Demi Lovato reveals how fame’s sudden rise at 15—from 200-person crowds to opening for the Jonas Brothers—clashed with childhood bullying, including a suicide petition that fueled her early activism. Sobriety for six years collapsed after a 2019 relapse involving heroin-laced fentanyl and crack, triggering three strokes, organ failure, and permanent brain damage, though she now explores IV stem cell therapy. Cannabis, her "sacred plant medicine," became a lifeline against depression and ADHD symptoms, contrasting with past benzo struggles tied to her mother’s eating disorder and father’s abuse. Through her documentary, Lovato reclaims autonomy, rejecting industry pressures and proving that self-truth over perfection defines real resilience. [Automatically generated summary]
I feel like I would just be the person that goes to their room and starts talking to themselves and defeats the whole purpose of being there because I just want to...
If you tell me not to do something, I'm going to go do it.
My best friend that I brought out here, her name's Susie, and I brought her on this trip.
And just like, for instance, one day I was at home and I had been doing stuff all day, you know, interviews and photo shoots and this and that, and I walked in the house and she was like, So you've been doing rockstar shit all day.
You want to do some normal shit?
And I was like, hell yeah!
And that's like, that's what I do when I get home.
Do you feel like that was like a shift in the way you thought about show business when you realized that you were now someone that if people saw you, they would scream?
The perils of becoming famous when you're young are well known.
There's a small handful of people that have made it through unscathed.
It's a weird way to grow up because everybody else grows up trying to prove their worth or trying to find their place in life and trying to get people to understand who they are.
You grow up where basically most people who run into you know who you are before you knew who they are.
And they're already like kind of freaked out that you're there and they'll do anything for you.
They want to see you and they want to see you perform.
They just want to see you sing and talk.
It's a very strange way to grow up.
Did you at any point in time have this feeling like, hey, maybe this isn't the best way to grow up?
But I grew up, you know, I went to public school except for the one year that I homeschooled on Barney and Friends.
And I experienced bullying pretty bad while I was there.
And so I ended up leaving public school.
And I went into a Really depressive state for a period of time.
When you're 12 and you're bullied, that's your social life.
Your social life is everything to you.
I felt like I didn't have much to look forward to anymore except for my music.
Music kind of kept me alive.
It's not that I ever looked at the industry as...
This kind of weird burden on my teenage years or whatever like yes it is weird in hindsight but I looked at it as it actually kind of saved my life at times because it gave me something to live for and I knew that if I stayed in Texas that I wouldn't make it out alive.
Well, and you have to understand is my generation was like the first with social media.
So what I was really dealing with was the cyber bullying of everything.
It wasn't...
I had wished that someone had tried to fight me because I'm a fighter.
And so I would have thrown down.
But they were coming at me with words that scarred me emotionally for years to come and ended up, you know, scarring me for the rest of my life.
Um...
And I kept saying to people who didn't understand cyberbullying, like, I wish that someone had just hit me and gotten it over with because at least I wouldn't have to live with those words that they said to me for years.
And that's what was the hardest part, was the emotional trauma of all of it, which made it hard to meet fans my age because I had just been bullied three years before by people my age.
When I was meeting fans, I was...
Excited to meet them, but at the same time, I knew what they were capable of.
So I had this weird battle in my head every time I'd meet someone my age of like, I'm so appreciative of you, but I'm also terrified of what you're capable of.
I mean, she came to the school and tried to tell them what was happening.
And they were like, if it's cyberbullying, we can't do anything about it.
It doesn't happen on school grounds.
So no punishment really took place.
And, I mean, they had a suicide petition that they passed around the school and tried to get people to sign it so that I would kill my...
Like, it gets gnarly.
And girls can be mean.
Middle school girls can be mean.
And so I talked about it a lot.
And then I decided...
That was really my first taste of activism work, was...
Being an advocate for anti-bullying and I remember I like decided to start talking about it and I felt like I felt some purpose and All of a sudden my career wasn't about my talent anymore.
