Anna David: You'll Never Go Back To Denying Your Addiction After This!

Now I get this is super controversial in recovery circles and I get why it is. I mean, I was absolutely horrified when I was labeled an addict before I embraced the label. And like an addict, I thought was the person in the gutter with the needle in their arm or maybe somebody like the guy I'd given my shoes to. Not like the girl from the nice family who graduated from a good college but just happened to spend her 20s holed up by herself doing cocaine.

Everyone in this room that knows me, which is a good portion of you, knows that I am an addict and that my passion is to help those with addictions. You cannot go online, any social media, any news websites. You can't pick up a newspaper, read a magazine, watch tv and not hear about the opioid addiction epidemic. It's not only devastating America, it's devastating many parts of the world. Many of you are also addicts or have family members that are addicts and often were embarrassed by that label. I know I was for many, many years. It doesn't have to be that way. That's why I wanted my very dear friend and fellow addict, Anna David to speak to you about this very important subject. On November 19th, Anna will celebrate her 17th year of sobriety. Anna is a New York Times best selling author. She's written six books about addiction, recovery and relationships. She and I are currently co writing the miracle morning for addiction and recovery, a book which will be released next year. She's also written for the New York Times, Time magazine and Huffington Post, among hundreds of other publications. She speaks at colleges and has been invited as an expert guest on the Today show, the Talk, Fox News, and the CBS Morning show. Through her company, Light Hustler, she teaches people how to share their darkest experiences so that they can find the light. She's been there, done that. She knows this world inside and out. Anna's title is how to wear your labels. Please help me welcome my dear friend, Anna David.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Well, I get 10 minutes, so can we just take 10 seconds to say I am so grateful to Joe for creating an environment where we can talk about this kind of thing and hear things like what Pedro just shared. So, Joe, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Now, who out there has two different sized feet? Anybody? Okay, interesting, because I, like 30% of the population, by the way, have two different sized feet. Now couple that with the fact that I'm a complete exercise fanatic. And this makes shopping for workout shoes really complicated because I have to pick. Am I going to cater to my Big foot or my little foot. So this one time I totally screwed up. I go to this hipster sneaker store in la and they don't take returns. I don't know that at the time. I buy the sneakers, I cater to the Bigfoot, and I go to my hip hop dance class, and I'm gonna, like, kill it with a fierce pop and lock. But instead of popping or locking, I'm tripping in shoes that are clown size on me. Now, being a misfoot, that's what I call it. There's no actual. If you look up, like, what is this called? There's no definition. So I call it being a misfit or a misfeet or sometimes I call it being a misfit. Why not? Now, when I realized that I had these clown sized shoes, I also happened to be going down to Skid row that night to feed the homeless. And so I thought, why don't I take these shoes? I'll give them to somebody who could use them a lot more than I could. So down I go to Skid Row and I'm like, ready to feel like this excellent person. And I immediately spot a guy who looks like the ideal sneaker recipient, which means he just looked like he could use a new pair of anything. So I hand over the sneakers and I'm ready for his complete gratitude. And instead, he looks at me. He looks at the sneakers, he looks at me again, and he's like, do you have another color? Yeah. So I go home very discouraged about humanity. Here I am trying to give back, and. And this guy who could clearly use my gift is sniffing at it. And that got me thinking. Why did I feel like I needed to be labeled a good person for what I'd done? And that got me thinking about labels in general. Now, I, like all of you, have worn many labels in my life. I'm literally wearing a label on my dress. I've worn the label of woman I've worn. And I don't tell everybody this, the label of cat lady. Because one of my books is about my relationship with my cats. And on my IMDb page, where it lists really cool trivia like has five children. Like expert Archer, Mine says one bit of has a cat. True, but the most important label I've worn is a little less benign than cat Lady. The most important label I've worn is addict. And I embrace that label wholeheartedly. Now, this is interesting because it came up yesterday with Dr. Mate the word addict. And I actually didn't know until he said it that it comes from the word slave. Now you may wonder why I would embrace a label that we talked about yesterday as being a bad thing. And that's because I think it's high time we all started embracing our labels. Now, I'm not talking about the labels other people give us. I'm talking about our self defined labels.

