Two months after I had tried to take my own life, I had come to the realisation that perhaps I had a big problem.

I knew I needed help, and that it needed to be a bit more substantial than the Psych sessions I was half-heartedly rolling into twice a week.

But I couldn’t afford to go to ‘proper’ rehab. Not just financially; enrolling in something like that would mean telling friends, family, and my employers about where I was disappearing to for four weeks.

And so, in line with what my shame and bank account would allow, I enrolled in “Dayhab”.

Dayhab was essentially rehab, but for those who couldn’t afford to take three months off to disappear. It was a three-week course, four days a week, 8:30am to 11:30am, which meant I could still head to work afterwards for an afternoon shift.

Halfway through the session, we would break for morning tea. The entire cohort would flock to the side-street, pulling out various forms of cigarettes and vapes.

Except for me. As the only attendee who didn’t smoke, I sat in the car park, watching my classmates huff away at their mid-morning ‘snacks’.

Disgusting.

All that money wasted — and for what? To smell bad? To riddle your body with several forms of cancer?

I would never.

Glancing back down at my phone, I refreshed the browser for the fourth time that minute; the live feeds of four South American football games I had a multi-bet on staring back at me. I had already lost a couple of hundred earlier that morning — most of which was on matches played out before I was even awake.

I was sitting in (what was effectively) Rehab, gambling away money I didn’t have, whilst judging the smokers.

At the time, the irony of this all was completely lost on me.

I hadn’t realised it, but during my years of gambling, I had developed this weird caste system of addicts. It was a hierarchy I think that I clung to because it was probably the last shred of dignity I thought I had. No matter how much I hated myself — and boy did I hate myself — I had to be better than somebody else.

The smokers were middle ground. Alcoholics were easy to assign, too — nice and low, but not too low; I didn’t want to completely rule out needing that category for myself one day.

Drug addicts?

Please.

Right down the bottom.

Because I had teeth, and a job, and forearms that I didn’t need to cover up. I was only a gambler. And somehow, in my mind, that made me better than all of the above.

But I suppose that’s how a caste system works, right? Or, at the very least, the one thing that makes a caste system appealing:

There always has to be somebody below you.

And so I sat in that Dayhab circle, arms crossed, shrouded in toxic superiority. I scanned the room and categorised them all by their addictions — things that they had admitted to the group in full confidence, feeling safe.

They probably didn’t expect such a judgmental, ginger prick to be sitting up the back, smirking under his breath.

I don’t belong here, I told myself. It was my mantra.

I looked at the woman across from me, her skin ravaged by years of methamphetamine use, and I felt a wave of pity mixed with disdain.

How could you let it get that far? I thought. You’ve lost control of your physical self.

I said this as sweat rolled down my back — the bets I had placed before walking in that day were minutes away from losing.

During the break, I went to the bathroom and checked my banking app to see how much I could transfer to my betting account for the next round of games.

It was all gone.

The guy sitting across from me had just shared with the group about his on-the-street living situation; suddenly, the distance between our housing security didn’t seem all that great.

And yet, because I wore a collared shirt and didn’t slur my words, I convinced myself I was merely a tourist in their hell.

It wasn’t until my second week in that room that the walls finally began to crumble.

The man who had been sitting beside me, fidgeting for eight mornings straight, finally began to share. He spoke about lying to his loved ones for money. He talked about the gut-wrenching panic of waking up in the afternoon and only partially remembering what he’d done the night before.

He talked about the way the world seemed grey and lifeless unless he was using.

The smirk dropped from my face.

Where he used a needle, I used a phone. Where he used a substance to escape, I used dopamine hits from a goal scored in a match I didn’t care about.

It was a devastating realisation. I had gone in there thinking I was better than them. I thought I was simply a “normal person” who had just happened to get unlucky with gambling. But watching him, I realised I was just another human being, desperate to escape my own skin.

I didn’t immediately stand up and confess. I didn’t go home and tell anyone. But something inside me had cracked. For the first time, the line I had spent years drawing between them and me didn’t feel quite as solid.

For the first time ever, I think I realised just how sick I was. And, like the people sitting around me, I was just desperately trying to get better.

Which was a terrifying place to live. To know I couldn’t continue living the way I was, but to be completely unable to imagine what life looked like on the other side.

But somewhere along that road, I did eventually find my way to the other side.

Or, at least, far enough away from the person sitting in that Dayhab circle that I can now look back at him with a mixture of embarrassment, pity, and the overwhelming urge to grab him by his stupid ginger shoulders and shake him.

Because I was an addict. Obviously.

The irony wasn’t that I didn’t know it — I think, deep down, I absolutely did.

The irony was that I had spent so much time constructing elaborate reasons why my addiction made me fundamentally different from everyone else’s.

But underneath all of those differences was something I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.

And I think that the most uncomfortable part of this story is that I would love to tell you Dayhab cured me of my judgement.

But it didn’t. I still judge addicts. Heck, especially addicts.

I still find myself looking at somebody else’s addiction and instinctively beginning the comparison, almost daily.

At least I never did that. At least I didn’t get that bad.

At least I still had...

And there it is again.

The caste system. The hierarchy. The desperate search for somebody I can place one rung beneath me.

I’ve been gamble-free for nearly three years now, and I still catch myself doing it. Which is pretty fucking inconvenient, because I now spend every Monday night sitting in a room full of the very people I once tried so desperately to separate myself from.

