I have some people that I would like you guys to meet. This is my family. Now  for a while, I've felt that my family was different. Now I know what you're  thinking. You look at this picture and you think they don't look different. They  look perfect and polished and happy. Well, I felt different for very long time. The  reason I felt this way is because of the little boy on the left side of the screen.  That is my oldest brother. He was diagnosed with the disease five years ago,  and it's changed my life in ways that I couldn't fathom before. The disease I'm  referring to is addiction. My oldest brother is an addict, and he's been struggling  with substance abuse for about five years now. Now it's really important for me  to frame this to you as a disease, because that's exactly what it is. It's been a  really long time for me to grapple with that idea in my head. When I first heard  about addiction and saw it in action, I thought it was something monstrous,  scary, but my brother described it to me in this way. He told me that it feels like if someone put a cup of water in front of you, and you haven't had a drink in three  days, and you're incredibly thirsty, then they try to have a conversation with you  while sitting right next to it. Odds are you're not going to care about what they're  saying about the relationship or about how you're behaving. The only thing you  can think about is having that glass of water. Now imagine if you were in that  kind of survival mode all of the time, how you would act and how you would  think and how you would feel. This survival mode is what has caused a lot of  internal psychological repercussions in my family. I learned about all of this  when I first went to a rehab when I was in high school, as far as my friends knew I was on a fun beach vacation in Palm Beach. On my Snapchat, it was all  pictures of palm trees and the pool and fun, but in reality, we were going to  rehab for a family weekend at an addiction center. That's where they told me  something that changed my life forever. They told me that addiction is actually  more dangerous for family members than for the addict themself. Now I know  that doesn't make much sense. It didn't make any sense to me at all. I didn't  understand how a drug that I wasn't using could be dangerous to me over the  years it unfolded, and I understood why. The reason this is is because in the  very worst moments of addiction and the overdoses and the relapses, the  suicide threats, the addict is numb. They're completely unconscious to who they  are and what they're feeling. But the family is sober, not only do they have to  watch somebody that they love turn into somebody that they don't know, but  they also have to watch them turn into somebody that they might fear, which is  what I've experienced. I first experienced the psychological effects of the family  disease that I like to call addiction when I was 16 years old. I was 16, I woke up  one morning, my parents were out of town, and my other brother was gone as  well, and it was just me and my oldest brother in the house. I was ecstatic,  because we were finally at that age where we could be friends and we could  start getting to know each other on a deeper level. I woke up that morning with  plans of what we were going to do that day, how we were going to spend it 

bonding and doing our favorite activities. I went to his room to wake him up for  brunch reservations, knocked on his door, and there was no answer. So I  walked in, that's when I saw him on the bed, motionless. I thought he was just  sleeping, so I went over and sat on his bed. That's when I saw him trying to  murmur words to me that didn't make any sense, and he was trying to move and couldn't. And I felt his hand. It was cold and it was beating so slow, his heartbeat going so slow. At that moment, the only thought in my head was, Is my brother  dying? I'm 16. I don't know what that looks like. I don't know if this is an  overdose, a relapse. He's just sleepy. I couldn't tell, but I knew I was too small to pick him up and put him anywhere and take him to hospital. I didn't know who to  call or what to do, and the only thing I could think is, how do I save my brother's  life? At that moment, I couldn't decide anymore if I wanted to have a childhood. I couldn't decide. Side, if I cared about who I was taking to homecoming that  weekend, or if I had a math test on Monday, all of those seeing things suddenly  seemed very arbitrary when it came to something so life and death. At that  moment, everything changed, and I started to harbor these feelings of fear every day. It would be a happier story for me to tell you that that was a one time  occurrence, but it wasn't that's something that I've experienced so many times  over these past five years, and my family has as well, the phone calls and the  suicide threats and the terrifying moments when you think it might be your last  words to that person. Now imagine with me for one moment, somebody you love more than anything in the world. Imagine them in your head. Now imagine if  every morning and every night you woke up with a thought and went to sleep  with a thought that they might be dead the next day. Imagine what that would do. I can tell you what it did to me. It me. At first it was just anxiety, then it turned into chronic anxiety, and then chronic depression. Eventually and recently, it turned  into suicidal thoughts of my own, which was terrifying, and even more recently,  self harm, which is something I never thought I would do to myself, but addiction and seeing it in action affects your mind in a different way. You start to become  numb to the idea of death, and you start to become numb to these terrifying  events. More than that, I knew that if I came and told my family what I was  feeling, or if I went and told my friends, it would seem stupid, because what do  my emotions matter when somebody's life is at stake? Why should I share my  experience? I thought of myself for a very long time in one word, a burden. I  thought that I was going to be a burden if I opened up and shared what I was  feeling, I thought it didn't matter. I decided silently to myself that I would be  anonymous, that I wouldn't talk about it, that no one was going to know about  this, because I didn't want to put any extra stress on my family, on my friends,  put them through anything more than they needed to go through. It wasn't just  me who decided to be anonymous. My family, silently and collectively, decided  to do this as well. We thought together, this will be the best way to conquer  addiction. We won't talk about it. It'll be hidden. No one will know, and we 

