One way is by keeping genuine friendships.  "I still have the friends and the people that [were] close to me before this happened to me and I still try to keep them a part of my life," Mariah has said.  "I think that it's really important that the people around me are real."

Growing up in a small town in Long Island, New York, Mariah wasn't used to the megamillion dollar, silver spoon lifestyle she now enjoys.  She had to rough it to get the top.  After graduating from Harborfeilds High School in 1987, Mariah held a string of jobs as a waitress, a coat-checker and a back-up singer for Brenda K. Starr.  It wasn't until she cut her own demo, one year later, with money she borrowed from her older brother, Morgan, that things started looking up for her.  Luckily, the demo landed in the right hands, and the rest is her-story.

Despite her fairy tale fortune, however, Mariah tries to keep her life real as possible.  And sometimes, she needs to pinch herself to make sure she's not daydreaming.  "When things are happening so quickly, you don't always live in the moment as well as you could, " the princess-o- pop's said.  Well, for now, Mariah is living the moment as well as she possibly can.  And, as she says, she wants to share forever with you!

While working on this new album with producers and rappers Sean "Puffy" Combs and Q-Tip may have shocked a few people, Mariah sees it as a natural evolution.  "People have to realize that I have been in this situation where I've been working with some really powerful people since I was a teenager," Mariah has said.

Mariah's certainly not ungrateful for her opportunities, but she feels that it's important to branch out and expand herself as a singer.  "As an established artist, it's good for me to meet new people," Mariah has said, "and to start working with them at the level that I'm at now."

At her current level, Mariah can look back and see how far she's come.  "In the past, people have been concerned, some [songs] were to R&B," she's said, referring to when she tried recording previous albums her own way.  "Everybody would say, "Don't do that! People might think there's a rapper on there!"

Though Mariah listened to her critics back then , she's doing things her own way now.  "Being able to handle things on my own is good ," she's declared.  "If there's one little part with a tiny bit of harder rap on it, who cares? It's not like I'm going wacky, off the deep end."  No, not off the deep end, but into it, discovering the treasures or her true self.