Keke Palmer opened up about the complications of growing up as a child star in a recent interview.
According to Palmer, the formative experience taught her a lot about herself in hindsight and shaped who she is now as an adult.
While speaking on InStyle’s Ladies First with Laura Brown, 27-year-old Palmer shared that growing up in the entertainment industry as a child performer could be challenging because her emotions weren’t often prioritized.
As she discussed how being in that environment could encourage people pleasing behaviors, she also mentioned that when child stars aren’t catering to the demands of the industry, they are often portrayed as being hard to work with.
“At a young age in the child entertainer world,” Keke Palmer explained, “your emotions are always the last thing that people care about. I think you get really quickly into being a people-pleaser and trying to be everything that everybody wants you to be. And so I think in a lot of that, you end up being misunderstood. When you’re not always being agreeable, you’re a brat.”
“It’s always been a bit of a thing for me because people have had all these expectations of who they want me to be at a very young age,” she said.
“How they want me to act and how they want me to respond. I’ve fought a lot of that most of my adult life, and I’m still new into my adult life.”
Keke Palmer also talked a lot about her journey towards finding self-acceptance — particularly when it came to her PCOS journey. She became less and less worried about covering up her skin and hormonal breakouts.
“As I got older, I think I really just got tired. It was tiring to me to keep on hiding my skin and doing that whole thing. I didn’t know anything about PCOS, anything about my hormones, or the condition of my hormones. I couldn’t deal with the burden of trying to hide it.”
“That’s why I really don’t have that many secrets. I mean I have privacy and I have boundaries but I don’t really have secrets and stuff like that. I just really feel like if I love and accept myself — that’s just the easiest route for life. If all I have to do is love myself, be myself, be true to myself, and keep it real with people — if that’s the hardest thing I have to do I’d rather do that than have to lie, cheat, and steal all to cover up these things when it’s not even really a big deal.”
she’s strong