Warning: This article contains descriptions of drug taking and alcohol abuse
I have never seen my father drunk. He got sober five years before I was born, having been given six months to live if he carried on drinking at the same rate.
My mother was a lioness who was well respected in the music industry and constantly fawned over me and my sister.
In fact, my childhood was pretty idyllic. But this is just one of the lessons I have learned from my journey with addiction – it doesn’t discriminate based on your childhood or where you come from.
My descent into addiction was founded on a constant yearning to escape from the discomfort I felt.
When I joined a mixed school from a strict all-girls’ private school, a whole world of booze (wangled on a fake ID), boys and drugs suddenly opened up.
It soon became apparent that whilst my friends were up for a party, they knew when to stop. I didn’t, and above all couldn’t. It wasn’t long before I found myself drawn to my soon-to-be drug of choice – heroin. Shortly after, cocaine and crack came too.
There seems to be a misconception that heroin addicts are all homeless and down-and-out. I too had this misconception once. But today I have friends in recovery that were in that situation when they were using, and I also have friends who were in high-flying jobs with houses, families, kids and cars, and they managed to keep it all going with a raging habit.
A friend once said to me, ‘It doesn’t matter if you are in first class or economy, if a plane’s going down, it’s going down.’
My addiction took me to weighing six stone, with matted hair, scraping change together for heroin. At other times, I was in presidential suites, mansions, surrounded by things I had always dreamt of, puking into marble basins, knowing I was dying but unable to stop.
Lying, cheating and manipulating are the hallmarks of active addiction. As soon as we stepped into the outside world, we became a ‘glossy, clean living, vegan devoted’ pairing. My ex’s staff were all sworn to secrecy about our real lives.
However, as my addiction got worse, so did my behaviour. I was visiting my boyfriend in Oxfordshire one winter and stopped at a town centre public loo to get high before heading to his.
Several hours later, I came round, freezing and surrounded by heroin paraphernalia and vodka and tonic that had spilt. Worse still, the loo had been locked for the night. Instead of embarrassing myself by telling my boyfriend the truth, I invented an excuse and spent the night there knowing I had ample heroin and alcohol to keep me numb.
My ex’s father was a rockstar, and with that came endless money and a lot of ‘yes people’. My ex and I passed our time in an antique four-poster bed, surrounded by empty bottles and drug paraphernalia. We would wake in the middle of a dark winter’s day with the same movies on a loop, not knowing what time it was.
One occasion particularly sticks out – driving back from a London Fashion Week show with my ex’s parents and driver. My boyfriend, already high, couldn’t wait for his next fix so asked to borrow the driver’s belt and shot up in the back seat.
He was getting pure heroin from someone who was essentially a legal drug dealer. If you have the money, it’s not uncommon for people to go to private doctors for prescription medicines of their choice. It might seem ‘glamorous’ but there is no glamour whatsoever to addiction.
I’ve been close to death on several occasions and was written off twice by the intensive care team that treated me. I was on life support with multiple organ failure and required an emergency operation to remove 12 inches of badly damaged intestine. Then followed three months in hospital being tube fed, and having to learn to walk again.
My parents – scared and desperate – sent me to numerous rehabs from the age of 17. I have had many rock bottoms but my last was in 2016 when I finally realised there were two options: surrender to recovery or surrender to addiction.
Recovery has allowed me to rekindle relationships with my family and repair past friendships that had been so badly damaged by my addiction.
I started to laugh again, I became employable, and I was excited about life rather than fearing it. I follow a program of recovery and have found magic and solution in the self-help groups I attend.
I have learnt that alcoholism and drug addiction is not only an illness – it is progressive, and can cause grave consequences. Prison and mental institutions are common and tragically many people die from it. I have been to the funerals of nearly 20 people who were unable to stop.
Addiction can attack anybody, man or woman, rich or poor, old or young, of any culture or ethnicity. It causes unemployment, breaks up families, and destroys dreams and aspirations, not to mention costing the government huge sums of money in terms of medical treatment, unemployment benefits, lost productivity, police and social services.
I am almost four years clean and sober now, I work in the film industry and have re-embraced my acting career. What I have today is never worth giving up for another drink or drug: I have self-worth, dignity, and true happiness.
It is as if I have lived two lifetimes in one life, and they couldn’t be more opposite. I have realised just how precious life is, and I treasure what I have today. I just hope that anyone feeling hopeless and stuck in the pain and misery of alcoholism or addiction knows that there is a way out.
Please reach out for help.
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