Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  It was coming up on our sixth anniversary. Danny Masterson was having a bachelor party the same weekend, and Ashton said he wanted to go down to San Diego for the night to be there for it. He went, and when he returned the next day, he said he’d had a great time. To celebrate our anniversary, he took me to the place we went on our first date: to that piece of land he’d bought that held so many of his fantasies. Our time together was strained, and I just felt in my gut there was something he wasn’t telling me. It was driving me crazy.

  The next day I had to fly back to New York to do press for a project I was really proud of. It was a miniseries for Lifetime called Five, composed of five different short films that told stories about breast cancer set in different times and places, directed by five different women. I was one of them. My story was set in the early sixties, at a time when people didn’t even speak the word breast in public, so awareness of breast cancer was a major problem. One of the most rewarding parts of the experience had been directing a little girl, and trying to tell the story with a lot of attention to her point of view. The first day of shooting, Ashton had sent me a beautiful bouquet on set: soft blue flowers with a card that read, “I believe in you.” I couldn’t stop thinking about those flowers on the flight to New York.

  I was at the Crosby Hotel, about to get my hair and makeup done for the premiere that evening, when I got a Google alert on my phone. “Ashton Kutcher caught cheating” flashed across my screen. At first I assumed that it was more about the previous year’s incident, that one of the tabloids had just found a new way to repackage it. But once I clicked on the link, I realized it was brand new. It was about the weekend of our anniversary that had just passed, the night he was in San Diego at the bachelor party. There were quotes from a young blonde replaying Ashton’s pickup lines. I felt sick to my stomach: I knew those words. I knew she wasn’t lying. “Aren’t you married?” she said she’d asked him. To which he replied that he was separated. Then he spent the night with her, got up, and drove home to celebrate his anniversary with his wife.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” is what came out of my mouth when he picked up the phone. By which I meant, How dumb can you get? Did you want to get caught? (The truth is, yes, on a subconscious level he probably did.) And what about me? Did you really have to put me in this position, again? You couldn’t at least have found a way to cheat on me quietly—to privately break my heart without dragging me through a public gauntlet of humiliation?

  He admitted it right away. Then I had to hang up and go walk the red carpet, praying with every step that this information hadn’t gone wide yet, that nobody would thrust a microphone in my face and ask how I felt about my husband of six years fucking a twenty-one-year-old he’d been hanging out with in a hot tub the weekend of our anniversary. I really thought I might throw up.

  A week after my forty-ninth birthday, on 11/11/11, Ashton moved out. The statement I released through my publicist was brief but perfectly distilled my feelings: “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that I have decided to end my six-year marriage to Ashton. As a woman, a mother and a wife, there are certain values and vows that I hold sacred, and it is in this spirit that I have chosen to move forward with my life.”

  Chapter 22

  I couldn’t eat. I shrank down to ninety-six pounds: skeletal. I started getting blinding headaches. My body hurt all over, and inside of it, my heart was broken. I felt like giving up.

  All I could think was, How did I get here?

  I went away with Rumer for Christmas. I was not in a good place, and I behaved badly. One of her friends was with us, and I was just being a little too flirty in that sad way a woman can sometimes act when she’s looking for validation.

  I started to misuse migraine medication—nothing crazy, but I was chipping away at something, trying to dig out of my pain.

  I found a way.

  At that party in my living room in January 2012, I didn’t do anything more than anyone else did—Rumer, some friends of hers, some friends of mine. I inhaled some nitrous. I smoked a little spice, which is like man-made pot. It’s not like I went wild and overdosed. I just had a weird reaction, a seizure, which is apparently not that uncommon when people do nitrous or “whip-its,” the DIY version of the laughing gas you get at the dentist’s office.

  But on a deeper level, would I even consider doing drugs with my kid there if I were in my right mind? Of course not. I scared Rumer so badly when she saw me there, semiconscious on the floor; she thought I might die in front of her. She was completely freaked out, and after that night she joined her younger sisters in refusing to speak to me.

  That was the worst part, by far. Worse than my friends calling 911 before I could sit up and scream, “No!” Worse than all the tabloid headlines blaring “Demi Moore, rushed to the hospital!” Worse than knowing that Ashton would see that story. Worse than my broken heart. Being a mom was the one thing I felt sure I was truly “successful” at in life, but how successful could I be when not one of my children would speak to me?

  How did I get here?

  I felt villainized by my family. I was angry that my girls weren’t showing me any compassion and that Bruce refused to intercede. And I was embarrassed that I’d put myself in this position. They all wanted me to go to rehab, which just seemed nuts to me: I’m going to show up at rehab and say, “My name is Demi and I don’t drink and once I did a whip-it”? I knew that the real problem wasn’t drugs or alcohol.

  I felt so lost, I would wake up in the morning and think, I don’t know what the fuck to do—how do I get through this day? I was in so much pain, physically as well as emotionally, I could barely function. I rarely left the house, except to let the dogs out. That feeling of not being anchored by all of these people’s needs and my role as their nurturer was unbearable. Not a lot was going on in my career, and even if there had been, I was too sick to work. I had no choice but just to be with myself, and I hated it.

