They say fame isn’t everything, and for singer and actress Selena Gomez (Grand Prairie, Texas, USA, 30 years old), this mantra is an integral part of her life. Surrounded by spotlights since the age of seven, in recent years lupus – a disease diagnosed in 2015 – and bipolarity have defined the steps she has had to take in her career. But now he’s faced everything he’s experienced and dares to show it publicly through his documentary: Selena Gomez: My Mind and I, available November 4 on Apple TV+. A documentary not based on the glamor that surrounds her, but on her most vulnerable and human side, which she shows without filters and which she recorded over four years, between 2016 and 2020.
An hour and a half of footage in which the artist reveals her fears, her insecurities and dares to reveal her moments of weakness. “I’m so tired,” Gomez says to her friend Raquelle, who is lying on top of her in a car in Paris. “Do you want to take your medicine?” he asks without getting an answer, “I know the answer, but you have to”. In 2019, the Who Says interpreter had to stop living the way she was doing for her mental health. “Everything I wanted or dreamed of, I accomplished, but it also killed me.”
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The life of a Disney girl has put her through some trials along the way, which she has gradually overcome. In 2016, when it looked like it was going to be her best year musically, she had to cancel her revival tour after more than 55 concerts due to anxiety, depression and panic attacks caused by lupus. Weeks after the announcement, she had to be admitted to a rehabilitation clinic to be treated for her illness. Days before the start of said tour, Gomez wasn’t having his best moment. “It’s all nonsense. Fatal paint. I have no idea what I’m doing,” she says to her friends and team in the dressing room between sobs in the documentary during the final rehearsal of her show. “All the time I have a voice in my head telling me that the shit is I forgot this or that. The pressure is incredible, I don’t want to let anyone down.”
Some confessions she shares as pictures surface of her with her fans, acting and even taking her pulse minutes before going on stage to check on her health – something she needs to do for lupus. Her friends also report intimate conversations with the artist: “We wanted to have a conversation to find out what was going on with her and she said to us, ‘I don’t know. I can not explain. I wish you could feel what I’m feeling in my head,” Raquelle explains to the camera.
And although Lupus briefly got him to quit back in 2016, he finally did it a year later. The singer had to undergo a kidney transplant due to complications with the disease. The donor was her friend and actress Francia Raisa. Her mother, who was with her during the trial, reveals how she felt five years after the procedure. “I thought he was going to die. It was a miracle that it came out. I’m still afraid that it will happen again,” she says, visibly moved and wiping away her tears. Six years after the operation, Gomez announced in an interview with the American magazine Rolling Stone that he would have the operation again in the future.
In addition to lupus, depression, anxiety, and a kidney problem, Selena Gomez was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2019. “I don’t want to go to the hospital, but I have to go so I don’t get stuck in my thoughts. I want to apologize to my mother for how many times I spoke to her. It wasn’t me,” the artist explains as she prepares to go to the medical center.
Despite the fact that his health improved over time, the documentary shows how he experienced a small relapse with every step: dizziness, insecurity and vomiting, episodes he went through every time he faced a public event. But the artist tries to show that she knows how to keep something positive out of every bad moment: in her case, her song Lose You to Love Me was born. In 45 minutes she had written one of her most special, sensitive and important issues and the one that helped her get through one of the longest stretches of her life: breaking up with Justin Bieber. “It’s more than a song about lost love. That’s how I learned to decide myself and life before others,” he says on this subject in the documentary. His relationship with the Canadian singer was always in the media spotlight even after their split and when he was already married to model Hailey Bieber: “Everything was very public. I felt constrained by a previous relationship that they wouldn’t let me out of.”
While promoting his single in London, he experienced one of the most difficult moments that made him go back in time. A journalist asks her a series of questions to which she answers. As the conversation between the two ends, the artist says to her team, “She didn’t listen to me and that’s something that annoys me because I don’t want to feel that way again. It took me a long time to get out of there.”
Since she was diagnosed in 2015, she has been plagued by the disease. In 2020, she had to face four hours a day of treatment attached to a machine during which she was visibly affected. “I just want to be happy and normal. I don’t want to be super famous,” she says. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the actress revealed that she will most likely not have children due to the medication she has been taking for years to cure her illness.
Despite the difficulties of her illness, Gomez has taken her time over the years to show her most human side. One of his dreams, as shown in the screening, was to start a foundation or school with a psychologist to help children. A year later, in 2020, he created the Rare Impact Fund, which he used to raise $100 million to provide psychological help to the little ones.
Always making her struggles visible, the singer sends a final message to those who are going through the same situation as her: “The essential thing is to know what to do and to recognize it. It’s something I’m not ashamed of. You’re not a bad person, you’re not crazy, you just have to learn to deal with it. Gomez continues to grow and collect projects: She’s continuing on with the hit Disney+ series Only Murders in the Building and has already announced that she will be releasing a new album in 2023. Nothing and nobody stops the artist, only herself when she needs it.