A young Cork woman has revealed how she overcame a battle with alcohol and drug addiction, self-harm and an eating disorder.
Lauren Edwards, 27, self-harmed and attempted suicide at her lowest point but is now celebrating three years sober.
She has been documenting her journey to sobriety and wellness on her blog laurenorlucifer.com ever since.
Speaking about how she started drinking at just 12, Lauren told The Irish Sun: “I was just following the crowd, trying to fit in and trying to be cool.
“I got so sick I blacked out but I loved it. It meant I didn’t have to be in my reality. Drink gave me confidence, I felt prettier and smarter.”
She later experimented with marijuana and hard drugs, with her addiction taking a turn for the worse when she emigrated to Australia.
Calum Best hopes talking about his dad's drinking problem will help others
Lauren was hospitalised several times and says she wanted to die at one point.
She said: “I wanted to end it all.
"I remember looking at pics of my baby brother and my family, crying and saying sorry. I wanted to be freed.”
And she admits she's lucky to be alive today after years of substance abuse and using class A drugs.
Lauren said: “I shouldn’t be here. I should just be a memory.
“But I survived, and something is pushing me to do this, to be a voice for people who can’t talk.”
She returned to Ireland where she entered a treatment facility but admitted she had relapses along the way on her journey to sobriety.
Mum of tragic Donegal teenager Liam McGlinchey urges young people to take care of friends at parties
She explained:“People said I could just have one drink. I tried different drinks, and the moral of the story was that I can’t drink at all.”
And she also battled eating disorders which she believes are linked to her substance abuse.
Lauren also opened up about how she was caught up in a photo-hacking scandal in 2016 which saw her pictures posted on a porn site.
Her contact details were also circulated around a Dublin prison.
She said: “It was horrible. I felt so unsafe. I had rape threats, the threat of acid in my face.”
Lauren turned to Valium to help her cope with the stress but realised she was in danger of becoming addicted to it.
Three arrested following seizure of €300K worth of drugs and cash in Wicklow and Dublin
"I knew I had to stop, and once I accepted I had a problem that took the power away from it", she expained.
Lauren hopes to document her experiences in a book one day and now says she uses her blog to show the "real me" to her followers.
She said:“Nobody sees the reality behind that, the fact that I go to AA meetings, that I’ve been in treatment.
“So I decided to share the real me in my blog.
"No human is perfect, we all have character defects and we have to accept them because we can’t live in a world of denial and perfectionism."
Lauren's blog can be found here.
