i am 1 year sober!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my battle with addiction, adderall, alcohol, and substance abuse

the day is august 1st, 2025. it will be the last day i ever drink alcohol and do drugs.

i’ve been wanting to share this story for a long time, why i got sober, from what, what happened…but i needed that brutal day in august to be further behind me.

it’s now been over a year.

the thing that’s most shocking about my sobriety when i think about the selective ignorance i had when engaging in my toxic relationship with alcohol, is that i didn’t know august 1st, 2025 would be my last night being drunk and high until it was.

august 2nd, 2025 is the day i declared sobriety. it was one of the most devastatingly shameful days of my life. there was no way i could reconcile with the disappointment unless i changed my life for good.

a lot of people ask me, “how do i do it? how will i know when it’s time to be sober?” and for me, and a lot of sober people, i think it doesn’t simply come on a random whim one day. it comes at a truly catastrophically rock bottom place.

this is my journey to sobriety. this is my homecoming. this is the funeral, the death, the rebirth. the struggle. the truth. the gift.

i share this for the younger version of myself that needed it and because: what is the point of having a platform if not to share these kinds of stories?

addiction runs in families.

until i was 16, my mom was an alcoholic. this was a declaration i never thought i’d announce to anyone, let alone the internet. it was a secret i held and carried for 11 years of my life… processing it, processing it, still processing it. my mom is my whole world, protecting her will always be a priority to me.

my mom is 12 years sober.

throughout my childhood, i watched her struggle with the pain of her mothers death, my dad being deployed to war and raising 3 kids on her own, constantly relocating because of that, and struggling to have a support system and surviving a black hole of grief.

this was the empathy i had, the compassion i felt but couldn’t articulate at the time, and the pain of my childhood… sad memories, grueling memories, ones only the children of alcoholic parents could understand.

you’d think addiction would end there… that the cycle of addiction in my family breaks there.

you’d think i’d know how alcoholism broke my family and not want to repeat it but…

my drinking and drug habits.

the way i would drink wasn’t every day… but when i was drinking, it was always all or nothing. i would go out and party 3 times a week. 17 drinks or none at all. i could set my intention to only have one drink but the second alcohol hit my lips, it was a different story.

a story that eventually involved party favors. in 2019, i was offered my first bump in las vegas. a penthouse suite with people we met at the club, a rolled up 100 and a plate, just like the movies. an older man boasting about its colombian origins. me and two other women sitting in an empty bath tub, fully clothed in our tiny tiger mist dresses talking about nothing for hours.

to contextualize why someone would even want to engage in extremely dangerous drug use, it’s important to know i played soccer my entire life and in college. i played division one sports for 4 years. drugs didn’t enter my realm of consciousness because i was a good girl… but i had always been curious about them. we were drug tested often in college but i knew when college was over, i was going to experiment. i didn’t want to die without knowing all that my human brain and body could feel. i had a vivacious and lethal curiosity.

adderall abuse.

when my soccer season ended my senior year, i was first curious about adderall. i heard people talking about it on campus and found someone to buy it from. the high was incredible. it was euphoric. everything became interesting. i wanted to conquer the world. and i could. i needed it to last forever. 2019 was the beginning of my very tumultuous and exhausting relationship with adderall abuse… which is also incorporated into my sobriety.

the double edged sword being i have ADHD. i saw a psychiatrist after soccer ended who quickly assessed my ADHD symptoms that were running rampant for the first time. i played soccer since i was 4 years old at extremely competitive levels until i was 21. my ADHD symptoms were mitigated by structure and exercise release. when soccer finally ended, my ADHD was hard to manage. i was encouraged to be medicated, which was also a desire of mine. i got exactly what i wanted: the co-sign for a prescription that i couldn’t wait to abuse.

i was going to do one semester abroad in puerto rico to study spanish, with all my classes being taught in spanish. my psychiatrist gave me a 5-month supply of adderall to focus. an unheard of prescription. one that was abused in service to a gnarly eating disorder and a workaholic’s paradise of productive escapism.

