Lucy Hale is pulling again the curtain on her private life in the course of the pinnacle of her profession, sharing that she was privately fighting an consuming dysfunction and habit to alcohol for years.
“From my very first experience drinking, which was like age 14, up until a year ago, I’ve had a problem,” Hale, now 33, mentioned on The Diary of a CEO podcast. “I’ve never had a period of my life where I was a normal, moderate drinker. It was always, ‘Let’s go!’ I was willing to just go to this crazy dark place every time.”
Hale categorized herself as a “textbook binge drinker,” sharing that she would black out at any time when she would drink. “I would pick up the first drink, I’d like the feeling, I’d have another drink, I’d really like the feeling and then it was past drink two, don’t remember,” she mentioned. “I wouldn’t remember the rest of the night.”
The actress encountered “hard conversations” with pals, household and even her supervisor who she mentioned “saved my life at times” in the course of the peak of the alcohol abuse. Admittedly, she did not want intervention to acknowledge what was happening.
“There was never a moment where I thought I was normal. There had been moments where I didn’t want to change because I’m like, ‘I’m not giving this up, are you kidding me? Who would I be if I can’t have fun and let loose and drink?'” she recalled.
She had an analogous relationship to her consuming dysfunction, which she mentioned she developed in her early teenagers when she “had to start logging my exercise hours” for bodily schooling whereas being homeschooled.
“I saw my body kind of change and then I started restricting eating and then it became, like I said, just it slowly just grew and grew to something I could not enjoy life, I could not have a conversation, I could not focus on anything,” she defined. “I went to a therapist, only a handful of times, where that was the first time I had heard, ‘You’re anorexic.’ And that word just sounds so daunting and scary. I mean I’ve never been in denial though like I always knew it wasn’t normal behavior. Like I knew that my hair shouldn’t be falling out, and I knew that I shouldn’t be able to see every bone in my body. But you get addicted to this feeling of controlling your own body.”
She first shared her expertise with an consuming dysfunction in 2012 and mentioned {that a} earlier boyfriend helped her to fix her relationship with meals. Both the physique picture and substance abuse points, she concluded, stemmed from a scarcity of self-worth that “manifested” in these methods. “I thought if I could just be this number or this goal weight, then I’ll be enough. Because it all rooted back to I don’t feel enough,” she mentioned of her consuming dysfunction. Alcohol additionally grew to become a strategy to numb that ache.
Ultimately, she needed to tackle the supply to make actual change in her life.
“I had so many things happen where you would’ve thought I would change. I tried to change for boyfriends, I tried to change for my mom, I tried to change for my career, I tried to change for vain reasons. I’m like, ‘Well I’ll look younger and be skinnier, I’ll stop drinking for that.’ None of that s*** works. I had to and wanted to get sober January 2nd, 2022 because I said, ‘I deserve more. I deserve more out of this life, I have to try it a different way and I have to be willing to just commit to it.'”
She acknowledged her sobriety publicly for the primary time on Feb. 14, acknowledging that her one yr of sobriety was an act of self-love. In the podcast, she shared that the journey has been removed from straightforward.
“I’ve been working on getting sober since I was 22. I’m 33, it takes time. It took time and it took patience with myself,” she mentioned.
And with a yr of sobriety beneath her belt, Hale feels extra ready to talk out about what she’s beforehand handled so privately.
“I was a kid and I was struggling. …I was like dealing with all these big things but I never wanted to talk about it because I was so ashamed. And now I’m not ashamed of it, which is why I can talk about it,” she mentioned. “You’re supposed to share your experiences because it will reach someone.”
If you or somebody you already know is fighting an consuming dysfunction, name the National Eating Disorders Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.
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