Lena Dunham Explained Why It Was "Necessary" For Her To Take A Break After "Girls" Backlash
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Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Lena Dunham has been involved in many, many controversies.
Like, there are literal articles dedicated to them, ranging from the outrage over the lack of diversity on her series Girls to the backlash she faced for defending one of its writers from rape allegations.
Lena ended up becoming a bit of a recluse in the aftermath of the controversy, telling the Guardian in an interview that she believes doing so was "necessary" for her own wellbeing.
“That was not a job I wanted and is a job that I respectfully resigned from," she explained, in response to being called "a controversy creator."
Lena continued, "Though my voice is loud, I’m actually a person who feels most comfortable alone in the world of thoughts and books. I had an instinct that taking some time away was going to be necessary to survive — there was a little while there when I wasn’t hearing my own voice.”
Lena said she was especially affected by the comments on her body, after she appeared naked on Girls — calling that "a trauma all of its own."
"I had always thought there was something crude or superficial about caring how people responded to me, so I tried really hard in my 20s to act as if I didn’t notice," she explained. “I thought I could receive all this input about what a hideous cow I was and also hold on to this feeling that I am essentially, you know, lovely?”
"I wasn't hit with the signal that I was not ‘correctly formed’ until the public really let me know," she continued, noting that she'd had confidence after growing up in a "feminist household."
"All of that feedback contributed to the formation of self. And I stopped being a person that I liked," Lena added.
Lena said she only recently found healing through her podcast The C-Word that launched in 2019, sharing that it's been "as helpful to [her] as therapy, if not more."
“And the funny thing is, now I’m much ‘curvier,' ‘bigger,' whatever, than I was in my 20s, it’s wild to me that THAT was the body everybody critiqued: the body of an anxious, emaciated, aching person," she added, referencing her then-struggles with endometriosis.
"I look at her and can’t believe that little hurting girl was subjected to this. What does that say to everybody else in the world? Now, I’m able to very proudly be in the body I’m in, recognizing what it’s taken to get here.”