  Is this life? Because if this is it, I’m done.

  I knew I had a choice: I could die alone like my dad, or I could really ask, How did I get here?, and have the courage to face the answers.

  HOW DID I get here?

  I got here because I had a grandmother who put up with a womanizing husband who was charming and good-looking and charismatic, and she felt like she had no choice but to tolerate it because she married it. She didn’t have the education or the independence to free herself, so she made do and taught her daughters to do the same.

  I got here because I had a mother who married the love of her life, but then lived in a state of total love-hate dysfunction with him until he ended his own life. She continued to choose men who were more and more abusive to her until the end of her life, and when she died, she had never experienced peace.

  I got here because I am the product of a power play by my mom to get my dad back by her side. They did what they always did when they found themselves in trouble: lied. I came into this world already wrapped in a secret, the child of the wrong man. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t worry, Is it okay that I’m here? And it wasn’t, really. I was a complication. I spent decades scurrying to justify myself, thinking if I just worked hard enough, maybe I could earn the right to be wherever I was.

  I got here because neither of my parents was old enough or wise enough to take care of my brother and me the way that all children are entitled to be cared for. They loved us. But they were not capable of putting our needs first. They did not know how to protect us from danger, and they put us in its way over and over again.

  I got here because I couldn’t bear to face the question: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

  I got here because I responded to the dizzying lack of safety and the constant change in my childhood by becoming tough and adaptable. I’ve spent so much of my life accommodating and adapting to new environments—new schools, new people, new directors, new expectations—that making adjustments based on how I am or
what I need was not conceivable. I never learned that. I think I existed in such a state of distrust that I didn’t really know how to be in the world—in life—comfortably. And so it was very rare that I was totally here for it.

  I got here because I tried so hard to be different from my mom that I took care of everyone but myself. I pushed and pushed myself to be the mom my girls needed, the wife Bruce and then Ashton wanted—but what did I need? What did I want? It was nobody’s job but mine to figure that out and demand it. And it was nobody else’s job to convince me that I deserved it.

  I got here because when I met the man of my dreams, trying to stay close to him became my addiction. Ashton had seemed like the answer to my prayers. But when we met, I had the experience and the preparation to be really committed. For him it was still the journey—he was still figuring out who he was. The thing I didn’t fully take into consideration (and who would want to?) when Ashton and I were falling in love is that what was magical to me and what was magical to him may not have been the same thing. I felt connection, communion. He was stepping off of a private plane for the first time and coming into my home, my family, which I’d long since created, and I had a body of well-known work in the very field he aspired to conquer. I was a forty-year-old who had had a big life with a big ex-husband and three children, and Ashton’s adult life was just beginning—both his personal life and his career. I didn’t see all that because I was inside of it. I just felt like a fifteen-year-old girl hoping somebody liked me—emotions that, if I’d had a safer and healthier upbringing, I might have been able to feel when I actually was fifteen.

  I got here because I chose men with the same qualities as my dad and my granddad, and I turned myself inside out trying to please them.

  I got here because I never dealt with all the rejection and scorn that came my way throughout my career—I couldn’t risk what that might feel like if I really took it in. It would be too terrifying, too much of a reinforcement of a much deeper feeling inside me, that someday, somehow, there would be some kind of big powwow, at which everyone would concur: What the fuck is she doing here? She’s not allowed to be here. She’s not good enough. She’s dirty. Get her out. Get her out.

  I got here because from day one I’ve been wondering, Is it okay that I’m here?

  And it was finally time for me to tell myself: yes.

  I GOT TREATMENT. But for the trauma I’d never faced and the codependence that arose from it. My missteps at the party were the symptoms, not the disease. My physical health was deteriorating: it was the last thing I had, and when it started to go, I had no choice but to stop and learn, for the first time, how to digest. I worked with a doctor, going through my life, one piece at a time, breaking it down, so I could start metabolizing everything that had happened.

  My kids had given me an ultimatum: we won’t speak to you unless you go to rehab. But I went, and they still didn’t show up for me. I told them how important it was for them to attend family week—not just for me, but for all of us. But they refused.

  After I completed the program, I reached out repeatedly, offering to meet wherever it would be comfortable—with a therapist, whatever. I was rebuffed or ignored. I couldn’t get my mind around what I’d done that was so terrible that they would cut me off without even a conversation. Eventually, though, I had to let go. If not having a relationship with me was what was best for my girls then I would accept that, even though it was the last thing I wanted. I had to trust that working on myself was the most healing thing I could do for them. It would be three years before we were able to find our way back to one another.

  It hurt me, and it made me mad, but that time with just myself was incredibly empowering. It gave me the chance to learn what life is as just me: Not as a mother or a daughter. Not as a wife or a girlfriend. Not as a sex symbol or an actress. It seems like it should be automatic, living as just yourself. But coming from where I came from, being me wasn’t even okay the day I was born.

