Frances Bean Cobain, the daughter of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, opened up about her sobriety in a lengthy note posted on Instagram yesterday, Spin reports. “It’s my 2nd sober birthday,” she wrote in the caption of a short video of her smiling in Hawaii. “It’s an interesting and kaleidoscopic decision to share my feelings about something so intimate in a public forum. 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. 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.”
Although she acknowledges that “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 … becoming present is the best decision I have ever made.” She continues, “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 … As cheesy and cornball as it sounds life does get better, if you want it to.”
She concludes the note with “Peace, love, empathy,” the sign-off that her father used in his suicide note. “I’m going to reclaim this phrase and define it as something that’s mine, filled with hope and goodness and health, because I want to,” she explains.