She was so thrown off that I even remembered who she was after becoming famous and a celebrity that she wasn't interested in talking about What had happened when I was 12, or when we were 12. What did she want to talk about?
No, it actually made me more upset because I was like...
How does someone who literally altered the course of my life, not that I'm blaming her for my eating disorder, I would have probably developed one anyways because my mother had one.
And so I was looking at negative food behaviors.
And that's all I knew.
And so when someone called me fat, I knew exactly what to do.
Now, like I said, I don't blame her for it.
But I couldn't believe that she didn't think I remembered who she was after what she said made me decide to stop eating.
But I think that that is a thing where when people, regular folks hear someone who's maybe an actor talking about, you know, how he wants to vote for Joe Biden.
And you're like, hey man, just shut the fuck up.
Just go be Captain America or whatever you do.
Not Captain America.
That guy's great.
I don't know why I say that.
But you know what I mean?
Go be some whatever you are in some television show or some movie.
Don't lecture folks about politics when you probably barely know what you're talking about and you're only doing it to suck up to the liberal people in Hollywood that you think they're going to give you movie roles.
No, it's smart because you're kind of self-checking.
But you could also look at it this way, that what you're doing is doing your best work, and your best work, just your best singing and putting together songs and performances, has a massive positive impact on your fans.
I mean, you have to think about it, not just in terms of you getting all the love and adulation that you do get, and that you would be a narcissist, but you're doing your best work.
And when you do your best work, and you have Thousands and thousands of screaming fans having the best time because of what you've done.
Because of the work that you put in and the performance that you put out.
When they're there watching it and experiencing it, they're having the time of their life.
So it is a net positive.
It's just the problem is only one person is the person with the microphone is singing and everybody's cheering at you.
You probably experienced this, but I can't go into a restaurant and see a cell phone pop up in my direction without thinking someone's taking a picture.
And they might not be.
But I'm so hypervigilant in every scenario possible that if I hear a camera shutter, I might...
The only way to do it, I think you would have to raise like 30 of them in a row from birth to adult and go, well, that didn't work.
Let's try another way.
Well, that's not working.
Let's get this kid to join the military when they're young.
Let's get them to do, you know, fucking boot camp or something.
Like, I don't know what you would do to a child star to take them and make them grounded when they know that they can walk on stage and 18,000 people go bananas as soon as they see them.
And so you've obviously done some things to try to balance yourself out.
You've done some things to try to mitigate some of the effects of fame and obviously just by the way you're talking about it, how you want to do good, you don't want to be a narcissist.
You think about these things all the time.
So when you said you went on that meditation trip, what are you trying to do when you're doing these things?
I actually was not doing so well on a trip to Bali and my security guard knew her and invited her along and when I was there we worked together and she told me things that nobody knew.
It was more complicated than that because after being sober for six years, I couldn't understand why the last two years of my sobriety I had a raging eating disorder.
Like, if I'm so good spiritually and spiritually fit and all the things, why am I still throwing up?
I guess because to them I wasn't underweight or I don't know but it was really bad and I was miserable and so I asked them I asked them for help, and when I didn't get the help I needed, I just stayed miserable for like six months.
And after that six months, when I said, hey guys, guess what?
I'm still miserable and I need help, or I'm gonna pick up.
This is the same healer that like also told me a year ago, right after I performed on the Super Bowl and Grammys, she was like, your career is gonna slow down a lot.
And I was like, what are you talking about?
I just teared up, teed up my career comeback this year.
And she was like, everyone's going to slow down, but don't worry.
And so I was like, okay.
I don't know what that means, but I told myself I wasn't going to worry.
And then we went into lockdown a month later for COVID. So she told you this in February?
All that stuff, like the law of attraction, here's the problem with it.
They only talk to the people who are successful.
So you have a positive user bias, right?
So the people that are successful, like, hey, Bob, how did you become this big rock star?
