships. In 2018, the Disney alum experienced psychosis, where she ended up in a treatment facility and spent several months suspended in paranoia. Her friends said she was unrecognizable at his point in her life. “It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away,” Gomez said.
At one point in the documentary, Gomez likens learning about her bipolar disorder to reading about thunder and lightning as a child to help subside her fear of storms — which is a lesson she told Billboard she still uses to this day. “Knowledge eliminates fear in my opinion, because then you start having a relationship with your mental health, so I would suggest to learn as much as you can,” she shared as her advice to those going through similar struggles that she has gone through.
The singer released a new single today, with the same name of her documentary. Gomez teased her return to music during the documentary’s premiere at AFI Festival Wednesday evening, telling Variety that new music will be coming “hopefully next year.” As for a tour, she said, “Maybe! I know. I should, right?”
My Mind & Me, directed by Madonna: Truth or Dare documentarian Alek Keshishian, hits AppleTV+ on Friday, November 4.
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