I might link his success to his sporadically prominent mental health. He has expressed homophobic ideas but he has also done things like “the hug heard around the world,” when he embraced Elton John at the signs you were roofied 2001 Grammy Awards. He has exhibited a concern for a better world, as with his anti-war track “Mosh.” And many of his songs demonstrate healthy values in line with being a good father and loyal friend.
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But, despite his overwhelmingly successful career, Eminem — like many artists before him — fell into the trappings of drug addiction. And sometimes, as with “Relapse,” this part of the famed rapper wins out. Mental illness overwhelms, the result of which are all of its unattractive and unappealing features—passivity, unregulated negative emotions, dishonest self-presentation, and interpersonal conflicts. This is the Eminem that grows defensive and embittered, whines about archaic slights, spills anger without a clear, coherent target, and aimlessly reflects on a now-stagnant life story. Now, the rapper has a routine with at-home workout DVDs.
Eminem Confronts His Inner Demons In ‘Recovery’
So, I’m coming off The Marshall Mathers LP and going into Encore when my addiction started to get bad. I kinda fell off the map a little bit and didn’t explain why I went away. I remember things started getting really, really bad when me, 50 and G-Unit did BET’s 106 & Park.
Eminem Battled Drug Addiction With Running: ‘I Became a F—ing Hamster’
“I had absolutely no value for myself and this self-destructive path, it very quickly brought me to a real crisis point and it wasn’t clear at the time the reason. Maybe it was divine intervention.” His battle began during the height of 1D mania. “So at a certain point, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to have a party for one,’ and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life.”
Eminem Celebrates 16 Years of Sobriety on 4/20
Even as I sit here now, I still trip out in my head about how it got to this level. All I ever really wanted to do was to be a respected MC. To make enough money to survive, so that I wouldn’t have to work a regular job.
- “I don’t know how the fuck I’m still here. I was numbing myself.”
- “I remember just being, like, really happy and everything was f–king new to me again.”
- All of these abilities round-out a generally elite musical presence.
Eminem says he ran so much that he injured himself, and realized he needed to mix things up. “I tried out some of those workout DVDs you do at home,” he said. “One of the first ones was Shaun T.’s “Insanity” workout. I know a lot of these what is the drinking age in russia DVD guys are wacky, but I’m alone in my gym; I need someone on the TV yelling to motivate me.” “I started getting OCD about the calories, making sure I burned 2,000 every day.” Soon, the Grammy-winning rapper was running 17 miles a day.
“I would get up in the morning, and before I went to the studio, I would run eight and a half miles in about an hour,” he said, “and followed that up with eight and a half miles at night.” The rapper has stayed busy since putting out Relapse, and your bac depends on has released a steady stream of albums since, including Recovery in 2010 and his most recent, Music to Be Murdered By, in 2020. “There might be [enough songs] but they’re terrible songs,” he added, clarifying there is no second Relapse project.
People obviously didn’t know it yet, but I was starting to realize inside that it was happening, and I always tried to keep it on the low and keep it together as much as I could. He eventually sought help, entering rehab on Dec. 18, 2011. “I got to the point where I knew it was something I couldn’t do on my own,” Gilbert said. “Pissed me off to no end and embarrassed me. I’m a pretty strong-willed person but that was the one thing in my life that I couldn’t get to stick.” “It was easier for me to say that I’m doing it for her because, at that time, I didn’t feel like I was sort of worth much,” he recalled of the early days of their relationship. “I didn’t care as much about hurting myself as I did about hurting her. So, initially it was easier for me to say, ‘I’m doing this for her.’ And now, I’m doing it for myself.”
“I was in a really dark place. I felt like it was over for me … professionally,” Eminem says. “I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block. … Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself — a lot of self-loathing. I was in active addiction. I knew I couldn’t control it anymore.” Em goes on to recount one story from that time period, when he performed for BET’s 106 & Park with 50 Cent and G-Unit and was interviewed afterwards. I remember a few months after Proof had passed, I was about to use the bathroom, and all I remember was I just fell over. The next thing I remember was waking up with fucking tubes in me and shit, and I couldn’t talk. I didn’t understand where I was and what the fuck happened.
“I don’t know at what point exactly it started to be a problem. I just remember liking it more and more,” Eminem says of his addiction to prescription medications in a clip from the documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Having brushed aside accusations that he had a drug problem on the grounds that he wasn’t shooting heroin or smoking crack, the rapper fell dangerously deep into a substance habit that included Vicodin, Valium, and Xanax. Eminem was eventually hospitalised in December 2007 following a methadone overdose, with doctors telling him he had ingested the equivalent of four bags of heroin. In a recent interview for manager Paul Rosenberg’s podcast, he discussed having to relearn how to rap following the overdose. Back in 2022, Eminem opened up about his past addiction and eventual recovery in an essay published by XXL.
So, it should have been one of the first signs to me, but I never thought that I had a problem. As I started making a little money, I could buy more of them. The article comes not long after Em shared his experience of a near-fatal drug overdose 15 years ago in an interview with Paul Rosenberg.
