I have some people that I would like you guys to meet. This is my family. For a while, I 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, polished, and happy. Well, I felt different for a 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 a 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. It's really important for me to frame this to you as a disease because that's exactly what it is. It took me a long time to grapple with that idea. When I first heard about addiction and saw it in action, I thought it was something monstrous and 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 hadn't had a drink in three days, you're incredibly thirsty. Then they try to have a conversation with you while sitting right next to it. Odds are, you're not gonna 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 the time—how you would act, 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 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, 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 themselves. 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 began to understand why. In the worst moments of addiction—the overdoses, 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 they love turn into somebody they don't know, but they also have to watch them turn into somebody they might fear, which is what I've experienced. I first experienced the psychological effects of the family disease, as I like to call addiction, when I was 16 years old. I woke up one morning, my parents were out of town, and my other brother was gone as well. 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 gonna do that day, how we were gonna spend it bonding and doing our favorite activities. I went to his room to wake him up for our 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. He was trying to move, and I felt his hand—it was cold, and his heartbeat was beating so slow. At that moment, the only thought in my head was, "Is my brother dying?" I'm sixteen—I don't know what that looks like. I didn't know if this was an overdose, a relapse, or if he was just sleepy. I couldn't tell, but I knew I was too small to pick him up and take him to the hospital. I didn't know who to call or what to do. The only thing I could think of was how to save my brother's life. At that moment, I couldn't decide anymore if I wanted to have a childhood. I couldn't decide if I cared about who I was taking to homecoming that weekend or if I had a math test on Monday. All of those 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. It's something that I've experienced many times over these past five years, and my family has as well. The phone calls, the suicide threats, 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 the thought and went to sleep with the thought that they might be dead the next day. Imagine what that would do. I can tell you what it did to 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. Even more recently, it led to 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 to these terrifying events. More than that, I knew that if I told my family or friends what I was feeling, it would seem stupid. Because what do my emotions matter when somebody's life is at stake? For a long time, I thought of myself as a burden. I thought that if I opened up and shared what I was feeling, it wouldn't matter. I decided silently to myself that I would be anonymous, that I wouldn't talk about it, and that no one was going to know about this because I didn't want to put any extra stress on my family and friends. It wasn't just me who decided to be anonymous; my family silently and collectively decided to do this as well. We thought together that this would be the best way to conquer addiction. We won't talk about it, it'll be hidden, no one will know, and we will continue life as normal. The show must go on the same way it always has. The reason we started doing this 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 or see him differently, thinking he might not get a job or that his friends would leave him. But then we realized it wasn't working. Maybe the real reason we wanted to be anonymous wasn't to save him but to save ourselves. There is a stigma against addiction in our culture that we don't like to acknowledge. We often think of families of addicts as bad families. When I say that my brother is an addict, people often ask what happened in his childhood to make him become an addict. What traumatic event triggered this? Well, I'm here to say that we were raised the same way. It could have easily been me who 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 your brain. But having that stigma and thinking that we would be viewed as a bad family made us want to stay hidden. It's not just my family and I that decided anonymity 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? I believe we want anonymity for two reasons: fear and shame. We're afraid of the addict, of the disease, of what they've done, or of what people will think of us. Or we're ashamed—ashamed to have them in our lives, to recognize that this is a part of our society. I was ashamed to recognize that this was a normal occurrence in my life. After all these years of seeing how addiction affects families, I can tell you two things: number one, I am not afraid of addiction anymore. 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 this disease saddens me but does not make me ashamed to call him my brother and to have him in my family. What I propose is vulnerability. We often believe that vulnerability equates to weakness, that it's 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 from how you've imagined it before. I bet when you first came in here, you might have viewed addiction as something dark, scary, and dirty. But 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. 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. To admit you're afraid to a child, someone you've tried to be composed around for so many years, that means the world. Vulnerability is watching your sister talk about addiction and your family in front of you and hoping 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 haven't necessarily come from a place of worry; it's more come from a place of feeling voiceless, feeling completely unseen. My brother has expressed this to me as well—that not only does he feel voiceless, but that no one even cares to listen, no one cares. 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, 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, 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. They have happened to me. They’ve 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 of fate, tonight I am also celebrating my 21st birthday. Well, as you can imagine, there's not gonna 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, there will be absolutely no lack of love. 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, supported me, and held me up when I thought I was going to fall down, who has given me a backbone, who has been someone to cry to, someone to hug, someone to love. That is what my story's about—it's all the people in my life and in your life that make life worth living and addiction worth surviving. Thank you.