Inside Out(52)

I was baffled. And talking to Ashton didn’t exactly clear things up. He chalked it up to miscommunication, but something didn’t feel right. The bottom line was that she wasn’t worried about me being on set, he was.

I was devastated. Bruce always felt that he wasn’t needed, that I gave him too much space. I’d been trying not to repeat that mistake. I thought I was being supportive, there for Ashton in whatever he needed—I had gone to stay with him on location in Louisiana while he was shooting The Guardian a few months earlier, just to be there for him—but, in fact, what he’d needed was space. And he hadn’t told me. He’d only been able to communicate what he wanted by dissembling.

He wasn’t honest. That’s on him. But I had made him the focus of all my attention and was putting too much pressure on him. I was losing myself. And that’s on me.


UNLIKE WHAT PEOPLE imagine about addicts—that you have one drink and everything comes crashing down—in my case it was a gradual downward spiral. The decline in my sense of confidence mirrored my substance abuse.

My agent had recommended renting Joe Francis’s house in Puerto Vallarta for my forty-fifth birthday. It’s an unbelievable place, run like a six-star hotel. (There’s an “anything” button on the phone.) Ashton and I chartered a plane and flew a dozen friends down for the weekend.

Everyone was having a great time and really cutting loose. We had a huge dinner at the long banquet table; waiters were coming around with trays of tequila shots, and people were getting up on the table and strutting down the middle—our friend Eric did it in nothing but underpants and a pair of pointy-toed boots.

But when you don’t have an off switch, you go until you can’t go anymore. Late that night, we all ended up in the hot tub, and I started passing out and slipping under the water. If other people hadn’t been there, I would have drowned.

Ashton carried me back to our bed, and he was furious. To some extent, I understand his reaction. If this had been the first time something like this had happened, that would have been one thing, but it wasn’t.

But it was also confusing: Ashton had encouraged me to go in this direction. When I went too far, though, he let me know how he felt by showing a picture he’d taken of me resting my head on the toilet the night before. It seemed like a good-natured joke at the time. But it was really just shaming.


I WENT IN for dental surgery. I left with a prescription for Vicodin. I took it as I needed it, when I was in bad pain. At first. Then, sometimes, when I wasn’t really in pain, I’d think, Hmm, maybe I’ll just take half a pill. I had back pain at the time, too, and I managed to get another prescription to deal with that. Initially, the pills took the edge off, made life feel just a little bit easier. Whereas alcohol felt risky—I never knew how much was too much—with pills I was in control. They gave me energy to jump in and get things done. Over time, though, they stopped having the same effect, and I needed more and more of them to feel the way I wanted. I got to the point where I was taking twelve a day.

I stopped after I scared myself one weekend when the whole family was together and I lost track of how many pills I’d taken. All of a sudden, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

I told no one. But the next day I had a conversation with Ashton about it, and he asked me if I needed help. I told him I would take care of it myself—and I did.

He was in Europe the following week, and the girls were with their dad. I used that time to detox. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my entire life. Going off of opiates is agony—it’s unimaginably excruciating. You can’t sleep because your body hurts too much. It’s an effort just to get to the toilet. Your whole body is screaming, “I’m dying: if you just took a little, all this pain would go away!” It is like the worst flu you’ve ever had times a hundred. I gutted through that week.

When Ashton returned home, I felt like I’d lived through a war. He did not offer me any reinforcement or compassion. I felt like he was angry with me for having this problem in the first place: you made your bed; now you have to lie in it.





Chapter 21


Ashton was less and less present. He was focused on other things: his work; his growing involvement in the tech world; his fantasy football league. He couldn’t have been clearer that whatever he was doing was really important—and I don’t fault him for that. But I do wish I’d been able to value myself in the same way.

Instead, I went into contortions to try to fit the mold of the woman he wanted his wife to be. I put him first. He didn’t ask me to do that. It’s just what I did—what I’d learned to do from my mother, and her mother before her. I wanted this marriage to work, and I was willing to do whatever it took, to jump through any hoop. So when he expressed his fantasy of bringing a third person into our bed, I didn’t say no. I wanted to show him how great and fun I could be.

Having other people in our marriage presented a totally false sense of power, and an absolutely temporary sense of excitement. There were two different people we opened our relationship to, and they didn’t have bad intentions; they held it in the right space. To this day, I know I could reach out to either of them at any time for friendship; one is now married and has a kid. They were good people, but it was still a mistake. Part of the point of monogamy is the energy of somebody making the sacrifice or the choice for you, and that you thereby hold this special place that no one else can have. As soon as another person is brought in you are no longer being held in that sacred spot.