Читать книгу Inside Out - Demi Moore - Страница 7

The same question kept going through my head: How did I get here?

In the empty house where I’d been married, where we’d added on because I had more kids than bedrooms, I was now completely alone. I was almost fifty. The husband who I’d thought was the love of my life had cheated on me and then decided he didn’t want to work on our marriage. My children weren’t speaking to me: no happy birthday calls, no Merry Christmas texts. Nothing. Their father—a friend I’d counted on for years—was gone from my life. The career I’d scrambled to create since I moved out of my mother’s apartment when I was sixteen years old was stalled, or maybe it was over for good. Everything I was attached to—even my health—had abandoned me. I was getting blinding headaches and losing weight scarily fast. I looked like I felt: destroyed.

Is this life? I wondered. Because if this is it, I’m done. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

I was going through the motions, doing whatever seemed like it needed doing—feeding the dogs, answering the phone. A friend had a birthday and some people came over. I did what other people were doing: sucked in a hit of nitrous oxide, and, when the joint reached me on the sunken couch in my living room, I took a puff of synthetic pot (it was called Diablo, fittingly).

The next thing I remember, everything went blurry and I could see myself from above. I was floating out of my body into swirling colors, and it seemed like maybe this was my chance: I could leave the pain and shame of my life behind. The headaches and the heartbreak and the sense of failure—as a mother, a wife, and a woman—would just evaporate.

But there was still that question: How did I get here? After all the luck and success I’d had as an adult. After all the running I had to do to survive my childhood. After a marriage that started out feeling like magic, to the first person I ever really tried to show my whole self to. After I’d finally made peace with my body and stopped starving and torturing it—waging war on myself with food as the weapon. And, most importantly, after I’d raised three daughters and done everything I could think of to make myself the mother I never had. Did all of that struggle really add up to nothing?

Suddenly I was back in my body, convulsing on the floor, and I heard someone scream, “Call 911!”

I yelled “No!” because I knew what would come next: the ambulance, then the paparazzi, then TMZ announcing, “Demi Moore, rushed to the hospital on drugs!” And all of that happened, just like I knew it would. But something else happened that I didn’t expect. I decided to sit still—after a life of running—and face myself. I’d done a lot in fifty years, but I don’t know that I’d really experienced a lot, because I spent most of that time not quite there, afraid to be in myself, convinced I didn’t deserve the good and frantically trying to fix the bad.

How did I get here? This is my story.