can someone with ADHD abuse their prescribed medications? absolutely. i hated to come down. i hated the crash. to avoid it, i’d sometimes take another half of instant release adderall at 8 p.m. to stay up late cleaning my closet. i needed it during the day and i abused it during the night.

it’s also worth noting, ADHD especially when mixed with alcohol makes you extremely impulsive. reckless. an ADHD person has a higher risk of binge drinking and risky choices.

i stopped taking adderall september 2024. almost a whole year before i declared sobriety from ALL mind-altering substances.

the quitting of adderall came not out of a rock bottom place, but the dreaded birthday of turning 26. happy birthday! you are off your parent’s insurance. the loss of insurance wasn’t the hugest deal because i actually could afford my own. the problem was my parent’s trusted military insurance would SEND ME my bottle of adderall every month. literally to my mailbox. which was VITAL during the adderall shortage. their insurance was through the military which veterans get benefits from, one of those being their daughter getting an adderall prescription sent to them while the rest of the country fights in their local walgreens for their respective prescriptions where adderall is scarce.

being off their insurance meant i had to start getting my adderall from my local walgreens. they were out. they had been out for months. every pharmacy in the 5 boroughs was out. there was an adderall shortage. after a grueling 2 weeks of radical acceptance and falling into the worst crash imaginable. i decided i would never be a slave to adderall ever again.

adderall at this point was ruining my life. i had been off and on it for 5 years. i was celibate because of it. and celibacy wasn’t a choice or a decision. i genuinely thought i was asexual. no one could arise lust in me. adderall, FOR ME, completely stripped my desire for human connection. i was obsessed with productivity. the week i got off of adderall, i kissed 3 boys in one week. love was pouring out of me. i was crying, extremely hungry, turbulent. emotions flooded me. i was fatigued. the first month off it, i missed the way adderall muted my experience. i didn’t want to cope with life without it. which is fucking devastating to admit but i achieved success that way. until it rot me from the inside out.

i always said i wouldn’t be able to be in a relationship on adderall. that the love of my life existed once i conquered the substance abuse. i had no tolerance for human connection. people bored me. everything was a transaction. i liked it that way. there were constant negotiations in my head of needing it to be able to function, calling it my prescription felt like an affirmation, it was plausible denial of misuse except for the fact that i was also abusing it like a fucking addict. i was a scoundrel for adderall, i’d dig out remnants from my purse, i’d buy it from dealers, i even used it for nights out. if i couldn’t find someone with drugs, i’d go into the club bathroom and take half of an adderall to sober up. it was fucking horrible.

i do not know who has been here since 2024, who has been here before that, but i think there is a very distinct and clear evolution of my art, content, writing since i got off adderall and especially since i got completely sober.

let me paint a picture.

a night that started out at a 7 p.m. dinner with friends easily turned into an after party in someone’s apartment until 8 a.m.

that was how out of control i felt in my body when i was drinking.

i couldn’t break free of the hold until i heard the birds chirping and even then i’d try to keep the night going.

i had never bought drugs. that’s what kept me from any admission of a problem. but i knew EXACTLY where to find them. who to text, where to show up, what table to be at… and in the 3 years leading up to my sobriety, it took only one drink to text someone, “wyaaaa?”

the people i would text were diabolical. people i wouldn’t trust anyone with. people i heard accusations about. people whose energy was dark. people you would only cling to for something dark. these sorts of people build their network of innocence through people like me, the cute and fun bubbly blonde girl posted up with the grim reaper. another girl would see me with him and he instantly gains credibility. she trusts him now too. and i only “trust” him in the first place, because the other beautiful, cool model was talking to him. the cycle continues, the network expands. you are a chess piece in an underworld. a disposable pawn. purgatory.

