By Millie Bobby Brown opens up about online bullying
Image: BBC
In her cover story for Allure’s September 2022 issue, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown opened up about the struggles she’s faced with social media, identity and mental health as a child growing up in the spotlight.
“It’s really hard to be hated on when you don’t know who you are yet,” she told Allure. “Then you just start shutting down because you’re like, ‘Who am I meant to be? Who do they need me to be for them?”. Brown says she’s “always struggled with self-identity” while working in Hollywood. “Even as a young person, I always felt like I didn’t quite belong in every room I was in. I also struggle with loneliness a bit.”
Brown has faced scrutiny, harassment, sexualization, and trolling for the past six years and as a result she stopped using social media on her phone. Her only active social media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, are managed by someone else. She added that she went to therapy to deal with the bullying she had faced online.
However, she explains how her mental health improved by connecting with family and friends and avoiding social media.”I started to grow more, and my family and friends really helped. It helped to be able to understand that I don’t need to be anything they said that I need to be. I just have to develop within myself. That’s what I did.”
The actress also discussed the “unhealthy situation” with Tiktoker Hunter Ecimovic, 21, who claimed to have had an inappropriate relationship with Brown when she was 16.
“It was a year of healing,” she said. “When you get publicly humiliated this way, I felt so out of control and powerless. Walking away and knowing that I’m worth everything and this person didn’t take anything from me, it felt very empowering.” Millie added that no one on the set of the Netflix show “knew” what was happening between the pair. She said, “Also, no one on the set knew I was going through this. So it was kind of nice to be able to just deal with that myself, and no one else knew. Then it was harder when the whole world knew.”
The actress says that her ultimate career goal is to help others and express how she also has struggles she has to face. She said, “Ultimately, all I wanted to do within my career is help young girls and young people out there know that I, too, go through things. I’m not this perfect person that is selling skin-care products and in ‘Stranger Things’. I absolutely have made wrong decisions.”
Written by: Tahsin Aktar
