Selena Gomez is breaking free. In her cover story for Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue, the singer-actress opened up about how she’s entering her liberation era after battling mental health struggles and an intense work culture as a child-teen actor.
Among her many forthcoming projects, including season three of Only Murders in the Building, in which she stars and executive produces, Gomez is most excited to release new, “happy” music.
“If I had my way, I would probably write ballads my whole life,” Gomez admitted to the outlet. With her next album, Gomez is eager “to produce music that will make people smile.”
“The music I’m doing right now is about real things that I’m walking through. It’s really powerful, strong, very pop,” she revealed. “The theme generally is freedom — freedom from relationships, freedom from the darkness.”
It’s been three years since Gomez dropped her last album, Rare. In 2021, Gomez released a Spanish EP called Revelación, which was followed up by her 2022 single “My Mind & Me,” the leading track for her Apple TV+ documentary of the same name.
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Of the many things Gomez is looking forward to breaking free from, is her Disney past.
“It’s not that I’m ashamed of my past, it’s just that I’ve worked so hard to find my own way. I don’t want to be who I was. I want to be who I am,” she explained.
Gomez confessed that she put a lot of pressure on herself to “be the best role model I could be” during her Wizards of Waverly Place years. The Disney Channel network also had tight restraints over their younger actors, and over what they could or couldn’t say.
“I wasn’t a wild child by any means, but I was on Disney, so I had to make sure not to say ‘What the hell?’ in front of anyone,” Gomez said.
From age 15 to 19, she portrayed the role of high school student Alex Russo.
It was also around this time that Gomez entered one of the most high profile relationships to ever exist, with popstar Justin Bieber. Their on-again, off-again romance was one of the many reasons Gomez decided to offload her social media accounts to an assistant.
“I went through a hard time in a breakup and I didn’t want to see any of the [feedback] —not necessarily about the relationship, but the opinions of me versus [someone] else. There’d be thousands of really nice comments, but my mind goes straight to the mean one,” she explained.
She added: “People can call me ugly or stupid and I’m like, Whatever. But these people get detailed. They write paragraphs that are so specific and mean. I would constantly be crying. I constantly had anxiety…I couldn’t do it anymore. It was a waste of my time.”
Now, for the sake of protecting and nourishing her own mental health, Gomez has a filtering system in place. While Gomez creates her own social media content, it’s all posted by an assistant. The actress doesn’t physically use the apps.
She also has a team who skims her comments section. Those that are lighthearted and uplifting are shared with her.
As she continues her advocacy for mental health, Gomez hopes to be “remembered for my heart than anything else.”
