In an emotional essay for The Players’ Tribune, Lamar Odom opened up about his struggle with drug abuse as well as the other darknesses plaguing his life.

In October 2015, he was put in a medically induced coma after he was unresponsive at the Love Ranch brothel in Nevada. He says it was struggles in his life that led to his drug abuse.

“My ex-wife was there in the room with me,” he says about waking up from a coma. “After all the sh** I had done, I was surprised to see her. Honestly, that’s when I knew that I was probably in bad shape.”

“Pretty much every second of free time that I had, I was doing coke,” he writes. “I couldn’t control it. I didn’t want to control it. Rick James said it best. ‘Cocaine is a hell of a drug,’ It’s a hell of a drug. It will make you do things you never thought you’d do. It will turn you into a different person. It will put you in situations where you say to yourself, ‘How the f**k did I get here?'”

On losing his mother at 12-year old: “The day that she passed away, I remember going to see her, and I remember how the cancer had just ravaged her body,” he recalls. “Like if I could go back to that time, and you could put me in that room, I probably wouldn’t even recognize who she was. Her face was so small and she was bleeding out of her mouth. And she kept saying [his nickname] ‘Mookah, Mookah….’

“When I did coke, I felt good for a minute,” he writes. “I stopped having so much anxiety. I didn’t think about the pain. I didn’t think about death. So I kept doing it more and more, but I was still in control. It wasn’t like an everyday thing.”

Read the essay HERE