Selena Gomez is a maestro on social media. She's got hundreds of millions of followers spread across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. But if those fans think they're having a one-on-one chat with the singer and star of "Only Murders in the Building," they should think again.
Because Gomez, 29, isn't really sending out any of those posts, and it's a move she says has "saved my life."
As she tells WWD in its new Beauty Inc. issue, "I do all of my posts through texting my assistant and the caption that I want."
She doesn't even keep those apps on her phone, having taken them off three years ago. And she's happier for it.
"That's a huge, significant part of why I feel like I've been as healthy as I have been," says Gomez in the interview. "I'm completely unaware of, actually, what's going on in pop culture, and that makes me really happy. And maybe that doesn't make everybody else happy, but for me, it's really saved my life."
Gomez knows what it's like to be caught up in that pop culture whirl; she's been acting since she was a child, and has dealt with anxiety and depression in her own life. She's also had to cope with lupus, had a kidney transplant in 2017 and last year, she revealed she was bipolar. That's a lot to digest in the real world, much less on social media, too.
She explains that there was too much of her out there for public consumption, which felt "uncontrollable.
"I felt like my thoughts and everything I was consuming revolved around a million different other people in the world saying good things and bad things," she says. "And I just thought... 'I don't get anything from it. Nothing is giving me life.' And I just snapped, and I was over it."
Since then, she feels much clearer.
"It feels good to finally not care as much as I did," she says. "I think of how many years I wasted just caring so much about what people thought, and it was just suffocating. And I think I wasted time doing that. What I love so far about getting older is that I'm starting to just really be happy with who I am, know what I want and know what I don't want."
And that, it seems, is the glare of social media.