Selena 2.0

A new album, a new home, a new job, a new life: At 26, SELENA GOMEZ is ready for the next chapter.

- Mickey Rapkin

Selena Gomez hasn’t disappeared. Not exactly. But in the past few months, the most followed person on Instagram (140 million and counting) has removed herself from the Tabloid Industrial Complex. In January, Gomez quietly moved to Orange County, where she and a friend from Hillsong Church, Raquelle, are playing house. “It’s been such a release. L.A.’s just gotten really claustrophobic for me. I can’t do any of the things I do here in L.A. It’s just impossible,” she says.

After selling her Calabasas estate—$3.3 million, to French Montana, of all people—she has now also put her Studio City bungalow on the market for $2.8 million. (Her Texas mansion, one of the most expensive homes near Fort Worth, is for sale at $3 million.) We’re sitting in a coffee shop, and Gomez, dressed in a denim jumpsuit, her hair pulled up behind a linen headscarf, opens a plastic container of pasta salad. “I think everything in my life is being majorly downsized, in a very good way,” she says. “I’m going back to simplicity. That’s always who I’ve been. It’s not me saying, ‘I feel the best I’ve ever felt,’” she continues. “It’s me saying, ‘I’m exactly where I am. And I’m so happy I’m in this place.’ It’s a lot of self-discovery. From 20 to 26? Oh my gosh. I feel like a totally different person.”

How so? “For a while, I think I did certain things because I thought I had to. Like, one of my friends looked at me one day—we were at lunch, and I think I purchased something, and she kind of looked at me and said, ‘Do you feel adequate enough?’”