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On the Next Gen NYC season two reunion, fans were stunned when it was revealed that Ariana Biermann‘s ex, Hudson McLeroy, had gone to rehab due to a drug addiction.
Ariana, 24, was the first to mention it, noting Hudson, 24, was “down bad in a f*cking drug addiction.”
“Hudson had just gotten out of rehab, and I was kind of going through a very traumatic point in my life,” she later shared.
Bravo’s The Daily Dish recently featured a tell-all interview with Hudson where he opened up about his drug addiction and where he stands with Ariana.
“I think to really understand my journey with addiction, you almost have to go back to when I was 13, and I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, because that’s when my entire world changed. I was angry – I was angry at the world, I was angry at God, and I remember constantly thinking, ‘Why me?'” he began.
Hudson noted there was a “lot of anger and emotion” attached to being diagnosed with Diabetes.
“Then, by 14 or 15 years old, I started experimenting with different substances,” he shared. ” I don’t think I recognized it as a problem then – I was young, I was trying to figure out who I was, and I think in some ways, I was also looking for an escape from how I felt, just to feel normal for a little while.”
Once he turned 18, he had a medical procedure that left him in severe pain, and he started to self-medicate.
“When I woke up without anything left, I experienced withdrawal for the first time in my life,” he said. “I was 18 years old, I didn’t really realize what addiction was yet, and suddenly I was experiencing it firsthand. And the part that made it even harder was the doctors had told me that the physical pain from the procedure should’ve started getting better around that same time, but it didn’t. The pain continued for almost 3 months – maybe longer – so I was dealing with this intense physical pain while also beginning to understand what my body had become dependent on.”
He noted addiction is something he’s going to have to “understand and be aware of for the rest of my life” and that recovery “is something I continuously have to choose.”
As for Ariana, Hudson noted she’s “always been a huge support system for me, but after our most recent breakup and everything that happened throughout Season two and the ten years of history we have together, I realized I can’t rely on her to carry me through my sobriety, or expect her to drop everything in her life to take care of me.”
“That isn’t fair to put on anyone, and looking back, I can see how selfish that pressure became,” he added.
Hudson also revealed they currently are “not on talking terms” as they decided that “no contact is the healthiest way for us to move forward and give each other the space that we needed.”
“I think everyone’s journey with addiction is different, and my journey with addiction has always been very different from anybody that I’ve seen, or anybody that I’ve been around, because when I’m with Ariana, I don’t have any need to feel like I wanna do drugs,” he also shared. “Like, that doesn’t exist in my life. My anxiety doesn’t exist. It’s like I have so much comfort with her. She’s able to take away all my worries. But if her giving me that kind of comfort is causing her the kind of pain that she feels, then it’s not worth it.”