Episode 3 — Adrian

EPISODE THREE: “ADRIAN — METALHEAD IN SPACE”

NARRATION

Hey everyone. Just wanted to give a content warning for this episode of the show. As well as some bad language, this story covers some heavy stuff, including abuse, depression, drug use and homelessness. If you think this might trigger something in you, maybe skip this episode. We also want to stress that this is just one person’s story, so may not reflect the experiences of others.

SFX: night-time soundscape

ADRIAN

So anyway, after about two or three days, I was walking past this marina somewhere in South Melbourne. And I remember just walking past and seeing a boat tied up. It must have been what 10, 11 o'clock, you know, everyone had gone home, the lights were off. So, I got in, I untied the knot. I grabbed a large pole and I just kind of push myself off.

SFX: slow paddling through water

HANNAH

You stole a boat.

ADRIAN

I stole a boat.

music: mildly ominous

NARRATION

That was Adrian. He’s 32, with long, brown hair that reaches past his shoulders. He’s an enthusiastic talker; the kind of guy that would strike up a friendly conversation with a stranger on a train. Adrian is a busy man, and when we meet he doesn’t have a lot of time. But, I ask him to start his story way back at the start, in his childhood bedroom.

ADRIAN

It was a relatively small room. On the second level of the house. Small, but it was mine. I had a large bookcase.

HANNAH

And what kind of books did you have?

ADRIAN

All sorts of books. Sci-fi books, fantasy books, funny joke books. I had one book, it was like a coffee table book. It's about the universe. Little factoids, but it was my first gateway into another world, where I realised, “oh, right, no, we're actually really, really tiny and small.”

And I'd come around to my bed and lie there and look up at the stars and I’d read this little coffee table book and look up and feel like I was, again, part of this large universe and all the problems kind of faded away.

It was an escape from the shit of my everyday life and the things that haunted me.

NARRATION

Adrian lived with his family – mum, dad, and younger sister – in a quiet suburb of Sydney. Adrian says there wasn’t much to do there except pull the wings off flies.

ADRIAN

My dad was an accountant. He was pretty aloof, and emotionless, wasn't really interested in anything besides his job.

My mum, she was a stay at home mum. And she was also kind of aloof and drank and sat around and played video games and wasn't really interested in me. I never really had a connection with her. I think she always resented having us.

I remember this one… she asked me to go upstairs and grab a jumper. So I went up and I grabbed a jumper and it was the wrong jumper and she kind of got mad. So she grabbed my arm and she bit me. Like, kind of like, tried to take a chunk out of my arm. She was a very angry person.

NARRATION

Adrian scrunches his face up as I try to get him to remember and recount the details of his childhood. It’s a hard task for anyone, but when you’ve had as full a life as Adrian, it’s near impossible. But there’s one memory that’s stuck in his mind, and now hasn’t left mine either. It involves him, his sister and a cabinet full of his parent’s wedding gifts.

music: light percussion

ADRIAN

It had a wooden frame, it had a glass top.

NARRATION

He and his sister used to play around the cabinet, and one day, when Adrian was only five or six, his sister began pushing the thing over.

ADRIAN

And I could see it start to kind of teeter and totter. And then I started to see it topple over.

NARRATION

The cabinet – heavy and fronted with glass – fell right on top of him. Adrian says that even at his young age, he thought he was going to die.

ADRIAN

And the next thing I remember were screams, like furious screams. Like just anger, so much anger.

NARRATION

The anger was from Adrian’s dad, who pulled him up from underneath the cabinet. But instead of comforting him, he started hitting him with a spatula.

ADRIAN

I could feel them beating like, shards of glass into my skin. Like that went on for about, it would have been like 15 minutes, half an hour of just beating us. Dad threw me into my room. And then then he came back. He pulled me over to him and started beating me again.

And he was shouting at me like, “you fucking bled all over the carpet!”

So it was my fault for bleeding all over the carpet. Apparently.

