The singer got help in late 2020, two years after she first tried the drug.
Noah Cyrus is opening up her battle with addiction. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the 22-year-old singer reveals for the first time that she's been in recovery for a Xanax addiction for two years.
Cyrus says that she first tried Xanax when she was 18, when her then-boyfriend offered her the drug, which is often prescribed for anxiety and panic attacks.
"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 tells the outlet. "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."
In addition to taking the drug to fit in, Cyrus says, "Once I felt that it was possible to silence things out for a second and numb your pain, it was over."
Cyrus was able to feel the effects of the drug with little to no effort, as it was easily acquired by people in her circle.
"I was surrounded by people who were easily able to get it by buying it from people," she says.
But soon, her Xanax use become "this dark pit, bottomless pit," in which she'd sleep all day, didn't know which day was which, and struggled with memory issues. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, Cyrus' addiction was at its worst; she started to pass out in the middle of an interview and grappled with the death of her maternal grandmother, to whom she didn't get to say goodbye.
"I felt so guilty for not being there when my grandma died," she says. "I was there physically, but emotionally, I was not there. I couldn’t be."
She also wasn't there for her mom, Tish Cyrus, a fact that still weighs heavily on the singer.
"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 says.
Not long after, Cyrus began getting help for her addiction.
"I was being helped by everybody that I needed help from, and it took some time to get on my own two feet," she says, before describing how working on her debut album, The Hardest Part, allowed 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," she says. "It gave me hope."
Her experience with addiction made it onto her album, specifically on the ballad "Noah (Stand Still)," in which she sings, "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."
It's for that reason that Cyrus decided to open up about her struggles publicly.
"I’m not trying to be, like, any spokesperson for recovery or anything like that," she says. "I, myself, am just going through it and figuring it out."
One way she's figuring it out is by dedicating herself to therapy and psychiatry.
"I wake up in the mornings, and I’m able to look in a mirror and go on about my day without hating myself," she says. "I’m able to comfort myself and nurture myself."
The Hardest Part is due out Sept 16.
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