I was introduced to Demi Lovato when I watched Camp Rock, a light, throwaway Disney confection that was one of my first assignments here at Plugged In. I don’t remember much about the show itself—not the plot, not the music, barely the setting. But I do remember one thing: Demi’s smile.
It was the sort of smile that told you immediately that this girl had “it,” whatever “it” is. She was going places. Sure, lots of girls can sing and dance and act, and Demi could do all those things. But the smile was one in a million. It was the sort of smile that cheered you up just by seeing it. As long as Demi could smile, you just kinda thought that things were going to be all right.
This week, Demi starred in an altogether different sort of special.
Demi Lovato: Stay Strong, which aired Tuesday on MTV, featured Demi discussing, in heartbreaking detail, her well-publicized personal problems: Her anorexia, her bulimia, her cutting, her bipolar condition. By the time she was 4, she was rubbing her fingers over her belly thinking she was too fat. By the time she was 12, she dropped 30 pounds from not eating. When she was 14 and starring in Camp Rock, she was deep in the throes of the problems she still struggles with—despite what she calls a great family, despite a faith in God.
But it was too late to really deal with these problems. She was a star by then. She was making movies, making albums, touring with the Jonas Brothers. And she worried that if she took time off or (heaven forbid) told anyone what she was struggling with, her career might be over. The spotlight is a fickle thing: Demi worried that if she walked out of it, it might never find her again. She says she could only slap on some Band-Aids and keep singing, keep acting, keep smiling.
“Everyone just kind of made me a role model, and I hated that,” she says in her documentary. “I was partying, I was self medicating, and I was like, ‘You don’t know what I’m suffering with; you don’t know what I’m dealing with. Why would you want your kids to be like me?’
“I felt like I was living a lie.”
At Plugged In, we sometimes talk about celebrity—what it can do to folks sometimes, and what it can lead you into. Stay Strong is, at one level, a cautionary tale: We see Demi take to the stage for the first time since leaving recovery, and she worries that the experience might lead her away from recovery. “Last time I went on the road,” she says, “I didn’t come home. I went right to a treatment center.” She tells how the anonymous Internet fed and feeds her eating disorder. And a bit of me wonders whether Demi’s love of her fans, of being on stage, of celebrity is just another coping tool … not entirely dissimilar, perhaps, from bulimia or cutting. We know it can be equally addictive.
But there’s more complexity to celebrity—more nuance to Demi’s path—than sometimes we say.
Onscreen, fan after fan detail how Demi’s honesty through song and story helped them talk to their parents about their own eating disorders, or pushed them through their own insecurities. “It sounds cliché, but [music] really does get you through stuff,” one girl says. “I’m not alone, I can do this,” another says. “If [Demi] can do it, I can do it,” a third tells the camera.
Before one concert, Demi’s introduced to a bald girl backstage. “You inspired me to go without my wig,” she tells her.
What the girl couldn’t know was, that very day Demi was struggling. She was tired. Sick. Thanksgiving was a recent memory, and she felt fat—not the after-meal thickness most of us might feel, but the debilitating disordered sense that, because she ate, she was a failure. “People [in the audience] are going to see everything I ate,” she says. But after the encounter, Demi seems visibly moved.
During the concert, she pulls the bald girl up on stage with her, and together they sing, hand-in-hand. “Keep inspiring people,” she tells the screaming fans, “because you’re inspiring me to stay strong to this day.”
“She helped me get on stage that night,” Demi says later.
Stay Strong, which I hope MTV will repeat, offers an inspirational, clear-eyed message of hope and recovery. And in the midst of that message, Demi comes across—by design, perhaps—as a work in progress. A Thanksgiving dinner with her extended family feels long and awkard. She spends a car ride with her mom and stepfather absorbed by her phone. Before shows, she seems distant.
This doesn’t detract from the message for me as much as strengthen it. This stuff is hard, and having it all documented by MTV must be pretty hard, too. When we tell one person about our personal pain, we feel exposed. Demi’s telling millions. That’s a level of vulnerability we can’t comprehend. And frankly, if a camera crew was documenting how I interacted with my parents or kids in the midst of crisis, I’m liable to withdraw a bit, too.
Demi tells us that she’s not “fixed.” That people aren’t like cars, where a mechanic does his thing and the troubled vehicle trundles out, running like new.
“I cannot tell you I have not thrown up since treatment,” she says. “I cannot tell you that I have not cut myself since treatment. I’m not perfect. This is a daily battle that I’ll face for the rest of my life.”
And yet, there’s hope—even in the midst of this ongoing pain. And there’s faith that God won’t let it all be in vain.
“I wasn’t given this voice just to sing,” she says. “I think it was given to me for a better purpose.”
She doesn’t smile when she says this. These are topics that don’t lend themselves to ear-to-ear grins.
But she smiles onstage—giving her thousands of screaming fans reason to hope. Her fans smile back at her. And maybe, through their smiles, each is telling the other that things really are going to be all right.
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