Selena Gomez exposes her worst fears in a documentary with unusual crudeness and admirable honesty

“Do you want to hear part of my story? / I tried to hide in the glory / And sweep it under the table / So you would never know.” The verses of “My Mind and Me”, the most blatantly autobiographical song by Selena Gomez, summarizes in a few words everything that is seen over an hour and a half in the extraordinary documentary of the same name that has just been released by Apple TV +.

It is not the first time that a star has chosen this narrative format to confess or show himself “as he is”. Not coincidentally, another great star of Latin origin and surname, although belonging to another generation, chose this year to become the protagonist of a documentary without a single drop of makeup to show how he was encouraged to overcome a moment of hard emotional and professional decline and what It was the path to his recovery. In half-timesincere, honest and impeccable testimony available on Netflix, Jennifer Lopez exposes all the pains of the soul and body in that fight, but with a declared purpose: asserting your identity.

With Selena something else happens. Like Jennifer, here we see her cry (several times) with her face washed, but the pain is much deeper because she has to see with a question he still feels unable to fully answer: what’s going on inside his head? Jennifer Lopez makes it very clear in half-time who wants to be a star and works to achieve it. For Selena, on the other hand, being a star is not good for her and she prefers to get out of that place; solving that dilemma leads her to choose the most risky path for any artist, because when she accepts it and she decides to walk it she must completely renounce any affirmation of her self-love. Get rid of her ego.

“Sometimes I feel like an accident / people look when they’re passing by / they never check on the passenger / they just want the free show,” the song’s lyrics say. My Mind and Methe documentary, is the translation into images of that confession. An oral and visual diary of five painful years (from 2016 to 2020), full of physical and mental suffering, exposed with unusual crudeness and admirable honesty.

accustomed to the rules showbiz ever since she debuted at the age of 7 on the Barney dinosaur show, Selena talks, asks herself questions, suffers, hesitates, gets angry, cries, believes again, dreams and says everything she likes and doesn’t like as if He did not have a camera next to him that records very personal moments of confidences, revelations and questions.

Each moment is equivalent to a new release. And in some passages, the material appears to have remained as recorded. You don’t even have to take the trouble to edit it. There are almost no abrupt breaks in a speech that always reveals the conscience of a person who is increasingly clear that something in his head is not going well at all.

At first, My Mind and Me shows us how the body is charging Selena the first bills, which are immediately transferred to her state of mind. At one point we see that she can’t take it anymore and the demanding tour she is carrying out in 2016 comes to an abrupt halt. That initial section of the documentary anticipates, from the mouth of Selena herself, an increasingly worrying diagnosis.

The sum can be devastating; the symptoms of lupus appear and the kidney transplant becomes inevitable, but with all its burden in the background they are nothing compared to the most serious: anxiety disorders, mental disorders, the risks of falling into depression. The lyrics of “My Mind and Me” bear this out: “My mind and I / Sometimes we don’t get along and / It gets hard to breathe.”

To solve it, Selena chooses to show the world that a person so famous, admired and idealized, can feel (as the lyrics of “My Mind and Me also say”) like a burden to herself. By recounting her mental hardships openly, by acknowledging that it is very difficult for her to get out of the darkness of her thoughts, by accepting the unequal struggle that confronts her “against something that my eyes cannot see”, Selena completely deconstructs herself, leaves aside the glamorous image that it transmits from the stage wants to distance itself from the empty rituals imposed by the rules of marketing.

He also hopes the world knows that his life as a successful star who has everything at his fingertips is no longer working. That existence, instead of giving you all the foreseeable satisfactions of a comfortable and uncomplicated material life, can become, if you don’t change it in time, on the sure path towards the slow and irreversible destruction of the meaning of things. He has to somehow find within his own being the keys to understand everything that happens inside his head.

When we see her convinced of this search, but still unable to find the answers, we begin to understand why there are figures who, at the peak of success, when they seem to have everything available to feel full and happy, end up subjected to an uncontrollable spiral. of anguish and pain that can take them in some cases to a point of no return.

In her urgent need (which is imposed almost like a mandate) to open the curtain on her deep mental problems and make them public, Selena begins to find the remedy. The documentary is the first person chronicle of that discovery and of the voluntary search for a way out that is beginning to be glimpsed. Along this path, Selena shows us her willingness to gradually give up everything that the public world usually shows of an artist of her characteristics: various promotions, banal routines, serial interviews full of superficial questions. “I feel like a product,” she admits in a moment of unease.

In his voice, the testimony acquires a devastating sincerity. We understand him even more when at the same time he declares, as he says at another point in the song, that he would not change his life with “all the shock, the flames and the breaks that I know now”. At the same time, she is deeply convinced that the same thing happens to many unknown people and that is why she decides to reveal what is happening to her. “Maybe someone who’s hurting will feel a little safer / They’re not the only ones lost.”

best moments of My Mind and Me they have to do with the successive attempts of that escape, especially through purifying trips, various searches and returns to the origin. There is an extraordinary section that shows her back to her hometown of Grand Prairie, Texas, a place that exposes the most disadvantaged social side of life in the United States: scarce resources, unmet needs, uncertain futures, resignation. Also, in the midst of these conditions, Selena spent her childhood.

There, the reunion with the school where he suffered constant episodes of bullying is recorded. Or her return to her neighborhood house that she still keeps the beautiful dollhouse that dazzled her when she was a girl. There lives an older woman, almost bedridden, who maintains a moving dialogue with Selena.

All of that is seen alongside small snippets of home videos of little Selena, raised in the ’90s by a teenage mother who had to drop out of high school after giving birth, with no father figure nearby. That need for affection is also expressed during the chronicle of a secret charity trip to Kenya that later turns into a deep disappointment for Selena when she discovers that something is wrong in the institution that encouraged that visit.

She is accompanied, as almost always, by her inseparable friend Raquelle Stevens, a familiar face for those who watched the two seasons of the highly successful reality documentary about cooking available on HBO Max that has Selena as the protagonist. We soon understand why Selena + Chef is one of the positive effects of the journey of self-exploration undertaken by the young artist in My Mind and Me.

The camera that follows Selena everywhere and shows her taking her blood pressure, drawing blood or sinking into bed in the midst of monumental physical exhaustion is never intrusive. It is Selena herself who wants us to see everything that happens to her. She is convinced that it is possible in this way to help those who are going through the same situation.

Among so many confessions, he will admit in a moment that the philanthropic vocation is his most precious dream. At the end of the story, the first concrete results of that action will be visible, such as the promotion of the Rare Impact Fund, the initiative created by Selena with the purpose of raising funds for the assistance of young people with mental problems.

Also at the end we see her again in Grand Prairie, but now touring the place with a chinstrap. We are already in times of Covid-19, but the image, brief, is not gratuitous or redundant because when we see it we immediately think of the devastating effects that the pandemic left on the mental health of the younger generations around the world. The same problem that Selena decided to face.

Throughout 95 minutes full of genuine emotion unsentimental, Selena Gomez told us part of her story. And surely we will learn a lot from her.