Why Addison Rae Took a Step Back from Social Media: ‘I Felt So Misunderstood’

Addison Rae is taking a step back from social media.

During a recent appearance on Therapuss with Jake Shane, the 24-year-old singer opened up about why she’s stopped sharing so much of herself on social media platforms, following her rise to fame as a dancer on TikTok.

“I felt so misunderstood,” she shared of her time on social media, “but I was sharing so much.”

“Sometimes you do what you need to do to get where you want to go,” she continued. “I wasn’t showing every part of myself, as one mostly doesn’t, you know. There are elements of yourself that surely you don’t share online that aren’t bad — they just aren’t things you’re willing to share or talk about or, you know, show.”

Rae shared that over the course of her young career, she realized that having a sense of privacy is one of the most important things to her.

“I think privacy becomes really important over time,” she continued. “Like, ‘OK, what can I allow people access to that isn’t going to hurt me? Or they’re not going to use to make me feel conflicted in my own life decisions that I have to make?'”

“Being misunderstood is definitely annoying and it does get on my nerves sometimes, but I think over time, I’ve realized that if somebody’s commenting that ‘I’m not this’ [or] ‘This is not who I am.’ … Or when I was 19 I was more authentic,” the “Headphones On” singer added.

“I’m like, okay, well, I just moved to LA. I’m like, geez. I was from a small town, of course I didn’t experience a lot of things or have the opportunity to even figure out who I was in those those ways,” she continued. “Because it was life whenever you grow up in a small town.”

In another part of her conversation with Shane, Rae also shared she’s applying the idea of “slowing things down” or taking a step back when it comes to other parts of her life so she can avoid feeling “too exposed.”

“It happens very frequently with a lot of artists,” she shared. “They feel like they’re too exposed or they need to pull back or, you know, they’re too scared to get overdone or feel like you’re too in front of everybody’s face and that people will get tired of you.”

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“But I feel like with projects that are delayed or a little bit later or make you wait, it’s almost like, ‘Okay, not everything has to be now.’ And I can feel comfort in the fact that something’s coming and not so pressured to make something happen now.”

Rae most recently released her self-titled debut LP Addison on June 6. During an interview on Quen Blackwell’s YouTube series Feeding Starving Celebrities, she opened up about the wide range of topics that the record covers — which influenced its simple name.

Rae thought about self-titling the album “for a really long time,” noting, “when you do hear all of the music like straight through, there’s not really a title that like encompasses all of it.” 

“Everybody that I played it to as well they were just like, ‘Oh it just sounds like just like you. Like it just sounds like music you would make,'” she recalled. “I don’t really know what else to call it and so I was like, ‘Maybe then the album is just my name.'”