Cara Delevingne has sparked widespread concern after paparazzi footage captured at a private airport in Los Angeles last September showed the model and actress looking disheveled and acting erratically on the Burning Man return. Now, in a revealing cover interview with voguethe 30-year-old said she was grateful for the footage as it sent her on the path to rehab and sobriety.
“I hadn’t slept. I was not well, ”she said vogue the writer Chioma Nnadi. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, OK, I don’t look good. You know, sometimes you need a confrontation with reality, so in a way, those photos were something we could be grateful for.
For the interview, conducted in late January, Delevingne confessed that she had been four months sober after a stint in rehab late last year. “I had interventions of sorts, but I wasn’t ready. This is the problem. If you’re not face down and ready to get up, you won’t,” she said, adding that she had come to the conclusion that she needed help. “I hadn’t seen a therapist for three years. I just kind of pushed everyone away, which made me realize how bad a place I was. I’ve always thought that work should be done when times are tough, but in fact, work should be done when things are going well. Work must be done consistently. It will never be fixed or fully cured, but I’m okay with that, and that’s the difference.
The cover story – with styling by Jorden Bickham and photos by legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz – details Delevingne’s family life with a focus on his mother, Pandora, who also suffered from substance abuse issues. “For a long time, I didn’t really put myself in his shoes. I just needed someone to be mad at and I was mad at her, but it wasn’t her fault. … The way this addiction took my mother was brutal, and it was brutal for her too.
She started drinking and partying as a teenager and reveals her first experience of alcohol abuse came during a family wedding when she was 7 years old. I had gone to nail glasses of champagne.
His teenage problems included crippling insomnia; dyspraxia, a disorder that affects movement and coordination; mental depression; and “inadvertent self-harm,” she noted. “As a teenager, everything fell apart. That’s also when I started drinking and partying. There was this need to escape and change my reality as I was hit with huge questions: what am I doing here? Who am I trying to be?
Of his wild moments at Burning Man, Delevingne said, “There’s an element of feeling invincible when I’m on drugs. I put myself in danger in those moments because I don’t care about my life. There were times when she was covered in bruises that she couldn’t explain. “I was climbing anything and jumping stuff… It was wild. It’s a scary thing for the people around you who love you.
Speaking of those who love Delevingne, the article cites several of her close friends, including Margot Robbie and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and she says she’s close with her. Only murders in the building co-star Selena Gomez. “We all have moments in our lives that we would rather not be photographed and shown to everyone. She has maintained her honesty and vulnerability and is open about her life and experiences – what more could you ask for from someone living their life in a fishbowl? Waller-Bridge suggested. “There is no one like her in the world. She has been a rock solid friend to me.
Says Robbie, who got close to Delevingne on the set of suicide squad: “We shared most of our 20s together and we were side by side when we entered our thirties. I was literally with her the day I turned 30 and vice versa. I think it will be always like this – 40, 50, 60. God knows what we’ll be doing for our 70th anniversary, but thinking about it already makes me laugh.
Delevingne credits a 12-step program for her recovery and healthy living filled with yoga, meditation, extra workouts, three meals a day, and a therapeutic diet that also includes psychodrama. She also says that “self-employment” is the most important thing in her life today, with her career being “secondary”. Still, she’s keeping busy on that front with a new season of Prime Video. Carnival Row and the Hulu docuseries planet sex. His other credits include Paper Towns, Pan, Tulip Fever, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Its Smell, Life in a Year And London Fields.
“Before, I was always in the quick fix of healing, going to a week-long retreat or a trauma course, let’s say, and it helped for a minute, but it never really reached the deep, the deeper things.. This time I realized that the 12 step treatment was the best thing to do and it was not to be ashamed of. The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12 steps,” she said. “That process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started to realize so much. People want my story to be that after-school special where I just say, “Oh look, I was addicted, and now I’m sober and that’s it.” And it’s not that simple. It doesn’t happen overnight… Of course, I want things to be instantaneous – I think this generation in particular, we want the Things are happening fast – but I had to dig deeper.