In this four-part series, Alice Austin interviews four prominent dance music artists, exploring where their relationships with drugs and alcohol began, what led them to quit, how they returned to the dance music world and the long-term rewards of sobriety.

Trigger warning: Contains discussion of suicide, depression, alcohol, and drug misuse.
 

Part 1: The Reckoning

Just like lots of Brits, DJ, producer and Defected Records darling Sam Divine started drinking in her early teens. “You’re 14, you’re down the park, you're drinking White Lightning and Lambrini,” she says, chatting from her home in Cheshire. She’s off on tour to the US tomorrow, and she looks bright-eyed, fresh and energised. “It all started on that park bench.”

When Sam was 15, she went to a party where she took her first pill. “I hated it,” she says. “I was so sick. I thought I was dying. But I loved the feeling of warmth that pill gave me, that I could talk to an absolute stranger. I was addicted from that moment.”

From then onwards, Sam went out every weekend, totally in love with the music, the community and the feeling the high gave her. “I started DJing when I was 19. We had a lot of after-parties, there were lots of drugs and alcohol,” she says. “Traumatic things happened in my childhood and teenage years, and gradually over the years the substances and alcohol weren’t just about getting high. I used them to numb pain and mask everything.”

Sam Divine has the career most DJs dream of. After signing with Defected Records in 2009, she began touring the globe, playing major festivals from Tomorrowland to Glastonbury and hosting the Defected Radio Show. She launched her record label DVINE Sounds in 2015, started her new label imprint 555 in 2025, building multiple careers in the process, and cemented her legendary status with a 2019 BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix and the 2024 DJ Award for Best House DJ.

But all the while, she’s been battling her demons and struggling with her mental health – and it all began during her first Ibiza season. 

“Drugs were cheap and easy to get hold of,” she says. “I became addicted to sleeping pills. I was young and naïve and Ibiza was my playground,” she says. “When you work a whole season, you forget about home and the real world. It was my sanctuary.”

And these habits remained throughout her career. “On the outside, I was having the time of my life,” she continues. “But I was struggling internally. The pressures – flying to all these amazing places on my own, and then going back to the hotel intoxicated – it was incredibly lonely at times. The next day you’re back on the plane, and then you go again, just to get over your hangover. And gradually, over the years, my low moods and burnouts just got worse and worse. I knew there was an issue when I stopped enjoying my sets as much. Music has always been a lifeline for me. I knew I had to get help at that point.”

Dance music and drug consumption has always come hand in hand. Some say it started in the States, others Ibiza, but everyone agrees that ecstasy emerged in the late ‘80s and dominated dance floors in the ‘90s. In the UK, towns hit by recession, poverty and hardship consumed it most enthusiastically. Some report that it created a sense of community in places that had little cohesion or opportunities. In Scotland, Celtic and Rangers football fans started dancing instead of fighting. In Northern Ireland, clubs brought warring communities together. In Berlin, ecstasy coincided with the reunification with the East and West after the fall of the wall.

So if drug use is part of dance music culture, how do you manage consumption when it’s also your full-time job? Jumpin’ Jack Frost, real name Nigel Thompson, is a British jungle and D&B producer who came up in the late ‘80s. He founded legendary D&B label V Recordings in 1993, whose roster includes Roni Size, DJ Die, and Krust, and produced one of jungle's most seminal anthems, “Burial,” in 1994.

He’s a legend in the game, but very nearly lost everything to drugs and alcohol. 

“I started drinking quite late, at 35,” he tells me. “I only smoked a bit of weed, I never took drugs or drank. But I’ve got an addictive personality, so once I start doing something, I go all the way.”

Nigel says he started taking cocaine socially in 2002, and quickly ended up taking it alone. “It starts off fun, like you’re the life and soul of the party, and then suddenly it just turns really dark,” he says. “I became someone that I didn't recognize.”

