Luke Williams is a journalist and former drug addict who spent time in rehab. Photo / ABC Radio
By Luke Williams
TRIGGER WARNING
The first fellow patient I met in rehab filled in the forms at reception with her own flower-print pen. She told me she was 51, a librarian and addicted to Phenergan.
The first conversation I heard between patients at rehab was outside my villa: "I like fat women with ugly faces," said one young man. "You'll be happy here then," replied the other.
Then the receptionist led me to my room. I would share it with two other guys who were fresh out of jail.
By then I had already been told the rules:
• Urine and breath tests twice a week.
• No contact with anybody from the outside for the first 21 days.
• The day started at 6.30am with exercise, then classes, four days a week
• Payments deducted directly from your Newstart Allowance.
I unpacked my clothes (my antidepressants were confiscated, along with my Listerine and deodorant when I arrived). I put my toothpaste and face cream in the bathroom.
I went into the kitchen, where a cockroach scattered when I got out some milk. Then I got a knife out of a drawer and hid it under my mattress.
On my second day, 11 of us were in a white conference room in the middle of a red brick building.
"The brain associates drugs with pleasure, the opposite of pain and death," our counsellor, Audrey, said. "You face a problem, you take drugs, your problem gets worse, you take more drugs and on it goes; that is what we call the cycle of addiction."
Audrey* then asked us to list the worst things that came about from our drug use.
"One time my Mum walked in and asked me if I wanted to go to Church, I was injecting heroin into my foot when she opened my bedroom door," said a guy named Max.
Then Celia, a 27-year-old stripper by trade, began laughing to herself louder and louder.
"Y'know how I'm addicted to Xanax. Well, once I was so smashed that I peeled a cigarette and ate it like a banana."
Audrey was also my individual counsellor. We had our first session on two ramshackle chairs looking out to a river.
I told her I didn't feel like I belonged at rehab because my addiction wasn't that bad and I was only there because my work had suspended me and I was sick of living on Centrelink.
She asked me whether I was comfortable with my sexuality and I said yes. And I then I thought "how cliche" - there's more to me than my sexuality and people always bring that up.
More classes. We discussed triggers and traumas. We each made a list of events that often led to our drug use. I wrote a list of risky events:
• Being dumped
• Being at a venue
• Stressful day at work
• Having something good happen
• Having something bad happen
The days rolled on. I got to know people there. One day I asked David, a self-described "bisexual bipolar bear" why he wasn't doing any exercise with us and he said his heart was enlarged because he had been found unconscious in his car after he tried to gas himself.
I also met Liam, who blinked unevenly. He had big, dark rings around his eyes. In meds room he whispered to me: "A dog being fist-f****d by the guitarist from Metallica."
Penny was a psychologist - she was also an alcoholic and patient at the clinic.
"I've been to eight different rehabs and none of them worked," she told me. "My partner died in 1996. When my son got older, he started talking about how much he missed his Dad. I started drinking and drinking - at night, at first, with just the lamp on. And then drinking all day," she said.
And there was Kristy. She had hooked up with the guy who said he liked big fat ugly chicks. Kristy called me over to her window at night to give me bits of peppermint chocolate. There she told me the judge called her "the Queen of Con Artists" before he sentenced her to 10 months' prison a few years back.
And Max: Stiff, square shoulders and reptilian eyes. Max: Who farted in my ear so many times while I was eating the inevitable happened - we became best friends.
And I had more sessions with Audrey. I told her the year was supposed to be "my year" that I wanted things to really come together, that life had been going well for some time and I just wanted my career to take the next step.
But my relationship ended. A work project failed and then I hated looking at myself in the mirror.
The next session I told her about the time I had the psych ward called on me. The next one how I cut myself sometimes when people I like don't call me back.
And then I told her about the latest suicide attempt, where instead of going through with it, I decided instead to inject a little bit of heroin. She said "you are safe here" as she rubbed my back.
But I couldn't sleep there and I felt really anxious and one night I self-harmed.
Meanwhile, Max made our counsellor cry. He told Audrey nothing in the world was better than drugs and she said drugs are just a flawed response to life events.
We had a class on personal boundaries where he announced "I like violating people's boundaries ... I like Japanese bondage-style sex with really slutty girls. I like getting people bashed. I'd like to kill someone one day and I am not wearing any underwear."
