Selena Gomez Is Glowing With Health on Her First American 'Vogue' Cover

24-year-old Selena Gomez is Vogue’s 2017 April muse. It’s been a long road to recovery and she returns to spotlight with no small accomplishment – it’s her debut cover with the American publication giant.
Over a “Sunday barbecue” dinner she opened up to Vogue about her mental health and the reason why she checked into rehab mid-tour last year.

“Tours are a really lonely place for me. My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it — which, I think, was a complete distortion. I was so used to performing for kids. At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t say, ‘Everybody, let’s pinky-promise that you’re beautiful!’ It doesn’t work that way, and I know it because I’m dealing with the same shit they’re dealing with. What I wanted to say is that life is so stressful, and I get the desire to just escape it. But I wasn’t figuring my own stuff out, so I felt I had no wisdom to share. And so maybe I thought everybody out there was thinking, This is a waste of time.”

So on she went to Tennessee and enrolled in a 90-day program, which included individual therapy, with six other young women.

“You have no idea how incredible it felt to just be with six girls. Real people who couldn’t give two shits about who I was, who were fighting for their lives. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done, but it was the best thing I’ve done.”

About her social media reign she commented:

“As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out. It had become so consuming to me. It’s what I woke up to and went to sleep to. I was an addict, and it felt like I was seeing things I didn’t want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn’t want to care about. Which is why I’m kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit.”

Read the whole story here and go behind the scenes with Selena below.

PhotographerMERT ALAS & MARCUS PIGGOTT