He says he’d arrive at gigs wasted, unable to perform as expected. “I’d turn up and people just didn’t know what they were gonna get,” Nigel says. “I was very successful at a very young age, and when I was young I was very balanced and focused and driven, never around the wrong people. But then I started getting into the wrong crowd. By 2019 I was smoking crack cocaine.”

Hrdvsion, AKA Nathan Jonson, is an electro producer from Vancouver Island, Canada, and once he discovered dance music he soon started to sneak out to raves with his friend. “I was always sober, maybe smoked weed, but the whole scene was so crazy we didn't need anything to make it more interesting,” Nathan says.

He occasionally took psychedelics, but it was only when he started DJing and spending more time in clubs that alcohol became dominant. “That was more of a coping mechanism, so I could be part of this world where I felt uncomfortable and anxious,” he says. “Only recently have I learned more about how drugs and alcohol impact people with ADHD. It felt like aggressive meditation where I was forcing my brain to turn off. If I got drunk enough, I would feel calm.”

When Nathan heard that Janice Joplin needed a bottle of wine to get on stage, he felt strangely comforted. “Alcohol abuse is demonised, but it helped me get through some difficult times,” he says. “It was what I needed. I don’t think of it as bad, but the thing that got me through. As long as you don’t get caught up and stuck – because that's a whole other problem.”

Tony y Not, AKA Mimi, is a Zurich-born, New York–based DJ and producer whose high-energy, genre-blurring sets fuse acid house, cosmic disco and pop cuts. Since she launched her career in 2017, she’s played fabric, Watergate and Brooklyn Mirage, and released on Kompakt, Nervous and fabric, all while lapping the world multiple times.

Like many people who connect with dance music, Mimi had a healthy relationship with partying. She didn’t consume anything heavily, and her journey to sobriety was less about substances themselves than about what surrounded them.

“Growing up in Zurich, drinking was fully normal,” she continues. “So my exposure to alcohol came early, and substances a bit later. But generally I felt really safe getting lost in music and dance floors, and I found it very healing at first. The community accepted me.” 

Mimi felt secure and happy on the dance floor. “It really felt like my heart opened up, I felt love for the first time in my life, things I’d never felt before,” she tells me.

But that sense of healing didn’t easily integrate into her everyday life. “I’d go to festivals all summer, creating these experiences disconnected from reality in extreme ways. I went to Burning Man 7 times. I was disconnecting from life. But there’s a difference between abuse and medicinal use, and the boundaries blur quickly if you're not careful.”

Mimi was living that disconnected lifestyle all year round, and when she decided she wanted to DJ, too, it became normal. “That became addictive as well,” she says. “And then it became my job.”

When she moved to New York City, partying remained a big part of her life, and despite enjoying herself, she questioned its sustainability. “I remember turning to friends at an after-party on a Sunday and asking them ‘when will this actually stop? When will we stop being like this?’”

Part 2: Reset

It’s the summer of 2020, the world is in lockdown, and Sam Divine is in hospital. She called herself an ambulance after a nervous breakdown triggered suicidal thoughts. “I was so scared and confused, I didn’t know what was happening to me,” she says. 

For the first time in her life, she’s telling the doctors everything: about her decades-long addictions, her lack of control, her depression, her anxiety, her terror.

“I was in a really dark place,” Sam tells me. “For 10 solid years I was in this tour bubble, then because of Covid it all just stopped. It was like someone put the brakes on hard and everything just came to an absolute crash.”

Checking herself into hospital was the first step on Sam’s road to recovery. After that, determined to turn her life around, she found herself a breathwork life coach, and that’s where she began her sobriety journey. “I’d been in complete denial about how bad everything had gotten,” she says.

By 2022, Sam decided to play all her shows sober, so she drove herself to her first gig back on the circuit and requested a sober rider. She felt more present and connected during her sets, so continued to play sober for about 18 months. Then Sam played at an event sponsored by a tequila brand. “That was a downfall for me,” Sam recalls. “I had a few tequilas before my set. I knew it could be the beginning of a slippery slope.” 

