Demi Lovato opens up about post-overdose life and ‘how queer I really am’

Almost three years after her overdose, Demi Lovato cannot drive. With tinnitus, she can’t hear properly all the time. And when she looks at a person’s eyes, she can’t see their nose or mouth.

These are a few of the revelations from the singer and actress from her new cover story for Glamour’s March issue.

“When I ignore and deny myself of my truth, I get angry and I overflow, and I make choices that are really bad for me,” she told the magazine. “If I look in the mirror and present the mirror with something I’m not, it will shatter.”

She’s begun meditating and has new management, she said, both of which helped find balance. Once she found that, Lovato said, “my whole life fell into place the way it was supposed to.”

Part of Lovato’s truth, she said, is that an all-or-nothing approach to sobriety in the wake of her OD wouldn’t work for her. She has left the door open to having a drink or smoking a little weed after EMTs, Narcan and hospitalization saved her life in 2018. She previously revealed that her overdose brought on three strokes and a heart attack.

In making that decision, she said she consulted her recovery case manager. She talked to him about how on one side, regarding her eating disorder, she was telling herself anything was legal. On the other, her sobriety journey, she was “following a program that’s telling me if I slip up, I’m going to die.”

Lovato told her case manager, “I think I want to try this balance thing in the substance side of my life too.”

She also opened up about her fluid sexuality, which she declared in 2017.

“When I started getting older, I started realizing how queer I really am,” Lovato, 28, said. “This past year I was engaged to a man, and when it didn’t work, I was like, ‘this is a huge sign.’ I thought I was going to spend my life with someone. Now that I wasn’t going to, I felt this sense of relief that I could live my truth.”

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Right now, she said, being with a man just isn’t her thing.

“I hooked up with a girl and was like, ‘I like this a lot more.’ It felt better. It felt right,” Lovato said. “Some of the guys I was hanging out with — when it would come time to be sexual or intimate, I would have this kind of visceral reaction. Like, ‘I just don’t want to put my mouth there.’ It wasn’t even based on the person it was with.

“I just found myself really appreciating the friendships of those people more than the romance, and I didn’t want the romance from anybody of the opposite sex.”

Learn more about Lovato’s life in her new four-part Netflix documentary, “Dancing With the Devil,” which will open the virtual SXSW Film Festival on Tuesday and starts streaming March 23.