An Instagram model has spoken candidly about her journey to sobriety.
After getting hooked on drugs and alcohol aged 15, Holly Valentine was “vulnerable and lonely” as she hung out with the “wrong” crowd.
As her mates were older than her at the time, she felt peer pressured to live dangerously.
The 26-year-old, from Los Angeles, California, recalled: “I started using drugs at 15. I have a really amazing and irritatingly stable family, I just wanted to see some s***.
“I used to be drug friends with this girl who would consistently try to pimp me out or just basically use me as an offering to get whatever she wanted.
“I was just a teenager who thought a bunch of cool older people wanted to be my friends, and I was vulnerable and lonely.”
As a young teenager, Holly necked alcohol and used drugs like cocaine, MDMA and pills regularly.
She said: “I was using cocaine, drinking and using pills in high school which I’m embarrassed to admit – but at the time I thought that’s what everyone was doing.
“Then when I was 17 I tried speed – thinking it was cocaine – and I went home and stayed up all night cleaning and getting ahead in all of my classwork.
“I was already taking ADD meds that had been prescribed to me and it honestly just felt like the same feeling but at a higher dose.
“I liked the feeling of having 24 usable hours in the day and I didn’t realise how high I was actually getting.
“Even after high school and in university I was holding onto this narrative that I had my life together.”
At 19-years-old, the Instagram star accidentally overdosed and had to be resuscitated.
Her family tried to monitor what Holly was getting up to but this didn’t stop her from turning back to drugs.
Holly recalled: “The doctors had been forced to resuscitate me and pump my stomach – I’d been in a coma for 12 hours.
“At this point, picking me up from the hospital, my mum knew something was wrong.
“She tried taking away my privileges and keeping me at home but wasn’t sure if I was just a troublemaker or if I had a substance abuse problem and needed help.”
The NHS is on hand to help if you need help with drug addiction or alcoholism.
You can see your GP for support and discuss potential treatment options.
If you’re not comfortable talking to a GP, you can approach your local drug treatment service yourself.
Visit the Frank website to find local drug treatment services.
If you’re having trouble finding the right sort of help, call the Frank drugs helpline on 0300 123 6600. They can talk you through all your options.
Holly continued: “My family have always been there for me – even at the worst of it – and although some friends couldn’t cope with it, I don’t blame them.
“It was pretty obvious that there was a problem but no one really knew what to do.
“I didn’t have a formal intervention like they do on TV but a lot of people tried to get me to stop.”
As the Instagrammer was hanging around with drug gang members, she worried about being trafficked or harmed.
Then in autumn 2011, she was arrested by police who found her carrying drugs after a night out in Southern California.
Holly was held for a week before being sentenced to six months of rehabilitation, which is the wake up call she needed to change her life.
She said: “My mum, dad and my lawyer basically decided for me that I was going the treatment route and at the time I was very upset but now I’m grateful.
“I have probably the most innocent family in the world and they didn’t see the signs of drug addiction, just erratic behaviour.
“They definitely caught on once I escalated to more serious drugs but thankfully my parents and family did a lot of work on their end in therapy to understand what addiction actually is and today they are my biggest support.”
The following year, on 8 June 2012, Holly went sober – going through the 12-step rehab programme.
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She hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol or any drugs, barring weed she takes for medicinal reasons, eight years on.
Holly’s mental health has also come on leaps and bounds since she went to rehab.
She said: “After sober living, I realised I could no longer enjoy doing drugs or spent time with the people I thought I missed so much in rehab.
“I’d always been nothing to them but now they were nothing to me. I got sober and started my journey on discovering how to validate myself.
“Happiness and success is the best revenge. At the beginning I was angry and wanted to have a word with anyone who ever hurt me but I quickly realised there are millions of other things I can do with my life and that was that.“
After getting sober, the @holly.treats Instagram star went to university where she studied alongside her marketing and modelling jobs.
Holly now looks back on her addiction as something that has helped make her successful.
She said: “I saw how bad life can get and nothing motivates success more than fear and spite.
“I will never let anyone else tell me who I am or what I’m capable of.
“My addiction also prepared me as a businesswoman and as an artist, and nothing bad that happens in my life today remotely compares to my old life.
“As a result, nothing surprises or scares me, or feels unsolvable.“