Growing Up Lana
A story of 2011 Lana fandom, losing my mind, regaining my sanity, and then going crazy once again — all to the syrupy, near-operatic soundtrack of Lana Del Rey.
original photo by will anderson, blurred by author (on the right)
This is a chaotic personal essay.
[Content Warning: mild descriptions of psychosis imagery / SMI symptoms]
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When I first heard Lana Del Rey, I was about 19 years old. The year was 2011. Her first full-length album was released in June of that year. By June of 2011, I was either on the precipice of psychosis or just recovering. The timeline of Lana’s music is factually more clear and better recorded than my history of psychiatric hospitalization.
The first time Lana influenced my life was a few months later. I had become entirely obsessed with Born to Die (the album) and was in the middle of delusions and hallucinations —
(REAL delusions, not the TikTok appropriation-plus-entitlement, ablest meaning of delusions).
I was sobbing in my mom’s bed, with her trying to understand what was going on, frantically placing damp cloths on my face, while I slid further and further down toward the floor (literally). It was 2:00 AM and I was wincing, yelling, snotty, and choking. And, most importantly, to the core of my being, I thought I was being physiologically and interdimensionally transformed into the newest pop-icon that was 2010s-style Lana Del Rey.
I could feel my eyelashes growing into false lashes. I could feel my skin, blood, and muscles changing into hers. The physiological transformation felt like a gooey caterpillar in a broken, yet somehow moldy cocoon. I started thinking about the stress of tour dates.
I wondered why they had to replace her at all; why they had chosen me, specifically. I wondered what kind of cosmic overlords were giving themselves access to my physical body, just to replace the dreampop sensation of Lana. And, about how I would actually miss the real Lana, as her fan. But, I was also secretly enthralled and energized to become her AI robot-human covert sleeper-replacement (… the AI thing was a side delusion). I mean, I was supposed to be crying — that’s how the false lashes would sprout! Obviously!!!
Could I tell anyone once I’d lost my own body? Did my mom know I was disintegrating? Did I also look moldy??? (For context, this was between hospitals, during a relative lull in the symptoms.)
The next time Lana Del Rey impacted my life was when I was first began having time travel dreams.
In my experience, you can’t be delusional or hallucinate in your dreams. In fact, at least for me, the physical brain injury that can happen in prolonged, florid, and initially treatment-resistant psychosis, meant that I did not dream at all. I didn’t dream in the hospital, nor in recovery, nor when I was first starting to read again.
But, I most definitely dreamt between it all, and afterward. And those dreams involved timetravel. A lot of timetravel. Romantic, terrifying, important, dramatic, and also very esoteric psychedelic-rock timetravel. But also, like, truly world-saving timetravel. Don’t ask.
Until then, though, I slept in a shade of dark grey. The lumpy nothingness of sleep in the psych ward in psychosis was somehow heavier than anything else. So, in the time of my dreams returning, I began to over-associate with the lyrics of her album. Specifically, the titular song, Born to Die.
I knew that my future husband, my partner, the man with whom I could reconcile the ills of the world, was perhaps already dead. Or that he had never lived yet, or that, “Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise. Nothing compares to you. I’m scared that you, won’t be waiting on the other side.”
I screamed, cried, went wild-eyed thinking about him, about this made up man. I knew that Lana knew. Sometimes I thought she was me, I was her, or that we were both telepathic.
Sometimes I thought that she merely was the messenger, delivering crucial truths from god, the gods, or perhaps the devil himself.
When Lana next spoke to my malady-minded yet societally-privileged soul was upon the release of Blue Jeans, in 2012. I was recovering from the first 9 weeks of locked unit hospitalization and closer to 6 months in and out of symptoms, with another year spent in residential psych treatment.
But please, please understand — my background of relative financial privilege, which allowed me to receive so much treatment, plus my dogged and unquenchable desire to survive and thrive, comprise a set of blessings that now allow me to live and write, currently-able-minded, over a decade later. And to hear music. To still hear music. To even so far as remember hearing music, and it’s meaning, at that time in my earlier life.
I was slowly and dully recovering, staying with my dad at an apartment after their divorce. The divorce was completely unrelated, but began a few months prior to my first psychotic break, arrest, and then 52/50 involuntary hospital holds.
