Cara Delevingne finally addressed those concerning paparazzi photos

At 30 years old and four months sober, Cara Delevingne is finally ready to face the speculation around her mental health. Last year rumors that the model and actor may be grappling with a substance abuse problem or mental health crisis came to a head when paparazzi pictures of a disheveled, shoeless Delevingne behaving erratically outside the Van Nuys airport surfaced. Around the same time, photos of friend and fellow actor Margot Robbie leaving Delevingne’s home looking visibly upset fed the rumour mill even further. Concerns for Delevingne worsened again when a clip of her looking shaky on the 2022 Met Gala red carpet went viral.

Now, seven months later, Delevingne seems ready to share what was really going on with her last fall. In a cover interview with Vogue, Delevingne called the airport paparazzi photos the “reality check” she needed to enter rehab and commit to getting sober from drugs and alcohol. “I hadn’t slept. I was not okay,” she said of the watershed moment, explaining that she’d just returned from Burning Man. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, Okay, I don’t look well.

“There’s an element of feeling invincible when I’m on drugs,” Delevingne continued, in reference to the Burning Man trip. “I put myself in danger in those moments because I don’t care about my life. I would climb anything and jump off stuff…it felt feral. It’s a scary thing to the people around you who love you.”

By the time she made it to the Met Gala two weeks later, Delevingne was “fucking exhausted,” having suffered another personal blow: the death of her grandmother. She walked the red carpet with patches of psoriasis peeking through the gold body paint that served as her shirt for the event. “It was a sign of the major stress in my life,” she noted, “that I couldn’t cope, that my body, this sensitive organ, couldn’t handle it.” Delevingne “got blackout” at the after-parties following the ball. “The day after, I had to travel to my granny’s funeral,” she revealed. “It was horrible.”

In some ways, she added, the worrying airport paparazzi images “were something to be grateful for.” Shortly thereafter, a group of childhood friends intervened. “If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t,” Delevingne said. “At that point, I really was.” Cara Delevingne subsequently checked herself into rehab and embarked on a 12-step recovery program. 

“Before I was always into the quick fix of healing, going to a weeklong retreat or to a course for trauma, say, and that helped for a minute, but it didn’t ever really get to the nitty-gritty, the deeper stuff,” the model admitted. “This time I realised that 12-step treatment was the best thing, and it was about not being ashamed of that. The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12-step.”

This story was originally published on GLAMOUR US.