Lili Reinhart Speaks Openly About Processing Trauma, Fame And Lockdown Anxiety

From ELLE

Lili Reinhart has spoken candidly about her mental health struggles and she's finally taking the chance to process her fame during the Coronavirus pandemic.

The 23-year-old Riverdale star recently spoke to author Sylvester McNutt III via Instagram Live about her struggles with anxiety during the health crisis and undergoing therapy.

‘I've very much been…just trying to take full advantage of this very rare time, where I don't have much to do and deal with my own little box of trauma in the back of my head that I wouldn't normally ever want to sift through, you know?’ she told the author.

‘And I'm fortunate enough that I can have therapy every week; and I can outsource for, you know, certain methods of healing, like Reiki or something like that, maybe a lot of people don't have the opportunity to do.’

The actress continued, explaining that she has found it difficult to cope with her anxiety during the pandemic.

‘I'll have a very simple task...to do, but you know, I don't want to do it,’ she explained

‘Say, going to the post office. Like, I really don't want to drive to the post office. It gives me anxiety because I don't want to have to leave my dog; I don't want to have to deal with going out in public; I don't want to do the mask thing. I would, but like I don't want to put myself in a stressful environment.’

The star said she often finds herself getting ‘hyped up about very dumb things’.

‘I remind myself, “Why the hell are you stressing yourself out about going to the damn post office?”' she continued.

During lockdown, Reinhart split from her long-term boyfriend, Cole Sprouse, and came out as bisexual. While self-isolating in Californian during the pandemic, she said she’s taken the time to process her fame and notoriety.

‘Things took off in my career and in my life around four years ago, and I never really had a significant amount of time to just process everything, and process fame, and my kind of new world that I am living in,’ the star said.

‘And it's been a very important time for me—the past four months—to just process things.’

Discussing her history of mental health issues, she said that she would often pretend to be ill and avoided school whenever she could as it caused her so much anxiety.

‘It became a routine, where every morning I was like, “Well, here it is again,”’ she recalled. ‘And it kind of took towards the end of my eighth-grade year to really, like, change my mindset [to] where I would wake up and be like, “OK, let's get through another day.”’

This isn't the first time Reinhart has taken the opportunity to address her mental health during lockdown.

She recently spoke about how she’s learned to accept her cystic acne after spending years not wanting to leave the house due to her skin problems and feeling 'so ashamed'.

‘No one cares about your acne except for you,’ she told Marie Claire last month.

‘Meaning that, no one is negatively affected by your acne. You are the only one who feels self-conscious about it. Acne can bring out some kind of hyper-paranoia in us that makes us think that it’s going to impact things around us.'

Last month, Reinhart, Sprouse and several other celebrities denied sexual assault allegations levelled against them by several Twitter users.

'I can't think of something more twisted than lying about sexual assault,’ the actress shared on Twitter.

‘It invalidates the men and women who are brave enough to come forward with the truth. This kind of lie can ruin lives and careers - and I can call it a lie because the person who made the allegations already admitted that the stories were fabricated.’

She added that the allegations have been ‘incredibly triggering’ and ‘scary’.

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