  I sat through not getting a call on Christmas, not getting calls on my fiftieth birthday or Mother’s Day. No email. Nothing. Not one thing. When I had nothing left to lose, I could finally exhale, stop gripping. I don’t think my instinct for caretaking would have allowed me the space to heal if I’d had my family around me. Maybe I needed to be alone to do it, and, without knowing it, they’d given me that opportunity. I had to focus on taking care of myself: getting help for my autoimmune problems, which turned out to be severe; getting treatment for the trauma I had stuffed deep down into my core, where it had started to rot.

  One of our collective fears is being alone. Learning that I’m okay with just me was a great gift I was able to give myself. Spending time on my own may not have been exactly what I wanted, but I was okay. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t need to rush to fill the space. There was an aspect of that time of isolation that was for my healing—which is how I started experimenting with looking at things in general. What if everything hadn’t happened to me but had happened for me? What I learned is that how we hold our experiences is everything.

  I’d learned this before. When my mother was dying, I found a way to change the way I held our relationship. I had spent years facing her with anger and longing: Why didn’t you love me enough to be better? I’d managed to move to compassion, and that transition had liberated me. Taking responsibility for your own reaction is the gateway to freedom.

  I’d learned this with my mother, sure. But that didn’t mean applying the lesson again would be easy. Some things just seem too painful to reframe. But if I really look at my difficulty with not being able to get pregnant, for instance, whether I could or I couldn’t is irrelevant: it’s the judgment I made against myself that was so damaging. If I’m holding it as I’m a failure as a woman, of course it’s going to destroy me. What if I look at it differently? What if it was for the best, not being tied to Ashton with a child? When I opened my mind to that possibility, I was able to hold it peacefully.

  This doesn’t mean that now I’m Saint Demi and I have no pain. It just means I can finally admit that I have weaknesses and needs and that it’s okay to ask for help. I can’t fix everything. I can feel sorrow and self-doubt and pain and know that those are just feelings, and like everything else in this life, they will pass.

  WASN’T THERE AN easier way to learn all of this? Couldn’t I have gotten to this place without Ashton walking out, and the kids not speaking to me, and my health deteriorating? Obviously not. Any one of those things would have been enough for most people to stop and say, “I need to take a look at myself,” but for me it took the extreme of losing my husband, our baby, my fertility, my daughters, my friendship with their father, and not having a career to hide in. Thank God it didn’t take losing my home, too.

  Things happen in life to get our attention—to make us wake up. What does it say that I had to lose so much before I could break down enough to rebuild? I think it says that the thing that got me here, this incredible toughness, was almost the thing that did me in. I got to a place where I could no longer just muscle through. I could either bend, or break.

  I got here because I needed all of this to become who I am now. I had been holding on to so many misconceptions about myself, all my life: that I wasn’t valuable. That I didn’t really deserve to be anywhere good—whether that meant in a loving relationship, on my own terms, or in a great film with actors I respected, who knew what they were doing. The narrative I believed was that I was unworthy and contaminated. And it wasn’t true.

  There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the tabloids or my mom or the men I’ve married or the people who’ve loved or hated my movies or even my children. My story is mine alone; I’m the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms.

  The second reason is that even though it’s mine, maybe some part of this story is yours, too. I’ve had extraordinary luck in t
his life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.

  Epilogue

  I believe Paulo Coelho was right: the universe conspires to give you everything you want, but not always in the way you expect it.

  Christmas is my favorite holiday, and I make a big deal of it. I try to use it as a reminder to play, to be childlike, to make room for a certain magic and joy in thoughtful giving. I know my mom always wanted to make Christmas special for us when Morgan and I were kids. She wasn’t capable of pulling it off consistently, but she did manage to maintain one ritual, and I’ve adopted it: everyone gets to open one present on Christmas Eve—and I always make it funny matching pajamas. (This year it was fuzzy reindeer onesies.) I feel like I’m able to carry out what Ginny started but couldn’t finish.

  When my daughters weren’t speaking to me, for the first time I was able to feel what Ginny must have felt when I shut her out of my life. How could I expect them to have compassion for me when for so many years, I hadn’t had any for my mother? As I fully heal the relationship with my mom in my heart, it has made way for a depth of loving and closeness with Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah that is even beyond what I thought was possible. We have been able to let go of the misperceptions and judgments that had been trapping us. I’ve always held the goal that as adults my children wouldn’t spend time with me out of obligation—that if they were with me, it was because there was nowhere else they’d rather be. All three of my daughters were here this winter in Idaho.

  We were a ragtag crew. I have a furry family of eight dogs and a cat, plus Rumer brought her cat and her two dogs, Scout and Tallulah each brought a dog, and so did my friend Eric Buterbaugh. Eric is my gay husband—it may not be romantic, but it is a marriage filled with love. I have someone who shows up for me and my kids, no matter what, and who shares my passion for clothes and design. There is no one else I would trust with my table settings. I have a mismatched collection of souvenir state plates, and somehow, he always finds a way of elevating them—this Christmas, he interspersed them with his signature “flexed” roses, which he meticulously opens by hand, one petal at a time.