When Lauren Gottlieb debuted in Bollywood with ABCD in 2013, she was already a dancing sensation in Hollywood. Nine years later, the former contestant of So You Think You Can Dance and Jhalak Dikhla Ja decided to take a break from stardom and focus on her well-being instead.

Speaking to Maniesh Paul on his podcast, Lauren revealed that a host of reasons compelled her to leave and she just wasn’t ‘happy anymore’ and kept ‘spiralling’. “I was growing in fame, but the more I was spiralling. I knew it was the biggest risk to let it all go, but I had so much faith in myself that I knew if I work on myself and feel mentally healthy again, I’ll come back,” she said.

Speaking about her struggles with depression while on set, she said that she felt the need to ‘leave’ even though she was ‘great on set’. “I was always so focused. But there were so many things on set that were out of my control. I had to let all of that go. I knew I needed to leave because I wanted an acting school and I needed therapy,” she recalled.

She added that she doesn’t feel like she is part of the rat race in Bollywood and is happy for the ones who are doing well as dancers in the industry. The cultural differences between her home country and India also were a major reason she chose to take a break. “I chose to leave. It took everything from me. I was spiralling so far down with the cultural barrier and the language barrier, and the Indian way of coming up and asking for ‘ek photo, ek photo’, and that’s never one photo,” she said. She also felt that as an American who prefers the ‘hard and honest truth’ the evasion of truth at work would wear her down.

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