It was, all in all, a probably almost-unbearable-situation for my precious little brother, who was 17 years old when the various crises started. He was set to live alone with my parents (as they fell away, in starts and fits, with me, insane or recovering) throughout his senior year of high school.
Lana couldn’t solve my younger brother’s trauma, but she definitely could sing me into a whole fervor while I sat, waiting to become more and more sane. Shoutout Zyprexa, Abilify, Lithium, Latuda, Geodon, Risperidone, Seroquel, et al.
At that point, the best guess of the doctors was schizoaffective disorder, but that was only after the could get me back from catatonia. (In my case, psychotic catatonia showed up as a coma-like state, for about 48 hours, much of which I was totally alert but couldn’t speak, move, or open my eyes. They felt glued shut.)
This isn’t a complaint. I’m absolutely and totally glad to be alive. I’m obsessed with the idea of redemption, of becoming helpful in society instead of having simply taken up a bed at the ward.
Luckily [was it luck? or the other side of injustice? oppression that benefited me indirectly as the categorical oppressor? was it randomly assigned? was it a template for what every human being should have the structural ability to access, unequivocally and irrevocably, as needed?] I had the ability to get help paying my medical bills.
I was — in some twist of contemporary, problematic, but also life-saving fate — able to leave the hospitals debt free, and with the further possibility of more medical treatment.
I would put in my headphones, still corded, and chant her music like hymns — like invocations. Like whispers from Aphrodite as I learned how to be understood. I would cry with her, laugh with her, sing her to the moon, new and full. I would puke with her, starve with her, eat with her, get sick with her. I would smoke weed with her. Quite weed with her. Go back on my meds with her. Yell in the streets for, with, and from her. Lana, for better or worse, carried me on the back of her melodies and lyrics, for the years between the hospitals.
Just over one year later, I turned 21 in the psych ward. Back again. Again, more meds, again, raving lunatic. Again, afraid to die, born to live, and re-learning how to survive.
There was no music in the psych ward at that time, which is fine. When we watched The Hunger Games, I thought we were being prepared by the Alta Bates medical staff to be sacrificial humans, for fights to the death against other hospitals’ patients, in the wide streets of Berkeley, California. The apocalypse was nigh.
Lana did not need to be connected to that part of the journey, for anyone’s sake.
One movie was already too much input, let alone the idea of accessing albums worth of melodramatic lyricism and mild camp aesthetics from the United States 2012 Sad Girl delegate.
I am sane now. I still sometimes listen to her. She became problematic (or, already was, but we found out,) then received societal redemption, released more albums, collaborated with The Weeknd on Stargirl, rewrote her family backstory, had a totally resurgence with the youth, happened on TikTok, got thick (which is the healthiest possible thing to happen for little girl’s body image in the history of Americana Pop).
She became an obvious adult, turned 36 during the pandemic, released weirder and more fun albums, embraced an updated 2020s sound and samples, added a Tommy Genesis collab, and, most recently, got engaged to a somewhat normal-seeming music producer — and played at San Francisco’s Outside Lands 2023, with iconic girls putting iconic flowers in her hair, while sitting in an antique makeup chair in front of a massive vanity mirror on the Lands End stage.
Full circle, full quirky, and full-figured. Lana was redeemed as I was. Lana is a grown adult like I am. Lana is fun, successful, and appreciated by the youth demographic of consumers, as I shall be too one day (loll). A template of theatrical womanhood. And possibly performative adulthood. For now.
So, ultimately, I’m not so sad-girl that I followed Lana this far. I am glad to be human, glad to be alive, glad to have survived, and now, extremely happy to be an adult in my early 30s, that can think.
Growing up Lana has felt complicated, but so has life.
Growing up in itself, overall, is one of the greatest blessings beyond my wildest imaginations, traumas, or fears. Getting older is the all-time greatest gift that I never knew I would receive. And, quite frankly, I am glad that Lana could join me along the way.
So yeah. Now, my brain works just fine. That is the most magical blessing of all — no matter the soundtrack behind it.
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follow me on medium: Abby Laporteor my website (....here....) at www.abbypeytonlaporte.com
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