Keke Palmer opens up about her history with anxiety while growing up as a child actor
Actress and singer Keke Palmer has been an inspiration throughout her career and she’s continuing that in her new book I Don’t Belong to You: Quiet the Noise and Find Your Voice. In it, Palmer opens up about her mental health struggles, as she explained in an interview to Cosmopolitan. While not everyone has had the same experiences as Palmer when it comes to growing up in the spotlight, her honesty about anxiety and depression will be something that many people can relate to.
Cosmo calls her book a mix of self-help and memoir, but Palmer herself was quick to say it wasn’t a memoir on TODAY. No matter what label you give it though, Palmer’s openness about her struggles with mental health show it’s not something to be ashamed of.
"I felt like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm so alone,'" she told Cosmo. "Then as I grew, I realized I wasn't the only person going through this."
"Being able to say how I feel, that was something that was so hard for me for so long."
Palmer has been in the spotlight since she was cast in Barbershop 2 when she was only 9 years old. And she has stayed there in movies like Akeelah and the Bee, on TV in Grease: Live and Scream Queens, and on Broadway in Cinderella. Yet, as she said on TODAY, she thinks her experience of growing up that she writes about in I Don’t Belong to You is pretty universal.
"Really, everybody is living that same life of trying to ... get to the root of who it is we want to be in this world. And that's what the book is about — us all finding our way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAx7mwfm-_w?feature=oembed
As she discussed in her book, Palmer has used therapy, meditation, and self-reflection to help deal with her anxiety and depression. And though she hasn’t always felt this way, she told Cosmo, “It’s OK to say how you feel … It feels good to be there for you.”
And we certainly couldn’t agree more.
