The popstar, who’s on the cover of the Elle September 2021 issue, is now focussed on helping people.
“My lupus, my kidney transplant, chemotherapy, having a mental illness, going through very public heartbreaks — these were all things that honestly should have taken me down. Every time I went through something, I was like, ‘What else? What else am I going to have to deal with?’” she shares, adding, “There could have been a time when I wasn’t strong enough, and would have done something to hurt myself.” But she had told herself, ‘You’re going to help people,’ she reveals. “That’s really what kept me going,” she adds.
Explaining why she took a break from social media in 2017, she says, “I suddenly had to learn how to be with myself. That was annoying, because in the past, I could spend hours looking at other people’s lives. … Now I get information the proper way. When my friends have something to talk about, they call me and say, ‘Oh, I did this.’ They don’t say, ‘Did you see my post?’”
(Selena had handed the control of her social media accounts to her assistant and deleted the apps from her phone “so that there’s no temptation.”)
