Ashley McBryde is continuing to open up about her sobriety, four years after she quit drinking. On the Human School podcast, McBryde reveals she had her first drink when she was just 12 years old, drinking out of a Flintstones glass. By 19, she was performing in bars, where getting free drinks was a normal part of her evening.
“I spent many, many, many years being proud that I could drink you under the table,” McBryde says. “I could drink as much as a tall man, no problem, and probably still win a spelling bee, after drinking as much as a man.”
McBryde would go for long stretches without any alcohol, multiple times, trying to convince herself that she was still in control of her drinking.
“It’s not what the label is on the bottle that’s the problem,” McBryde maintains. “The problem is you. Because I was not addicted to drinking. I was addicted to not feeling out of place. And [drinking] prevents me from feeling like a very overwhelmable little girl. It’s liquid courage. I believed that the songs come from it. And believe me, I wrote every single song you could possibly write with whiskey in the title.
“I’m so glad I never moved on to tequila titles,” she adds with a laugh.
Because McBryde was having success in her country music career at the time, she tried for years to deny she actually had a problem.
“I wrote great songs in the grips of my addiction,” McBryde says. “I’ve written great songs since, some that are better. Turds are still going to be turds. You’re still going to write those.”
“It really is an effective tool, until it isn’t,” she says. “And then when it isn’t, it is so ineffective now, and detrimental now.”
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Why Ashley McBryde Decided to Quit Drinking
The Arkansas native’s addiction spiraled until she discovered she didn’t need a social situation to overimbibe.
“I found out it was cheaper to just drink at home,’ McBryde says. “Now I’m not even going out with my friends. I can’t even blame social drinking on this, because I’m going to go drink at my house by myself. I may come meet you later at the bar. I will have already been drinking for hours. And how lonely is that?”
“That’s super sad,” she continues. “And being so sick. It didn’t matter if it was a glass of wine or a bottle of whiskey. I was so sick. So sick. Where, I remember vomiting at such a rapid pace, I couldn’t catch my breath. I’m on the bathroom floor going, ‘This kills people.'”
McBryde previously revealed she went to rehab after yet another night of drinking too much. McBryde tearfully recalls that night, after she had, in her drunken stupor, threatened to “blow her head off.”
“That is when I woke up, at their house. I didn’t know where I was. I went to go get a drink of water, and found my team in her living room,” McBryde says.
“There wasn’t a chance to say, ‘I really have to quit, and I really need help,'” she continues. “I just did what I do, which is overdo it until there is no possible other outcome, than you gotta stop. Stop or die. Ever, ever, ever have a drink again, or ever, ever, ever play a show again. Choose. That’s not a hard choice to make. It’s a hard choice to keep.”
Now, the 43-year-old is profoundly grateful that her drinking days are over, for good.
“When I finally recognized myself in the mirror, I could say, ‘I love you,'” she says.
Watch the entire interview here.