NARRATION

You’ll find that Adrian offsets these traumatic stories with a laissez-faire attitude and off the cuff jokes that seem at odds with the deeply troubling events he’s recounting. So it’s important to note here that everyone has different ways of processing things. This is Adrian’s story, the way he tells it.

And Adrian says that the cabinet was an extreme example, but it was fairly typical of his childhood. By the age of 15, Adrian was already drinking heavily as a coping mechanism.

I’m Hannah McElhinney, and this is The Things I’ve Thought.

music: theme (medium tempo hip hop beats with piano)

ADRIAN

I would take a bottle of whiskey with me to school. And on the days where I wanted to drink fairly heavily I'd take that bottle of whiskey in as an ice tea bottle. As in I’d pour the bottle of whiskey in…

HANNAH

Yeah, that old trick. But you cottoned on to that tactic and you were going through how much whiskey in the bottle?

ADRIAN

I’d go through most of it during the day. Those were those big one litre ice tea bottles too, not the little ones. I'd never done anything half-assed.

NARRATION

You’ll see that with Adrian, this comment cannot be truer. Despite his family situation, and despite the fact he turned up to each of his exams wasted, Adrian passed Year 12. He was then free to leave the prison of his parents’ home.

HANNAH

Where'd you go?

ADRIAN

I booked a ticket to Brisbane.

SFX: passing train

I had this entirely unrealistic dream or idea of like, “maybe I could like hitchhike my way to Europe. Like, okay, so you know, north, right? What's the first city north? Brisbane! Then I'd get to like, maybe The Gulf and I could swim over The Gulf, surely. Like from the northern tip of Queensland to Papua New Guinea. Easy, right? You know, and then just keep going.

HANNAH

I think you’re the most ambitious person I’ve ever met.

ADRIAN

Thank you. I don't know if ambition is the word. Madness, maybe. So anyway, I ended up in Brisbane and I didn't know anyone.

SFX: daytime city soundscape, people walking past, cars, buses

I didn't know anything about the place. So I found a park bench, I sat down and I started thinking. And I kind of just did that for an entire day. So I just kind of sat down, almost like shut down.

NARRATION

After sitting on that park bench for most of the day, he finally plucks up the courage to head into a nearby backpackers and see if they have any work. Then they hook him up with a fruit picking job in Childers, about half a day’s drive north of Brisbane.

ADRIAN

So they said that they’d drive me up there. And all I had to do was just turn up to the farm and start picking fruit. So I thought “okay, well, I've got nothing else. I've got no plans. So yeah, let's do this.”

SFX: bus driving

music: mainstream hard rock

It was a small room we ended up in. I ended up in with a group of backpackers. It was an entirely new experience, I'd never really experienced anything like it. And everyone was partying, everyone was having fun.

I was picking watermelons for pretty much all of it. It was incredibly difficult the first time I remember getting back to my room feeling like I had been in a fight.

And after a couple of months – that dream of travelling off across the world – realism (reality) started to set in. And there was these two people I met; there was a guy and this girl. And they had a van. And they were going back to Brisbane, and they said, “do I want to come?” And I said “yes.” I just wanted to keep moving.

NARRATION

When he gets back to Brisbane, Adrian still knows no one, and has nowhere to go.

ADRIAN

I didn't have any money coming down here too. I spent it all on, I don't know, alcohol. So I got back here, I found Brisbane Square. And I kind of went there and I laid down and I went to sleep. I kept doing that for about 12 to 18 months.

SFX: park in the night; rain; a distant dog barks; distant cars pass by; a shifting body on concrete; breathing

When it was raining. The only place in that area that you could sleep on was under concrete. And I didn't have any pillows or mattresses or real blankets. So I'd sleep on the concrete.

NARRATION

Adrian soon took to smoking weed to help him get to sleep and deal with the excruciating body pain that comes from sleeping night after night on cold hard concrete.

ADRIAN

In the night it can get dangerous because you have people that see you as a target, and you know, are perfectly happy to walk over and take everything from a homeless person.

