Noah Cyrus has revealed she’s been “in recovery” for two years as she opens up about her battle with addiction.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the 22-year-old sister of Miley Cyrus shared for the first time that she’s been recovering from a Xanax addiction for two years.
Noah said she first tried Xanax when she was just 18 – when her then-boyfriend offered it to her.
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“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,” she told Rolling Stone.
“I think I wanted to fit in with him. I wanted to be what he wanted and what he thought was cool and what I thought everybody was doing.”
The singer admitted that she continued taking the drug when she “felt that it was possible to silence things out for a second and numb your pain.”
Noah explained that she was “surrounded by people who were easily able to get it by buying it from people,” which accelerated her addiction.
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However, her Xanax addiction became “this dark pit, bottomless pit,” in which she’d spend most of the day in bed, struggled with her memory, and wasn’t sure which day it was.
When the pandemic happened, the singer’s addiction became worse, as she started to pass out in the middle of an interview, and was blindsided by her grandmother’s death.
“I felt so guilty for not being there when my grandma died,” she said. “I was there physically, but emotionally, I was not there. I couldn’t be.”
“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 said of her mother Tish, whom she was unable to comfort after the passing of her grandmother.
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Shortly after her realisation, Noah began seeking help for her addiction struggle.
“I was being helped by everybody that I needed help from, and it took some time to get on my own two feet.”
The singer described how working on her debut album ‘The Hardest Part’, helped her to heal.
“It gave me so much structure in the time that I really needed structure, because I didn’t want to just be sitting around and stirring in my brain. It gave me hope,” she explained.
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Her battle with addiction is apparent in the lyrics of her track ‘Noah (Stand Still)’, which read, “When I turned 20 / I was overcome with the thought that I might not turn 21 / Death upon my doorstep / If I took just one more step / There’d be nothing left of me except these songs.”
“It was coming out in my lyrics,” she says. “So, it’s like, ‘I’m not going to hide my truth.’ I think it was evident that I was going through something the past couple years — I think my fans saw it. I think the public could see it.”
Once her battle had begun manifesting in her songs, Noah decided it was time to open up about her struggles publicly.
“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.”