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Now, I get this is super controversial in recovery circles, and I get why it is. I mean, I was absolutely horrified when I was labeled an addict before I embraced the label. And like an addict I thought was the person in the gutter with the needle in their arm. Or maybe somebody like the guy I'd given my shoes to. Not like the girl from the nice family who graduated from a good college but just happened to spend her 20s holed up by herself doing cocaine. But because I was holed up by myself doing cocaine for my 20s, I knew there was something really wrong with me. I thought I was just maybe a freak, not destined for this world, or someone just who would spend her whole life alone. And once the pain of how I was living got to be greater than the pain of changing, which is one of the most painful things in the world, I realized there was something wrong with me. I was an addiction. I still am. I'm just one who hasn't had a drink or a drug in almost 17 years. But let me define addict. Lots of people have lots of definitions. I've even been talking about it this weekend. To me, an addict is somebody who is so uncomfortable with how they feel that they'll do anything in the world to change it. Even if changing it may mean dying. Now back to skid row. When I thought back on the experience, I realized I was so consumed by my own hurt feelings, I failed to see my own prejudice. It's like I saw a guy with an invisible sign around his neck that said homeless. He saw a pair of shoes he didn't like. To me, he was someone who should be so grateful to someone like me for caring. To him, he was a guy with his own story, his own hopes and dreams, his own taste in sneakers who had fallen on hard times. And he probably saw me not as the amazing person I wanted him to see me as, but with a label of his own. Sanctimonious person, trying to feel like a good person. Whatever it was, I don't know. But the problem as I see it, isn't that we label people. It's that we do it in this close minded and judgmental way. If we could use our labels as a jumping off point and not a conclusion, I think it could be one of our greatest tools for advancement. Now think about it. Studies show that when students are labeled smart or motivated, it changes the rest of their lives. But that's not the only good that labels do. Labels give us a sense of solidarity, like a feeling that we're among like minded people no matter what it is. It could be like Dodgers fans. That was a big deal last week in la. It could be Deadheads, Burners, Genius Network members, it doesn't matter. But it makes you feel like a part of a group. Now labels change. And if you don't think labels change. When I was growing up, the worst label you could have was Nerd. It was just like, oh God, you know, that was. It was just absolutely the worst. Now cut to today. Like, there are the gods who walk among us. I live in la. People show me pictures of themselves with celebrities. I'm like, I could care less. Somebody sent me a picture of him with Mark Zuckerberg. I was like, are you kidding me? That's so cool. But Nerd isn't the only label that's changed if you think about it. What about add, which we talked about yesterday? Not long ago, that meant you were pretty screwed up. Now we raised our hands. Who here thinks they have ADD either diagnosed or self diagnosed? You know what? There were more people yesterday. The ADD people are outside on their phones. I think today. People like Richard Branson talking publicly about having ADD and dyslexia. That meant you were stupid. Now it's like, if I'm going to keep with that definition, I got to figure out how Steven Spielberg and John Irving are stupid now. I noticed something when I embraced the label addict. Sober addicts and not sober addicts, just addicts are some of the coolest, smartest, most motivated, most successful people I know. You know, I realized, I was like, it's no wonder that people like Russell Brand and like Elton John and Robert Downey Jr. And these amazing people are addicts. It's no wonder that the people who made me want to be a writer, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, struggled with alcoholism. Now, until I embraced that label, I didn't see myself as smart or motivated or successful or any of those things. But as soon as I noticed those commonalities among all the addicts I was meeting, I started to think maybe that was me, too. Now, when a lot of people out there hear the word addict, they don't picture that. They picture what I used to. The person in the gutter. But it's considered so controversial that the Associated Press last summer released a statement saying journalists shouldn't use the word addict in their stories. Instead, they should say person with addiction. Now, I radically disagree with that. In fact, I think that's the problem and not the word. A word only has a pejorative label if we continue to see it in the way we used to see it. And so that means we can be part of changing it. Joe bringing it to this conference is part of changing it now. On my own road to embracing my own labels, I suffered what we call in recovery. A lot of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization, which culminated in a night over 17 years ago, driving, coked out of my brains, wondering if I should just end it all by swerving into oncoming traffic. Now, I could regale you with more tales of my seedy adventures and misdeeds, but they're really not that interesting. What's interesting is that I wear the label addict squarely on my chest, in turn giving other people permission to do the same. Now, we all have labels we're ashamed of, and that means we can all be part of the revolution in perception. Yes, by just embracing the labels you're ashamed of, you. You can be part of a revolution. As Leonard Cohen saying, there's a crack in everything. That's where the light comes in. So my parting words to you are, look at the labels you're ashamed of. Share them with the people in your lives, and if you're comfortable, share them with the world. And if you don't know where to start, how about the label of human? Or the one I started off with? Misfit. I don't know anybody in the world who hasn't for at least a split second felt like one of those. So that's my message, fellow misfits. Go out there, Embrace your dark labels. Change the world. Thank you.

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