Pauley Perrette was a fan favorite in her role as forensic scientist Abby Sciuto on the long-running CBS hit NCIS, but she walked away from that series in 2019 after alleged issues with co-star Mark Harmon.

But it wasn’t the last time her fans saw her on screen. She followed up NCIS with the short-lived comedy Broke, but now she’s saying that she permanently retired from acting after the sitcom was canceled in 2020 and she is revealing why.

“I’m not ungrateful for the benefits that [acting] gave to me,” she told Hello! “But I’m a different person now and I want to be here for it—the good and the bad and the painful. I want to be me all the time, and it takes a good amount of courage for me to say that to myself but it’s authentically how I feel.”

What Pauley, who fell into acting after she studied criminal science and sociology in college with plans to work for the FBI, is saying is that she needs to live in the moment and not disappear into acting roles.

Mark Harmon, Pauley PerretteCBS

“There’s no drug that I ever did that worked as well as being an actor,” she once said of acting. “What you’re looking for with substance abuse is escape. But with acting, you can escape into 1,000 different things without almost killing yourself doing it. Acting is a total drug!”

That doesn’t mean that Pauley has completely given up on show business, but rather that she chooses to approach it from behind the camera. To that end, she is serving as an executive producer on the documentary Studio One Forever and she directed the short Red Ribbons of Love.

“At this point in my life I have this deep need to find authenticity in everything, and being an actor, especially at certain points in my life, was a great escape; it’s like a drug because I didn’t have to be me, I could be somebody else. My character didn’t have all of the problems that I was having,” Pauley told Hello! “It’s why I only watch documentaries, I want the truth. For me, going back to being an actor would be taking away from this life of true authenticity that I’m living 100 percent of the time.”