Cara Delevingne said that when she saw the disheveled paparazzi photos of her at an airport in Los Angeles in September, it was a wake-up call that led her to take the steps to sobriety over the last four months.
The 30-year-old model/actress opened up to Vogue about her long battle with drugs and said that being in the entertainment industry, one’s problems were often only “magnified and exacerbated.”
“I hadn’t slept. I was not okay,” Delevingne said of those photos. ”It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, Okay, I don’t look well. You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”
“In a way, a lot of people have looked at my childhood or my family and thought, she’s spoiled, there’s nepotism, she grew up extremely privileged, which I did, don’t get me wrong,” she added. “But life wasn’t all that easy for other reasons.”
“I was happy as a kid for sure, but I think when I grew up, I looked back and realized, that’s not normal,” the actress continued. “And then as a teenager, it just all came plummeting down. That’s also when I started drinking and partying. There was this need to escape and change my reality as I was hit with just huge questions: What am I doing here? Who am I trying to be?”
The supermodel said she started drinking and using drugs before she was even a preteen.
“This was the beginning of mental health issues and inadvertent self-harm,” Delevingne explained, sharing that at the age of 10 she was prescribed sleeping pills to deal with insomnia. Then at the age of 15, she suffered a breakdown, and was prescribed antidepressants to help her deal with that.
“There were so many times that I was encouraged to take this or be put on that,” the star shared. “[Now] I’m more of a naturalist, a purist in a sense, when it comes to medications.”
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In September, the paparazzi photos came out. She said it was the reality check she needed and decided to check into a rehab facility.
“I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready,” Delevingne said. ” That’s the problem. If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t. At that point, I really was.”
“I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they’re good,” she added. “The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed but I’m okay with that, and that’s the difference.”