in all honesty, part of the guilt, shame, disappointment, and disgust that led me to sobriety was the way i surrounded myself with energy vampires for their tiny baggies when i was drinking. i sought them out. i had no fear when i was drunk.

there’s a girl i met high off 2C four years ago. let’s call her ella. we met at an after party at a nightlife mogul’s apartment. a watering hole for gorgeous models, internet celebrities and musicians alike, a place to do drugs with famous actors. this was the well that quenched the circuit.

ella and i have recently talked about my sobriety and her complete transcendence from that scene. she’s completely carved her own path in the modeling industry, stacking a decorated resume of the greatest designers in the world. of course, only after escaping the scene. she recently told me, “i think back then we existed in purgatory and now we’ve granted ourselves access to the world.”

the tribulation of a young person in the VIP nightlife circuit is that you think you will achieve your greatness while you’re in the scene. if the drugs and the fame are the well, then your dreams propped up like fruit on a tree are the food. hungry models and dream seekers become swallowed up in night life because they believe it only takes one person to make them famous. to make their dreams come true!!! only, cinderella doesn’t get to go to the big ball! she becomes distracted and a drug addict. (and if you think that’s mean, continue reading… because that’s a hyperbolic anecdote of what happened to me)

i can attest that no one in night life will pluck you from obscurity onto the big stage. if you’re the .000000001% that that happens to, it’s empty. poke it. it’s deflated. it’s an empty calorie. you get your big break only to get lost on a board. who is this person again? you were a puppet, darling. YOU didn’t get yourself there.

losing my life to partying

i was completely functional whilst maintaining insidious nightlife escapades. i’d show up to things hungover… there was one time in 2023 where i had a casting the next day and stayed out until 8 a.m. in some random finance guys place with 4 or so other stragglers. waiting for his dealer to wake up so we could get another bag. i asked him if i could borrow clothes for a casting at 12 p.m. he said, “go home. shower. focus. you’re too good for this.” fuck.

that’s the thing when you’re drunk or not as drunk anymore but high on drugs… your priorities are rubble, reality does not exist. showing up to a casting still rolling from the night before sounds like a good idea. well, it repulses sober me. get your fucking shit together. it would repulse the version of myself that would wake up the next day too. that’s how extreme the polarities of self were in my head. drunk me was not who i was. and because of that, the hangovers… when i was finally sober… would wreck me. i would feel remorse. i would feel dread and confusion for who i could become. i feared her.

and as i grew into my creativity, i couldn’t shake the spiritual hangover and how it wrecked havoc on my soul and spirit. i hated myself the next day but would re-engage in the cycle two days later.

i would experiment with sobriety… do a month here and there. especially after a night where i scared myself. that day i went to the casting still high, the one i reference a couple paragraphs above, i think i went sober for a couple months after that. i would consistently try to prove to myself that i didn’t have a problem.

there was a month in december 2023 that i went “sober” for a reality TV show. sober for a month did not include the adderall i was buying from a drug dealer out in LA. okay, so i guess i did buy drugs. but in my head, i wasn’t able to pick up my prescription in LA, so i was just supplementing while i was away. this is how people die by the way. counterfeit pills. the drug dealer is not getting “adderall” from a fucking pharmacy. they’re pressing their own pills with god knows what. in this case, my “adderall” was probably meth.

by the end of that month, i was fiending to go out. i thought, maybe i have a handle on myself now. i went out with the cast from the reality show… our final night to celebrate, the next day was filming but it was only post-season interviews.

we went to a gay bar where i met someone who liked my shirt and invited me to afters. for context, LA’s bars and clubs close at 2 a.m., 2 hours before NYC clubs close at 4 a.m. going home at 2 a.m. after not drinking for a whole month sounded like my worst nightmare. the night needed to last forever. i dragged the cast to this random after party where they all lasted until about 3 a.m. when they left, i decided to stay. per usual. alone. at 4:30 a.m. the party was ending and the guy that brought me there asked if we should go back to my hotel room while he tried to text his dealer. we went back to my hotel room where we did my skin care routine. a routine i shared with him, while we waited and waited for no text back, and finally just fell asleep. i had to be up at 8 a.m. for my final interviews, i left him in the room and when i came back, he was gone.

