Noah Cyrus is speaking about her addiction to the drug Xanax, and the actions she’s taken in the past two years to recover from it.
The 22-year-old singer, speaking with Rolling Stone Tuesday, said that she initially tried the drug at the age of 18, amid a time she was ‘surrounded by people’ who provided her with access to the narcotic.
‘My boyfriend at the time, when I was 18, was the first person that gave me a Xanax, and it became a way for us to bond,’ the Nashville-born vocalist told the outlet. ‘I think I wanted to fit in with him.
She continued: ‘I wanted to be what he wanted and what he thought was cool and what I thought everybody was doing. Once I felt that it was possible to silence things out for a second and numb your pain, it was over.’
The Grammy-nominated musical artist recalled one instance in which she was ‘completely nodding off and falling during an interview.
‘I was … unable to keep my head up or keep my eyes open because I was so far gone,’ Cyrus said. ‘It just kind of becomes this dark pit, bottomless pit.’
The July singer, who is Miley Cyrus’s younger sister, said that amid her worst days of Xanax addiction in August of 2020, her grandmother Loretta passed away, and she was not present emotionally to comfort her grieving relatives.
“I felt so guilty for not being there when my grandma died. I was there physically, but emotionally, I was not there. I couldn’t be,” she said.
“That was my big eye-opener: I was sitting alone, and I was scared, and I realized that all the people that I love and all the people that I need, I was the one pushing them away,” she continued, noting that she struggled to grieve with her family members due to her emotional unavailability.
Cyrus went into recovery soon after her grandmother’s death and told the publication that it ‘took some time to get on [her] own two feet’ in her efforts to quit using the drug and that she had a strong support system around her. “I was being helped by everybody that I needed help from…”, she said.
“I’m not trying to be, like, any spokesperson for recovery or anything like that,” she said. “I, myself, am just going through it and figuring it out.”
She continued, “I wake up in the mornings, and I’m able to look in a mirror and go on about my day without hating myself. I’m able to comfort myself and nurture myself.”
Cyrus is slated to release The Hardest Part, her debut album, on September 16.
