Growing up, I always felt like I had this secret. From the outside, my family seemed picturesque but from my point of view, my family was battling something so many others experience. You see, my brother has an addiction problem.

My brother and I were born eight years apart, so I spent a lot of my early childhood trying to imitate him and his friends; I took up inline skating, soccer, anything that would make me fit in with him and his group of friends. My childhood was great. Then we moved. He got involved in things he had no business being tied up in, and things changed. Obviously, like with everything, there’s more to this story, but that’s the gist of it; that’s all you need to know to make sense of my story. I was around eight years old when things with my brother became noticeably different. It wasn’t until he had his first run-in with the law that things really started getting serious for me. You see, at the time, I was living in a place where gossip was an everyday part of life. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone and their dog knew my family’s business. They knew my brother had been arrested, but that was all they knew. They didn’t know what was going on behind closed doors; they didn’t know my parents utilized everything at their disposal to help my brother, but they also didn’t seem to care.

It was during these years that I became ashamed of what was happening within my family. I pretended it wasn’t happening. When we moved and people asked about my brother who was in another state, I made up a story. The thing about stories, or rather, about lies, because that’s what I was telling people, is they catch up to you. So when he got in trouble yet again, there was nowhere to run.

Slowly I started telling people. At first, it was a select few close friends that I knew I could turn to when things seemed to inevitably take a turn for the worst. Then I started mentioning it casually, usually using humor to mask the pain. It changed in college. It was out in the open, but instead of joking about it, I found myself comforted and surrounded by people who experienced the same or similar kind of thing.

I’ll never forget the moment it stopped feeling like a secret. It was two or three months into my first semester of college and I was at a retreat with the freshmen girls in my sorority. We were sitting in this massive circle telling our life stories (it sounds painfully cliché; I know). When it got to me, I sort of fell apart while telling my story, but when it was all said and done and we were walking around after and just talking, girls started approaching me. These girls who seemed to have it all figured out were telling me about how they knew how I felt, how they had experienced something similar. It wasn’t something I needed to be ashamed of or hide anymore, because it isn’t something that I am going through alone. You could easily go through this article and replace “brother” with any other family member or friend, because odds are, you’ve been touched by addiction, too.

This isn’t a pity party, and I’m certainly not looking for sympathy, but on the off chance that you’ve been lucky enough not to have addiction affect your life in some way, I hope this makes you think of the people around you a little differently. Everyone is battling something, and if you are anything like how I was, don’t hide it. I am surrounded by the most incredible kind of people because I am (trying to be) open about my struggle. Nobody can help you if they don’t know what’s going on. It’s because of the things I’ve been through that I love harder, fight stronger, and stand taller. It’s not a dirty secret; it’s a part of life.