For Selena, Quietly

There are very few celebrities I actually root for in a personal way—where it stops being about the music or the image and becomes something closer to just wanting a person to be okay. Selena Gomez is one of them. The last couple of years have been genuinely hard on her in ways that go past the usual tabloid churn: the lupus complications, the kidney transplant, a psychiatric stay in October, the slow public implosion of her relationship with The Weeknd, and then Justin Bieber going ahead and marrying Hailey Baldwin as if that required no processing time from anyone.

She stepped away from Instagram for a while, which the internet treated as a story in itself, and I understood it completely. A platform that size is also a weight that size. The scrutiny never stops. 13 Reasons Why, which she executive-produced, attracted serious criticism for its depiction of suicide—criticism that wasn’t entirely unfair—and she had to absorb that publicly while also just trying to stay well. At some point you have to put the phone down and be a person somewhere quiet.

And then she comes back, and the photos her friends post from a ski trip show her actually smiling—genuinely, not for the camera. Bailee Madison and Connar Franklin put up pictures of Selena happy in the snow with people who care about her, and that’s the whole story. She told an interviewer recently that she’s reached a point where she needs to say the things that matter to her, regardless of how they land. That she worked through the discomfort of being honest in public and found something on the other side of it. That sounds hard-won to me.

I hope 2019 treats her better. Not as a fan wanting more music—though yes, obviously—just as someone who has watched a person go through a lot and come out the other side still there.