i do not know his name, nor do i have his number. this is one of many stories that illustrate the lack of boundaries within myself, impulsivity, and recklessness when i was drinking. the stories always went like this. some worse than others. that’s the thing too, i was never “black out,” i remembered everything. that’s what made it worse. i genuinely would make friends with anyone anywhere when i was drunk and high. it scared the shit out of me.

after that, i think i went sober for another 3 months.

then that sobriety stint would end, i’d think enough time had passed to be purged of my sins, and i’d go even harder. i’d stay out until 11 a.m. there was no off switch. all i wanted to do was escape. to be around strangers. to be nameless. to be so enthralled in the “present moment” of an artificial high while my soul rotted inside.

the night i got sober.

so the day is august 1st, 2025 and it would be the last night i’d ever engage in my toxic relationship with alcohol and its companions. boyfriend was showing paintings at a store in soho.

boyfriend and i had been dating for 6 months at this point. alcohol was already creating tension in the relationship. that’s the thing about relationships and how they evolve you and grow you… they show a mirror to things that are straining within yourself. behaviors you typically manage and conceal by yourself, especially addiction… show up so clearly when you are in a relationship. i think that’s why many people avoid relationships when they’re on the threshold of one, there is a visceral awareness that you are about to be confronted by yourself. sometimes that awareness will manifest into sabotage before it can even begin.

boyfriend is a painter. he’s an artist. that night, he dedicated his show to me. the show was on swans. their elegance, grace, monogamy. swans mate once and they mate for life.

sweet texts from boyfriend

a painting from his show... title: I was kissing you many moons before this one

a painting from his show… title: Stubborn Grace

me that night… painting title: Mating Ritual

at his showing, i drank 10 cups of wine. i tried to be modest with my drinking, i was the girlfriend of the artist… i didn’t want to have my binge drinking problem out on display. i was asking people left and right if they could go get a drink for me so i wouldn’t have to confront myself through the eyes of the bartender.

when they closed the bar 30 minutes before his show was over, i was antsy. i wanted to leave. i wanted drugs. i needed more alcohol, more stimulation, more, more, more.

i rushed him out of his own show. i made a reservation at a restaurant down the street and only invited my friends. when i got to the restaurant, i ordered us bottles of wine and then a margarita, i wanted two drinks at the same time. around this time, i was finally making money. to enable my alcohol problem, i’d tell everyone to not worry about the tab. it made me feel better about my own proclivity to binge drink that way. i started texting people about their plans for the night… especially the ones i knew would have a bump.

boyfriend doesn’t do drugs. he doesn’t even like alcohol. if he has one drink, he will throw up the next day. he hated who i would become when drunk, that i had a propensity to doing drugs with strangers in bathroom stalls… he hated it. it was a major challenge in our relationship. i’d accuse him of not letting me be free, i would come up with eloquent ways of defending my inner party girl, even when i knew that the reality was even worse than what he feared.

my biggest fear was that i would cheat on him or get myself into an absolutely horrible position while drunk and under the influence of drugs. i didn’t trust myself. the cheating fear wasn’t even because i felt lustful to others, it’s that i knew all it took was being in the bathroom stall with the wrong person for someone to kiss or grope you. it happens that fast, that easily… especially as a girl in NYC and especially as someone who hopefully and naively will follow the white rabbit into any corner of the party for a bump of something to take her somewhere else. anywhere else.

and so i sat there with my margarita and wine, giggling to my friend about where to go next. boyfriend was to the right of me, his energy had evaporated, he was cold, mute, hurt. i felt preemptively disappointed in myself for what i had done and the only way i could make myself feel better was to blame him. i told him he was no fun so he’d go home.

