Being Honest Made the Difference–Andrew

The following is the transcript of Andrew’s speech at NCPSG’s 10th Annual Addiction Awareness Vigil at 6 South Avenue in New Canaan, held on September 2, 2026. To view the video of his speech, just CLICK HERE.

For a long time, I avoided my own feelings, and convinced everyone else I had it all together. Both seemed to work for a while — until they didn’t.

There was another way, I just hadn’t learned it yet.

I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember. The older I got, the more intense it became. I found relief for the first time in high school, when I started drinking and smoking. I quickly realized these fell short — they didn’t manage my symptoms well enough, and they were harder to hide from the people around me. So I moved on to cocaine, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, and eventually opiates. Initially, these worked far better at suppressing my feelings than anything before had, allowing me to thrive by every external measure. I was an accomplished student-athlete with plenty of friends and a loving family — all while on my way to being recruited to an Ivy League school.

Tonight’s vigil is being held in the town over from where I grew up — a part of the world where people were judged by things others could see from the outside, never by what was actually happening on the inside. Because of that, hardly anyone talked about struggling, which made it seem like nobody did. I got the impression that if people knew I was having a hard time, they might think less of me. So when I started to fall behind, my instinct wasn’t to ask for help. It was to work harder at looking like I didn’t need any.

But the more I used, the more I struggled. I was starting to lose the things that were supposed to prove I had it all together, to myself and everyone else. By the end of my freshman year, I’d gotten kicked off the team and out of the school that recruited me. At one point, I weighed just a hundred pounds. I was starting to become unrecognizable, inside and out. Ashamed of my reality, I was willing to do anything that would help me escape from it. And finally, when I was twenty years old, I overdosed.

Until then, I’d managed to conceal or explain away the extent of my addiction from other people — including my family. Lying in a hospital bed, with nothing left for me to hide, I decided to finally let them in.

That decision led to something more deliberate: I started asking for help, and kept choosing to actually be honest about how I was doing. All this time I had expected people to respond with judgment, maybe even disdain. What I got instead was curiosity, interest, empathy. Talking about what was actually going on — regularly, out loud — did something for me that using never had. For the first time in years, I felt relief instead of dread. That feeling is what made me want to keep talking.

Being vulnerable isn’t a single choice, or even a series of them. Like staying sober, it’s something I’ve had to build into how I live each day, and I don’t always get it right. There are still days I default to managing how I feel, and what people see, instead of letting anyone in. Before I got sober, the only strategies I had were using, and working hard to look like I had it all together. Both were faster, and for a time easier, but neither one changed anything.

Being vulnerable is the only thing that’s actually helped. Along with the unconditional love and support from my family, and from many of you here tonight, it’s what let me build a life — and a way of living each day — that I couldn’t have imagined back then.

This isn’t just about my story. Tonight’s vigil is for those we’ve lost to this disease, and for those still fighting it. This is the tenth year we’ve gathered like this. When I got sober eleven years ago, events like this one were rare — not because fewer of us were struggling, but because only a few of us were talking about it. Since then, this vigil has continued to grow, with more people finding their way here every year. That’s proof people are benefiting from talking.

And there are some of you here, right now, still deciding whether it’s safe to let anyone see what you’re actually going through. If that’s you: find one person, and let them in.

I worked so hard to hide what I was going through that being honest felt like failure at the time — and yet it’s one of the only reasons I’m still here.