Selena Gomez’s new documentary, “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me,” takes a candid look at her life from 2016 to the present. The 30-year-old singer opens up about her career, mental health, and relationship history in the Apple TV+ film, which is now available. Here are 7 things will learn about Selena Gomez from the documentary.
Her struggle with self-doubt
In one of the documentary’s opening scenes, Gomez laments her production and plans for her Revival tour in 2016.
During a conversation with her best friend and her manager, Selena broke down in tears as she expressed everything she felt she did wrong.
“It just sucks, all of it,” Selena cries after one rehearsal. “It looks so bad. I have no idea what the f–k I’m doing.”
In that same scene, she continues to pick herself apart, and shares an underlying fear: her past. “I don’t want to disappoint John, I don’t want him to think he signed some f*cking Disney kid,” she says, tearful, about Interscope head John Janick. When John comes into the room, she tells him, “I just don’t want you to ever regret signing me.” She’s concerned the show feels young: “I want nothing more than to not be my past, and it comes back.”
Her experience in a mental hospital and with bipolar disorder
Gomez discusses her time in a mental health facility, where she received a bipolar disorder diagnosis in 2018, early on in the documentary.
“At one point, she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be alive right now. I don’t want to live. And I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’” Gomez’s former assistant Theresa Marie Mingus describes in one scene. “It was one of the moments where you look in her eyes and there was nothing there. It was so scary.”
“I just remember it being very chaotic, and she was hearing all of these voices, they kept getting louder and louder and louder,” her friend Raquelle says of this time. “That triggered some sort of psychotic break.” Selena then checked into a psychiatric hospital for rehabilitation, dealing with psychosis that caused her to lash out at family and friends. “It’s a miracle she got out, but there’s always the fear it’s going to happen again and it hurt us so much,” says Mandy Teefey, Selena’s mom.
Her relationship with her mom
Selena Gomez’s mom admitted she found out about Gomez’s treatment through TMZ. “They called me and wanted to know what my daughter was doing in the hospital,” she explained as she began to cry, noting that their relationship was strained at the time. “She didn’t want anything to do with me and I was scared she was going to die.”
“You hang on as tight as you can and try to help them with their treatment and that’s the hardest thing to do, to just go to bed and hope that they wake up the next day,” Teefy continued. “It’s a miracle she got out but there’s always that fear that it’s going to happen again.”
Thankfully, Gomez said that she’s “in a better place,” and is taking it “day by day.
“That’s why I say to people that I have the greatest friends and family, especially my mom and stepdad Brian because I shouldn’t have spoken to them the way that I did, and I shouldn’t have treated them the way that I did sometimes,” she says through tears. “When I wake up the next day, they told me what happened … they explained to me, they’re like, ‘Look, I know that that’s not you talking and we’re really concerned. We love you. We don’t see anything different from what was last night to now.’”
Her friendship with her cousin Priscilla
In a touching section of the film, Selena visits her childhood home in Texas and thinks back on her childhood. She also introduces us to one of her closest friends, her cousin Priscilla. “Probably the closest person in the world to me except for my mom,” Selena says of her cousin. “To this day she’s my life, she’s my blood.” In ensuing scenes, we see the pair travel around their hometown and visit Selena’s old school and favorite fast food spots; they also make time to visit neighbors who were instrumental in her early life
Her Crush on the Sprouse Twins
Gomez travels to Texas to see her hometown during the documentary. She visits her former middle school to surprise the students there, chats with an old neighbor who used to give her cookies and let her play with her massive dollhouse, and swings by her childhood home. She looks inside her childhood bedroom, where she says she wrote Dylan and Cole Sprouse’s names on her wall. The object she wrote on is still in the house, and the camera shows where she wrote the twins’ names with hearts.
“I had a crush on Cole and Dylan Sprouse, so I’d come in my closet and I would write things down,” Selena admitted of the The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.
The twin actors starred on Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody starting in 2005. In 2006, Gomez ended up having her first-ever onscreen kiss with Dylan on an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody
Gomez shared more about how her lupus affects her daily life
In 2014, Gomez was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease lupus. She had a painful flare-up during the pandemic, which was documented in the film.
“it just hurts in the morning. When I wake up, [I] immediately start crying because it hurts — like everything,” she says, visibly suffering. “I think my past and my mistakes — that’s what drives me into depression. It’s like, my whole life since I was a kid, I’ve been working … the only thing I want is [to be] a mom. I don’t wanna be super famous. I just feel stuck, and I just wanna move forward.”
The doctor then suggests another intravenous dose of Rituxan, which would relieve the star’s joint pain for a “year or so.” She is later seen going through the medical procedure.
Her Dislike of (Silly) Promotion
The documentary follows Gomez as she conducts a press tour in Paris and London in the early months of 2020 in support of the release of her third studio album, “Rare.”
Selena does album promo in London and Paris and is seen in a frenetic montage falling asleep during glam, answering question after question after question, some relevant and some not. She and her friend Raquelle even get into a spat, as Selena feels as though she’s being perceived as ungrateful for wanting to prioritize her rest after such a stressful promo tour.
After one interview, in particular, Selena vents to her team in a green room, so upset she’s shaking. “F*cking dumbest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “I’m done. I can’t do that anymore. Do you know how cheap it makes me feel? She’s asking me questions, and like, good ones, then she didn’t even pay attention to what I was saying. I don’t want to do that ever again. I feel like a product. It was making me angry.”
Then, after a pause, she realizes she was triggered. “You know what it is? It made me feel like Disney. I’ve spent years, years of my life trying to not be that.”
Miracle Edee 