Gwen Stefani

Pop star Gwen Stefani grew up thinking she had no brains, no talent, and would probably be a teenage mother. In a recent interview with Elle magazine, the 39-year-old says that she was very apprehensive about school work, particularly exams, and that she still is sometimes haunted by the fear of those exams.

She told Elle, “School was just really hard for me. I didn’t want to fail I wanted to be smart! But I was really dreaming, like drawing my boyfriend’s name on my notebooks.”

Once she began writing songs, however, her confidence improved. “I never had any kind of ambitions. I just thought I was going to have babies… When I found out that I could write songs, I felt like all of a sudden I’d found myself.”

Stefani recently got back together with the other former members of the band No Doubt and has faced rumors that she and the bandmates are having a tough time getting along together. While she said she had a “heated conversation” with her ex-boyfriend Tony Kanal (bassist for No Doubt) about No Doubt’s cover of the song “Stand and Deliver” by Adam and the Ants, she says that whatever tension there was has since disappeared.