It’s been a long time since Miley Cyrus’s Hannah Montana days. Cyrus, who will be 29 in November, was only 12 when she was cast in the famous Disney Channel role, and it still sticks with her.

In an interview with Kevin Hart on his Peacock talk show, Hart to Heart, Cyrus told the comedian about how doing her show affected her, even after she was no longer Hannah.

“The concept of the show is that when I would alter my image and I would put on a wig and I would put on sparkly things that I held a new value,” she said. ”That I was valuable. It did translate into my real life. There was a different level of, like, hysteria when Hannah…the way that kids would react at these Hannah shows, versus when I was myself and I would meet fans out, it was different. And so, again, on that kind of psychological level, I guess that’s kind of why originally when I started doing solo projects as my own identity, I’d almost create kind of alter-egos of myself.”

She added that because the character was also named Miley (Stewart), there was very little separation between the show and her real life and identity. She she treated the 15th anniversary of Hannah Montana, which was in March of this year, as a “birthday” and a way to move forward.

Cyrus told Hart about the letter she wrote to Hannah and shared on Instagram. The letter, she said, was “about just my gratitude towards the character.” She said she was “able to kind of make peace with it” and asked herself what she “wanted, I guess, these next 15 years to look like.”

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This is not the first time Cyrus has talked about the Hannah Montana effect on her life.

“Talk about an identity crisis,” Cyrus said on Spotify’s Rock This with Allison Hagendorf on March 5. She said that Hannah was “a character almost as often as I was myself, and actually, the concept of the show is that when you’re this character, when you have this alter ego, you’re valuable. You’ve got, like, millions of fans, you’re the biggest star in the world, and then the concept was that when I looked like myself, when I didn’t have the wig on anymore, no one cared about me, I wasn’t a star anymore.”

She added: “I never created a character where it wasn’t me, but I was aware of how people saw me, and I maybe played into it a little bit.”