In this months ELLE, New York writer Cat Marnell reveals her incredible account of what its like to be a successful career woman by day and prescription drug addict by night.
When her two worlds collided, Cat checked into rehab and came out with a new perspective and, in her words, really great hair.
I had been a star assistant, then writer and editor
and my early career success was the only thing about myself I loved, Cat writes in her piece.
Of her drug use, she says: Who was stopping me? When your whole life is a super-ambitious career fuelled by a massive consumption of drugs, you have no energy for friends, old or new or for any kind of romantic life.
She also contemplates how far removed she became from her normal colleagues: What if after all these years of lovely office friendship they realised that I wasnt anything at all like them? They were living lives; I lived for drugs. They were becoming adults, I wasnt.
And on the cathartic effects of writing itself, Cat says: After years of hiding my sickness from the world, allowing myself such abandon and honestly writing about drug abuse has been incredibly liberating.
Funny, insightful and brutally honest, make sure you read Cats memoir in full in the December issue of ELLE, on sale now
