"Drugs made me feel more normal"
About this Quote
For Carrie Fisher, “normal” isn’t a goal so much as a costume she couldn’t keep tailored without chemical help. The line lands because it flips the usual moral script: drugs aren’t framed as rebellion or decadence, but as a crude form of self-regulation, a DIY attempt to quiet an internal weather system that never matched the calm face the world demanded.
The intent is blunt, almost deadpan, and that’s Fisher’s signature. She strips away the melodrama that celebrity confessionals often trade in and gives you the humiliating logic of dependence: if your baseline is anxiety, depression, or bipolar volatility, intoxication can feel like corrective eyewear. “More normal” is doing heavy cultural work here, too. It suggests that normality is not a neutral standard but a social performance with penalties for failure. Fisher, frozen in the public imagination as Princess Leia, was expected to be composed, charming, and unbreakable; the quote exposes the gap between that iconic image and the private maintenance required to approximate it.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of how we talk about addiction. We prefer stories about bad choices and rock bottoms because they’re tidy. Fisher offers something messier: drugs as a misguided solution to pain, not its glamorous cause. Coming from someone who later became a fierce advocate for mental health candor, the line reads less like excuse-making than like diagnosis: if “normal” feels chemically achievable, maybe the real abnormality is how little support exists before the self-medication starts.
The intent is blunt, almost deadpan, and that’s Fisher’s signature. She strips away the melodrama that celebrity confessionals often trade in and gives you the humiliating logic of dependence: if your baseline is anxiety, depression, or bipolar volatility, intoxication can feel like corrective eyewear. “More normal” is doing heavy cultural work here, too. It suggests that normality is not a neutral standard but a social performance with penalties for failure. Fisher, frozen in the public imagination as Princess Leia, was expected to be composed, charming, and unbreakable; the quote exposes the gap between that iconic image and the private maintenance required to approximate it.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of how we talk about addiction. We prefer stories about bad choices and rock bottoms because they’re tidy. Fisher offers something messier: drugs as a misguided solution to pain, not its glamorous cause. Coming from someone who later became a fierce advocate for mental health candor, the line reads less like excuse-making than like diagnosis: if “normal” feels chemically achievable, maybe the real abnormality is how little support exists before the self-medication starts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
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