Royce da 5’9” celebrated his 8 years of sobriety last week. His journey from self-medicating with alcohol to elevated consciousness was not easy but having Eminem by his side helped.
Luckily enough Royce did not go through the extremes of a near-death experience as Eminem before getting clean. However, he had his own struggle. Eminem, who went through this before knew that it was an uncertain time to his friend and offered his support, said Royce in a recent interview with Reginald Da R Star on the Unabashedly Reggie YouTube channel:
My journey was a little bit different from Marshall’s. I don’t know if a lot of you guys noticed that but Marshall really messed himself up. Really bad. With those pills, with those drugs. He OD’ed and he was in the hospital and they had to revive him and it was ugly, it was ugly. So when he finally got out of the hospital he had to teach himself how to rap again. His whole process was just different. He gave me some wise words and some kind words just as an OG in recovery. He just told me things to boost my confidence up. I remember him telling me when I told him that I was stopping he said, “You’re strong today”. He said most people would take this moment and process it as being a weakness because essentially what you’re doing is you’re admitting that you’re powerless over this, this substance. But really, this is the strongest that you’ve been because you’re finally willing to admit [it], you’re taking the first step and this is what you’ve lacked all these years. All these years that you’ve known that this thing could be problematic. So he helped kick my confidence up.
Watch Royce da 5’9″ sharing these memories below:
Watch the full video below:
The Unabashedly Reggie YouTube channel specialises in breaking down songs of Eminem and other hip hop artists, make sure to check it out.
