Nov 28, 2018 | By Tim Stoddart

Bring Out The Dancing Lobsters, Amanda Bynes Is Sober.

Famous for her “Judge Trudy” on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show, and always ending the sketch with dancing lobsters, we could only do the same today, because “Amanda, please” has been sober for four years.

Amanda Bynes recently opened up in an interview with Paper Magazine, explaining what happened and letting us in on the dark world she was living in behind the infamous tweet rampage she went on in 2013.

“It’s My Own Fault”

“I’m really ashamed and embarrassed with the things I said,” Bynes told the magazine. “I can’t turn back time, but if I could, I would. And I’m 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 actress reflected on the rise and fall of her career as an actress, her public downhill spiral, and the tweets – noting that there are still some “tweets” – that she doesn’t like to talk about. She also mentioned how some of her most popular films like, “She’s the Man,” played a role in negatively shaping her self-image and driving her out of Hollywood.

“When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for four to six months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she told Paper, adding that seeing herself with a boy’s short hairstyle was “a super strange and out-of-body experience. It just really put me into a funk.”

Adderall As a Downfall

Bynes revealed that she started smoking marijuana at the age of 16 despite her “good girl” image, and the drug use eventually escalated to harder drugs such as ecstasy and molly. She also started abusing Adderall to keep her weight down after reading in a magazine that the drug was “the new skinny pill.” Bynes revealed she “faked the symptoms of ADD” so a psychiatrist could write her a prescription.

Now, currently enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles, the 32-year-old student said she thinks her use of Adderall played a major role in her public downfall, which first started in 2010 while filming the movie, “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,” 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.”

Eventually, the actress quit filming, “Hall Pass,” and made an announcement on Twitter that she was retiring from acting. She now says that the unanticipated desire to leave acting was due to her being high and criticizing the way she looked on film during a screening of her 2010 movie, “Easy A.

“It Became a Really Dark, Sad World”

“I just had no purpose in life. I’d been working my whole life and now I was doing nothing. I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me,” she stated.

“I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long,” Bynes admits.

Between 2010 and 2014, the star had a number of run-ins with the police, which eventually lead her to be put under a conservator-ship.

This included being sentenced to three years probation after she hit a police car in Los Angeles in 2012, and appearing in a New York court in 2013 on allegations that she threw a marijuana bong out the window of her 36th-floor Manhattan apartment.

In August that year she was placed under conservatorship of her parents and put on psychiatric hold for a year after starting a fire on the drive of her home in California.

The Twitter Rants

It was also during that time that her Twitter rants began where she criticized fellow celebrities, and her own family, including false allegations of abuse against her father.

“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.”

The former child star, who rose to fame in the ’90s on shows like Nickelodeon’s “All That” and “The Amanda Show,” is now in a much different place. Four years sober, she’s getting ready to graduate with her Associate of Arts degree at FIDM and and hopes one day to return to acting. 

“I have no fear of the future,” she said. “I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it, so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”