Cara Delevingne opens up about her journey to sober living. For the first time, the 30-year-old model and actress opened up about getting sober in her cover story for Vogue’s April 2023 issue. “If I was continuing to go down the road I was, I would either end up dead or, like, doing something really, really stupid,” Delevingne said. After being spotted shoeless at a Los Angeles airport, she raised public concern. Having just returned from Burning Man, she was photographed looking disheveled and riding in an SUV with her feet hanging out the window. “I hadn’t slept. I was not okay,” she told Vogue. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point, it was like, Okay, I don’t look well.”
Delevingne added, “You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.” She recalled reaching a low point after her breakup with Ashley Benson while quarantined during the pandemic.
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“I was alone, really alone,” she told the outlet. “I just had a complete existential crisis. All my sense of belonging, all my validation—my identity, everything—was so wrapped up in work. And when that was gone, I felt like I had no purpose. I just wasn’t worth anything without work, and that was scary. Instead of taking the time to really learn something new or do something new, I got very wrapped up in misery, wallowing, and partying. It was a really sad time.”
During this time, she was also filming her “super personal” docu-series, Planet Sex, and dealing with the passing of her grandmother, Jane Sheffield, in April 2022. “When I heard she had died there were a lot of things I had to process because I hadn’t seen her since Christmas the year before. I was really trying to pour everything I had into work, and every night I would come back from filming and sit alone and just cry. By the time I got to the Met Ball two weeks later, I was f— exhausted,” Delevingne recalled. Despite this, she attended the gala, shirtless at times, and “went and got blackout afterwards. “It was like, What am I doing? The day after, I had to travel to my granny’s funeral. It was horrible.”
As her 30th birthday approached at the end of August, she threw herself a huge party and vacationed in Ibiza, though she admitted she rarely left the tower at the house she stayed in.
Delevingne said her birthday was “a funeral for my previous life, a goodbye to an era,” and she would “party as hard as I could because this was the end.” Her trip to Burning Man that followed was marked by bruises and using unknown substances.
“I would climb anything and jump off stuff…it felt feral,” she told Vogue. “From September, I just needed support. I needed to start reaching out. And my old friends I’ve known since I was 13, they all came over, and we started crying. They looked at me and said, ‘You deserve a chance to have joy.’”
She had been sober for four months at the time of her Vogue interview in late January, after checking into rehab late in 2022 and adhering to a 12-step program. “This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started realizing so much,” she said. “People want my story to be this after-school special where I just say, ‘Oh look, I was an addict, and now I’m sober and that’s it.’ And it’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
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