Here is the full transcript of Sam Fowler’s talk titled “Wasted: Exposing the Family Effect of Addiction” at TEDxFurmanU conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I have some people that I would like you guys to meet. This is my family. Now, 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 and 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.
My Brother’s Struggle
That is my oldest brother. He was diagnosed with the disease five years ago. 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 or 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 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 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 themselves. I know that doesn’t make much sense. It didn’t make much sense to me at all. I didn’t understand how a drug that I wasn’t using could be dangerous to me.
The Family’s Burden
Over the years, it unfolded and I understood why. The reason this is, is because in the very worst moments of addiction, in 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. When I was 16, 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 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 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, 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. It was 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 or relapse.
Facing Reality
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 the 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 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. 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 the thought, 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 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, or 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 that this will be the best way to conquer addiction. We won’t talk about it. It will be hidden. No one will know, and we continue life as normal. The show must go on the 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 is 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’s Role
Society has done that as well. Think about the biggest weapons we have against addiction in our society: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous. We 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.
Shifting Perspectives
And that’s not true. We’re ashamed to recognize that this is a part of our society. 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 a 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?
The True Face of Addiction
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 hand, 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 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 brother’s 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. 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 of fate, tonight I am also celebrating my 21st birthday. 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 has 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 has given me a backbone, who has 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, in my life and in your life, that make life worth living and addiction worth surviving. Thank you. Woo-hoo!
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Sam Fowler’s talk, “Wasted: Exposing the Family Effect of Addiction,” offers a deeply personal and insightful look into how addiction affects not just the individual struggling with the disease but their entire family as well. Through her family’s story, Fowler challenges the stigma surrounding addiction and the culture of silence that often accompanies it. She argues against the common misconception that addiction is a result of moral failing or poor upbringing, emphasizing instead that it is a disease that can affect anyone, regardless of their background.
Fowler advocates for vulnerability and openness, suggesting that sharing our stories and struggles can be a powerful tool against the isolation that addiction breeds. She highlights the importance of facing addiction with courage and love, rather than fear and shame. By bringing her own experience into the light, Fowler aims to give a voice to the countless families impacted by addiction and to inspire a more compassionate and supportive approach to recovery.
Her message is clear: vulnerability is not a weakness but a strength that can lead to healing and understanding. “Wasted: Exposing the Family Effect of Addiction” is a call to action for society to address addiction more openly and to support affected families with empathy and solidarity.