Justin Bieber on Sunday opened up about his past struggles and bad behaviour.
In an Instagram post, the Canadian singer reflected on how he “went from one of the most loved and adored people in the world to the most ridiculed, judged and hated person in the world!”
Bieber recalled how he grew up in Stratford, Ont. with young separated parents and was then thrust into the global spotlight.
“I went from a 13 year old boy from a small town to being praised left and right by the world with millions saying how much they loved me and how great I was,” the 25-year-old wrote, adding that there was no time to learn humility and rationality.
“Everyone did everything for me so I never even learned the fundamentals of responsibility.”
MORE: A Look Back At Justin Bieber's Arrest 5 Years Ago
Bieber said he found himself at 18 with “no skills in the real world,” millions of dollars and “access to whatever I wanted.”
He added: “I started doing pretty heavy drugs at 19 and abused all of my relationships. I became resentful, disrespectful to women, and angry. I became distant to everyone who loved me, and I was hiding behind a shell of a person that I had become.”
Bieber admitted it has taken several years to “bounce back from all of these terrible decisions, fix broken relationships, and change relationship habits.”
The pop star said marriage to Hailey Baldwin has taught him about “patience, trust, commitment, kindness, humility and all of the things it looks like to be a good man.”
Bieber previously addressed his rocky past in an interview with Vogue that was published in February.
“A lot of the douchey things I was doing gave people the right to be like, ‘Man, that’s frickin’ douchey, bro.’ But a lot of the stuff was like—me peeing in a bucket, people made such a big deal of that,” he recalled. “Or me owning a monkey. It’s like, if you had the money that I had, why wouldn’t you get a monkey? You would get a monkey!”
Bieber said he was abusing Xanax to “put a screen between” him and behaviour of which he was “ashamed.” He recalled: “It got pretty dark. I think there were times when my security was coming in late at night to check my pulse and see if I was still breathing.”
In this weekend’s Instagram message, he acknowledged the “cycle of feeling disappointment after disappointment” and “the point where you don’t even want to live anymore.”
Bieber is getting lots of positive reactions to his Instagram post, including from fellow artists like Cody Simpson, Sean Kingston and Noah Cyrus as well as Bieber's former music director, Ottawa-born Dan Kanter.
Read Bieber’s full message below: