Lena Dunham Mourns End of 'Girls' With Sweet Instagram Tribute and '45 Minutes of Sobbing'

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Lena Dunham has emotionally said goodbye to her hit show, Girls, with a touching series of Instagram posts and “45 minutes of sobbing.”

The actress, who has nabbed multiple awards for the HBO series, which she created and starred in, wrapped filming at 2 a.m. on Friday, then documented the difficult farewell on Instagram.

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“This is the end of the largest and most potent chapter of my life so far,” wrote the 30-year-old actress. “Before Girls, I had zero identity, zero self-love and an urgent sense of untapped creative desire that kept me up and sweating at night in other people's beds, wondering why vague sexual affirmation wasn’t enough to make me feel human.”

“I had hardly an inkling of the responsibility we take on when we tell stories, or of the power words can have, but what I had - as an obsessed fan of shows from Girlfriends to Felicity to Ally McBeal - was the audacity to think that people might want to see women like my friends and me (broken, imperfect, angry) on television,” continued the Golden Globe winner.


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Dunham
noted how she never dreamed she “could be so fulfilled” by making art and credited the series for helping her develop “an identity” and begin “my life in earnest.”

She also thanked the series’ crew for “putting up with my t*ts for six years,” and paid tribute to the show’s loyal fans.

“You've made me believe there was a place for the strange girls and the ones who don't know how to love quite yet,” she wrote. “And I know you'll give the same warm reception to all the radical & essential female voices coming to TV in the near future. Because we are just at the beginning of a golden era in which every woman -- no matter her race, religion, body-type, or the gender assigned to her at birth -- can tell her story and have it heard and recognized for its essential her-ness. Let's all make sure of that together, okay? We must.”


WATCH: Lena Dunham and America Ferrera Team Up on Trump in DNC Speech

The series debuted in 2012 and the sixth and final season is expected to premiere in early 2017.

Although Dunham was crying a river after wrapping her final scenes, she noted that the difficult farewell was also something to cherish.

“To say I don't enjoy goodbyes is an understatement,” she wrote. “But, as a wise woman once told me, ‘Relish it. We so rarely get to choose our goodbyes.’ She's right.”

See the actress team up with America Ferrera in a DNC speech in the video below.