Audrey looked at him, rolled her eyes. He shifted in his seat. He stared back at her. She angled her head, cocked one eyebrow and pursed her lips.
"I think that way because my first sexual experience screwed me up," he says. "My aunty asked me to perform a sexual act on her when I was six, so I did it and so I lack respect for other people boundaries".
Not long after that David got kicked out for cracking onto everyone, including me.
Celia got kicked out after smuggling in Xanax.
The librarian got kicked out for not swallowing her antipsychotics at meds time and then taking them all day so she didn't have to do any chores.
Kristy had already been kicked out after scamming money off nearly every single person in there and stealing communal food - her husband would drive to the bottom of the driveway most nights to pick it up.
Liam left voluntarily and died of a heroin overdose a day later.
Penny graduated, her hippie mother and her son - dressed in his private school uniform - came to the ceremony.
I ended up telling Audrey about my self-harming. She took me into the head manager's office and the head manager told me that self-harm is a response to stress or anger turned inward, it provides relief, but does you no good in long-run - kind of like drugs, that many drug addicts were also self-harmers.
Audrey told me anxiety comes in peaks and troughs and I should try and breathe and ride out the waves.
I still couldn't sleep. Audrey told me to write down what I was thinking about, but I started writing down something I hadn't actually been thinking about - high school.
How nobody wanted to be friend when they realised I was gay: My best friend threw my pencil case on the ground when I went to sit next to him. People yelled names at me everywhere I went. A group of giggling girls said "that would be your sticker" and pointed at the pink star when we went to the Holocaust memorial on an excursion.
I told Audrey about it all hot with tears. "You've got through the worst of it," Audrey told me. "You have already survived it; it's time now to accept yourself and be kinder to yourself."
Max caught wind of it all and taught me how to kickbox. Then he said "I want to turn you into society's worst nightmare - a poof who can kill people," and he showed me how to kill someone with your bare hands.
And still I couldn't sleep.
So they took me to the doctor and I was put on antipsychotics. And that day I slept 12 hours. I woke up feather-light and fresh and full of ideas: Fear could be overcome, failure was all perception, all demons could be slayed and all humans have souls.
A few days later, at the nightly group meeting I said goodbye to everyone. I told them I saw my drug abuse as poorly expressed rage and that going to rehab was best thing I had ever done in my life.
I got my Listerine and deodorant back. I said goodbye to Max, who was on his way to exercise and he said: "I'm leaving too - in three days. I am going to be moving in with friends and I am going to start going back to church with my mum and get a job and make music. I'm over drugs, I really am, and I want to be better to other people."
Max stayed in contact and we met up again eight months after we left rehab at his house in Logan.
When I got there he was acting weird, I thought he was upset about something. I asked him what was wrong and he said "nothing, I'm just on Acid."
I asked if I could have some and a big party began.
This week, it's been 10 years since I was in rehab and therefore about 10 years and eight months since I left Max's house with him slumped, eyes shut, muttering nonsense on the couch as his girlfriend played Rock Lobster for four hours on repeat.
Not that long ago I found Max on Facebook under a pseudonym. I added him and we spoke for the first time since we saw each other the day we took Acid. He was living on the Sunshine Coast and I could tell he has stopped using drugs. I asked him how and why.
"Firstly, the doc gave me Suboxone," he said, "to get me off heroin."
Then he told me doctors also diagnosed him as having ADHD. So he didn't know he had that until he was in his early 30s, and he was given medication for that too.
In effect, he'd been using drugs to self-medicate his condition and it made it worse.
He then asked me how I got better. And I said I think first it was recognising my own pain, but then it was realising I'd started to self-victimise. That many people had it worse than me. That most people had been very good to me.
But before I had realised all of that, I'd moved from ecstasy and speed abuse to a full-blown crystal meth addiction.
It's now been two years since I last used drugs. Today I travel low-budget Asian countries endlessly and all I do is live and live and live because you never know when life might end.
*Names have been changed.
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 (available 24/7)
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO) (available 24/7)
• Youthline: 0800 376 633
• Kidsline: 0800 543 754 (available 24/7)
• Whatsup: 0800 942 8787 (1pm to 11pm)
• Depression helpline: 0800 111 757 (available 24/7)
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
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