And he'll say, listen, man, I dreamt it.
I put the pictures on my wall.
I practiced every night.
I listened to Hendrix.
I played music.
I lip-synced.
I did everything, man.
I lived it.
I wanted it so bad, and I made it happen.
But what about that guy that's, you know, working at the fucking...
Chuck E. Cheese right now, who also had the same dreams, who also had the pictures on his wall, who also lip-synced to songs and wanted to be in a band so bad.
It never happened.
I think for everyone who becomes successful at anything, you obsess on that thing, you think about that thing all the time, and when you do make it and they interview you, everyone wants to pretend there's some sort of magic involved in what they've created and what they've done.
I think there's definitely luck.
There's definitely moments where the stars align.
There's good fortune.
There's raw talent.
There's people that have personalities that are suited to whatever endeavor they pursue, whether it's athletics or whether it's art, whether it's literature, whatever it is that you excel at.
You can decide that it was manifest, that your mind created it.
That you were destined to do this, and you're destined to help the world and change the world.
But I think we attach meaning to things to try to find order in chaos.
And I think that if you just had a grand, if you had an enormous sample group of all the people that wanted the same things that you have, or all the people that wanted the same things that, you know, pick a person.
Chris Rock.
All the people that want to be a Chris Rock.
How many of them actually make it?
How many of them who have those dreams actually make it?
There's a lot involved.
This idea of manifest, the problem is it leaves out discipline.
It leaves out focus, drive, passion.
It leaves out objective thinking, introspective thinking, where you look at yourself and look at yourself honestly.
Like, what am I doing well?
And what am I sucking at?
And where am I failing?
And how do I correct?
And how do I make better?
That's how you get better at everything.
And some people don't do that.
So this idea of manifesting things, it is a part of an enormous thing.
I know that I earned the chair that I'm sitting in today in front of you because I worked hard.
And I have talent.
And I did help manifest that.
But I think it all works together.
I believe in...
Listening to your intuition and honing in that ability and trying to Kind of like use what your body tells you and your intuition and your gut to make choices that will have the best outcome for your life.
And that's what mainly I mean by intuition.
Not like I don't need to know the tickets on a lottery ticket or the numbers on a lottery ticket.
I just like if I want something, I'm going to continue to work hard to get it, but I'm also going to manifest it.
There's something to people that you can't put on a scale.
You can't write it down.
You can't say, oh, well, they have 20 points of that.
You don't know what it is, but some people have a thing.
And that's a part of being a human being is reading people's energy.
But I think the problem is some people make a bigger deal out of that than it really is and then they try to pretend that they have special abilities and they take advantage of people who are looking for people that have special abilities.
I think that if you are If you meet a healer that is all about posting things on their Instagram or getting clout or whatever it is, I don't trust those healers.
But if you say some shit to me that really connects, and on top of that, you're not looking for anything from me, I don't feel like you have another agenda, then I can get on board with trusting you.
But if spirituality is essentially energy, even when you're manifesting things, it's like if you're putting positive energy towards something, if you are able to detect the drop of someone's energy, isn't that still in alignment with all of these things, you know?
There's some weird shit that happens when you think about someone and all of a sudden they call you.
I don't know what that is.
People say, oh, it's a coincidence.
Maybe it's a coincidence.
And it sounds better if it's a coincidence, right?
Then you sound smart and you sound like you diminish any possibility that there's some strange connection that people share with each other.
But I think sometimes it's almost...
It's almost weird enough where I'm willing to entertain the possibility that something else is going on.
Because sometimes I'll get a text message from somebody I haven't talked to in a long fucking time, and then I'm just thinking about them, and I'm like, how does this dude know that I'm thinking about him?
Or they'll call you, or they'll send you an email.
You know, that shows that you've, you know, whatever these obstacles that have been put in front of you, you've figured your way over them or around them or you've gone through them.
