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Jennifer Lopez struggled to adjust to her quick rise to fame.
During an appearance on the June 10 episode of her Office Romance costar Brett Goldstein's Films to Be Buried With podcast, Lopez opened up about her increased anxiety in the early years of her career and learning how to cope with fame following her breakthrough role in the 1997 biopic Selena, per People.
Lopez shot to fame thanks to her performance as late Mexican-American musical sensation Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, who took the world by storm with her debut album in 1989 but whose life was tragically cut short when she was murdered in 1995 by Yolanda Saldívar, president of her fan club.
After Goldstein asked how Lopez navigated her newfound fame after coming from a family outside of showbusiness, she candidly explained that she was struggling with the massive change, admitting, "It was really bad at first... It was a really bad time."
She remembered being "terrified" shortly after the movie came out when someone she didn't know started yelling her name and thinking "please don't attack me."
"And they came over, and I was just like so on the defensive and angry... and they were like, 'I loved you in Selena' or whatever. And I was just like, 'Oh, s---,'" she recalled, adding, "I remember going back to my apartment and realizing my life had changed. I was no longer anonymous, and I started getting panic attacks. The idea of that, and not being able to reverse that, was so scary to me."
The "On the Floor" singer worried that she would be "trapped" in fame because she did something "I can't undo," but "little by little" she learned how to "cope and adjust," partly by speaking with others in the industry about her experience.
"It wasn't something that couldn't be undone, that nothing is that permanent, nothing is," she said. "Everything always is changing, and that was a principle [that] kind of helped me through that."