Then, in March 2024, Sam had just boarded a plane to start a month-long South America tour when she got the call that her mum had passed away, while her brother was in hospital on life support (and thankfully survived). But Sam couldn’t succumb to her emotions because she had to be strong for him. 

“So I had to bury my grief really deep to look after my brother and be strong for my family,” Sam says. “I took two weeks off, then flew out to finish the second part of the tour. I didn’t give myself time to grieve.”

Eventually, it caught up with her. “In September, when the Ibiza season finished, grief hit me like a brick wall. I just lay in bed Monday to Thursday. I was hurting, self-medicating again, and I had no motivation for anything that made me happy. I had to drag myself to the airport and put a brave face on, which was exhausting in itself,” Sam remembers.

Everything came to a head in the winter of 2024. “I was on my honeymoon and the only night I drank I blacked out – probably because I hadn’t drunk in a while – but it was enough to put me off alcohol for life. That was the last time I drank,” Sam says. “I was in a dark place and no one could get me out of it. Not my family, not my friends, not my husband. Now I know it was just the grief talking. I was exhausted, I was burnt out, I wasn’t enjoying my shows. I just felt like a ghost. Nothing was fulfilling me at this point. The grief was too much to handle.”

Then, in January 2025, Sam checked herself into rehab.

In dance music, it can take time for people to recognise they have a problem because the industry normalises high consumption of drugs and alcohol. In many ways, artists are incentivised to take drugs. They help you stay awake for a set, they help you bond with promoters, and they’re often given out for free. After-parties, sessions and three day benders are often glorified, blurring the line between social and real addiction. That’s why it can take several attempts over the course of decades for people in the industry to seek help. 

That was Nigel Thompson AKA Jumpin’ Jack Frost’s experience. “I was just around the wrong people,” he says. “And then after a while, I was the one leading the party. I was the instigator.” 

As he went further off the rails, Nigel realised he was going to have to change a whole lot more than his drink and drug habits if he wanted to straighten himself out. “I was only hanging around with whoever wasn't gonna hold a mirror up against me,” he says. “So when you suddenly decide enough's enough, you have to change your environment, your friends, your girlfriend, you have to change everything, otherwise it's not going to work.”

Nigel used to be someone who was never late, well-dressed and reliable. “But I was letting everyone down,” he says. “I just wasn't myself. I was completely unrecognizable to the person I really am, and at some point you have to hit a real rock bottom.”

So, in 2019, he checked himself into rehab. “I was there for six weeks and it wasn't really that helpful,” Nigel says. “When I came out, I just kind of carried on doing what I was doing.”

Nigel says he wasn’t yet ready to commit to sobriety. “You have to really want to change,” he says. “And then when I was finally ready, it was because I fainted at home and ended up in hospital. And I decided that was enough.”

That was three years ago, and when he checked himself into rehab for a second time he used the tools and techniques from his first experience to get through it. 

“I’d been in therapy for 17 months as well, and I’d done a lot of inner work,” Nigel says. “I was starting to wonder what makes me behave this way. Because you can’t fix what you don’t understand. And that's a lot of really hard self-discovery. You have to own the part you play in your own suffering.”

Hrdvsion’s relationship with alcohol and drugs came to a head when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. “I started feeling the effects of cigarettes and getting out of breath walking upstairs, and my mom had breast cancer, so I was just like, fuck, I don’t want to wake up one day and have given myself cancer,” he says.

So Nathan originally quit drinking so he could quit smoking. “But in doing that, everything changed,” Nathan says. “After a month and a half, this crazy clarity happened.”

Living in Berlin at the time, Nathan started distancing himself from people who expected him to act a certain way. “It's quite hard to do it on your own,” Nathan says. “I had to really separate myself from a lot of people, because they were enabling me to keep drinking and drugging. And when I was getting sober, people were telling me I wasn’t funny or interesting anymore, so I had to really separate myself from society and find the strength within myself, without much support from other people in that world. Because you’re rejecting their standards.”