NARRATION

So, purely for safety’s sake, Adrian starts hanging out with some people he rather unaffectionately refers to as “shitholes”.

ADRIAN

At some point, we were looking for weed. And we went into this apartment complex, and we're walking in, and they kind of were walking in front of me, and this girl was walking the other way.

ASHLEY

When I first met Adrian, he was hanging out with a whole bunch of people I knew previously. And I knew they were street people and a bit dodgy.

NARRATION

That’s Ashley who was only 13 at the time she first met Adrian. She’s talking to me from Lismore in NSW.

ASHLEY

And he was wearing the same t-shirt as me, it was a heavy metal band called Kreator.

ADRIAN

One of the best German thrash bands of all time. And I pointed it out to her. “Hey, look, this is the same shirt.”

ASHLEY

And I said, cool shirt, bro.

music: thrash metal

ADRIAN

So we're just like talking about music. And she's like, “hey, do you want to come up and meet my mum, she's into the same kind of thing. Like, you seem like a cool guy. Let's hang out.”

And so I went up to their apartment and, and her room was just full of these cool posters of all of the bands that I’d loved as a kid, that had kind of got me through all the shitty times.

ASHLEY

I remember they sat down and had a cup of tea and a cigarette and just spoke for a few hours.

There is such a bond between people that like heavy metal. I don't know if it's maybe because they have been shunned by society in the past and made to look like misfits and rejects, that when they do get together it's like this bond between them. Thick as thieves kind of thing, you know?

ADRIAN

And that led on to “well, what are you doing now? Where are you in life?”

ASHLEY

And we got to realise that he was in a really bad spot, and mum decided to help him out by trying to find him some stable accommodation.

ADRIAN 

It was just like this little shining light in this like world of fucking terror and just absolute nothingness.

ASHLEY 

I would definitely describe my relationship with Adrian as brother-sister. We used to listen to music all the time together and even attend shows together. Or even just go outside of a show that's playing and stand outside the venue and listen, because we couldn't afford a ticket.

NARRATION

Despite the living arrangements going well, staying with Ashley and her mum was never going to be a permanent thing. So Ashley’s mum soon helped Adrian into a boarding house. But by this time he had been introduced to ice and was drinking heavily.

music: thrash metal; heavy bass drum

ADRIAN 

The room was tiny. It was really tiny. It was dirty. And it was just gungey. And most of the people there were just out of prison or, you know, we're just fucked up. But I had a TV. I had, basically my, my portal back to civilisation.

It's hard to describe what the small things really do and how they matter. You know, to most people a TV would be a small thing. But to me, that was it.

I think one of the first things I did was I went out, I went to cash converters, and bought a cheap guitar and a jack. There was a VCR on top of the TV, so I like jammed the cable in. And somehow it worked. I have no idea how that worked. But yeah, so I had a TV and I had an amp. So basically, you know, you could have put me in a palace and it would’ve been the same thing.

NARRATION

While Adrian was beginning to create a life for himself, the environment he was in also led him to using ice regularly.

SFX: buzzing electricity

ADRIAN 

At the start of the high, it's like everyone, everything is awesome. Everything is awesome. I felt like every possibility that I'd ever considered was at my fingertips. It's like the perfect convergence of inspiration and dedication. All boiled down into me.

Those moments are the only moments that I've ever felt truly happy.

SFX: buzzing electricity intensifies; and then dies out

So that high generally lasts for about nine hours. After that nine hours of “I’m manic, I’m crazy, I'm fantastic, everything's great!”, everything starts to get a little muddled. And all of a sudden, I start to get this feeling like “why aren’t I dead yet? Why didn't I kill myself a long time ago? What's the point of living?”

And that's the worrying part. You feel like, you're just in this world of nothing, no hope, no dreams, no future. None of it makes any sense. It doesn't end.

