personalities
By Lydia Freudenberg
Changing the Stigma Jefferson Series speaker Elizabeth Vargas to talk about addiction and her new book
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welcomes Vargas for the final Jefferson Series event of the 2017-2018 season. Guests can expect to hear Vargas speak on her career and past health concerns. Though addiction is a part of her life, it is not her entire life.
An Impressive Career
After working for a Chicago-based news outlet and NBC, Vargas broke the glass ceiling when she became anchor for 20/20. She was not only the first woman anchor on a network evening newscast in the country since Connie Chung, but the first Latina woman to take on the position. “It was an enormous honor to be the first Latina to anchor the evening news,” she says. “It’s really important that we in the news represent all the people in the country – women, men, people of all socioeconomic strata and all colors.” In December 2017, Vargas announced her resignation from ABC News, and will leave in May. Though it
will end her 22-year career with ABC, it won’t mean the end of Vargas’ professional life. “I hope I get the chance to continue to do the work I love someplace else,” she says.
Dealing with Addiction
When Vargas realized her addiction was only getting worse, she knew it was time to seek help, no matter how challenging. “For people in the grip of the disease of addiction, it can be very difficult to get help,” she says. “For me, it was finally realizing that I would lose everything to this disease if I didn’t get help.” Vargas describes her two children, Zachary and Samuel, as the greatest gift in her life. She knew that she needed to get healthy, if not for herself, then for them, and that required taking time to go to rehab. “I went to rehab, but it took a while for recovery to stick. That is the one www.healthynewalbanymagazine.com
Photo courtesy of Greater Talent Network, Inc.
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n late 2013, Elizabeth Vargas confirmed with the media that she was undergoing treatment for alcoholism. Vargas, a longtime journalist and news anchor of ABC’s 20/20, tried to keep her addiction confidential, but being in the public eye can make that impossible. “After it was leaked to the press that I was in rehab, I was forced to issue a statement saying I was seeking help,” Vargas says. “I would have preferred my medical issue would have been private, but it wasn’t. I felt very alone when I was first trying to get sober.” Even in this time of stress and anxiety, Vargas found comfort in reading books about others dealing with addiction and how they overcame hardships. After receiving medical help, Vargas decided to work to break the stigmas associated with alcoholism and write her book, Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction. On May 9, Healthy New Albany and the New Albany Community Foundation