I have no desire to make Gomez uncomfortable, but I am curious about a few things. For instance: Why go to a rehab facility for an auto-immune disease? Why tolerate vicious rumors for more than a year when a simple statement of fact would immediately make everyone desist with the wild and often cruel speculation about what was happening to her? But these are questions I never really get to ask.

This is delicate, but you began the year we’re talking about in rehab—

“No, no, no, no, no,” Gomez says, cutting me off. Here in the low light of the bowling alley, her face is as fluid and expressive as a mood ring, and her reaction to any given question is obvious long before she begins answering it. Frustration and disgust now pass across her features like bands of clouds. “First off, this is something that everyone always wants to fixate on. I got diagnosed with lupus. My mom had a very public miscarriage. So I had to cancel my tour. I needed time to just be okay. And I was going through leukemia”—I think she means chemotherapy here—“and I went to two different locations for those treatments. It’s really frustrating, because I am 100 percent allowed to have that, but I think people just want to have some sort of—”

She gathers herself. “I understand what you’re asking”—though I haven’t asked any of it yet—“but I’m just saying, I don’t think it really matters.” She pauses again. “My past seems to be way more fascinating for people than my future, which bums me out.”
Why do you think that is?
“I don’t know. Why do you care?”

I say I care because I’m interested in how she experienced what she experienced. In what it did to her. Being that sick that young, for instance—it’s remarkable, in the worst way a thing can be remarkable.

In response she tells me a story—the story of the first time she told a stranger about being diagnosed. I almost hesitate to retell it, because it’s an anecdote about a celebrity visiting a children’s hospital, which is a very admirable thing, but neither of us is naive, nor particularly inclined to live up to our respective clichés. But this is what Selena Gomez does. She somehow humanizes a celebrity doing a charity visit at a ****ing children’s hospital. Finds the real thing inside of it. So here goes. She’s at the hospital.

“And there was this kid that wouldn’t look me in the eye at all. And I wear my emotions on my face, as you just have witnessed. And I don’t care, that’s who I am. I wanted to get his attention, even though maybe it was too much. So I just said, ‘Ask me anything you want.’ And he was the first person that I told, besides my best friend and family, because he asked me, ‘Have you ever dealt with anything like this?’ And I said, ‘I have lupus. I was in the ICU for two and a half weeks. I was in this exact same room.’ And it was the first time that he looked at me.”

She looks at me evenly, like: There it is, take it or leave it.“I don’t ever really like to sit and dwell on what that experience was,” she says wearily. “Was it fun? No. Is it fun to have it? No.”

FULL

Originally posted by thewayshemoves

We already knew she had a bad attitude. Nothing new here