One thing you want to do to get out of this is… “maybe I can sleep, maybe I can just lie down and go to sleep.” So you lie down and you sit there and you realise, “oh, wait, I've taken fucking ice. There’s no way I'm sleeping.” Like this is the one thing that I thought would work. It's not gonna work.

SFX: wine cork being removed; glugging as glass is filled

NARRATION

Adrian returned to drinking to take the edge off the ice comedowns and be able to get some sleep.

ADRIAN 

But you have to drink a lot. Because part of what that chemical does is it suppresses the effect of alcohol. So you can drink two litres of port and it have no effect whatsoever.

NARRATION

Just to pick up on a small health-related matter here. What Adrian is referring to, that the alcohol had no effect on him, is that he didn’t feel drunk. But it should be known that whatever impact booze isn’t having on your consciousness, it most definitely is still impacting on your body and brain.

music: ominous drone

ASHLEY 

I remember him drinking a lot at this time. He was always drunk, always smelled like alcohol a little bit.

I was very concerned for him because he was living in an environment where the people that he was living with were definitely enablers. At that boarding house, you know, alcohol and drugs are very rife in those kind of situations. And it's easy to get sucked into those kinds of things.

NARRATION

Adrian may have been in the midst of regular meth abuse, but he kept pushing forward. He engaged with youth services, he tried to keep active, he wrote, he read, he learnt to play his Cash Converters guitar. And then one day, at a youth drop-in centre, he heard about a free podcast workshop.

ADRIAN

How crazy is that? It was awesome. And I was able to record my own little podcast. I’d write a script, I’d make the thing, and they said at the end you could get your podcast played on radio.

NARRATION

His podcast was a short fiction show called Metalheads in Space.

clip: Metalheads in Space

MALE VOICE 1

That fucking rocked!

MALE VOICE 2

Yeah, it was pretty cool. The bass player was a bit rusty though.

FEMALE VOICE

So what are we going to do? We don’t know how to operate the ship, we don’t know who else is on the ship, we don’t know anything.

MALE NARRATOR

The cleaner had finally admitted that she was the stupid one. Which had thoroughly enthused this voiceover guy.

NARRATION

That’s Ashley on the podcast there, and they’re all cleaners out of their depth on a spaceship sent to destroy an asteroid called MTV.

ADRIAN

Yeah, weird and crazy story with my friends.

NARRATION

Part of the podcast workshop was having his work be played on the local community radio station 4ZZZ. They invited him for an interview before pressing play on Metalheads in Space.

ADRIAN 

And I was nervous throughout the whole thing; I was like shitting myself. So that finished, I went outside, I breathed, I had a smoke and started chatting with this lady beside me. She was just sitting there and so I started chatting to her just about stuff and black holes and all of the weird stuff that would come into my head.

And at some point, after about an hour of talking to her, she turned around and just kind of said, “well, you talk a lot.” I'm like, “yeah, I know.” So she said “do you want a radio show?” I'm like, “yeah, I’d love a radio show.” “All right. Well, you have a radio show on Thursday morning. Good luck.”

And that's how I ended up hosting The Sentinel.

music: heavy metal

It was amazing. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in life.

NARRATION

Adrian would go to local metal shows in the Valley on a Wednesday and then invite the bands into the studio to chat on air. But more importantly, they were there to party. The show was going well though, and he was beginning to get noticed.

ADRIAN 

So I did that for about a year. And close to the end of that year, I started to hear, particularly from the manager, that Triple J was interested in my show and interested in me.

NARRATION

And then five days later it fell apart.

music: heavy metal fades out

Adrian’s last ever shift was with a band with an extremely creative, but kind of cooked name that we thought it best to leave out.

SFX: buzzing electricity builds through the next scene

ADRIAN 

Crazy, crazy people. They come to the show with about two bottles of whiskey. And we're sitting there outside of 4ZZZ and sitting on the bench, just drinking before the show, we're chatting.

Then we end up inside. We were drinking, we're shouting at each other, we're having fun. And then we all passed out.

