Lucy Hale said this week that “life seems so good” after getting sober, also saying she hit “rock bottom” at 32 before deciding to quit drinking.
Hale, who has been sober for two and a half years, said People she “made the choice” to “do everything she can to get sober” on January 2, 2022.
“It was the scariest choice of my life, but it was also the greatest gift,” Hale said. “When I made that change, everything else changed. My whole life changed.”
THE pretty Little Liars The actress recalled that she “hit rock bottom” at 32 just before making the big decision. “I've always wanted to change, but with any addiction, you become helpless in the face of that obsession,” she said.
For Hale, her addiction began in her teens. “From a very young age, I always felt alone and misunderstood,” she said, adding that alcohol “shut my brain down.”
“It worked for me for a while, until it got really dark,” he said.
The journey to sobriety has involved many twists and turns. “It took many, many, many years, many relapses, many dark moments, many that fell in my face literally and figuratively, to figure out what was working in my life, to figure out why I was drinking, because cutting out alcohol is just part of the process,” he said.
If she had continued, the singer said, “I would have lost everything I cared about.”
Hale's Rise to Fame pretty Little Liars helped her deal with alcoholism in her 20s. “Without my career and without that creative outlet, I don’t know if I would have made it,” she said. “I think that show and my love for what I do was really my North Star, and it gave me purpose, and it still does. But I was constantly in this cycle of extreme depression and anxiety while having to show up to work and be high. And that ‘being high’ fueled the alcohol even more… I was trapped in this cycle that I couldn’t get out of.”
Nearly three years later, Hale said that sobriety can still be “painful and uncomfortable,” but that “my life is so good now that I wouldn't give it up for the world.”
“I still have to make a choice every day of, 'OK, today I'm going to stay sober and today I'm going to choose myself,' but it goes deeper than just not drinking,” she said. “I can't believe I'm at a point in my life where I can talk about the things that made me feel so ashamed.”
This weekend, Hale will receive the Humanitarian Award at the 34th annual awards luncheon at Friendly House, a Los Angeles-based addiction recovery center.
“When I got sober, my intention was never to be a poster child for sobriety,” she said. “But when I started speaking out, it was born out of a need to heal and take back my power.”