Eminem says he had to “relearn how to walk, talk and … rap again” after overdosing during his addiction to prescription pills.
The 15-time Grammy winner, real name Marshall Mathers, got sober in April 2008 after a nearly decade-long battle with Vicodin, Valium, Ambien and Xanax resulted in an overdose, which he candidly speaks about in the new documentary, Stans.
“I woke up in the hospital and I didn’t know what happened. I woke up in the hospital with tubes in me and s– and I couldn’t get up,” recalled the Stan artiste, according to Us Weekly.
“I got into this vicious cycle of, ‘I’m depressed so I need more pills,’ and then your tolerance gets so high that you end up overdosing,” Eminem said.
Upon later learning that he’d “missed” one of his daughter Hailie Jade’s birthdays due to his addiction, the rapper “kept saying to myself, ‘Do you want to (expletive) miss this again? Do you want to miss everything? If you can’t do it for yourself … at least do it for them.’ I realised I’m never doing this again.”
Following the overdose, Eminem needed to “relearn how to walk, talk and for the most part had to relearn how to rap again” as his “writing had gotten terrible.” But he got his musical muscles got back in fighting shape “really quickly,” at which point he stopped being “embarrassed” about sobriety.
“I started treating sobriety like a superpower and I took pride in the fact that I was able to quit,” said Eminem, who addressed his addiction in his 2009 album, Relapse.
More recently, he released the song Somebody Save Me, which serves as a heartfelt apology to his kids for missing out on much of their childhoods, as well as a reflection on all the other moments he would have missed if addiction had taken his life.
Stans — which not only offers a look into Eminem’s life and career, but some of the fans who are wholly obsessive with him — is shown at cinemas in the United States for a limited run. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
