We’ve all seen the question plastered on nearly every job application:
Are you a convicted felon?
Have you committed a crime?
There are different ways it can be worded, but the bottom line is they want to hear about your past. They want to know if you have had a run-in with the law. And ultimately, they might judge you on it.
They might be wondering…
Will they steal again?
Will they be a reliable employee?
Will they represent our company well?
There is a lot of stigma that comes with being a convicted felon, or even just having gone to jail in general. And unfortunately, stigma surrounds a lot of things – including addiction.
Stigma, by definition from the dictionary, is a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. And it isn’t something that just goes away with your addiction. You will likely still come across the stigma around addiction because you were still once an addict.
Don’t let this discourage you though.
Stigma is like fear – you just have to look it in the face and say, “well, now I have a reason to prove you wrong.”
The stigma is often that people who have suffered from addiction in the past are weak or have failed morally. Oftentimes, people assume an addict chooses to be an addict.
But you know first hand this is wrong.
The key is to push yourself. Harder, and harder, and harder. The only way to change someone’s mind is to prove them wrong .
Of course, you can start by educating them a bit and showing them the statistics of addiction, quotes from doctors that shatter that stigma that addicts choose to be addicts, but at the end of the day the best thing you can do is simply use this as motivation.
Use this stigma to push yourself even further and to show everyone just how different you actually are. How reliable you actually are. How an addict can actually turn their life around.
And not only are you helping break the stigma for yourself, but you are also helping break the stigma for other addicts.
There will always be stigma and judgment surrounding us, rather it is for an addiction, something we are wearing, or just the way we speak. People are not going to dismiss all stigma and they are not going to be completely free of judgment. It is human nature.
But you can use this as fuel to keep improving yourself. You’ve got this!