Well, you should be proud of yourself because I have many friends that were famous when they were young and it is not easy.
It's real hard.
And one friend whose parents ripped him off, he was a child actor and he was famous when he was really young and he found out as he was a grown adult that his parents had stolen millions of dollars from him.
And these are still his mom and his dad.
And he's like, what in the hell?
And he lives in this tortured world.
And he never sought out the things that you're seeking out.
And that's more common than not.
What's more common than not is when someone becomes famous very early.
And it doesn't even have to be young, right?
You could be in your 30s and get famous and go fucking crazy.
I think my manager at the time had managed the Jonas Brothers and didn't realize when he took on me as a solo artist that I would need more time to recover.
Because you know when you're managing three guys, you're not factoring in two hours of hair and makeup.
A full show of performance by yourself.
You can't rely on your brother if you're tired.
There's nobody else but you on stage.
And so there was an adjustment period because they were used to working so much.
So he just kind of gave me that schedule.
But when I said, hey, I can't work like this.
This is too much.
And my voice needs time to heal.
Then I started touring like It went from like five shows a week to four to three.
So I do like three shows a week when I'm on tour pretty much.
So hot tea, sleep, water, and then I don't know what works now, to be honest, because I'm in a different place than I was the last time I toured in 2018. How so?
Well, 2018, I went on a North American tour and then a world tour.
And the North American tour, I was sober, but bulimic.
Then when I went on the world tour, I wasn't sober, but I wasn't bulimic anymore.
So it was just like...
I had different needs at the time, and I think my needs will be very different than...
When you first started recognizing that you were using, like, and you were using probably to try to mitigate some of the pressures of fame and all the wildness of your life.
I used to always think of Xanax as this thing that people did, just no big deal.
Just, oh, you take a Xanax, you relax, take a Xanax, have a glass of wine, relax.
I had no idea how difficult those things were to kick until two things.
One, my friend Jordan Peterson got off of it and it took him like a year and he was in hell.
And then talking to another friend, Hamilton Morris, who is a real chemist.
It really understands the actual mechanisms of what these drugs do to your mind and your body and why it's so difficult to get off of them.
But benzodiazepines, Xanax and those type of drugs, those anti-depressants or anti-anxiety rather, those medications are some of the most difficult drugs to get off of.
Way more difficult even for many people than heroin.
The other thing that Hamilton was explaining is that it changes your baseline, that when you get on these things and it does alleviate some of your anxiety, but then when you get off of them, it actually accentuates your anxiety.
So your anxiety, whatever you had before, is now elevated.
So it becomes more difficult to get off of them because you needed them because you were trying to alleviate your anxiety.
Now you get off of them and you're more anxious than you've ever been before.
And I think there's probably Disney stars that would get mad at me for saying that, that might be under 18. Well, they can consent to having their photos taken.
Sure.
But I think there needs to be like...
That.
There needs to be consent.
And the fact that there wasn't any...
There were times where I hid in my house.
Halloween one night, I hid in my...
When I was 16, me and another Disney star just hid in my room.
I think it's weirder to take advantage of people that don't have money and are dealers to regular people on the street.
I'm not saying that it's good to take advantage of anybody, but I'm saying I can see the incentive of wanting to go after a celebrity because they have a lot of money.
It's like, how do you go after somebody that's already on the street and homeless and not making anything?
I don't know.
I see the incentive to go after someone with money.
And they're just taking advantage of the fact that it's like if they didn't exist, if they were never born, that homeless person is still going to do meth.
I think there's a benefit in escaping certain states of mind, for sure.
Depressed states of mind, anxious states of mind, anger, fear.
Yeah.
A run will cure you of most of what ails you.
There's a lot of things that you can do where you feel like you're overwhelmed with anxiety or thoughts or just so many...
So much pressure and the weirdness of life.
It sounds so simplistic, but a really brutal workout oftentimes will alleviate most of those feelings to the point where if you could take in a pill form what it feels like to complete a brutal 90-minute kettlebell workout and how you feel after it's over...
