The singer-songwriter was injured in early June, which led to him relapsing
Credit: Stephen J. Cohen/Getty
Singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly is opening up about the difficult reality of life in sobriety.
Kelly, 37, shared a moving Instagram post on Wednesday, July 29 revealing that he is three days sober — and has now given up all substances, including alcohol — after a freak golf cart accident in early June led him to relapse.
The “Mockingbird” singer, who has struggled in the past with drug addiction, wrote that back in 2021, he told himself he’d be on “the right ‘clean’ journey” so long as he was not using amphetamines.
“Somewhere along the way I became obstinate in my journey, that I wasn’t an ‘addict’ in the traditional sense of the word, that I was only addicted to amphetamines,” he wrote. “ ‘I’ve never had a problem with alcohol, I’ve never had a problem with XYZ.’ ‘See I can be like everyone else, I can show self control, I am in control.’”
View this post on Instagram
Last year, Kelly marked five years of sobriety, and wrote in his post that he’d recently reached a point in his journey where he was able to try and live a lifestyle “that was satisfactory to my carnal impulses because I ‘never had a problem with them.’”
But then came the unexpected. In June, Kelly was riding in a residential golf cart when he hit a root growing out of the pavement. He overcorrected and the cart flipped, throwing him headfirst into a mailbox and essentially breaking his arm “in half.”
For three days, he was given fentanyl, morphine, ketamine, Dilaudid and oxycodone to manage his pain, and he left the hospital with a “month-long” prescription for the painkiller Percocet.
“I needed it for the level 15 pain but very quickly they started running out sooner and sooner. I was chewing them in the pharmacy before I walked out the door,” he wrote. “I was hiding how many at a time I was taking. I was complaining to the [doctor] it wasn’t enough. It awakened something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.”
Credit: Jason Kempin/Getty
Kelly wrote that he decided on July 26 to take charge of his future and get sober again to “end any chance of ruining anything good,” for the sake of his soul, his wife, his family, his art, his career and his people.
“I admitted that whether I like it or not I will forever have a substance abuse disease,” he wrote. “ALL drugs/substances including alcohol and THC are off the table for good (working on nicotine). That if there is something that will scratch an itch I didn’t think I had, I will use it beyond excess and into addiction.”
He concluded: “I am 3 days completely clean and sober again, and intend to remain this way forever, one day at a time.”
Much of Kelly’s music, which blends rock and country with his poignant and profound storytelling, is about his struggles with addiction; his 2018 debut album Dying Star was written following a 2016 overdose, and its 2020 follow-up Shape & Destroy documented his path to sobriety.
Credit: Erika Goldring/Getty
His most recent album, Pale, Through the Window, came out last fall, and largely chronicled falling in love with his now-wife Tia, whom he married in May after a 2025 proposal at the Grand Ole Opry.
“I know that life is not going to be perfect and there’s going to be weaves in and weaves out and difficulties here and there,” he told PEOPLE at the time. “But I think being able to write from the perspective of knowing who I am and knowing who I belong to will actually deepen that impulse of, when it is time to write about the rain clouds, there will be even more substance and a root to it. I know that life is life and I think I’m excited to look through everything through this lens.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, please contact the SAMHSA helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.
Read the full article here
