Growing up in the spotlight is definitely not easy, especially when you’re constantly being compared to your siblings. Just take it from Noah Cyrus. The young star just got real about how hard it was for her to find her own voice while growing up with famous sister Miley Cyrus, and fans are seriously of how she’s come.

Looking back at her early years of fame, the now 20-year-old recalled locking herself in her bedroom and sitting alone with the lights off in an attempt to “hide from the bullying, the comparisons and the cruel things strangers wrote about a preteen they had never met.”

“Being in my room with the lights off, hiding from the world, that’s not a way to live for such a young girl,” she told TMRW Magazine. “So, you know, whenever I think about how many other people are going through the same thing — especially at the age I was at — there are so many more people out there. I think that whenever I see other artists like myself speaking out and talking about it, it makes me really happy because I didn’t really have that when I was growing up.”

The singer explained that strangers wouldn’t even call her by her name, but instead, they would refer to her as “Hannah Montana‘s sister.”

“Somebody not even coming up to you and calling you by your name?” she continued. “That’s going to really f**k you up as a kid, make you feel like you don’t f**king even matter to the population — for them to not even know your name.”

noah cyrus talks downsides of growing up with miley cyrus
Invision/AP/Shutterstock

“I think what’s weird about people on the internet is that they think if you have a well-known last name that whatever they say to you may not hurt your feelings or that whatever they say about you couldn’t possibly make its way to you or hurt you,” the “Good Cry” songstress added. “There’s no mercy from people who see you only as public. I would say what bothers me the most is that people think that they can just say whatever the f**k they want, and it doesn’t really have a consequence to it or it doesn’t affect anything ‘cause it’s said over the internet. There’s so much power to the internet. Whether you’re well-known or not, it still f**king hurts somebody so bad to read the s**t that I’ve been reading since I was so young. So many people get that every day, and it’s so f**ked up, man.”

Despite all the roadblocks, Noah has certainly come a long way. She released her debut EP back in 2018, and her latest single, “I Got So High That I Saw Jesus,” is still on repeat, TBH.

“I’ve always understood that I had a ‘powerful’ last name, or a well-known last name, so that’s not really what I wanted to be tied to. I always wanted to be tied to Noah,” she concluded. “I felt I was put in this really unique situation of growing up in the family I grew up in. Very different. Not being able to go to school, not being able to do a lot, it really was a different way of growing up. I feel like now is my chance to all the people that were so awful to me when I was so young publicly, and everybody that called me what they called me. I feel like it’s kind of my time to prove them wrong, make them feel stupid, and that’s kind of how I feel right now. I just want to do things for me and make me happy. All the people that told me I couldn’t, prove them wrong and show them that I could.”

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