Paulina Porizkova didn’t suffer silently when grief overwhelmed her.
In fact, when the former supermodel found herself struggling in the wake of husband Ric Ocasek’s death, she took to Instagram to share her pain and her tears.
And now, in an interview with NBC News special anchor Maria Shriver, the 57-year-old is sharing why she made that choice.
“COVID shut down the world,” Porizkova said of the period several months after Ocasek’s 2019 death. “I was grieving, and I was heartbroken."
And her grief was complicated.
She and The Cars frontman were together for more than 30 years and shared two children. But in 2018, they "peacefully separated" romantically, while continuing to live together as friends.
Before his death, she took care of Ocasek as he recovered from a surgery. After his death, she learned he'd cut her out of his will and accused her of abandoning him.
"So I, like a drowning person, was tossing out these little messages in the bottle of, like, ‘Please help, I’m drowning,’ onto Instagram," Porizkova told Shriver.
She soon learned she wasn’t alone.
"It turns out there was a lot of us drowning at the same time," she said.
With the help of that social media connection, Porizkova was able to stay afloat through her difficulties, and eventually, she decided to use her platform to share other aspects of her life — including body-baring photos and messages about aging and acceptance.
The reaction from her followers, she said, was "kind of mixed."
Some welcomed such posts, while others made it plain that they didn't approve.
“Like, ‘Grandma, cover up!’” she recalled. “That actually kind of pissed me off. Why was it okay for me to show it off when I was 16 and 17, and I didn’t even know what sex was. Now, I’m doing it because I like my body.”
Porizkova is releasing a new book of essays titled, "No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful,” and she says the novel is a chance to connect with women her age who feel they are seen only one way — or not seen at all.
"All of the invisible women, a category which I’m sadly in, too,” she said of the readers she most wants to reach. “Probably in my mid-40s, I started noticing this sort of slight cloak of invisibility. And I would ask my girlfriends, ‘Do you guys ever have that feeling of not quite being seen?’ And every single one of my girlfriends went, ‘Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.’”
However, anyone who fails to see Porizkova now is missing out.
“I have now, at my age, reclaimed me,” she insisted. “This is, in fact, my prime. Maybe I was glossier and prettier 20 years ago, but I was only half as smart. As a woman, this is me at my best.”