Tony y Not’s reset moment also came in the form of a health crisis. “I got really sick with COVID,” Mimi says. “I mean, really sick. I was in a wheelchair for a year. I was bed-bound and completely disabled. I couldn’t consume anything at that time because I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t watch movies. My brain was too inflamed.”

While Mimi healed, she dreamt of getting back to full health, and the idea of jeopardizing that with partying wasn’t on her radar.

“I had to create a lifestyle around my illness and that made it easy to do healthy stuff,” Mimi says. “Five years later and I’m still not 100% recovered from long COVID, so I decided to cut everything out. I don’t crave it, and in retrospect I’m so grateful it happened because it was really problematic the way I was treating myself, my mind and my body.”

Mimi doesn’t feel that substances were ever an issue for her, but is wary about the way they can be used as coping mechanisms. “Like, the actual issue is you're not able to face yourself or stay present with yourself,” she says. "You're so uncomfortable, you need to mask it and you can do that with anything – smoking, sex, drugs, alcohol, food. There’s so many different ways. I went through something so crazy that forced me to learn to deal with my mental health issues. And because I did that, my coping mechanisms are a lot healthier than they used to be.”

Check out Tony y Not’s podcast Safe Space Series, which focuses on mental health and nightlife.

Part 3: Rediscovery

In January 2025, Sam Divine spent 28 days in a rehabilitation facility. She’d been battling drug and alcohol addiction for over 20 years and it had become a matter of life or death. To outsiders, the wildly successful DJ, producer and Defected Radio host was living the dream, touring the world, releasing chart-topping house music and gracing the cover of DJ Mag. But behind closed doors she was falling into the abyss, and only drastic measures could get her out of it. 

“When I went to rehab, everything changed,” Sam says. “It was a very holistic approach. I was doing mindfulness and movement and yoga and breath work, and I wrote three songs. I just put everything out there.”

Sam had only written one song before – “Cravings” – and it was about her ketamine addiction. “That’s actually coming out on my label this summer,” she says.

Sam describes her sobriety journey as beautiful. Not only did she regain her will to live, she ignited new depths of creativity. “Every day I’m waking up with a positive mindset,” she says. “I'm bouncing out of bed, I'm hyper-focused on all my projects. I'm so much happier in myself and found this profound inner peace which I didn't have before.”

But there were challenges. Five days after Sam came out of rehab, she went on tour in Asia and it wasn’t easy to navigate the walk through Duty Free, the complimentary champagne on the flight, or the mini bar at the hotel. Sam had to reintroduce her new, sober self to the fans and the industry, surrounded by the very substance that caused her downfall.

“It highlighted that the music industry isn't a safe space for sober DJs,” Sam says. "I've picked up, like, four alcoholic drinks this summer, thinking they were sparkling water, and it's really challenging to navigate that.”

Sam is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a programme that requires total abstinence from alcohol. “My mindset is that if I drink, that’s the end of my life,” Sam says. “Because it's not just one alcoholic drink for me. It's ketamine and laughing gas and then depression, guilt, shame, disappointment and all these things that come with it.”

Because one sip of an alcoholic drink could be the end of all Sam’s hard work, she has to be hyper-vigilant when playing shows. “Some promoters don't support my sober rider,” Sam says. “I have a crew rider that has lots of alcohol on it, and that’s always supplied, but half the time things like ginger shots, smoothies, electrolytes, soda water or a face mask aren't on my rider, and they're the things that keep me safe.”

Sam will take a ginger shot instead of a vodka shot, and energise herself with smoothies to overcome exhaustion. “Sobriety highlights the impact of flying and late nights and early mornings,” Sam says. “The blessing is, I have this new-found energy that just came out of nowhere.”