SFX: buzzing electricity cuts out

Clearly we all passed out, because I remember waking up almost in a daze, looking down at the desk with vomit all over it. And realising that me and the band had passed out for about three or four hours.

SFX: static and feedback builds

And it was 9am. And I could hear static. I think it was the first time that 4ZZZ had ever been off the air in like 20, 30 years of broadcasting.

ASHLEY

And that's a very concerning thing. I mean, you gotta drink quite a lot to be able to just pass out in the middle of a recording studio, right?

NARRATION

Right. Adrian lost his show and any interest from Triple J went with it.

music: deep drone and slow drums

ADRIAN

And all I was left with after that was sitting there watching my life, and the people that had believed in me, look at me with that look. It wasn't any words, it was that look of disappointment. And that's, that's what that was, it was disappointment. I was disappointed in myself. I did that. It was a golden opportunity, and I kicked it away like it was nothing.

HANNAH

I mean, I have to tell you, I was doing the graveyard shifts on Triple J for a while. And I also fell asleep. Leading to quite a bit of dead air on that station. So I got a lot of angry emails. And I had to be like, “I got nothing to tell you.” Sometimes, shit happens.

ADRIAN

That’s like, good to hear. I'm glad it's not just me. I’m glad it's not just me.

NARRATION

With the 4ZZZ opportunity dead and buried, Adrian’s substance use increased along with his sense of hopelessness.

ASHLEY

He was very down, very depressed, and very concerned for himself.

NARRATION

So he pinballs back and forth between Melbourne and Brisbane over the next couple of years. He went wherever life took him and was often riding the highs and lows of various drugs before getting his last train to Melbourne.

SFX: passing train

ADRIAN

I didn't really plan it out. So I ended up sleeping on the streets for a couple of days there.

After six, seven years of slowly building myself back up to something, I was back to square one. That was worse than everything that had come before it.

There's a certain amount of hope that you just cling on to that maybe things will change in the early years of your life. And that had gone because I was there again. I had fucked up again.

SFX: water birds; sail hitting a mast; water lapping the side of a boat

NARRATION

And here we are – back where we started.

ADRIAN

So anyway, after about two or three days, I was walking past this marina somewhere in South Melbourne. And I remember just walking past and seeing a boat tied up. It must have been what 10, 11 o'clock, you know, everyone had gone home, the lights were off. So, I got in, I untied the knot. I grabbed a large pole and I just kind of push myself off.

SFX: slow paddling through water

ASHLEY 

I was probably about 20, 21. And I got this text maybe two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night and it said, “Hey, Ash, I've stolen a boat” and all I could send back was “What the fuck?” I didn't know what else to say to him other than “what are you doing? Like, what do you mean, ‘You stole a boat’?”

HANNAH

You stole a boat.

ADRIAN

I stole a boat.

NARRATION

Have you ever done something whack when you’ve felt like you have nothing to lose?

ASHLEY 

And he's just like, “yeah, yeah, I stole this boat. And I'm having a mad time.” And I put my phone down, I didn't end up getting back to him. Like he can just go do what he's doing.

ADRIAN

Yeah, that was a thing that happened. I don't know why. I cannot explain to you what was running through my head before that moment. But yeah, why not? Why not? It seemed like the thing to do at the time.

music: dreamy soundscape

The boat was tiny. Just like an aluminium frame and a motor. And once I was kind of in the middle of the marina, I just kind of laid down on the boat. And I looked up and all I could see was this grand sight of stars. And again, in that moment where I felt the worst in my life. It was just that, that constant theme that kept coming up. That whenever life was fucking horrible, I'd look up and I'd see a bigger world than me.

SFX: Melbourne cityscape with trams and foot traffic

NARRATION

Not long after, Adrian is walking through the city and passes a weird looking building that catches his eye. It’s got a whole bunch of other young people around. Curious, and with nothing much else to do, he walks in, not realising that the place is a university.

ADRIAN 

And I started talking to this lady at the desk. She started talking to me about courses and I was just enjoying a chat with some lady that I'd met.

