I recently read a short article, Call Us Beautiful, by Vanessa Mártir (2020)

In the article, Vanessa Mártir offers a stunning, deeply personal exploration of addiction and the way society determines whose pain is worthy of recognition. Mártir’s piece reveals what happens when people are left behind and when shame and social rejection strip them of their humanity.

She forces us to see addiction not as a moral failing, but as a deeply human experience shaped by trauma, poverty, and systemic neglect. More importantly she reinforces the importance of understanding someone else’s story.

Who Decides What Stories Matter?

Mártir opens her essay with a memory that underscores how stories about addiction are silenced. As a college student, she wrote about her neighbor who was a woman addicted to drugs, yet still a fully realized person with moments of joy, struggle, and dignity. Her professor dismissed the piece, returning it with the words: “This isn’t writing.”

That one moment kept Mártir from writing about addiction for 25 years.

Her experience is an example of what Paulo Freire (2000) describes as the banking model of education, where knowledge is treated as something to be deposited into students rather than something to be shaped by lived experience. Mártir’s professor, consciously or not, reinforced the idea that stories about addiction, particularly those about poor Black and Brown people, did not belong in literature.

More importantly, it raises a larger question: Who gets to decide what literacy means? Who determines which stories are valuable? And what does it mean when an entire group of people’s experiences are deemed unworthy of being written about?

Addiction and the Stories We Silence

Mártir refuses to look at addiction with disgust. Instead, she offers a rare perspective—one that treats those struggling with addiction as people first.

As a child, she saw them as pariahs, much like society does. But as she grew older, she realized what many overlook: addiction is not just about bad decisions. It is about pain so deep that drugs feel like the only escape.

Addiction is one of the loneliest experiences a person can endure. Not only because of what it does to the body and mind, but because of how society reacts to it. People battling addiction are often discarded, shamed, dehumanized, and forgotten

She references a separate article, Five Unexpected Things I Learned from Being a Heroin Addict, where the author states:

“If you know someone who’s using or has used, you should know that this isn’t as simple as them making bad decisions. They’re running from something that, to them, seems a whole lot scarier than a needle.”

This line forces us to reconsider our judgments. How often do we look at someone struggling with addiction and ask, What pain are they trying to escape? Instead, we dehumanize them. We see them as lost causes. But Mártir refuses to let us turn away.

The Science of Addiction: Understanding the Why

Mártir also highlights something that is often overlooked: how addiction actually works.

She references how crack affects the body, breaking down its brutal cycle in a way that forces the reader to move beyond stigma and see addiction as a physiological battle.

It ultimately creates a “depression, erasable only by more crack.”

This phrase captures the endless loop of dependency. The body craves more, even as it destroys itself. Understanding this is crucial in recognizing that addiction is not just a mental struggle. It is a chemical and neurological battle, where the brain is rewired to demand the very thing that is killing it.

For many, this battle is fought alone, without medical support, without therapy, without a safety net. Instead of being treated with care, those struggling with addiction are often left to fend for themselves, pushed to the edges of society.

Who Gets Compassion?

One of the most striking elements of Mártir’s piece is her critique of how addiction is treated differently based on race.

During the crack epidemic, which devastated Black and Brown communities, addiction was criminalized. People were incarcerated rather than treated. Families were torn apart. Communities were left in ruin.

But when the opioid crisis hit, impacting largely white populations, the response was different. Addiction became a public health crisis instead of a crime. Treatment programs and government funding poured in.

This disparity is not accidental. It reveals who society sees as worthy of saving.

Mártir makes this point even more personal when she shares the loss of her friend Ulysses  and, more painfully, her own brother. He remains unnamed throughout the piece,a powerful omission that speaks to the depth of grief and loss.

As the oldest of four siblings, including two brothers, I read this omission of his name as something that highlighted something that was deeper than experiencing sadness. It was about pain so profound that language could not contain it.

Finding Beauty in Imperfection

As someone who grew up in poor neighborhoods with addiction all around me, Mártir’s words moved me. I, too, once saw people with addiction as failures. I could not understand why they chose that path.

But I have also known pain. I have faced tragedy. And I know what it’s like to look at the long, terrifying road of healing and wonder if it’s possible to walk it sober.

This revelation made me immediately think about the neighborhood crackhead that Martir describes and wonder what pain was scarier to her than the needle she used to inject drugs daily. Martir’s vivid description of the inexplicable joys that Teresa encountered, followed by the low depths, was a beautifully vivid description of a woman looking to hold on to her humanity and moments of blissful escape in the only way she knew how.

Martir’s description made me smile and made me sad as I thought of all of the family members who have lost their lives, or many decades, to a drug that takes much more than it gives. How lonely it must have been to be fighting this internal battle with yourself as your own worst enemy and doing so alone. How sad it is for a person with an addiction not to feel like they have a community that they can trust in or seek to unite with.

This, in itself, reinforced the critical need and power of community.

Final Thoughts

Despite its heavy subject matter, Call Us Beautiful does not leave the reader in despair. Instead, it offers something rare in discussions of addiction: hope.

Mártir’s central argument is that people with addiction deserve to be seen in their full complexity. She writes:

“I’m saying people can be imperfect and still be remembered as beautiful. They can still be worthy of being written about.”

This is a radical statement in a world that so often erases and punishes those struggling with addiction. It reminds us that every life has value. Every story deserves to be told.

We cannot change the past, but we can change how we move forward. We can listen. We can see. And we can call each other beautiful, even in our imperfection.

Take Action

1. Amplify the voices of those impacted – Stories like Mártir’s remind us that every person has a narrative worth telling. Share and support literature that humanizes those often dismissed by society.
2. Build community, not isolation – Loneliness is a silent killer. I think often about the quote: “Everyone is fighting a battle you cannot see”. Be kind. Whether personally or systemically, we need solutions that foster connection and healing.