When Jumpin’ Jack Frost, real name Nigel Thompson, checked himself into rehab in 2022, he had to ask himself some difficult questions – ones he had been avoiding his whole life. “Therapy changed my life, because I found out so much about myself,” Nigel says. “It gave me the tools to sustain being sober and to love myself again.”

One of the keys to his success was a total recalibration of his social circles. “I had to create a new standard of who has access to me and when,” Nigel says. “I had to acknowledge my weaknesses and my triggers, and create a life away from that. You need tools to do that, because it’s easy to revert back to default.”

Now, he exercises every day, he’s focussed, he meditates and he helps others. “I try to give my time to people on a similar journey to me, and help younger people get on the right path,” Nigel says. He does a lot of workshops and programmes to support young people, regularly working with an organisation called The Hummingbird Project to help folk struggling with addiction.

But sobriety is a constant negotiation. “I go away twice a year for metabolic resets to maintain my well-being,” he says. “It’s constant, at no point can you stop and say you’ve done it. That’s not how it works. I’m always developing and re-wiring my brain, challenging it. The mind is a complex thing and you have to stimulate it in a positive way.”

As Nigel slowly rediscovered his connection to music away from sessions and after-parties, his passion reignited. “I just fell in love with it all again,” he says.

For Hrdvsion, AKA Nathan Jonson, sobriety meant re-discovering his own values and boundaries beyond those set by the music industry. 

“You’re rejecting this set of standards, but it felt really healthy,” Nathan says. “I had this realization that I am worth taking care of. I guess I’d never thought I was valuable.”

Nathan created a bucket list of things he wanted to do sober, the first of which was to play Panorama Bar in Berghain. “I knew I needed to be together for that show,” he remembers. 

Nathan opened that night, and over the course of four hours it got busier and busier. “It was my favourite gig I’ve ever played,” he says. “It was super overwhelming, because I felt so emotionally connected. My eyes were watering because I was so emotional. The crowd would see it and cheer and I’d well up again. A few times I straight-up cried. It was a crazy, crazy experience. If I was drunk, I would have just played the show. I wouldn’t have felt any of that.”

Sobriety means losing that punctuation between your weekends and weekdays, with no time-out from reality. “It's crazy to be sober,” Nathan says. “It means I'm willing to face myself over and over again. There's no break from looking at myself in the mirror.”

Tony y Not, AKA Mimi von Koerber, had to rediscover her connection to music while recovering from chronic illness. Hit with long COVID, she had no choice but to quit drugs and alcohol to allow her body to recover, so she played her post-lockdown shows sober.

“I was just on a natural high,” Mimi remembers. “Because I wasn't disconnected from myself, I had this, like, raw experience. It sounds so corny, but I’ve cried several times while DJing sober. It's a very spiritual experience.”

Mimi says these feelings cannot be recreated with drugs and alcohol, because they’re raw and real. “When you're really in the flow, really connected, it’s a psychedelic experience in itself, right?”

Mimi has a podcast called Safe Spaces Series, where she speaks to folk in the music industry about mental health, in the hope to normalise these conversations and make others feel less alone.

“Last year, I had really bad depression, and I totally got why people drink,” she says. “You don't want to be exposed to these thoughts, and it's so heavy and painful, all the shame, guilt, like, all these emotions that come up. I wondered if I should start drinking. Like, I didn't want to feel this stuff.”

Mimi refrained from drinking alcohol to manage her depression, but it led her to question what sobriety really means. “It’s always about coping mechanisms, so it’s easy to get addicted to other things,” she says. “Like, what if you quit drugs and alcohol and develop a sex addiction? Is that sobriety? I think addiction is whatever you use to avoid dealing with your shit.”

Part 4: Reward

I’d been working as an electronic music journalist for three years when I started questioning my relationship with drugs and alcohol. Born and raised in South London, I started drinking at the age of 12, and as an adult I never learned how to function in a social setting without alcohol. Drugs came much later, when I was 23, alongside my interest in dance music, festivals and raving. 

