Camila Cabello gets candid about her OCD and anxiety

Camila Cabello is giving an unfiltered glimpse into her obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In an essay for the Wall Street Journal for Mental Health Awareness Month, the singer admitted that the carefree pictures she posts on social media don't always tell the real story of what her life is like.

"Here's what there aren't pictures of from the last year: me crying in the car talking to my mom about how much anxiety and how many symptoms of OCD I was experiencing," Cabello writes. "My mom and me in a hotel room reading books about OCD because I was desperate for relief. Me experiencing what felt like constant, unwavering, relentless anxiety that made day-to-day life painfully hard."

The singer says her OCD made her "feel like my mind was playing a cruel trick on me" and even manifested in physical symptoms, like difficulty sleeping, constant headaches and a persistent knot in her throat.

She admitted at first she was ashamed to tell anyone for fear they might see her as "weak."

But she eventually realized that "denying my suffering and berating myself didn't help things" and she needed to talk about it in order to fully deal with it.

Cabello sought help with cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, breathing exercises and other techniques and wrote that she now feels the "healthiest and most connected to myself I've ever been."