In terms of your relationship to anxiety and your relationship to stress and pressure, that pill would be so popular.
It'd be so popular.
But the actual act of doing a 90-minute hard workout, for some people, is just so daunting.
I think the reason because of that is because of the diet culture that is forced on us 24-7 and especially women.
Women don't...
I'm not going to want to go do a hard 90-minute workout at 10 p.m.
at night or whenever.
Say it's 3 in the afternoon if I'm stressed because the second I walk into the gym, I'm now seeing...
If I'm walking into a regular gym at Unbreakable, they don't have weight loss shit on the walls.
But if you walk into a normal gym, if a woman or anybody has had an eating disorder or deals with the effects of diet culture and has dealt with all the shame that comes with that, that isn't the most therapeutic way for someone.
I think it's...
You're right, but for some people, a workout isn't as beneficial because they might deal with the crippling shame and anxiety of the diet culture that's put in our faces every day, you know?
Like, Unbreakable doesn't have mirrors, which is why I really found comfort in And like working out there because I didn't I wasn't catching the corner of my eye thinking I need to work on this or I need to strengthen this.
You know, it's not about that.
It's about making myself feel better, which is what you were talking about.
But I think when like it's easy people can get easily distracted and it becomes more stressful for them to step foot in those environments than it is to maybe go on a walk.
Well, that's the beautiful thing about exercise videos.
That you can just watch someone do a video.
True.
Or if you have a really good coach or a trainer that can come over and put you through a video where you don't have to stare at some weight loss advertisement.
And I think for me, like, when I really want to get in a good workout, now, like, because of COVID, it used to be jujitsu, but, you know, now it's going on a hike.
Or it's getting outside, being outdoors, anything like that.
I would work out in the morning and then I would take a meeting at the gym, like in the back office.
My management would come to the gym.
Yeah, I would take a meeting, maybe eat some food, go to a second workout, which was probably either like if I did jits in the morning, I'd do striking at lunch or vice versa.
And then I'd do weight training as my third workout.
And after I would eat and do recovery, like the Norma Tech pants, the IV. I was training like a fighter at one point.
Well, one of the things that does happen to people when they develop addictions is they try to replace that negative addiction with a positive addiction.
I never got super big into supplements, just like vitamins, but nothing.
Because my team had known about my eating disorder, for some reason, they were totally fine with me working out three times a day, but didn't want me to take supplements.
I also just stopped caring about my weight, which is like...
I know for someone in the fitness world, it's probably hard for you to hear, but I think I just spent so many years stressing about it that in order to really find a balance with my health and my body, I had to legalize all the foods that I had Not kept down for however many years.
I didn't eat pasta or pizza or cheeseburgers for years.
I'm talking like years.
I did not eat them.
Now I just allow myself to eat what my body...
As craving.
And because of that, I don't eat the whole thing anymore.
If I'm craving ice cream, I allow myself to get the ice cream.
I eat it.
I don't throw it up.
And yet, I still don't finish it, which is funny because when I was in my eating disorder, I would finish it even if I was hungry or not.
It was just this like, I have to eat it now because if I don't eat it now, I'm never going to be able to.
Whether it's eating disorders or gambling disorders or whatever, the human mind is very strange in these patterns that it gets locked into that it just wants to repeat over and over and over again.
So it sounds to me like what you're doing is developing a healthy relationship with food.
She's super petite, and that's not invalidating what she went through at all, but she is a little firecracker, I call her, because she's this ginger, used to be a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, just the most upbeat, personable mom you've ever met.
She came over and like, I remember I went upstairs to go get a massage and in the middle of my massage, which was like an hour later, I hear her, like, finally leaving.
She, like, stayed and hung out with my cousin and my friend.
And it was just cute because, like, I wasn't even down there anymore, but she...
