Justin Bieber wrote about drug abuse, depression, religion and his rapid and difficult journey from small-town boy to teen superstar in a long Instagram post late Sunday.
The post opens with an honest admission that he suffered from depression. “Have u noticed the statistics of child stars and the outcome of their life,” he wrote. “There is an insane pressure and responsibility put on a child who’s brain, emotions, frontal lobes (decision making) aren’t developed yet.
“It’s hard to get out of bed in the morning…when it feels like there’s trouble after trouble after trouble,” he continued. “You start foreseeing the day through lenses of ‘dread’ and anticipate another bad day. A cycle of feeling disappointment after disappointment. Sometimes it can even get to the point where you don’t even want to live anymore. Where you feel like it’s never going to change.”
He then talked of his descent into bad behavior after a few years of fame. At 18, with “no skills in the real world” and “access to whatever you wanted,” the pitfalls of fame began to catch up with him. “By 20 I made every bad decision you could have thought of and went from one of the most loved and adored people in the world to the most ridiculed, judged and hated person in the world.”
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He admits that he took “pretty heavy drugs” and “abused” his relationships. “I became resentful, disrespectful to women and angry.” But he says he turned the corner with the help of religion and his recent marriage to Hailey Baldwin.
“Now I am navigating the best season of my life ‘MARRIAGE’ !! Which is an amazing, crazy, new responsibility,” he wrote. “You learn patience, trust, commitment, kindness, humility, and all of the things it looks like to be a good man.”
In March, he wrote a post about how he had struggled with mental health and decided to take a break from the music industry.
He concluded this latest post by saying, “All this to say even when the odds are against you, keep fighting. Jesus loves you. Be kind today, be bold today and love people today, not by your standards but by God’s perfect unfailing love.”
Bieber emerged from a personal and career spiral in 2015 with the release of his album “Purpose,” which vaulted him from a teen star into more of a career artist with a pair of genre-breaking hit singles “Sorry” and “Love Yourself.” The global success of the single “Despacito,” which features him on its remix, cemented his status. However, his behavior in recent months has been somewhat erratic, between his increased involvement with religion — he led a service at the Los Angeles megachurch Churchome last week — and his sudden marriage to Baldwin. In an Instagram post about the service, he wrote, “God is pulling me through a hard season. Having trust in Jesus at your worst times is the absolute hardest.”
A rep for the singer did not immediately respond to Variety‘s request for comment.
Read the post in full below.