Teddy Geiger reveals how she abused drugs and went to rehab because of anxiety before gender transformation
Teddy Geiger, in one of her extremely emotional revelations, came forward and said recently that before her transition into a woman, she was plagued with a crippling amount of anxiety, which in turn pushed her into a world of drugs and cigarettes. She also revealed that because of her drug abuse and gender crisis, she had to take refuge in a rehabilitation center to get clean and sober.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Geiger told the publication that she was extremely overcome by anxiety over her troubling gender issues and her struggle with her own identity. She said that by last summer, she used to smoke up to two packs of cigarettes and a half-ounce of weed a day.
She also got very self-conscious an obsessed with her nails, and resorted to keeping them painted so that looked gleaming at every glance. “It was the only femininity that I was expressing, so I wanted it to be so perfect,” she recalled. “It was the only thing I could control.”
In September last year, the songwriter entered rehab to “get to the bottom of the gender thing.” She said, “I can remember back to being 5 and looking in the mirror, feeling like a girl and wanting that,” she noted. “But growing up in Rochester, there were limited resources. I’d never met a trans person before.”
After her stint in rehab, she announced her transition in October that year. “I threw away all my boys clothes and started wearing makeup.”
Speaking about her transmission and the hardships she faced because of it, she revealed, “I just feel more open,” later adding, “because I’m willing to talk about everything now, people are then more open with me.”
She continued, “There’s no longer this piece of me back there saying, ‘Don’t go there.’ I used to find that I’d sing songs and think, ‘Ooh, it sounds like I’m talking about that stuff, and I don’t want to talk about that stuff.’ But it was just coming out.”
She also revealed how she used to struggle as a child with regards to her identity disconnect and the fact that she was always thrust into the spotlight for the sake of her career. “I was going through adolescence and having sex for the first time, but it was in this really weird context,” the 'For You I Will' singer explained. “I didn’t have a real support group.”
“The only roles I had done were musician roles, and then they were sending me out for the lead in ‘Spider-Man,’ or like, the military boy with a crew cut,” Ms. Geiger said, motioning to her lanky frame. “Um, it’s not going to work.”
The pop star, who has frequently collaborated with fellow musician Shawn Mendes, got nothing but love when Mendes was asked about her transition since he was one of the most vocal supporters of her at the time. The singer recalled meeting up with Geiger to begin working on his self-titled album after she completed treatment.
“It was the first time I ever saw her sober,” the 19-year-old singer said. “She was like Teddy, but on steroids. There was this electricity running through her.”
Talking about how he found his first defining smash in a demo of “Stitches” sung by Geiger, “She’s mesmerizing and just has a star quality to her,” Mendes said. “She was the person I was trying to sing like.”
“I met someone who really acts like me in the studio, who really sings like me, who gets excited like me,” Mr. Mendes said. “It was a serious, serious connection — deeper than a songwriter — and from then on, I decided she has to be a part of everything I do.”
In her interview, Geiger said that she used to see flashes of her own past pressures in what Mendes was experiencing. “Everyone that’s around you is working for you, and you feel responsible for them,” she said. “But also you’re a child.”
Mendes said he would never forget when he “unconsciously referred to Geiger as ‘she’ for the first time in the flow of conversation.”
“It was right then that everything really made sense to me,” Mendes said. “For everybody that ever questions why people may choose to transition, if they had a best friend or somebody they loved dearly look at them the way Teddy looked at me in that moment, they would no longer question it.”