
Kid Cudi has discussed his struggle with mental health over the years, and that continues in his upcoming book, Cudi: The Memoir. In an excerpt obtained by GQ, he opens up about nearly overdosing while working on his album Man on the Moon II.
“I was at peace with dying,” Cudi began, recalling a night in his New York City apartment where he’d been “crying for hours” and had just done “more coke than I ever had in my life.”
“I tried to get up off the bed, but my legs wouldn’t work, so I collapsed to the floor and started to crawl,” he wrote. “Eventually, I gave in and just laid on the ground. My heart was racing. It felt like it was going to burst any minute.”
“‘You made great music that people loved,’ I thought,” Cudi continued. “‘But this is the end.’”
In the memoir, Cudi described how he started using cocaine as a way to grapple with fame and gradually increased his consumption. He said he believed that being Kid Cudi would “transform my life in all the best ways,” but would later realized it was “not like anything I had imagined.”
By the time he started working on Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, Cudi admitted he had thoughts about dying by suicide.
“After we’d finished a session, I’d be alone Googling exit bags. I was thinking about a way I could actually do it. I was plotting it. There’s a song at the end of Speedin’ Bullet where I say good-bye, and that was meant to be my final album,” he writes. “I was going to kill myself at the end of that album, or before it came out, or during that cycle. I was not planning to live that year. Not many people around me expected me to either.”
Cudi: The Memoir comes out on Aug. 12.
If you are in crisis or know someone in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or by visiting 988lifeline.org. You can also contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
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