Cara Delevingne gave the most honest interview of her life this weekend. Speaking to US Vogue, she explained so much of what’s going on in her head, behind all the pouts and wacky faces, and we’ve got big love for her for being so open.
Here are the topics she covered:
Women being the best and worst things in her life
‘Women are what completely inspire me, and they have also been my downfall. I have only been hurt by women, my mother first of all’
Her mother Pandora’s heroin addiction
FYI, Cara’s mother, Pandora Delevingne, has battled a heroin addiction throughout Cara's life: ‘It shapes the childhood of every kid whose parent has an addiction,’ Cara said, before explaining: ‘You grow up too quickly because you’re parenting your parents.
‘My mother’s an amazingly strong person with a huge heart, and I adore her. But it’s not something you get better from, I don’t think. I know there are people who have stopped and are fine now, but not in my circumstance. She’s still struggling.'
Drugs
‘I smoked a lot of pot as a teenager, but I was completely mental with or without drugs.’
Teenage depression
‘This is something I haven’t been open about, but it’s a huge part of who I am. All of a sudden I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety and self-hatred.’
Self-harm
‘The feelings were so painful that I would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out. I never cut, but I’d scratch myself to the point of bleeding. I just wanted to dematerialise and have someone sweep me away.’
Contemplating suicide
While on a break from modelling, she was in New York: ‘I was packing my bags, and suddenly I just wanted to end it. I had a way, and it was right there in front of me. And I was like, I need to decide whether I love myself as much as I love the idea of death.'
What stopped her was her computer's shuffle function coming up with a song that had been playing at the funeral of a friend who’d recently died of a heroin overdose: ‘It felt like a warning from him. And it made me so furious with myself.’
Her girlfriend St Vincent (real name Annie Clark)
‘I think that being in love with my girlfriend is a big part of why I'm feeling so happy with who I am these days. And for those words to come out of my mouth is actually a miracle’ – this is huge, it’s the first time Cara’s spoken openly about a girl she’s been seeing!
Her sexuality
‘It took me a long time to accept the idea [of being attracted to women], until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognised that I had to accept it’ – as for who that girl was? Cara was 21 when she was photographed on dates with Michelle Rodriguez (who’s also since said of her relationships with both Cara and Zac Efron that she couldn’t last more than six months)… therefore… Cara’s first (female) love is still a mystery to us.
Her parents think her sexuality is just a phase, and the interviewer seemed to agree, asking her if it was: ‘If I ever found a guy I could fall in love with, I'd want to marry him and have his children. And that scares me to death because I think I’m a whole bunch of crazy, and I always worry that a guy will walk away once he really, truly knows me.’ The interviewer then suggested mummy issues were behind Cara's sexuality...
Sex dreams
‘I only have erotic dreams about men. I had one two nights ago where I went up to a guy in the back of a VW minivan, with a bunch of his friends around him, and pretty much jumped him.’
Though she might seem muddled in parts, Cara’s still in the eye of the storm of various big issues affecting her life, under a lot of public scrutiny. She’s also remarkably level-headed about all these huge things, at only 22. You might not like the fact she’s bloody everywhere right now, but she works hard, seems to care about the bigger picture, and is also changing – if only slightly incrementally, after all, she’s still a skinny white blonde girl - what we expect from models. And female celebrities. And, well, women in general. If she’s the ‘norm’ then the norm is getting increasingly more tolerant and intelligent and interesting and there’s nothing not to like about that.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Miley Cyrus Is A Great Role Model: Twerking, Charities, And The Rest
Picture: Vogue
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.