He's a famous you looked at me so I'm gonna say you don't he's a famous addiction specialist pretty brilliant guy I've listened to him talk multiple times and one of the things that he says about addiction is that almost all of it has roots in childhood trauma And I watched your YouTube thing and the thing that struck me the most was,
well it was a lot, I shouldn't even say the most, but one of the things that struck me pretty hard was your relationship with your dad and that your dad died alone and you don't even know what day he died and they found him.
And just the relationship that he had with your mom and just you having to grow up with that in your head that this is your dad and that this this person who is abusive to your mom and who died alone and you have this like people want relationships with their parents they want good relationships with their parents everybody does and when you have that like I mean it had to be a big part Just besides all the fame and all the chaos that comes along with that,
And I think that set me up for relationship issues later down the road.
It was hard growing up because my mom didn't ever want to like not have me be raised without my father, but at the same time he was so abusive to her that She couldn't be around him.
And I don't know.
It was really hard for me because I wanted my birth dad.
I didn't understand at that young age why my real dad wasn't around.
But I also knew that my mom didn't have a ring finger for a reason.
And so there was a lot at a young age that I think I didn't know how to process, didn't know how to comprehend and...
You know, unfortunately, I had to go through a lot to learn where all these roots have stemmed from.
But because I've gone through all of that, I've been able to kind of identify the problem and reprogram my narrative into what I believe is true today, not what I believed was true 15, 20 years ago.
Do you think people also have a weird thing about it because they saw you when you were young?
You were this young girl and this teen star and now they think of you as being whether you're gay or whether you're gender fluid or sexually fluid, whatever you are.
People are like, no, no, no.
You're that cute girl from Barney and now you're the...
But when she came out, I remember there was some discussion amongst moms, like whether or not, you know, is this, are you okay with this?
Like your daughter's, you know, likes JoJo Siwa, but now she's talking about maybe being gay and like, it's weird that the expectations that people have on folks, like, look, Gay adults used to be gay kids.
I think I've always had a hard time working with PR. Because I have such a strong opinion and such strong boundaries that if I feel like a boundary is being crossed in an interview, I don't want to come off as an asshole, but I feel obligated to stand up for myself.
But PRs don't really like that.
Publicists want to interject for you.
So if someone was sitting here and you asked a super inappropriate question, the publicist would be like, Sorry, next question, please.
And I'm like, that's so much more cringy than like me just shutting shit down.
Yeah, of course.
And so I... But it's hard because, you know, some of the people that are doing the interviews are writing an article about you in a magazine that you've read for years and years and years.
I mean, it's really difficult for a lot of people to do, but I think what...
stars and athletes even, all kind of performers where people are paying attention to them, what they need to do is take back that narrative and figure out a way to speak for themselves.
And whether it's through their own podcast or a blog or if they just feel like writing their thoughts or just making videos and putting them up on YouTube about how they really feel about things.
And it's a great exercise too for them because sometimes you don't know how you really feel about something until you think about it for a long time and express yourself.
Like you can have like a real quick response to anything, whether it's a current events or something's going on in your own life.
You might have a quick response that you might think about it 20 minutes later and go, well, I don't think I think about it that way.
So when someone else is deciding who you are or what you think or how you behave just by virtue of a bunch of weird gotcha questions and they're trying to make some article about you, that's not representative of who you are.
Yeah, but it's such a loaded subject that even bringing it up, you have to kind of guard yourself from the way other people are going to perceive what you're doing, right?
I've always found that when people think that marijuana is an escape, I mean I guess it can be for some people, but for me it's been the opposite of an escape.
It makes me be able to appreciate the present moment longer.
Because they say it slows down time.
And so for me, as someone who deals with...
I have ADHD. How does it manifest itself when you say you have ADHD? My ADHD manifests in...
Um, I lose my train of thought really easily, which you've kind of seen once happen already.
I lose my train of thought.
I get distracted so easily.
But I just, I can't focus.
So say I'm in the studio, like, recording my vocals.