Once I started, I couldn't stop. I was taking a cocktail of drugs every weekend – ketamine, MDMA, mushrooms, weed, pills. It started while I was going through a painful break up and wanted to be unconscious. I didn’t want to feel a thing. 

Drugs and alcohol helped me avoid my emotions, so when my dad died suddenly in June 2016 I went straight to Glastonbury and plied myself with drugs. I moved to Berlin four weeks later, where things got much worse. Grieving, lonely, and desperate for connection, I turned to nightclubs so I could be near people for longer. In Berghain, I didn’t have to face my feelings or myself. 

Soon, I was jetting around the world writing about dance music for various magazines, caught up in a whirlwind of free alcohol and drugs, festivals, backstage passes, and multi-city tours with world-famous DJs. On Instagram, I was having the time of my life, but back at my Berlin apartment, I felt hollow, desolate, detached, and undeserving of love. It felt like I was looking at the world through glass. I only ever felt connected while clubbing, but that feeling vanished in everyday life.

In September 2019, after one particularly deranged experience at a festival in Lisbon, I started to wonder whether drugs and alcohol might be stopping me from finding the connections I craved. So when lockdown came and the world shut down, I took the opportunity to reevaluate. I spoke to some sober friends – Hrdvsion was one of them – and after I heard “I just wish I’d done it sooner” for the umpteenth time, I decided to try it myself. 

The first month sucked. Everyone called me boring, and I felt it. My social battery ran out fast, I got headaches, and I had an identity crisis. But something told me to stick with it, and after 3 months, the curtains opened, and the world shone in.

My mood improved exponentially. Errands I used to dread became enjoyable. My energy returned, and conversations became more honest and interesting. I had spare time and energy so I learned to DJ, which enhanced my relationship with music. My writing improved, my curiosity deepened, and although I lost some friends, I made new ones. 

I realised that drugs and alcohol had made me so detached from myself, it was impossible to connect with anyone else. How could I expect anyone to get to know me when I didn’t know myself?

In April 2026, it will be 6 years since I quit drugs and alcohol, and my dependency feels like a distant memory. I simply don't think about it anymore. I’m still deeply connected to clubbing, and I still travel around the world writing about culture. The difference is those magical moments feel even more special because I know they’re really happening. Now, everything I feel is real.

Dance music has always been a sanctuary for marginalized groups, many of whom experience disproportionately high rates of trauma as a result of systemic discrimination, violence, and socioeconomic hardship. In other words, dance music’s very roots are intertwined with trauma, which is proven to lead to substance addiction. Scores of studies explore the link between adverse childhood experiences and substance abuse. According to the National Institutes of Health, approximately 50% of people with PTSD will also have a substance use disorder. 

That’s not to say there is anything wrong with big nights out, blow-outs, and staying up all night with the help of substances. It is only an issue when drugs and alcohol are used to avoid dealing with that trauma. Dance music’s relationship with drugs and alcohol isn’t just about hedonism and escapism, it’s also about self-medicating to heal from racism, sexism, homophobia, assault, grief. It’s easy to get swallowed up in the culture without dealing with our trauma head-on. 

Sam Divine spent over 20 years self-medicating before checking herself into rehab in January 2025. “The biggest blessing to come out of this has been my faith,” Sam says. “I’m a born-again Christian. I read the Bible and pray every day. In recovery, you have to go back to those dark places and unpick it and make sense of it. And it’s just been a beautiful journey. I can't ever see myself going back. I just wish I’d done it sooner.”

Now, Sam is regularly invited onto panels to talk about mental health and sobriety in the dance music industry, and feels infinitely more fulfilled in everyday life. “I'm rediscovering who I am,” she says. “God keeps me on my higher path, I got into painting-by-numbers and it’s so healing. I’m painting horses, I’m painting love birds, it cracks my husband up. Everything I start, I see through until the end and I give it 100%.”