then i went out with friends until 6 a.m.

and only until 6 a.m. because no one would go to an after party with me.

i got what i wanted. that bump. so i could drink more. that’s the thing about drugs and alcohol. some drugs only become addictive so you can stay out longer and drink more. once you start to create the habit, it’s impossible to just drink. especially when you’re already drunk.

august 2nd, 2025

when i got home at 7 a.m., after the sad and lonely ride in the uber home, i sat in the shower and felt the biggest wave of darkness i’ve ever felt in my life. if darkness was a kaleidoscope, it was every color of black. it was shame, disappointment, and most of all — confusion. i was confused because i hurt someone who i love so much, who loves me so much, for what? i replayed his sweet dedication to our love at his show. how could i do this to him? without alcohol i would’ve helped him clean up his show, lingered in the doorway saying goodbye to everyone who came… without alcohol, we would’ve gotten tacos down the street, i would’ve helped him carry stuff home on the subway, we would’ve had a quiet, sweet night. without alcohol, i would’ve showed up for him the way he’d show up for me.

but instead, alcohol brought out my fun monster. the one who wanted to drink with strangers and forget who i am.

he ignored all my texts that next day so i showed up at his apartment at 3 p.m. i sobbed, i apologized, i hyperventilated, and i realized crystal clear that as long as alcohol is in my life, i’ll always feel like this. i’ll always take it too far. i’ll always let it take over.

and so i said “ok im done.” for my future kids!!!!! for my relationship!!!!! for my mom!!!!! but most of all… for me!!!! because i couldn’t bear to ever feel like that again.

so i took it day by day. i declared it. two days in, i was on a job in canada. i was already telling people “oh, i don’t drink.” i couldn’t say sober yet, but i already began to manifest this new reality for myself. i needed to recode my mind.

i began looking up celebrities who don’t drink. some aspects of that comforted me. i truly felt like everyone cool, drank… that turned out to be completely untrue. i believed in order to be my charismatic and vivacious self, i needed to be buzzed. now i realize, all it ever did was bring my worst traits to the surface. it made me selfish, impulsive, interruptive, mean, immature, messy, sloppy, aggressive… it made me someone with no boundaries, who would take anything that anyone would give them. it put me in unsafe situations.

i read Quit Drinking by Alan Carr… a fantastic and perfectly redundant book that reminded me why i needed to make this decision.

i talked to a lot of sober friends and my mom.

and i did it.

i’ll never feel like that again… and that thought is so comforting.

i will never feel like that again.

a journal entry 1 day into sobriety

a journal entry 1 day into sobriety continued

1 year sober

there are many people i hurt during my toxic relationship with substances. as a means of being forgiven, i practice sobriety as a living amends.

one of the proudest physical manifestations of this journey to sobriety is publishing an art poetry book. i have been writing poetry since 2021. scenes of heartbreak, my struggle with binge drinking, drugs, partying, nightlife, new york city, ex best friends, god, homesickness, the void, body image, self discovery, love… this book only exists because of the decision i made on august 2nd, 2025. i channeled grief, i underwent a metamorphosis, i alchemized the darkest moment of my life and focused its potency into making something beautiful.

if i was still drinking, the poetry would still be in a notebook. the writing would’ve stayed the same. the days and nights i spent working on bringing this book to life, would’ve been lost to parties, strangers, regret, seeking redemption, and inevitably ending in disappointment. part of me believes Whiskers of a Kitten only exists because i lived through my own resolution.

my art poetry book is called Whiskers of a Kitten. it is a hand written poetry book with mixed media companions that create scenes from my life. it is the bridge between girlhood and womanhood. a sneak peak of the first page exists below.

it is now available for preorder. it releases october 27, 2026.

if you have any questions about sobriety and my journey, i will happily embrace and answer comments. my hope is that today, next week, next year, or maybe years from now… someone will discover this substack post and it might make them feel less alone.

thank you.