What the Performance Costs

Selena Gomez makes sense to me in a way that most pop stars don’t. Not because of the music, exactly—though the music has its moments—but because of the specific texture of her public existence: perpetually cheerful, always composed, Disney-graduated, and visibly running at a deficit that the cheerfulness barely covers. I recognize that. The maintenance of a surface that contradicts the interior. You can do it indefinitely; the question is only what it costs.

In V Magazine she shot topless with photographers Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and spoke with more openness than she usually allows. About being eighteen and first in love: When you’re that young and constantly being told so many different things… it almost felt like we only had each other, like the whole world was against us. It was strange, but also wonderful. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. She doesn’t name him but everyone knows. The past-tense mythology of it—already a country she once lived in—is both sad and recognizable.

And then about the period that followed: There was a time when I was really depressed. I didn’t leave the house. I was driving myself crazy. I didn’t even want to go out for groceries. I just didn’t want to be photographed. But I’m slowly getting better. It’s a process.

What stays with me is the grocery line. Not the depression itself, which was documented and expected to surface eventually, but that specific ordinary thing she couldn’t do—the errand so small it has no drama, no narrative weight, which is exactly why it becomes impossible. Depression tends to announce itself in the mundane. The spectacular suffering at least has a shape. The grocery run you can’t make has no shape at all.

I’ve loved Selena Gomez for years. I still know exactly why.