Selena Gomez Explains Why Her Voice Sounds Different

Selena Gomez is clearing the air about any apparent vocal changes.

“There’s no excuse, I don’t really care,” Gomez, 33, said during a Tuesday, December 16, Instagram Live session, per screenshotted fan footage. “I think my point is that sometimes things happen. I get weird [or] my throat swells from the inside sometimes. That’s all.”

The Only Murders in the Building star has been candid about her health through the years, including a battle with lupus.

“I was diagnosed with lupus, and I’ve been through chemotherapy,” Gomez told Billboard in a 2015 profile, nearly one year after she was first diagnosed. “That’s what my break [from the spotlight] was really about. I could’ve had a stroke. I wanted so badly to say, ‘You guys have no idea. I’m in chemotherapy. You’re a**holes.’ I locked myself away until I was confident and comfortable again.”

Gomez later underwent a kidney transplant — her donor was on-off friend Francia Raísa — in 2017.

“Recovery was hard. I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want to drink anything. Selena did have a complication too,” Raísa, now 37, told W magazine in March 2018. “A few hours after our surgery, I woke up and had a text from her that said, ‘I’m really scared.’ My kidney was very active, and when it turned I broke an artery. They had to take her into emergency surgery and get a vein from her leg and build a new artery to keep my kidney in place. She could have died.”

She continued, “We went through a depression at the time. I’ve never had anything personal come out about me before. I’ve dated very famous people, and no one knows because I’m very private. I was like, ‘Did you have to be famous?’”

Gomez now continues to take medication.

“I shake because of my medication for lupus,” she wrote via TikTok comment in January 2023.

Gomez’s lupus battle has also affected her weight, which has fluctuated through the years.

“I tend to hold a lot of water weight, and that happens very normally. And then when I’m off of [my medication], I tend to lose weight,” the Golden Globe nominee said in a TikTok video uploaded in February 2023. “I just wanted to say and encourage anyone out there who feels any sort of shame for exactly what they’re going for and nobody knows the real story. I just want people to know that you’re beautiful and you’re wonderful and, yeah, maybe we have days where we feel like s*** but I would much rather be healthy and take care of myself.”

Gomez’s weight changes have often become public discourse.

“I got stung by a person saying I was fat. Why is that [emotion] coming up?” she told Allure in September. “I’ve dealt with a lot of weight issues in my life, and that’s something I’m very sensitive to.”

According to Gomez, she has undergone dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) to deal with the critical comments.

“Now I understand, that’s stemming from that one time when I was going through some medical stuff and I had gained weight,” Gomez told the outlet. “You just definitely have to be willing to do the work, and that part can be tricky.”