Ashley McBryde Makes Dramatic Life Changes: ‘I Just Needed to Stop Killing Myself’ (Exclusive)

The description stuck, and McBryde kept living up to it. (“I love whiskey,” she says. “I love the way it smells. I’d wear it as perfume if I could.”) Periodically, she made attempts to moderate, she says, but the slope always proved too slippery. Last year, she reached the realization that her drinking had put her on the edge of an abyss: “I wasn’t hurting anyone. I wasn’t unreliable. I wasn’t embarrassing my band or my business. But I was close enough to know that that was the next thing that would happen.”

She decided, she says, “that maybe part of being the ‘whiskey-drinking badass’ is knowing when to set it down, knowing when it’s costing you too much. This had become too costly, and I’m not willing to trade this — what I do, what I love — for anything.”

She says she asked for help “and I got it,” soon surrounding herself with both a therapy team and a treatment team. The hard work began. “At first I was like, I’m not abusing,” she says. “And then when you’re away from it for a while, you’re like, oh, s—, yeah, I was. I definitely was.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

She also learned that understanding and changing behavior wasn’t as simple as just quitting. “It’s all the decisions that lead up to that decision [to drink],” she says. “If you’ve been drinking this hard for this long, everything is that. And so you have to relearn how to do everything. And sometimes it’s really painful.”

The re-education is ongoing, she adds: “I’ll still encounter a situation where I’ll be like, oh, normally I would drink about this. And I go ahead and sit with that feeling and I’m like, OK, you had a great show or you had a great interview, or you had a great interaction, or whatever. Why on earth would you punish yourself for that? It takes a while to understand that’s what’s going on. Literally, it was punishing myself for doing good things. And when I stopped doing that, the good things got better.”

She considers it no coincidence that her career is now next level. In just this past year, she took home ACM and CMA awards for music event of the year (for “Never Wanted to Be That Girl” with Carly Pearce), a Grammy for the same performance and a Grammy nomination for her 2022 concept album Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville. Last December, she reached a personal pinnacle, membership in the Opry; she wept through much of the induction ceremony. Now she’s up for three more CMA awards, including her second for album of the year, for Lindeville, and her fourth for female artist.

What she seems to be enjoying just as much as the accolades is her freedom from conduct unbecoming. “I don’t have to worry about something I might have said after having a couple drinks,” she says. “Now I can go, you know what? I said what I said. I can trust that, and I can trust many, many things.”

And yet she still inhabits a world steeped in alcohol. Nine of the 11 songs on her new album feature at least casual references to drinking; five include aspects of it in the title. That level of frequency, of course, isn’t unusual in the country genre.

“I don’t hate that about our culture at all,” she says. “I still function in the culture, and I still love it. I’m not mad at anybody that drinks. I still love being in bars. I still love all of it. And I lived that life so well that I won. I’ve done enough of it to write about it for the next hundred years.”

But a life without drinking also has meant sometimes making the choice to skip the pre-parties and after-parties at events, and it’s meant learning how to make mocktails after years of being the go-to bartender. It also has meant enduring such thoughtless comments as “I liked you better when you drank.”

The quick-witted McBryde has a ready riposte: “‘Dude, I f—ing liked you better when I drank!”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Today, McBryde says, she still loves “a good buzz,” but now she gets it working up a sweat with regular jogging. Boxing, which she took up at a therapist’s urging, is also giving her a new high.

“Early in the [boxing] training,” she recalls, “I looked like I might puke, and my trainer is like, ‘Are you OK? Do you need a break?’ And I was like, no matter how I feel right now, this beats a hangover a hundred times out of a hundred. And I love it, so now it’s just a thing. Instead of wanting a glass of delicious whiskey after a show, or if something’s going wrong, you gotta get me the bag. It’s so much fun.”

The best buzz of all, she says, “is just being alive.” Now that she feels that she’s fully taken the wheel, she’s not about to let her foot off the gas, especially knowing how fleeting a music career can be. She and her tight-knit band, she says, perform each show as if it were their last.

“I think that’s what gives us that little extra something on stage,” she says. “You can definitely see how much joy and love that we have across the stage.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

McBryde wants a career that lasts a lifetime, and with these new changes, she believes she’s fully equipped herself for longevity. No doubt that reward is greater than any trophy.

“I don’t need a day on the calendar,” she says (though she knows exactly the date she took her last drink). “I don’t need a parade. I just needed to stop killing myself.”

For more from Ashley McBryde, pick up the current issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Source: people.com