She recalls her first experience with alcohol misuse at just seven years old, at a family wedding. “I woke up in my granny’s house in my bedroom with a hangover, in a bridesmaid’s dress,” says Delevingne. “I’d gone around nailing glasses of Champagne.” By the Philadelphia Eagles 2023 Kickoff Game day New Logo Shirt Apart from…,I will love this age of 10, she was prescribed sleeping pills to manage crippling insomnia. She was also diagnosed with dyspraxia, a disorder that affects movement and coordination. “This was the beginning of mental health issues and inadvertent self-harm,” she remembers, and led to various forms of therapy—“art therapy, music therapy, EMDR, CBT,” she says, rattling off the list. Then at 15, she suffered a breakdown, and was put on antidepressants to help her cope with her deep sense of isolation. “I was on medication and it just…it saved my life,” she says. “This wasn’t a chemical imbalance as much as it was a full trauma response,” she adds. “I hadn’t uncovered the fucking hole inside, the real whirlpool within. And I still think there’s a part of diagnosis and labeling that is damaging. There were so many times that I was encouraged to take this or be put on that.” Now, she says, “I’m more of a naturalist, a purist in a sense, when it comes to medications.”Delevingne has weathered bouts of depression at various stages of her life, but in 2020, as the world went into lockdown, she hit a wall. “In the beginning, I was living with people in this COVID bubble in LA. We thought it was going to be a weeklong thing, and so it was fun.” She started her quarantine with Ashley Benson, her then girlfriend of almost two years. By April their relationship had ended. “And then I was alone, really alone…it was a low point.” As each day bled into the next, she struggled to get out of bed. “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,” she says. “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.”
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