'Can’t f**king believe I’m alive sometimes': Drew Barrymore opens up about struggles with alcohol and road to self-discovery

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Drew Barrymore recently opened up about her tumultuous life and how she can’t believe that she is “alive sometimes.”

Barrymore, 48, has spent the entirety of her life in the limelight. After first appearing in a dog food commercial when she was just 11 months old, Barrymore became the audience’s favorite through her character of Gertie in ‘E.T.’.

However, as she was riding in the success of her life, Barrymore got entrenched in the challenges as well. Per her admission, she started drinking at the age of nine and entered rehab at 13.

Barrymore got emancipated from her parents when she was just 15. She has struggled with alcohol for a better part of her life as well.

Now, during a recent candid interview with Us Weekly, the celeb-favorite host has reflected on her life and how she overcame the challenges.

Drew Barrymore opens up about her alcohol addiction

During the interview, Barrymore opened up about her alcohol addiction and shared, “I drank for, oh God, since I was nine. And then one day, I just thought, 'I’m never going to do this again'.”

However, she admitted that she has mastered her cravings, saying, “I don’t have cravings. I have alcohol all over my house. I serve people drinks.”

But she is confident in her decision, saying, “It’s a confident choice. But it took me 35 years to get there. So, once I got there, I was really done.”

She shared that apart from drinking, she was also keen to change her lifestyle for the better. Her daughters Olive, 11, and Frankie, 9, with ex-husband Will Kopelman - served as the driving force for her.

She said, “My lifestyle also was something I wanted to change. I didn’t want to drink anymore. Before children, I could get away with it, but [after] I felt like, “This is too loud and glaring, and I can’t ignore it anymore. And divorce didn’t help.”

Barrymore continued, “For better or worse — and I hope and believe it’s for better — you will go through such earth-shattering things a few times in life, you really won’t know where to go or who you are anymore or who you want to become.”

“And especially if children are in the picture, it’s so high-stakes for you to get it together,” shared Barrymore and went on to talk about the agony of self-castigation as she said, “It’s like, it can’t happen fast enough. And then you’re beating yourself up about that.”

Drew Barrymore’s journey toward self-healing

Barrymore, not only opened up about her decision to quit alcohol but also the struggle to maintain the lifestyle.

She continued, “But when I stopped, everything didn’t fall into place. I then had to really go to work and start figuring out how to build myself up and get in touch with why I was drinking like that.”

She explained that alcohol was her way to cope with the other troubles, as she revealed, “It was my coping mechanism. I loved the way that alcohol emboldened me. The anxiety went away. It makes you feel like an immortal that can handle anything.”

She continued, nevertheless, “And then the next day you are living in that chemical aftermath and you feel worse. It wasn’t a new concept to me; it was something I knew my whole life did not work for me.”

“I kept saying, 'I’ll master this one day',” continued Barrymore before adding, “And sometimes it’s as simple as just getting so sick of yourself wanting to do something for the majority of your life, and one day, it finally clicks.”

Drew Barrymore can’t believe how she is 'alive'

Barrymore reflected on her wild youth saying, “I’ve had a 'bad girl' narrative on my back my whole life. I thought I deserved bad things. Now I’m raising two daughters. I can’t do that to myself anymore.”

She explained, “Kind of like the drinking — I’m picking off things one at a time, going, 'I can’t carry you anymore. You aren’t good for me'.”

Despite the struggle, she accepted, “The personal part of me has been the ultimate work in progress. The professional in me feels really brave and never entitled,” and explained, “Always so privileged and grateful. I’ve lost everything. I’ve got it back. I’ve lost it again. Got it back. So I don’t assume anything stays.”

She continued, “I know not to take anything for granted. Whatever difficult times I’ve gone through professionally, I believed I could rewrite things.”

While her professional life has always come back to a state of restitution, her personal life was a different story altogether.

She contemplated, “Then in my personal life, I was a failure and a broken person. I can’t f**king believe I’m alive sometimes.”

But by allowing her sheer will to exert right on her being, Barrymore has finally managed to take control of her life back.

The actress who is turning 49 in two weeks on February 22, said, “And it’s the first time in my life, going on 49, that [the personal and professional] are complementing each other.”

She sounds hopeful as she has finally overcome the struggle and concluded, “Time is the greatest asset we have — it allows things to get better, to shift, to have light come into a dark space. It has taken my whole life to get here, but I’m so happy to be out of the jail in my mind.”