The thrill

I guess from age ten I really took on responsibility to grow up quite quickly, but at the same time I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to do. I didn’t have any boundaries. So as soon as I entered intermediate I unfortunately attracted some real naughty kids, but they became my family because I didn’t have my family around me anymore. And I trusted them, and we did some naughty stuff. We’d steal. I got caught at K-mart, just sunglasses and things like that, and not even to do anything with them, just for the sake of it.

The thrill, but thankfully again, I got caught. So that was a good thing, but on the weekends, things like that; I mean, mum was away working. She’s a real estate agent. She’d go away for conferences and things, and just leave me at home with a friend popping in every now and again, and I just started to kind of explore boys at that age too. So they would head off to parties, and a lot of them were surfers, guitar players and things like that, because we were living on the beach.

I’d go hang out with them, down the beach, things like that, and it was unfortunately, yeah... I’d just turned 14, and I was with a guy I was dating. He was about four years older than me. Yeah, so having him as my boyfriend, the pressures of I guess, finding where I belonged, and just really doing things that I didn’t have a lot of understanding about.

So, from age 15, right through to age 27, a lot of partying, like drugs then to alcohol abuse, and again, I never really saw it at the time. This is only an understanding through massive self-reflection of current years, almost recent years, to recognise that I was constantly just trying to fill a void.

It was about Monday to Friday working hard, and then playing hard Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I can’t remember, I would say... a good eight years solid. I was very successful in what I did with my work, my mahi, always. Always showed up to work, never took sick days. Didn’t matter how, I know where I was. I just knew that if I was going to play hard I had to still show up for work.

I mean, alcohol was just a part of it, but I was never the person to have a just glass of wine. If it were a glass of wine it would go straight into some vodkas, and then shots while we were out. I didn’t even know how half the time I was able to walk, but somehow I did.

People would say to me, “I can’t even tell if you’re drunk.” But in my mind I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see at all, and sometimes I’d get into cabs on my own, and pass out in the back. The danger that I could have been in, and there was no-one to tell me different. I lived on my own; I had whoever I wanted around. No-one around me really gave a shit obviously. I was just the life of the party.