And then about 30 minutes later she started talking about this Certificate IV in tertiary preparation. Because she was describing this as “okay, well this will be your path into university.” And I was kind of not really taking it seriously, because I just walked into the building and I didn't really have any plans. I’d thought about it. I had thought about university. But it always seemed like something I didn't want to do, because it would seem too constricting or all the reasons I’d come up with in my head.

The biggest reason was, you know, there's no way like they take on someone like me, that has just come off the streets. But we organise this Cert IV in tertiary preparation, and I walked off, and that was the start of, I suppose, the rest of my life.

SFX: students in lecture theatre before class

So I walk into the very first class. It was… surreal is a weird word. It doesn’t really capture what… In order to cope with a lot of this stuff, a lot of the things that I've managed to do and jump into – especially at this moment – I kind of have to just switch my brain off (if that makes any sense), and just go with the moment.

And if it turns out that they don't want me, then they don't want me. And that was the real realisation I had while I was sitting there just listening to this lady talk. Maybe she was, maybe I was in my head. I was thinking she's looking at me, like “what are you doing here?” but I think that was in my head.

In order to make this work, I realised I had to kind of take a different attitude towards it that I had taken to a lot of things. So in order to start this obviously I needed textbooks. I needed workbooks, I needed to turn up to a class regularly, I needed to have internet access, I needed to get through an hour-long study session. This all took a lot of planning.

And after that first class, that introductory class where everything was explained, I walked out and I made a pact with myself that I was going to give this the best fucking shot I could. Because this was my ticket. This was literally my fucking ticket out of here. I had already fucking burnt one at 4ZZZ. This was it. This was looking at the stars.

NARRATION

After Adrian finished the tertiary preparation certificate, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Science degree, where he found the structure of university life had a positive impact on his wellbeing.

ADRIAN

When you live the kind of life that I've lived over the last, well, previous to uni, everything's a crapshoot. Nothing's planned, nothing's set. And so you don't really make any long-term plans. You don't really come up with any grand ideas and you just kind of keep moving on from day to day

Having structure, that university structure, the most important thing was that it showed me that some of those dreams I had as a kid could be real. And that meant that I had something. I had like a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to go outside, a reason to get into uni and sit down at a computer for however many hours and focus on something. Because it seemed attainable.

ASHLEY 

So I always knew Adrian was going to do something great. He's a very smart man. He always has been, especially with maths and physics. And I was just so excited for him when he told me he started his undergrad degree. He was so excited. He was so proud, and so was I.

music: heavy rock

NARRATION

Adrian excelled at university. He made friends, found himself a great sharehouse, and committed himself to fulfilling the potential he always knew he had. He also found time to give Ashley a helping hand with her new university studies in psychological science.

ASHLEY 

I'm terrible at math, especially algebra; I've never done well. And as soon as my statistics unit come up, I was like, “what am I gonna do? I'm freaking out. I know. I'll hit up Adrian, he's really good at math.”

And he just helped me the entire time. I was on the phone to him for three hours one day working out an assignment and I was yelling at him like a brother and sister do. I was just like, “you're frustrating me!” but we ended up getting there and I got a distinction. So I can't complain.

NARRATION

Adrian also tried to engage with some professional support services

ADRIAN 

And did I get anything from it? A lot of the times I felt not, I felt like I didn't. But there were moments where I talked to someone and I just felt like the weight had been taken off my shoulders. Or they would say something every now and again, that’d just get you to change your point of view a bit.

Like I remember this one lady, she said to me, after I'd been telling her about just feeling stressed and bottling all these problems in. And she said, “well, this is like, it's like you're in tug of war. So why not just let the rope go?”

I hadn't thought of it that way. I would always kind of tense up and hold in my problems and just hold everything to my own standard and obsess about “I have to do this myself. And I have to make this happen myself. And it's all on my shoulders.” And I never really thought about just letting go.

