I got a lot of flak for publishing my memoir. People said it was a shameless cash grab. I got called a hanger-on, a fame whore, a starfucker. I don’t think any of those people actually bothered to read my book, because if they had they would have seen that I wrote every word of it straight from my heart.

After I found the girl, I went to therapy. I worked with a life coach. I embraced a vegan diet. I tried Xanax and Zoloft. I got into reiki and did a four-day silent meditation retreat. I even followed this guru for a while. Her hugs were supposed to cure you, it didn’t matter what was wrong with you. During her North American tour, I went to see her at the Sheraton near LAX. I waited in line for three hours. When it was my turn, I approached the dais and the guru wrapped me in an embrace so powerful it felt like it originated at the center of my soul. I swear I could feel it wiping everything away. A new beginning. Or so I thought. But on my drive back to Santa Monica, I was stopped in traffic on the 405 and it happened again—the girl appeared in my mind. That bloated white arm, reaching out to me.

My therapist said that intrusive thoughts and images are an extremely common neurological phenomenon. To stop them, I simply needed to retrain my mind; he told me that it is not only possible to rewire the brain’s neural pathways, it is easy. Plasticity is exactly what our brains are designed for. Whenever the image of the girl intruded, I was supposed to imagine that I was in the checkout at the grocery store. On the belt were different grocery items and each item was a thought, and the girl was just one of these thoughts, and I knew which items were healthy and which were not, and I could choose which ones I picked up and which ones I put down, and I could watch these unhealthy thoughts travel away down the checkout belt of my mind. I just had to put her down and pick up something else. I spent hours putting down the girl and picking up yogurt, avocados, blueberries. But the longer I spent there, the more I tried not to see her, the more I saw her. The light blue polish on her nails. Her hair swirling upward in the water.

Eventually, I decided my only choice was to accept her into my life. I still see her, but when I do, I just … say hi to her. I call her by her name. Hey there, Ali. I tell her I like her nail polish. It is not okay, and I don’t think it ever will be. But I have found that this way, I can turn her from a body into a girl. And I feel damned proud that I was able to find my own solution when all these supposed experts couldn’t help me.

I’ve been thinking about going back to school to become a licensed mental health counselor. Wouldn’t that be a second act nobody expected from me? But actually, I’ve always wanted to help people. You want to know the real thing the men I dated had in common? It wasn’t that they were celebrities. It was that they were broken, broken dudes. He was the most broken of them all. Ironic, isn’t it? I made him go to that waterfall because I thought it would heal him, but instead I think it’s the thing that broke him for good.