Selena Gomez revealed in an interview with Business of Fashion that as a young singer and actress who found stardom through Disney, her rise to fame left her feeling vulnerable due to being followed by older male paparazzi who would take photographs of her wherever she went. ‘I remember just feeling really violated when I was younger, even just being on the beach,’ she recalled. ‘I was maybe 15 or 16 and people were taking pictures – photographers. ‘I felt very violated and I didn’t like it or understand it, and that felt very weird because I was a young girl and they were grown men. I didn’t like that feeling.’ This was just the start of her tumultuous relationship with photographers, and she was often caught out by paps during her high-profile on-off relationship with singer Justin Bieber.
The singer also spoke in the interview about finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that she was getting noticed for what was happening in her personal life rather than her acting itself, causing her to lose interest in what she was working towards. She explained: ‘I started getting known for things that weren’t [related to] my work. That’s when my passion started to really feel like it was going further and further away. And that scared me.’
The pressure was soon on top of the actress and in 2016, she took a three-month break from the spotlight to check herself in for treatment at a rehabilitation treatment center. She made an emotional speech at the 2016 American Music Awards after her stay in rehab, during which she famously said:’ If you’re broken, you do not have to stay broken.’
The main reason for her stay was to deal with health issues caused by her lupus diagnosis but has said the experience, on the whole, has taught her the importance of self-care, and to ensure that she is ‘healthy and happy in [her] mind’ when it comes to her career. ‘I would look in the mirror and I just felt like, “I’ve had enough, I don’t know if I can go on anymore.” And I stopped it for a second,’ she confessed. ‘But it didn’t mean that I didn’t love it, I just had to find what I was going to do with it. As long as I’m healthy and happy in my mind, I’m all about it.’
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