Showing results for "The Shadow" in Alcoholism

Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her pulse-raising memoir. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.

For almost 10 years, Ashleigh Nowakowski stood on stage alongside her brother in front of countless students across the Midwest sharing their stories of the impact that substance abuse had on their lives from different perspectives: the user and the sibling. They talked about her brother’s recovery, providing hope for others that their loved ones could get sober. That was until her world came crashing down on her when her brother relapsed. It wasn’t until then that Ashleigh realized she had never really healed from the past and was still living in her brother’s shadow.