Selena Gomez and shit

Below are only the important sentences so please read it all at least. Full version here: https://telegra.ph/-11-04-852

Speaking of gagging, her beauty line, Rare, is one of the few purporting to “embrace inner beauty” that doesn’t trigger that reflex, in part because of its inclusivity (there are, famously, 48 shades of foundation), and in part because a portion of its proceeds go toward efforts to provide underserved communities with access to mental-health services. Maybe with the diagnosis of the autoimmune disease lupus, which is triggered by stress and necessitated Gomez getting a kidney transplant in 2017, after which the organ managed to flip itself over, causing grievous harm to an artery and requiring doctors to rush her into a six-hour surgery during which she very well could have died. So that’s … a lot, even if it weren’t paired with a series of highly publicized breakups with the likes of Justin Bieber and the Weeknd and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which she first shared with the world via a 2020 episode of Miley Cyrus’ Instagram Live show, Bright Minded. Meanwhile, she was popping up here and there to broadcast her allergy to bullshit, to make appeals for kindness and decency, and to rail against the ills of social media while at one point racking up more Instagram followers than any other human on the planet — a mindfuck if there ever were one. But then there’s this: Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, a documentary on Gomez’s struggle with mental illness that debuts Nov. 4 on Apple TV+. Any preliminary ideas that this might be a puff piece or vanity project are shattered five minutes in, when the mental anguish that caused Gomez to cancel her 2016 Revival tour early and check herself into a treatment facility is on full, painful, tearful display. The cameras do not stop rolling, and the next hour-plus provides one of the least sugarcoated explorations of mental illness one is likely to find on film. There are scenes in which Gomez is unable to get out of bed, scenes of her lashing out at friends, scenes of her roaming her house aimlessly, scenes of her coming apart in the middle of a press tour, contemptuously responding to the media circus when she isn’t seeming to disassociate entirely. The documentary is so raw that Gomez almost didn’t sign off on its release. “I’m just so nervous,” she says of that prospect, pulling her bare feet up onto the chair. “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. “I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” Gomez tells me now. “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, prompted by nothing she could put her finger on. Sometimes, she wouldn’t be able to sleep for days. She’d be convinced she needed to buy everyone she knew a car, that “I have a gift and I wanted to share it with people” — a symptom of mania complicated by the fact that, in her case, it was kind of true. Then, a low would hit. “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,” she says matter-of-factly. There were things she thought might be contributing to her distress. She was struggling to find an authentic artistic voice, to shirk the Disney polish, to age along with her fans. Her health was precarious. Her life didn’t look much like she’d imagined it back in Grand Prairie. “I grew up thinking I would be married at 25,” she says. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that — couldn’t be farther from it. Gomez only remembers snippets of this time, but she knows she ended up in a treatment facility, where she spent several months suspended in paranoia, unable to trust anyone, thinking they were all out to get her. Her friends have since told her that she was unrecognizable during this period. One of the most scary things about psychosis, Gomez tells me, is that no one can predict if or when it will end. Some people come out of it in a matter of days or weeks; others never do. Gomez found herself slowly “walking out of psychosis,” as she puts it. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which helped her make sense of what had happened, but also meant that she was loaded up on medications, doctors throwing things at the wall and hoping something might stick. She got better, sort of. “It was just that I was gone,” she says, explaining the effect the drugs had on her. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.” After she left the facility, she found a psychiatrist who realized she was on a lot of medications she shouldn’t have been on and pulled her off all but two. Slowly, she felt herself starting to come back. “He really guided me,” says Gomez. “But I had to detox, essentially, from the medications I was on. I had to learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking. 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.” Philanthropy helped. She realized that there was something about talking to other people about real things that grounded her, pulled her out of her own head, if only momentarily. She started caring about politics, talking openly about how her Mexican grandmother had entered the U.S. hidden in the back of a truck, and periodically turning over her social media accounts to people like Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality.” She co-executive-produced the Netflix series Living Undocumented and the Netflix miniseries 13 Reasons Why, joining the cast in getting a semicolon tattoo — a message of solidarity with those who have struggled with suicidal ideation and other mental-health issues — and in defending the show against accusations that it romanticizes suicide. She started the Rare Impact Fund, whose goal is to raise $100 million to do such things as provide a mental-health curriculum in American schools and combat the stigma against mental illness that can keep people from seeking help. She visited the White House earlier this year, started working alongside Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “There’s something very powerful in what she’s doing, not just for other people, but for Selena herself,” Murthy tells me. “When you struggle with mental-health concerns, it can erode your sense of self, your own self-esteem, and then it makes it harder and harder to reach out to other people, and so you enter this downward spiral of loneliness and isolation. Service has the power to break that cycle.” “It’s kind of like I’m sacrificing myself for a greater purpose,” she says of her documentary. “God’s honest truth, I almost didn’t put it out.” Much of the ongoing process of