Christina Aguilera is "frustrated" by fame.
The 43-year-old pop star has been known around the world since she was in her late teens but almost three decades into her music career has insisted that fame has "never been the goal" and that she only wants to share "love and creativity" with her work.
She told Paper magazine: "I have a really good sense of humor about myself. At the end of the day, I don't take myself and fame so seriously. I’m in it for the love and the creativity, and how I can connect and hopefully spread messages. But as far as the fame itself, it's never been the goal. That's the most frustrating part for me: having to over give myself when I'm such a private person, especially with this age of social media. Everybody wants something of you.
The 'Beautiful' songstress - who appeared on 'The Mickey Mouse Club' in the early 1990s alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake before launching a pop career with 'Genie in a Bottle' in 1999 - became aware early on in showbusiness that she could never truly "strive for complete perfection" and doesn't want to come across as too polished anyway.
Christina - who has Max,16, with ex-husband Jordan Bratman, and Summer, 10 with her fiance Matt Ruttler - added: "But having such a history in the business, I learned very early on that it's impossible to strive for complete perfection and to please every single person in every way. I am a perfectionist, but there's an element of being raw that I love with live performing.
"Being too strategic loses the element of living in the moment as an artist. I'm a weird juxtaposition of things, but now more than ever I get comfortable with the idea of letting go. And you have to be an example to your kids, too. You can't fall apart, s***gonna happen, things are gonna get messy. So I try to keep a positive headspace for them."