Nicole Hough for AFTER Magazine: Robbie, we’re so happy to have you as our cover and interview for this issue! Let’s get into your story. Where did this whole journey start for you? 

Robbie Shaw: [The story] begins way back in my childhood. Drugs and alcohol [played a large part in my life growing up]. My father was an alcoholic—a very active, functioning alcoholic—throughout the majority of my childhood. He was also pretty successful, and those two things together created an interesting environment. There was this very pretty picture [on the outside], and then behind closed doors, it was a little ugly. My mom was very loving, [but] she came from nothing and then married a man who worked his way up and did well so all of the sudden they were highfalutin in the South and making money… You know what comes with that…it comes with some torture. You hear it a lot in the celebrity world. It comes with some ugly stuff. I grew up with a lot of opportunity and privilege, but it was an environment where there were inconsistent priorities that I don’t necessarily subscribe to or agree with now. 

I first tried alcohol at 12 years old. I was in sixth grade and I vividly remember riding my bike down a hill in my neighborhood and looking up at the sky and seeing the streetlight and thinking, “Holy cow, this is great!” It lit me up and I was kind of off to the races after that. Throughout junior high and high school, I’d do a little acid and lots of drinking. I was an athlete, so I had that high competitiveness—the stress, the pressure, and the work-hard-play-hard kind of mentality. That was normal in most places across the country and [especially] in the South. It was like you see in movies—a lot of tomfoolery.