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Mary J. Blige Candidly Opens up About Battling Addiction Early in Her Music Career: ‘It Was Either Put up or Shut Up’

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Perseverance has been a staple in Mary J. Blige’s music. Albums like My Life and classic songs like “Be Without You” deal with overcoming pain. A lot of times, that pain can be manifested through rough experiences of love. However, other times, she’ll reflect on the life she’s led and all of the strife that came with it. Ultimately, it took a long time for her to reach a point where she could fully let the pain go. Instead of finding momentary relief in vices, the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul gradually healed.

But the journey to get there was far from smooth. In a 2007 conversation with the New York Times, Mary J. Blige looked back on everything she went through in the buildup to her album Growing Pains. “It was years of painfulness to get to this point. But once you’ve been going through so much self-hatred and stuff for so long, you get to that point and you say, ‘Gosh, am I good enough?’” she asked herself. “And then something says — and this is the growth — yes, you are. And that’s why I named the album Growing Pains because it was that moment that I realized, you know what, it’s going to take a lot more growing and a lot more pain to sustain this breakthrough.”

Mary J. Blige Gets Candid About Her Rocky Road to Recovery and Healing From Grief and Addiction

When Blige thinks back on the person she used to be, she wishes she had someone in her corner to raise her up amidst all the pain and uncertainty. “I wish I could just take her, and I wish I could raise her. Me, this Mary. Because she just wanted to sing, and she didn’t know anything about the music business. She always cared about people more than she cared about herself. And she would give so much away to people. No one would give her anything back. And it would hurt her really badly,” Mary J. Blige told the New York Times.

When she reached My Life in November 1994, she likened the record to a cry out for help. At the time, there was a copious amount of drugs and alcohol that might’ve seen the end of her life. Ultimately, though, she’s keenly aware of how many people saw themselves in her pain. By 2001, Mary J. Blige had reached a simple but pivotal breaking point.

“I was dying. I had come off of being an alcoholic and a drug addict and everything else. And I just — it was either put up or shut up. It was two choices. It was: You want to live or you want to die?” Blige recalled. She credited her husband at the time, Kendu Issacs, for bringing her up when she was at her worst.

“And so I prayed and I was like, ‘Lord, you’ve got to help me, you’ve got to send me someone that’s going to help me or send me a friend or something,’” Mary J. Blige continued. “And here he comes. And he just started questioning me and challenging me and not being afraid to go against me in a positive way up against that negative stuff.”

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