I get so...
So caught up in, okay, what am I doing tomorrow?
What do I need to get done today?
What's the plan tonight?
And I'm just thinking.
I'm future tripping.
You know, I'm not appreciating the magic of music coming from my body in that moment.
And that, to me, is like...
Weed was able to help me slow down and appreciate the instrument that I am.
And that was a revelation that I had as an artist that I'd never had before because I'd always just thought that my voice comes from me and not really appreciating myself as an instrument.
Have you looked into, there's some therapies that they're doing with people with neurological damage where they're using IV stem cells.
IV stem cells are doing it in Panama and in Colombia and a few other places where they can't, they're doing some shit they can't really do in the United States.
I like kind of feel like I want to cry right now because like I didn't think there was there might listen there's always new things coming down the horizon you know I just literally like had such radical acceptance over the fact that this is that's it forever yeah that I was just kind of like okay and like I'm gonna keep fighting well more power to you that you're able to do that you it might really be what you see for the rest of your life this might be it but yeah who knows But who knows?
I never thought that there would be a possibility of anything else.
So after I had relapsed in 2019 on the hard stuff, I went back to the treatment center I'd gone to right after treatment.
And I just said to them, I was like, I think I need to allow myself the ability to really try this middle path.
And not like before when I said I was on a middle path, but really was like going, was like really trying to party.
Like, I mean, like, if I want to smoke, then I'll let myself smoke.
And I just...
I kind of came to terms with...
I kind of came up with that and talked it through with my treatment team back home and let everyone know, like, hey, this is...
I have to own my truth.
And my treatment team said, okay, like, we'll support you and stand by you.
What do you need from us that will help?
And it was at that point that, like, I started getting this thing called the Vivitrol shot, which is...
A shot that blocks all the opiate receptors in your brain.
Honestly, even if I were to get in a bad injury and go to the hospital, I couldn't even get opiates in a hospital because my body will reject them so much it goes into withdrawals immediately.
So I'm still curious as to like what about weed made you want to even introduce it into your life after working so hard to be sober and having this horrible experience with overdosing?
I often say, and this is really hard for people to hear sometimes, but I think that drugs saved my life at times because had I not had something to medicate with, I wouldn't be here.
I would have taken my life by now.
I've dealt with suicidal ideation since I was seven years old.
And...
That's just something that's always been a part of my journey.
I don't know why, but depression, I've had a journey with that.
There was a period of time where I thought to myself, I'm so miserable.
I'm still sober.
Now I'm sober again.
This is after the overdose.
I'm so sober and still so unhappy.
What am I doing?
And I got to this place where I kept thinking, If I pick up, you know, that term, I had been told so many times by people in recovery or treatment team, whatever, not this treatment team, but a different one, that if I picked up that I would die.
And I thought to myself, what kind of life...
Am I living if I'm miserable 24-7?
And if I feel like the bottom is going to drop out, I'm going to die.
Like, that's not really a life to live.
And so I thought, what if there's some sort of relief in between that's not going to kill me, that's not, I don't know, super dangerous?
And so I tried it and it wasn't so bad and I began to appreciate what it could do for me.
It stopped me from going to the other things.
A lot of people say that weed is a gateway drug, but what people don't know is that it can also be a drug that can provide a little bit of relief for people who feel like when they get that low, they're either going to pick up something really dark, really heavy, or Something more ominous.
Who I am or even what I want out of life because my whole growing up as a kid, I thought my life was music.
I thought my life was success was all of this that I worked so hard for my whole childhood.
And when I the way that my even my treatment team has changed my case manager today, like came into my life and kind of reshaped my whole thinking.
I remember I sat down with him, and he talks about this in my documentary, like, I sat down with him, his name is Charles, and he was like, what's wrong?
And I was like, I don't want to be here.
He's like, why are you here?
And I was like, because people want me to be.
And he goes, who's paying for it?
And I said, me.
And he goes, You can leave.
