Christy Carlson Romano Talked About Struggling With Alcohol And Depression After "Even Stevens"
"I struggled with all of my relationships, alcohol usage, and career path for 10 years."
If you grew up in a household with the Disney Channel, you certainly remember Christy Carlson Romano — AKA Ren Stevens on Even Stevens.
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Christy just penned an essay for Teen Vogue about her life post-Even Stevens. And in it, she gets real about the difficulties she faced after the show ended — from depression to binge-drinking to self-harm.
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Christy says that being famous and working full-time as a child led to her becoming "a confusing mix of sheltered and overexposed to the public."
"Needing to be liked was my full-time job and constant concern of mine," she said.
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Christy enrolled in college, but felt like a "misfit" on campus. She eventually left to get back into acting, which is when the real trouble began.
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As Christy describes it, she started partying too much and felt very alone:
I became a bit harder-edged, binge-drank more at loud nightclubs, and started to accept the transient natures of love, sex, and friendship. Growing up, I entertained thousands of families only to feel completely lonely. People were as replaceable as they had deemed me to be.
She describes a brief period of self-harm and talks about how she "struggled with all of [her] relationships, alcohol usage, and career path for 10 years" after that.
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She also tells a story about a psychic who "conned" her out of $40,000 for a crystal:
I was told to just move on unless I wanted this to go public. I felt marked, used, and violated so I started to blame myself for everything instead of learning from my past mistakes and growing as a person.
In the end, Christy had some pretty damning words to say about being a child star:
I have two friends from my earlier Disney Channel days who died by suicide. You can search their names, I am sure, to try and find some sense in their deaths, but you can never understand what was going on behind closed doors.