In the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, the 24-year-old actress admits making mistakes in the past and “dabbling in certain things.”

But in a July interview with the magazine before she served 14 days in jail followed by 23 days of inpatient rehab, she defended her actions, saying she was young and curious and was associating with the wrong people.

Lindsay Lohan on the cover of the October issue of Vanity Fair

“So many people around me would say they cared for the wrong reasons,” Lohan said. “A lot of people were pulling from me, taking from me and not giving. I had a lot of people that were there for me for, you know, the party.”

Lohan says she used to get her news from tabloids, which she now calls “scary and sad.”

“I would look up to those girls … the Britneys and whatever,” she said. “And I would be like, I want to be like that.”

Despite everything, Lohan is confident in her acting abilities and future: “I don’t care what anyone says. I know that I’m a damn good actress.”

She says she’ll do whatever it takes to fix her party-girl image.

“I want my career back,” she said. “I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies. And if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it. It’s not fun anyway.”

Though, her clubbing days are over. “I see where that’s gotten me now,” she says, “and I don’t like it.”

As for drug use, “I’ve never abused prescription drugs. I never have – never in my life. I have no desire to. That’s not who I am,” she says. “I’ve admitted to the things that I’ve done – to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things ’cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, okay, ’cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it.”

Going to Los Angeles for her career in her late teens, Lohan, a Long Island native, says, “These were my college years … but they were in the public eye. I was irresponsible. I was experimenting. I was doing certain things that people do 10 times more of when they’re in college.”