Frances Bean Cobain Talks Addiction, Her Sobriety: ‘It Is an Everyday Battle’
Frances Bean Cobain shared via Instagram Tuesday that she is officially two years sober.
The only daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love has never spoken publicly about her struggles with addiction in the past, making Tuesday’s revelation a first.
“I thought I would start this post by using a pure moment in Oahu amongst nature, with my love,” she began her lengthy post, coupled with an image of herself smiling before a backdrop of lush mountains and blue skies. “This moment is a representation of who I am on February 13th, 2018. It feels significant here, now because it’s my 2nd sober birthday.”
“It’s an interesting and kaleidoscopic decision to share my feelings about something so intimate in a public forum,” she continued. “The fact that I’m sober isn’t really public knowledge, decidedly and deliberately. But I think it’s more important to put aside my fear about being judged or misunderstood or typecast as one specific thing.”
Both of Frances’ parents have publicly struggled with drug abuse in the past – Kurt died with drugs in his system in 1994, at the age of 27, and Love was ordered to rehab by a judge in 2005.
Frances, now 25, noted that she felt compelled to speak out because she recognized that her role as a public figure could help others who might be battling their own demons, even as she herself is continuing to work at her sobriety every day.
“I want to have the capacity to recognize & observe that my journey might be informative, even helpful to other people who are going through something similar or different,” she wrote. “It is an everyday battle to be in attendance for all the painful, bazaar, uncomfortable, tragic, fucked up things that have ever happened or will ever happen.”
The visual artist added that she wants to focus on positivity in the form of “peace, love, [and] empathy” to ensure her own mental and physical well-being, and hopes to help spread “goodness” to others.
“How we treat our bodies directly correlates to how we treat our souls. It’s all interconnected. It has to be,” she concluded. “So I’m gonna take today to celebrate my vibrant health and the abundance of happiness, gratitude, awareness, compassion, empathy, strength, fear, loss, wisdom, peace and the myriad of other messy emotions I feel constantly. They inform who I am, what my intentions are, who I want to be and they force me to acknowledge my boundaries/limitations.”
“I claim my mistakes as my own because I believe them to contribute to the dialogue of my higher education in life. I am constantly evolving. The moment I stop my evolution is the moment I disservice myself and ultimately those I love,” she wrote. “As cheesy and cornball as it sounds life does get better, if you want it to. I’ll never claim I know something other people don’t. I only know what works for me and seeking to escape my life no longer works for me.”