trying to break that cycle was caught on film. In 2019, after receiving her diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Gomez traveled to Kenya on behalf of the WE Foundation, visiting schools she’d helped raise the money to build. She invited Keshishian along to document the trip. When she returned from Africa, he kept filming. The pandemic started, and he kept filming. Gomez’s lupus came back from remission, and he kept filming. Her mental-health struggle continued, and he kept filming, even when he wasn’t sure that he should. “I was in her home, and she [would be] in tears,” he says. Over time, he began to see that there was “a deeper documentary here about a young woman struggling to incorporate her diagnosis — she was fresh out of the mental facility — and trying to reconcile the fact that she’s still a patient, she’s still in the earliest stages of her recovery, but she desperately wants to use her platform for good and to talk about it. There’s some tension there because obviously she’s trying to be an example for others, but she’s still not on the other side of it, so to speak.” Gomez knows that there’s really no “other side,” that psychosis could return, that her bipolar diagnosis is one she will forever have to navigate and manage. She says she’s viewed the documentary only a handful of times, and while she immediately recognized its stark potential, she went back and forth on whether to release it. “I know it has a big message, but am I the right person to bring it to light? I don’t know,” she states plainly. “I wanted someone to say, ‘Selena, this is too intense.’ But everyone was like, ‘I’m really moved, but are you ready to do this? And are you comfortable?’” Finally, Apple+ set up a screening. Gomez didn’t watch the film, but she did watch the audience response afterward. She saw the emotional impact. “I was like, ‘OK, if I can just do that for one person, imagine what it could do.’ Eventually I just kind of went for it. I just said, ‘Yes.’” Gomez hopes this was the right decision. At one point, she asks what I think of My Mind and Me — she wants me to be honest. I reply, honestly, that I think it’s profound and powerful, and then suddenly I’m telling her about the panic attacks I’d started having during the pandemic, and how as they’d gotten worse — unmoored, unbearable — my mind started doing things to my body, and that, once done, those things were real and painful and my mind couldn’t handle it, and the loop continued and I felt like I’d never, ever be able to break it. I tell her how I was loaded up on medications, doctors throwing things at the wall and hoping something might stick. I tell her how hard it was to break the cycle, to figure out workarounds, to detox. Inside, in a sleek lecture hall, are the attendees of the Mental Healthcare Innovations Summit — a hundred or so researchers and bold names (the surgeon general of California; Robin Williams’ son) assembled to “raise awareness of cutting-edge mental-health therapies” and to listen to Gomez and Elyse Cohen, the VP of social impact at Rare Beauty, talk about unrealistic beauty standards (“I don’t look like this. I mean, this took me three hours to do,” Gomez admitted) and creating a “stigma-free company,” and what Gomez did most recently to support her mental health (answer: the night before, instead of holing up to watch Schitt’s Creek in the “safe bubble” of her suite at the Palo Alto Four Seasons, she’d come downstairs and joined some of her team by the fire pit). This was no small part of her life now, these meetings with scientists and health care professionals, these discussions of how to support mental health in a micro and macro manner. “We actually are in communication with tons of different mental-health organizations and resources through Rare Impact,” Gomez says in her suite that morning, clothed in layers of soft knits and sitting at a table spread with the remnants of breakfast. It sounds really cheesy when I say it sometimes, but I truly don’t know how else I’d be here, simply based on the medical stuff and balances in my head and conversations I’d had with myself [that were] really dark.” If there’s a reason she’s here, she thinks, it must be this. After the talk at Stanford, Gomez lingers in an antechamber of the center as various mental-health dignitaries approach. At one point, she removes her heels and stands barefoot on the floor, nodding along to a discussion of how therapy sessions of the future might be conducted by bots (a seemingly terrible idea until one learns — as we do in that moment — that 98 percent of Wisconsin has no access to mental-health care whatsoever). Gomez doesn’t say much — she’d been clear that she was not an expert, but rather there to listen — but when people share their own mental-health struggles with her, she takes in these stories graciously, seeming to hum with acceptance and goodwill. She still has some trouble directing that same acceptance and goodwill toward herself. “I’m not fine and just back to happy life,” she tells me the week before in her glam room. At one point, she mentions that donated kidneys don’t last forever, that hers might have a shelf life of only 30 years. “Which is fine,” she says. “I might be like, ‘Peace out,’ anyway.” She talks about going to visit a friend who was trying to get pregnant and, afterward, just getting in her car and crying: Her need to remain on the two drugs she takes for her bipolar disorder means that she likely won’t be able to carry her own children — and “that’s a very big, big, present thing in my life”— though she’s convinced that “however I’m meant to have them, I will.” She tells me about a recurring dream she has, one in which she’s often traveling, always near water, and voices descend in different forms to subtly condemn her, to ask if she’s learned her lesson, to tell her that she’s not doing enough or doing too much. “I think there’s something over me that is maybe my bipolar that kind of just keeps me humble — in a dark way,” she shares. She has tried to “make bipolar my friend,” as she puts it: doing dialectical behavior and cognitive behavioral therapy, visiting gurus and her therapist, trusting in “a force that’s bigger,” getting closer to her mom — who she says has been “very open about having struggles with her own mental health” — and working with her to launch Wondermind, a website devoted to mental fitness. I’ve never met him, but I’m secretly hoping he finds that out just because I want him to be like, ‘That’s weird.’” She also takes stock of her own indicators of mental fitness.