And Sam says her music writing has blossomed. “I’m going into my sessions with so much confidence,” she says. “I sit in bed at night just making loops and writing lyrics. I have so much gratitude for having this second wind in life, and being able to do it with a smile on my face. I find beauty in everything now.”

Nigel Thompson, AKA Jumpin’ Jack Frost, says his career has sky-rocketed since he quit drugs and alcohol. “I’m more successful now than I’ve ever been,” he says. “I got stuck into production, I’m playing lots of gigs again. I’m in demand, and I’ve become a bit of a poster boy for sobriety.”

Nigel says that it took a little while for the dance music community to see that he was taking sobriety seriously, and now people around him change their behaviour. “I was playing a gig a few weeks ago, and I was in the green room and I could tell everyone was just waiting for me to leave,” he says. “I just knew that when I left they were going to start doing whatever they're going to do, but not while I was there.”

It makes Nigel feel great, like he’s a responsible and reliable adult again. “It encourages me to keep going,” he says. “And everyone says I look good, my skin looks great, I seem healthy.”

For anyone struggling with addiction, Nigel has some advice. “It’s never too late to turn your life around,” he says. “Therapy can change anyone’s life, and that first step is the hardest thing but it can change everything. I mean, look at me, look where I was and look where I am now. I run a successful clothing brand, I’m DJing all over the world, I just signed to Def Jam Records. I’m doing stuff now that I would have never thought possible ten years ago.”

Hrdvsion, AKA Nathan Jonson, says the ultimate reward of sobriety is the range of experience. “People think that you're abstaining from something, but actually you're just letting in so much more,” he says. “When you drink and take drugs, you're actually abstaining from a full experience in a natural sense.”

Nathan says he’s not in the business of demonising drugs or anyone who takes them, but there are moments he’s experienced sober that are more eye-opening and crazy than any experiences he’s had on drugs. “Just feeling electricity ripping through your body and knowing it’s a pure, real thing that’s happening to you,” Nathan says. “When I drank, there was a bit of a cloud, and after 6 weeks of being sober I got this wave of clarity. I see everything, I smell everything, food tastes better.”

Tony y Not says her reward has come in the form of her physical and mental health. “Just staying real,” she says. “I feel healthy, clear, focussed. There’s no hangover. And it’s not just physical, I’m not suppressing anything any more. I’m letting my emotions come up and my triggers and sitting with them and dealing with them.”

Mimi says she used to be terrified of all her suppressed emotions, but now they’re on the surface she feels so much better. “Without those substances I’m able to deal with all of that,” she says. “It feels good. I feel like I’m connected to my true self or my higher self, there’s no filter.”

Now, Mimi’s in the process of ending her reliance on external validation sources. “I’m taking a closer look at why I started DJing in the first place, and what that does to your self esteem,” Mimi says. “There’s only so many slots out there, social media is perfectly curated, people are on top because of weird algorithms, and now I just want to focus on making music, making my album and focusing on my podcast. I want to help people out there who might need to hear what we have to say.”

If you're struggling with drugs and alcohol, you're not alone. 
Links for support below:

• SAMHSA – National Helpline & Treatment Locator (US)
  Free and confidential support for mental health and substance use issues, with referrals to local treatment services and care options.
   
• With You – Free Drug, Alcohol & Mental-Health Support (UK)
  Confidential support services (online chat, referrals, advice) for people in England and Scotland.
   
• MusiCares – Addiction Recovery Support Groups
  Offers free weekly virtual addiction recovery and emotional support groups specifically for music industry professionals and creatives, led by licensed facilitators.
   
• Music Support (Music industry helpline & workshops)
  Confidential helpline, mental health & addiction resources, and workshops tailored to music workers (artists, DJs, crew, managers, promoters).
   
• DanceSafe – Harm Reduction & Peer Safety
  Nonprofit with education, peer counseling, and harm-reduction tools at raves and festivals; good for people navigating nightlife while choosing safer behaviors.