SFX: office atmos; keyboard tapping; people hard at work

NARRATION

Adrian is now at Swinburne. After his science degree, he was once more drawn to the thing that he’d always been fascinated by: the stars. He’s just finished an honours degree in astrophysics.

ADRIAN 

I'm using artificial neural networks to detect gravitational waves in Lygo and Virgo data.

HANNAH

All I understood from that was Virgo. And that’s because I like star signs.

NARRATION

And remember when Adrian said that being high on ice is the only time he ever felt truly happy? I asked him whether that’s still true.

ADRIAN

Put it this way: it's the happiest I've ever felt. It's not the most fulfilled I've ever felt.

No matter what happens in life, you know, that chemical reaction that happened in my brain when I would smoke methamphetamines and it releases all endorphins, like you can't beat that.

But that is a chemical and that wears off. And the reality is that I'm sitting here having finished an honours degree, having worked on neural networks and gravitational waves, I'm looking at running off and accomplishing some of the things that I only dreamt about when I was a kid, you know? There's a big difference between happy and fulfilled.

SFX: park in the day; birds chirping; kids playing; laughter

NARRATION

From his study area on the ninth floor, Adrian gets a good view of the city, and also of a nearby park.

ADRIAN 

It looks in my mind, like the park that I was sleeping in, in Brisbane. It's like I'm looking back at my own life. And I can see myself looking up at the buildings that I used to look up at many years ago, thinking I'd never be in something so amazing.

That's what I felt like when I was homeless. Like I'd never amount to anything. As many dreams as I had, really I’d never amount to anything. And now I'm like, I just walk into this building on the ninth level, and I look down at this park and it's like looking down at my life and seeing it from an entirely new perspective.

music: theme

NARRATION

Thanks to Adrian for sharing his story, and to Ashley for offering her perspective. Adrian has finished his honours now, and is waiting on his results before embarking on the next chapter of his life. I’m sure he’s going to kill it.

If listening to Adrian’s story has brought up any issues that you’re struggling with, help is close by

If you’re in urgent need of assistance, contact Triple 0, Lifeline on 131 114, or the Suicide Help Line on 1300 651 251.

At Swinburne, students can access a GP, and a team of mental health clinicians, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. Call 9214 8483 to learn more and book a free appointment.

There’s also an after-hours crisis phone service that Swinburne run that is available every day of the year, even weekends and public holidays, 5pm to 9am. Call 1300 854 144 or SMS 0488 884 145.

We’ll chuck all this info into the show notes.

You may also like to go and do something nice for yourself, like call a friend, get a donut or go for a walk.

If you or someone you know is in need of help, please reach out. There are no stronger people out there than those that can put up their hand and say they need help.

Okay that’s it. Even on a cloudy night, there are still stars up there.

The Things I’ve Thought is a Swinburne University of Technology initiative, produced by Sam Loy and me, Hannah McElhinney, with sound design and mixing by Tiffany Dimmack, and executive produced by Clare Monte, May Ling Yong, Douglas Pope, and Kate Montague. Additional audio recording for this story by Jeanti St Clair.

Special thanks to Jonathan Lang in the Swinburne media department, and Jess O’Callaghan.

NEXT EPISODE PROMO:

NARRATION

On the next episode of The Things I’ve Thought…

music: synth keyboard

BROOKE

My name’s Brooke, I’m 28 years old and I’m studying media and communications, majoring in professional writing and editing.

NARRATION

Sometimes the things I’ve thought have brought up bad moments from the past, and made me see them in a different light.

BROOKE

And I didn’t realise I felt like that, and just suddenly I was taken back to being 13, not understanding what I was doing. And suddenly I had more context for my relationship. That it was based on power and I’d never come to terms with that.

music: theme fades in

NARRATION

From Swinburne University of Technology, a story about online relationships, abuse, and learning to manage trauma.

The Things I’ve Thought, exploring how our minds sometimes try to sabotage us, why it happens, and what to do if yours does. Available wherever you get your podcasts.