Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott/VogueIn a new cover story with Vogue, Selena Gomez explains how touring ultimately led to her 90-day stint at a Tennessee treatment center last year.
“Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she tells the mag. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage.”
Selena says she felt like she wasn’t good enough and that she wasn’t giving her fans anything meaningful.
“I was so used to performing for kids,” she explains. “At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say.”
She adds, “What I wanted to say is that life is so stressful, and I get the desire to just escape it. But I wasn’t figuring my own stuff out, so I felt I had no wisdom to share. And so maybe I thought everybody out there was thinking, ‘This is a waste of time.’”
Selena credits entering treatment as the best thing she’s done. Now, she takes care of herself by going to therapy five days a week and limiting her time on social media. She’s even deleted the Instagram app from her phone, despite being the app’s most followed person. And we know she’s besties with Taylor Swift and dating The Weeknd, but they might be the only famous people that have her number.
“I think seventeen people have my phone number right now,” she says. “Maybe two are famous.”
Copyright © 2017, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.