continue life as normal, the show must go on same way. It always has. The  reason we started doing this at the beginning was because we wanted to save  my brother. We thought that anonymity would be the way to make him safer, to  put him in the shadows so that people wouldn't judge him differently, see him  differently, maybe that he would not get a job, or his friends would leave, or  something like that. But then we started realizing it wasn't working, and maybe  the real reason we wanted to be anonymous wasn't to save him, but to save  ourselves. There's a stigma against addiction in our culture that we don't like to  acknowledge we like to think of families of addicts as almost bad families. Often  I hear when I say that my brother's an addict, people ask me, what happened in  his childhood to make him become an addict? What traumatic event triggered  this? Right? Well, I'm here to say we were raised the same way it could have  easily been me that became an addict and that I just equate to luck. Sometimes  it's not necessarily about a traumatic event or a bad family. It is a disease inside  of your brain, but having that stigma for us and thinking that we were going to be viewed as a bad family and that we were all bad in some way made us want to  stay hidden. It's not just my family and I that decided that Anonymous was the  best way to go. Society has done that as well. Think about the biggest weapons  we have against addiction in our society, alcoholics, anonymous, Narcotics  Anonymous. They even have family groups, but they're all anonymous. My  question is, why do we think that this helps? Why do we want to stay  anonymous? Well, I believe we only want anonymity for two reasons. The first is fear. We're either afraid of the addict, of what the disease is, of what they've  done, about what people think of us, or we're ashamed. We're ashamed to have  them in our life, that they're part of our family, that we might have done  something to cause them to be this way. And. But that's not true. We're  ashamed to recognize that this is a part of our society. And for me, I was  ashamed to recognize that this was a normal occurrence in my life. That was  just something that was happening after all the years of seeing how addiction  affects families, I can tell you two things. Number one, I am not afraid of  addiction anymore. I am not afraid number two, I am certainly not ashamed of  my brother. I love my brother. I think he's brilliant, and the fact that he has  disease saddens me, but it does not make me ashamed to call him my brother  and to have him in my family, what I propose is vulnerability. We also have a  belief that vulnerability equates to weakness. We think of it as our Achilles heel,  something that can completely destroy us. But I think vulnerability might be the  only way we can fix this. I'm not here to necessarily bring awareness to  addiction. If you've seen addiction in your life, you know what it can do. You're  pretty aware. What I'm here to do is to give it a face different than how you've  imagined it before, because I bet when you first came in here, you might have  viewed addiction as something dark and scary and dirty. What if I told you  addiction looks something more like this? My family, we keep addiction in the 

dark, and that is our biggest mistake, because addiction is an interesting  disease in that it completely thrives in the darkness. That's where it does its  absolute best work. Darkness thrives in the darkness, which is why I think we  need to bring this problem to light. Vulnerability is amazing to me. It's absolute  courage. Vulnerability is a mother sitting down her child like my mother did last  summer, she held my hands, and I saw her cry for the first time in my life. When  she cried, she told me that she was afraid. Never in my life have I had more  respect for another woman than in that moment, because to admit you're afraid  to a child, somebody that you've tried to be composed around for so many  years. That means the world. Vulnerability is watching your sister talk about  addiction and talk about your family in front of you and hope that she says the  right thing. Vulnerability is telling the world that you've self harmed, not knowing  if they're going to see you differently. To me, that is not how I show weakness,  it's how I show strength through all of this. My anxiety and sadness hasn't  necessarily come from a place of worry, it's more come from a place of feeling  voiceless, feeling completely unseen. My brothers expressed this to me as well,  that not only does he feel voiceless, but that no one even cares to listen. No one cares well by listening to me today, I have to thank you, because you've given  me a voice. Now, if everyone would do me a favor and please take out your cell  phone and turn on the light and hold it up high. Like I said, addiction makes you  feel voiceless. I think we need to give it a voice. The world that I envision to be  perfect is not one where we completely mask everything bad and shove it to the  ground and pretend it doesn't exist. The world that I envision to be perfect is one where we can say, yes, these awful things happen. It's happened to me, it's  probably happened to you, and yet, even then, we can be brave and strong and  we're going to continue because there is so much love in this world, in an ironic  twist fate. Tonight, I am also celebrating my 21st birthday. Well, as you can  imagine, there's not going to be any alcohol in celebration of my 21st birthday,  and I could not care less. I really couldn't. Because while there will be no alcohol tonight, no lack of alcohol, there will be absolutely no lack of love. Because in  the end, I don't think my story's been one about pain and sadness and fear. It's  been about every single person along the way who has encouraged me and  supported me and held me up when I thought I was going to fall down, who  have given me a backbone, who have been someone to cry to someone to hug,  someone to love on. That is what my story is about. It's all the people in life, my  life and. Your life that make life worth living and addiction worth surviving. Thank  you. 



آخر تعديل: الأربعاء، 28 مايو 2025، 11:59 ص