Keke Palmer Says She’s Comfortable Being Herself

Keke Palmer is confident and comfortable with being herself  and being by herself. But it hasn’t always been that way.

Palmer rose to fame as a kid on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon circa 2008. But being a child star and gracing the cover of Tiger Beat isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

“At a young age, as a child [in the] entertainer world, your emotions are always the last thing that people care about,” she said on InStyle’s Ladies First with Laura Brown. “I think you get really quickly into being a people-pleaser and trying to be everything that everybody wants you to be. And so I think in a lot of that, you end up being misunderstood.”

Since growing out of her child stardom and transitioning to her adult career, Palmer has learned to stop caring so much about what the public thinks of her. But she says it’s something she still works at every day.

“I’ve fought a lot of that most of my adult life, and I’m still new into my adult life,” she said. “And I think that’s something that I work towards every day is to not worry about people not understanding me, because I understand myself.”