Rhyannon Styles’ Help! I’m Addicted: A Trans Girl’s Self-Discovery and Recovery is not just a memoir, but a raw and powerful exploration of the tangled intersections between identity, addiction, and healing. It is her second book, following the groundbreaking The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is (2017), and it picks up where her first left off, with an even deeper dive into the struggles and triumphs of her journey. The book begins with a disarmingly simple and stark confession: “My name is Rhyannon, and I’m an addict.” From that point on, the reader is drawn into a story that is both painfully intimate and universally resonant, offering insight into the process of recovery while shedding light on the unique challenges faced by transgender individuals navigating mental health, identity, and substance use.
Rhyannon began her gender transition in 2012, a transformative year that also marked her introduction to the world of 12-Step meetings. These two life-changing experiences ran in parallel, and in many ways, they informed each other. Transitioning meant facing the world with a new honesty, while recovery demanded the same vulnerability and commitment to truth. The book captures this duality, portraying how the journey toward self-acceptance and authenticity can collide with, and sometimes intensify, struggles with addiction. In her candid prose, Rhyannon lays bare the complexity of trying to build a new life while carrying the weight of old habits and destructive coping mechanisms.
Her narrative spans multiple forms of addiction, including alcohol, food, sex, relationships, the internet, and narcotics. Each one is discussed with brutal honesty and compassion, showing how these compulsions served as both escape routes and prisons.
By weaving her own story through the broader framework of addiction and recovery, Rhyannon avoids generalizations and instead embraces the messy, complicated reality of lived experience. She refuses to present recovery as a neat, linear process. Instead, she offers a portrait of resilience that is all the more compelling because of its setbacks, contradictions, and moments of doubt. For readers who have faced addiction in any form, her story is likely to feel both familiar and affirming.
What sets Help! I’m Addicted apart is how it situates these struggles within the broader context of LGBTQ+ mental health. Transition, while deeply liberating, often comes with emotional, social, and psychological challenges. For many trans people, addiction can emerge as a response to stigma, isolation, and the internal conflicts of navigating an often-hostile world. Rhyannon’s book makes this link explicit, highlighting how addiction and transition can overlap and complicate each other. By doing so, she breaks new ground, offering one of the first memoirs to directly address this intersection and providing a source of solidarity and hope for others in the LGBTQ+ community.
From performing at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, to dancing with Kylie Minogue on ITV, to roller-skating nude at the Barbican Art Gallery, Rhyannon has consistently pushed boundaries and challenged expectations. That same boldness infuses her writing, which never shies away from difficult truths. Her literary career began with The New Girl, where she charted the contours of her early transition and life as a transgender woman. With Help! I’m Addicted, she turns her focus inward, confronting the hidden battles that accompanied her public transformation. Beyond her books, Rhyannon has contributed essays and articles to major publications including ELLE UK, i-D, Vice, The Berliner, and Sunday Times Style, where her distinctive voice has brought nuance and honesty to conversations about gender, creativity, and cultural identity. She has also ventured into podcasting, scripting episodes for Broccoli’s #Cancelled series, proving her versatility across multiple mediums.
Rhyannon’s artistic journey is not limited to words or performance. Her deep interest in sound has led her to host regular gong-bath and sound-meditation events in Berlin, offering another form of healing and exploration. In 2023, she formed the dance-punk band Objet Darling and joined Nike’s Well Collective, further expanding the range of her creative practice. Her presence has also been felt in the commercial world, where she has appeared in campaigns for Nike, Zalando, The Body Shop, and Tu Clothing, and collaborated with Tatty Devine and Poppy’s Papercuts for the Women of the World Festival. Each of these endeavors reflects her ongoing commitment to challenging perspectives, embracing complexity, and crafting experiences that transform both artist and audience.
Help! I’m Addicted is ultimately more than just one person’s story. It is an invitation to reconsider how we think about addiction, recovery, and identity. It offers practical wisdom, heartfelt advice, and most importantly, hope. For those struggling with addiction, whether within or beyond the LGBTQ+ community, Rhyannon’s honesty provides reassurance that they are not alone. For allies and readers seeking understanding, the book is a rare opportunity to witness the resilience of someone who has fought not only to survive but to thrive. In placing her own vulnerability at the center of her work, Rhyannon Styles achieves what few writers can: she turns her personal story into a universal mirror, reflecting back the courage, pain, and possibility within us all.
Available via waterstones.com
Photo via Instagram
Other related sources:
Post a Comment