Amanda Bynes - former sweetheart of teen programming - is back. Four years after a slew of troubling Twitter rants and arrests, she is ready to talk about what went down.
In a new interview with Paper Magazine, Bynes opened up about her public downward spiral - which included her now-infamous tweets, which were directed at family members and fellow celebrities alike - and what she's been up to since getting sober almost four years ago.
"Everybody is different, obviously, but for me, the mixture of marijuana and whatever other drugs and sometimes drinking really messed up my brain," Bynes explained. "It really made me a completely different person. I actually am a nice person. I would never feel, say or do any of the things that I did and said to the people I hurt on Twitter."
"I'm really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said," she continued. "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. It's definitely not Twitter's fault -- it's my own fault."
The 32-year-old thinks that her use of Adderall was a significant factor in her public downfall, which the world first got a glimpse of when she was filming Hall Pass. "When I was doing 'Hall Pass', I remember being in the trailer and I used to chew the Adderall tablets because I thought they made me [more] high [that way]," she said.
"I remember chewing on a bunch of them and literally being scatterbrained and not being able to focus on my lines or memorize them for that matter."
Bynes decided to quit Hall Pass, and then made a spontaneous announcement on Twitter that she was retiring from acting. She claimed that her sudden desire to stop acting was due to her increasing addiction, and her reaction to her appearance and performance in the 2010 movie, Easy A.
Suddenly out of work, Bynes' drug use increased. "I just had no purpose in life. I'd been working my whole life and (now) I was doing nothing," she told Paper. "I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me."
The erstwhile child star, who rose to fame in the 90's on Nickelodeon shows such as All That and The Amanda Show, disclosed that she's currently enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.
She hopes to release a clothing line and eventually get back into acting. But above all, she hopes her experience with drugs will serve as a cautionary tale for others.
"Be really, really careful because you could lose it all and ruin your entire life like I did."