Justin Bieber has opened up about his troubled past in a candid new interview.
The pop star was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a valid license in January 2014. He has also been accused of faking illness to skip a ‘Sorry’ songwriting dispute deposition, and allegedly headbutting a man after a pre-Grammys event.
Now in a new chat with Vogue, the Canadian superstar explained how finding fame at such a young age led to his reckless behaviour later on in life.
“I was real at first,” Justin says, “and then I was manufactured as, slowly, they just took more and more control,” he said.
“I started really feeling myself too much. People love me, I’m the shit—that’s honestly what I thought. I got very arrogant and cocky. I was wearing sunglasses inside.”
“I found myself doing things that I was so ashamed of, being super-promiscuous and stuff, and I think I used Xanax because I was so ashamed,” he continued. “My mom always said to treat women with respect. For me that was always in my head while I was doing it, so I could never enjoy it. Drugs put a screen between me and what I was doing. It got pretty dark. I think there were times when my security was coming in late at night to check my pulse and see if I was still breathing.”
He later added that he had “a legitimate problem with sex,” also revealing that he recently attended a weeklong intensive group-therapy retreat where “you sit on a mat, you put a pillow down, and you beat your past out of it.”
“I beat the fact that my mom was depressed a lot of my life and my dad has anger issues. Stuff that they passed on that I’m kind of mad they gave me,” he said.
Bieber’s last album was his 2015 release ‘Purpose’, which saw him perform 150 concerts in 40 countries in just sixteen months. He cancelled the final fourteen shows during that run and has yet to release another LP.
“Just thinking about music stresses me out,” he said. “I’ve been successful since I was thirteen, so I didn’t really have a chance to find who I was apart from what I did. I just needed some time to evaluate myself: who I am, what I want out of my life, my relationships, who I want to be—stuff that when you’re so immersed in the music business you kind of lose sight of.”