Melanie C has accepted she will always be Sporty Spice.
The 46-year-old singer shot to fame as a member of the Spice Girls and though she spent a long time trying to find her true self away from her musical alter ego, she’s now found peace and doesn’t need to "search" anymore.
She said: "I felt like I had spent many years trying to find myself, who I was when I wasn’t Sporty Spice. Then last year I kind of realised that I am Sporty Spice, what am I trying to find?
"I just kind of feel like I can exhale because I don’t need to search any more, I just need to embrace all of these parts of myself. Like everybody, we are so complex, there are so many sides to us."
The ‘Wannabe’ hitmaker battled with depression and an eating disorder at the height of her fame and she admitted she had piled too much pressure on herself to be "perfect" so that she could feel worthy of her success.
She explained to the Daily Mirror newspaper: "I was still trying to figure out who I was anyway. But then being bombarded with people’s opinions of you, nothing prepares you for that.
"That was hard. You find yourself in this situation where you are living your childhood fantasy. I come from a working-class background.
"I was earning lots of money. I felt guilty and I think I felt maybe I didn’t deserve it and I think all of these things made me put an extraordinary amount of pressure on myself to fit and be what in my head was the idea of perfect, so I did deserve all of the things that were happening to me."
Mel – who has 11-year-old daughter Scarlet with former partner Thomas Starr – recalled how she sought help in Los Angeles in 2000 when she feared she was "going mad" and no longer had the "will" to stay alive.
She said: "I was struggling to get out of bed, I felt hopeless, I was very, very teary and I feel like my body took over my mind.
"I didn’t have the will any longer to stay in this life. That is when I decided to go and see my GP… the first thing he wanted to address was my depression.
"It was a massive relief to me. I just thought I was going mad, it had a name, it was something you could be helped with… recover from."