Amanda Bynes is Back & Better Than Ever!

You know her from hit TV shows and movies like ‘She’s The Man,’ ‘What A Girl Wants,’ ‘What I Like About You’ and ‘The Amanda Show.’

After years out of the spotlight, and quitting the only job she’s ever known, Amanda Bynes is back and better than ever!

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Talk about a comeback! In the new issue of PaperMag’s ‘Break the Internet’, Amanda Bynes is opening up about her struggles with substance abuse, how it changed her life and why she quit acting.

In the article, Amanda admits that she began smoking marijuana at the age of 16 and as she got older, things only got worse, “I definitely abused Adderall. Later on it progressed to doing molly and ecstasy.  [I tried] cocaine three times but I never got high from cocaine. I never liked it. It was never my drug of choice.”

So, why did Amanda quit acting? She explains that overusing Adderall left her ‘scatterbrained’ and eventually, she dropped out of ‘Hall Pass’ and following the 2010 release of ‘Easy A’, Amanda made the decision to quit acting altogether.  “I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.  I was high on marijuana when I saw that but for some reason it really started to affect me. I don’t know if it was a drug-induced psychosis or what, but it affected my brain in a different way than it affects other people. It absolutely changed my perception of things.

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So, what is Amanda up to now if not acting?  She’s been four years sober and has been enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown L.A. since 2014 and will soon receive her Associate’s of Art degree in Merchandise Product Development and in the new year, she’ll work towards her Bachelor’s degree.  Amanda explains,  “Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act.  When I was off of them, I was completely back to normal and immediately realized what I had done — it was like an alien had literally invaded my body.”

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Amanda also gave advice for those currently in a similar situation, “My advice to anyone who is struggling with substance abuse would be to be really careful because drugs can really take a hold of your life.  There are gateway drugs and thankfully I never did heroin or meth or anything like that but certain things that you think are harmless, they may actually affect you in a more harmful way. Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did.”

Amanda’s final words, “I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said. I can’t turn back time but if I could, I would. And I’m so sorry to whoever I hurt and whoever I lied about because it truly eats away at me. It makes me feel so horrible and sick to my stomach and sad,  Everything I worked my whole life to achieve, I kind of ruined it all through Twitter but, it’s definitely not Twitter’s fault — it’s my own fault.”

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