It’s been a tough few years for Ellen DeGeneres. After stepping away from the spotlight following the workplace controversy that ended her long-running talk show, she’s been living a much quieter life. Then, just when she thought things might finally calm down, her body decided to throw another curveball, actually three of them.
In her Netflix special “Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval” (her first stand-up in six years and what many believe will be her comedy farewell), the 67-year-old got painfully honest about what she’s been going through health-wise.
“I don’t even know how I’m standing up right now,” she joked onstage. “I’m like a human sandcastle; I could disintegrate in the shower.”
It started with excruciating back pain that she thought was a torn ligament. When an MRI came back, doctors first thought it was arthritis. Turns out it was osteoporosis; her bones had become so brittle that, as she put it, “I have the bones of an 80-year-old bird.” Getting older, she admitted, is rough. “It’s hard to be honest about aging and still seem cool.”
But the physical stuff wasn’t the only thing weighing on her. While working through everything that happened with the show, she started therapy. That’s when a therapist suggested she might have OCD.
Ellen laughed about it: “I thought OCD meant ‘very organized.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I am very organized!’ I didn’t know what it actually was.” Growing up in Christian Science, she explained, mental health and illness were never discussed, so none of this had ever been on her radar.
Then came the third piece of the puzzle: ADHD. Suddenly a lot of things from her whole life started making sense.
“So I have ADD, I have OCD, I’m losing my memory,” she told the audience. “But somehow I think I’m well-adjusted under the circumstances, because I’ll obsess about something… but I don’t have the attention span to stick with it, and then I forget what I was obsessing about. So it all cancels itself out and brings me right back to normal.”
These days, Ellen and her wife Portia de Rossi have left the U.S. behind and settled in the English countryside. She’s officially retired from hosting, but still works quietly as a producer. For the first time in a long time, she seems at peace, even if her bones aren’t.