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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at SBU chapter.

Mental health remains a taboo topic for several people. I feel comfortable talking about mental health, and I always feel like that is a conversation that can happen more often, but there are still times when it is deemed inappropriate or uncomfortable to talk about in 2024. 

Often it seems that celebrities fall into the category of not talking about it. I think this has improved with time as the current generation has, in my opinion, fueled more mental health conversations to happen. 

But, you will still have the people in the limelight that choose to not say much. 

My aunt had been pestering me to watch Selena Gomez’s documentary on Apple TV ‘My Mind and Me,’ and I got around to it finally (thanks to her log-in)!

This is not a recent documentary as it was filmed a couple years ago. Surely so much has changed in Selena’s life since its debut. What hasn’t changed, and what will never change for her, is her autoimmune disease, lupus. 

A large center of Selena’s documentary was her experience with her lupus diagnosis and how that has affected the trajectory of her life forever. The documentary outlines how Selena had to even have a kidney transplant in 2017 to help treat her lupus. It saved her life. 

I am someone who is healthy all the time. Obviously I come down with illness like everybody else, but day-to-day I do not suffer from chronic pain or illness. I am fortunate enough to wake up 95% of my days pain-free. 

This documentary honed in on a normal day for Selena being disrupted by her chronic body pain, which was a flare up of her lupus. 

I have been keeping up with Selena on social media in the past few years, mostly because I’ve become a huge fan of her makeup line, Rare Beauty. I know from her Instagram updates that she has a partner, and I see her selfies flash across my timeline once in a while. I don’t hesitate to double-tap as I scroll by because she’s always looking drop-dead gorgeous. Nothing new, right?

But you look at pictures of people, not just famous people, but people projecting their life happenings to the world and there are several invisible battles you don’t notice. One of my best friends and one of the best mentors I have had for teaching have autoimmune diseases. You can’t see these diseases outwardly. 

Another invisible battle that affects so many is mental illness. 

Selena pours out several details and stories with her audience. She talks about the moments she has hurt the people she loves when she was struggling with severe depression and anxiety. She talks a lot about childhood fame and the fear of disappointment being at the root of her pain as an adult. 

Selena’s thoughts resonate with me as a woman. Here you have a very successful woman who many young girls turned women have looked up to and continue to look up to in adulthood. I am speaking to my generation of girls who grew up on “Wizards of Waverly Place” and can name every top 10 pop song from the radio in 2012.

We grew up with Selena! So watching her speak about her struggles in this film was an intimate experience. Hearing the way she talks about her own body breaks my heart, but I know that I’ve said similar mean things about myself and my body. It’s sad, but it’s comforting at the same time.

Letting down your guard is hard. It’s hard to speak to a group of people about how you have overcome your battles when the next day could bring something entirely different.

The next day you could be trying to pick up the pieces again and you somehow have to figure out how to listen to your own advice. Somehow, I think we all figure it out.

Cassy is a new Her Campus SBU chapter member who writes about her physical and emotional journeys, topics she adores, but also any topic that comes to mind that week. At St. Bonaventure, Cassy is Vice President of the SBU College Democrats chapter, a Student Ambassador for admissions, and a member of SBU's EMPOWER club on campus. Cassy is a senior whose double-major is Adolescence Education with Disabilities and History, and she could not say enough praise about her "Ad-Ed" cohort who have become her rock at school. This semester she will be student teaching at two local schools at the middle and high school level. When Cassy is not at St. Bonaventure, she resides in the Finger Lakes area and enjoys substitute teaching where she gets to work with her former school teachers and build relationships with students. She loves attending country concerts during the summer at her favorite concert venue on Canandaigua Lake, CMAC. In her free time, Cassy enjoys perfecting her Spotify profile, reading on her Kindle, working out, and sitting on the porch– coffee in hand– with her roommates. Recently, her most frequented albums are Noah Kahan's "Stick Season" and Zach Bryan's "The Great American Bar Scene." In terms of books, Emily Henry remains a staple author in her reading life and "Funny Story" was her favorite read this past summer.