And I was like, really?
And it was like hearing somebody in the treatment world say to me, like, you're in control.
When you're always running things by people, another thing that's happening when you're doing that is you're trying to find out what you should and shouldn't do in terms of how other people feel like you should behave.
Other people feel like what's going to be best for your career, what's going to be best for your image.
Do you think that sometimes help for a person like you means they have to kind of step in and tell you what to do, and they don't want to, and they're scared of you?
Because you're the boss.
Because you're the one who makes all the money, you're the star, you're the one who goes on stage in front of all these people.
So when you say, I need help, they're like, just fucking keep her moving.
You know what I'm saying?
To really step in and intervene in someone's addiction and problems and whatever they're going through in their life, whether it's bulimia or whatever, you've got to put your foot down and you've got to tell them this is what we're going to do.
A lot of people probably don't want to put themselves into that position with you.
The only reason why it's low calorie is because they put so much air in it that you think you're eating a pint of ice cream, but you're only eating like this much.
So I think that like at some point, yes, but I think at some point in the future, like people might think that because I'm making my own choices, but it hasn't.
I have never consistently made my own choices for a solid amount of time.
And so now I feel like I have a...
Now I feel like the boss.
Because I'm making the decisions.
Now I'm like, no, I want to do this TV show.
Or I want to put out this album and I want to do this.
I don't want to go on tour yet.
You know what I mean?
Just making choices for my wellness that are more important than my career.
And I think knowing ahead of time that that was not ever going to work with personal relationships, like, I didn't ever really open myself up so that people could come to me and ask me for money.
Like, if it's family, of course.
If it's, like, Close, close, close, close, close friends.
There's been times where I've thought, yeah, I should be 100% sober, but when I ask myself what is the reasoning behind that, It's not realistic for me to look at my life and think for the rest of my life I'm never going to ingest some substance.
Whether it's at the dentist getting work done or You know, like, it's just not...
I don't know what's gonna happen in my life.
And I once had somebody tell me, like, at my first time in rehab, like, they were like, I always turn down pain medication.
And I was asking them a question.
I was like, so you mean to tell me, like, if your arm got chopped off and you're in the hospital and you're turning down pain medication?
She was like, yep.
And I was like, I just don't believe that.
Like, my pain tolerance isn't that high.
If my arm's getting cut off, I'm gonna need something.
So it's just this kind of ideal of perfection I don't subscribe with because perfection has never worked for me before.
And in fact, perfection has always been my demise.
It's been my downfall because I've strived to be so perfect at things that when I'm not, it becomes destructive.
That's a real problem with artists because you're trying to put something out and the way to get something really good is you have to be self-critical and because of that it can kind of get away from you and then nothing's good enough and then you know you're striving for perfection you can never achieve it no matter what you're unhappy and people get in these crazy mental loops when it comes to creating things and it can be very self-destructive it's hard to get out I think it's self-destructive when that's the
And I think that's a common belief that a lot of child stars have is that When you attach your purpose to your career at such a young age, you don't know any different when you get older.
And then it stops fulfilling you and you're like, why isn't it working?
But it seems like you're consciously moving in the direction of improving your life and figuring it out.
When you're doing that, when you're constantly moving in the direction of figuring it out and trial and error, but always moving towards living a better life, living a more fulfilled life, then you're on the right path.
It always bothered me because I've only stepped on an actual red carpet, like maybe twice, and then all the rest of the times it was an actual red carpet, it like didn't meet the stature of the event.
shutting the door on telling my story didn't feel authentic to me anymore.
Maybe because I had never done that before and it may have been a healthier decision.
I just also think there's something really healthy in speaking your truth and putting your truth out there.
And for someone like me, who's always tried to please other people by being what they want me to be, whether it was a sexy pop star and a leotard or engaged to a dude, I had to speak my truth and tell the world hey, my truth isn't going to be what you want it to be.
I'm chopping my hair off because it feels right to me.