It's possible. Here's the proof.

Jafta's drinking started in her first year of university and slowly became something she reached for whether she was happy or sad. By autumn 2022 she was drinking daily, checked herself into rehab, and genuinely thought her international cricket career might be over.

Four months later, she was playing in a World Cup final. In 2026 she won the Makhaya Ntini Power of Cricket Award for it, and still speaks openly about her recovery so other young South African women athletes don't think they have to hide what they're going through.

One of South Africa's biggest crossover pop stars of the 80s and 90s fought a daily drinking habit for years, with blackouts and failed attempts to just "moderate" it — in her autobiography she's described how bad the withdrawals got, including drinking alcohol-based hairspray when she had nothing else.

She's been sober since 2009. These days she won't associate her name with alcohol at all — she once took a retail chain to task for using her name in liquor advertising without permission.

Before he was known for running marathons, Kabelo was one third of TKZee, one of the biggest kwaito groups South Africa has ever produced — and deep in an addiction that started with alcohol and marijuana before escalating to cocaine binges that nearly killed him.

He's now over two decades clean, wrote a memoir about it ("I Ran For My Life"), and has said staying sober stopped being just about him a long time ago — it became about showing the people watching that it's actually possible to come back from this.

Barrymore was drinking by age eleven and using cocaine by twelve — a childhood spent in and out of institutions, culminating in rehab at thirteen after a suicide attempt. It's one of the most extreme starts of any story on this list.

Decades of sustained recovery later, she's one of the most successful and warmly loved public figures in America, hosting her own daily talk show. Proof that where addiction starts doesn't have to decide where a life ends up.

The father of South African jazz battled drug and alcohol addiction for 44 years before finally going into treatment in 1997. He didn't stop there — in 2001 he started MAAPSA, a programme specifically built to help other South African musicians and artists get the same help he did.

Worth knowing: Masekela passed away in 2018, from prostate cancer — not from his addiction. He got the years of sober, celebrated life that so many people are still fighting for, and used them to build something for the people coming after him.

Cooper was addicted to cocaine, painkillers and alcohol through his twenties — at one point demoted off a TV show he was starring in because of it. A friend, actor Will Arnett, is the one who finally got through to him.

He got sober at 29, in 2004, and has stayed sober ever since — going on to become one of the biggest actors in the world only after he'd already done the harder work first.

Chad has spoken candidly about a cocaine addiction that took him to what he's described as his lowest, darkest point — including an overdose. His mother, Norma, has been openly by his side through it, publicly celebrating each year of his sobriety with him.

He's said he shares his story specifically to motivate other people going through the same thing right now — not after the fact, but while they're still in it.

Before he was Iron Man, Downey's addiction to heroin and cocaine was one of the most publicly documented in Hollywood — years of arrests, relapses, and court-ordered rehab stints through the late 90s and early 2000s. Worth being upfront: his story is centrally about drugs, not alcohol.

He got sober for good in the early 2000s and rebuilt a career into becoming one of the biggest movie stars alive — one of the most recognizable "it doesn't have to end your story" examples anywhere in the world.

Kelly has spoken about a two-year cocaine addiction that cost her money, a home, and nearly her career — something that started, she's said, through the company she was keeping at the time. Her path into recovery began with her first Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

She's now been clean for close to a decade and has used her platform to talk to young South Africans specifically about what addiction actually costs, beyond what it looks like from the outside.