All the memories of my career are really fuzzy. It’s like I drank away the memories. I will be four years sober this September.

I had my first drink at 21. I remember it was Jack Daniels. I went and hung out at a college with my friends and they finally got me to drink. People had been trying to get me to drink for years, since I was in my late teens. I just never did it, I was never really into it. I didn’t start drinking heavily until my mid-to-late 20s.

When I started drinking I immediately found a little groove with it. My first drink of choice was Bacardi Limón. I found something that was sort of working for me — like a drink that I could stand the taste. I had a few experiences that were like “I had fun last night, we were fucked up!” I just kept going. The way that it works with me — or anyone else that is wired like an addict — is that you do things in binges. Not just drinking, anything that you like.

For example, there’s this restaurant called J. Alexander that we used to go to in Michigan, by my house. They’ve got this carrot cake that is crazy. I think I ate that carrot cake every day for a month straight. I just kept going back for the carrot cake. And this is since I’ve been sober. That’s just to give you an example of how I am.

Alcohol was the main thing — a drug — that took off with me. I tried other things, I used to do ecstasy, but that was just something that I did while I was drinking. It just so happened that I was always drinking every day, so I wanted to do ecstasy too. But I couldn’t do ecstasy without liquor. I’d see people popping pills and they were feeling good, but it was impossible for me to pop a pill without drinking. I needed to do both together.

Alcohol led to most of my bad decisions. I’m not even blaming everything on it. I chose to be under the influence so much, for such a big part of the day, that I was pretty much drinking from sun up to sun down. As soon as I would wake up, I would brush my teeth, take a shower and look for a drink. The first thing I would do was hit the liquor store, whether I had eaten or not.

Alcohol made it easier to work into my life the newfound fame and notoriety as a rap artist. I had the kind of career where you feel like you can drink and still get your job done and have more fun doing it. Alcohol got rid of the nervousness, the anxiety and all of the things that come with being an artist. It was like I skipped right over that part of it.

I thought it made me more creative at the time. In retrospect, I would say that it didn’t. I would say that I used it when I was being creative and the more I used it, the more my brain started to look for it. It was like training a dog so every time he hears the bell, it’s like a trigger for whatever you are training him to do. Basically that is what you do to your brain with alcohol. Like if I was on my way to the studio, I’d automatically start craving that trigger, like it was a part of it.

You don’t realize it until you stop drinking and then everything you try to do feels weird. Public appearances, shows, everything you thought you didn’t need to drink for, but now you are doing those things and you feel like you should be drinking.

When I first got sober, I would go to do shows and it would be on my mind and I would just have to fight through it. I’d have to tell myself “I have to get through this without it.” The very first show I lost my voice immediately, as soon as I touched the mic. My first thought was that if I had a drink to loosen up, then maybe my voice would return. But I knew that was the addiction talking. After that, all of the shows went well. The more I performed, the more I got accustomed to doing them without liquor. Now it’s like second nature. Same with recording.