Lena Dunham "didn't want to live" when she was addicted to prescription medication.
Lena Dunham for Cosmopolitan magazine
The 'Girls' star went through a rough patch following her hysterectomy and her split from Jack Antonoff that she turned to anti-anxiety medication to help her get through.
She said: "It got really complicated. I realised I wasn't just taking medication for physical pain, I was taking medication for the emotional pain too. And then suddenly, especially this stuff, the benzos [benzodiazepines, a common type of anxiety medication], it changes your brain chemistry and suddenly you're not yourself. You're not present. You're not functional. One day, I looked around and I was lying in a bed in my parents' apartment under two blankets, in the same pyjamas I'd been in for three days, and I was like, 'This isn't me.' It wasn't that I was suicidal. I felt nothing. I didn't want to live."
The 33-year-old actress has been single for over a year now but she has enjoyed the "hiatus" from dating and her own sobriety.
Speaking to the March issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, she shared: "Sobriety for me means so much more than just not doing drugs, it also means that I abstain from negative relationships. It means I've taken a hiatus from dating, which has been amazing for me. I think it's been 14 months now that I've just been totally single. I may have smooched a guy at a party once, but that's not illegal. I hang out with my dogs, my cats. It's created a lot of clarity because I think [for] so many of us, even though the world has become much more sex-positive, as young, ambitious, independent women our relationship to sex is fraught and complicated.
"On the one hand, we're taught to demand what we want; on the other hand we're scared we'll never find anyone and have to settle. We're contending with the prevalence of porn and having to be performative during sex, and once my body started to break down I just didn't have that option any more and I started to feel really vulnerable. I realised that until I was in a dynamic with someone who made me feel super-safe, I didn't want to do it. People right now will go, 'Oh my god, you haven't had sex in over a year,' and I'm like, 'No, actually it's been the most healing thing.'"
The March issue of Cosmopolitan is on sale from January 30.
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