Addicts.

Gamblers, specifically.

Because I’ve realised that I need them.

Without the community and love and support that I have found in recovery, I wouldn’t have my recovery, pure and simple. I’ve come to realise that the people I need the most in my life, are the people that force me to constantly reflect on my own insecurities and struggles — and there’s nobody in this world that can do that better than those who understand me.

It’s what drives me to continue to work on abandoning this constant judgement.

Because every time I start creating a them and a me, I begin rebuilding the exact wall that almost took me to my grave.

I start convincing myself that I am different. That I don’t need the same help. That I’m somehow above the people around me. And I know where that road leads. I’ve been there before.

So, yeah, I still judge addicts; I still look at people sometimes and think, How the fuck did you let it get that bad?

And then, occasionally, I’m lucky enough to remember the answer:

The exact same way I did.

One bad decision — one lie — at a time.

Until, before you know it, you’re sitting in a plastic chair in a Dayhab centre, watching a group of smokers and wondering how the fuck they let things get so bad.

All while refreshing the live scores of four South American football matches with your rent money riding on the result.

I really do hope that this caste system disappears entirely from my psyche one day, but for now? It’s a case of a daily destruction of my own ego, and a constant striving to see myself in the person I’m passing judgement on.

I understand something today that the terrified, judgmental ginger prick sitting in that Dayhab circle didn’t.

There was never “them”.

It was always just “us”.

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It’s a weird thing, waking up when you really should be dead.

It’s nothing like in the movies. Not the ones I’ve seen, anyway. My eyes didn’t fly open, followed by the immediate, panicked-confusion of seeing an unfamiliar and loud hospital room. I wasn’t settled by my partner, leaping up from where she was sitting to clasp my hand.

Instead, I woke up at 4pm.

My face buried in my pillow, arms pinned underneath me — an unwanted puppet, tossed to the side.

Alone.

The night before I had downed enough pills and alcohol that, by all logic, I shouldn’t have woken at all. But I did. Groggy, aching, confused — but alive.

I remember fumbling for my phone before messaging a friend, alluding to the fact that perhaps I “hadn’t had the best of nights.” Truly the understatement of the year.

And yet the fact that I had reached out to him was substantial for me at the time, and I think he keyed on to this pretty quickly: realising that I was in an incredibly bad spot. We met up for dinner, chatted, and then he dropped me home.

We didn’t talk about my attempt. I didn’t bring it up, and so he didn’t know to ask me anything about it.

The next day, I woke up when my usual week-day alarm went off, and I went to work.

Why this particular night pushed me over the edge, I’m not sure.

Because my gambling addiction had been all-consuming for quite some time at that point. So too, my suicidal thoughts. I’m talking multiple years. I wasn’t at the lowest point that I would ever be financially — that would be in about 6 months — and nothing significant had occurred that day.

Perhaps the reality of my situation had finally set in: the numerous payday loans and money that I had started borrowing from friends under false pretenses to keep gambling.

Maybe I simply had one too many suicidal thoughts during the day.

Or maybe the years of hiding and drowning in my addiction had led me to drift just far enough that, for the first time, I was going to sleep without being able to see the abundance of love my friends held for me.

I actually don’t think the exact reasoning is important. What is overtly apparent is that my brain had reached its limit. And at this point, something had to give — either me, or my gambling.

The insanity of addiction, of course, is that I chose me.

I’ll repeat that.

A phrase thrown around a lot when it comes to suicide is that it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Something about that irks me — probably the cliché-nature of it — and yet it is annoyingly true.

In a moment of painful hindsight, I realise today that a real solution to my problems ironically lay in my hands all day, every day. My phone was where I gambled the most, and yet I couldn’t see that my way out of the pain lay in the very thing I was using to deepen it.

Had I clicked on any one of my friend’s contacts and phoned them, I have no doubts they would have been just as loving and responsive to my problem then as they were when I eventually told them.

They would have been in their car, driving to my house, before I had finished saying the word suicide.

I think I realised this at the time, though I didn’t believe it to be completely true.

Such is the nature of shame, and the power it held over me in relation to my addiction, that to tell my friends the full truth of my suicidality would be to also openly admit that my gambling was so far from my control, and had to stop immediately.

Which, at the time, was far too much for me to do.

What I wanted wasn’t death. I just wanted to vanish.

Dying, especially by suicide, would only pass all of my problems onto those who loved me, I could recognise that. So rather than death, I wanted God to smite me.

Because if I had never existed, then it was a win-win. I wouldn’t be in the constant state of overwhelming pain and shame and fear that I was in, and my loved ones would have no one to mourn.

And this is where I think the conversation around suicide gets warped. We talk about it like it’s always a rational, thought-out desire for death itself. But for me, it wasn’t about wanting to die — it was about not knowing how to live. About being so tangled in shame, fear, or addiction that death felt like the only way to make it all quiet down.

I could no longer separate my existence from my gambling, so I simply didn’t believe that I could ever get ‘sober’.

This is an exceptionally difficult place to be in, and I truly do feel a lot of empathy for my past-self as I reflect on it.

But empathy from the future wasn’t enough to keep me safe. Because the truth is, that first attempt didn’t scare me straight. It didn’t wake me up to the seriousness of what I’d done. If anything, it almost normalized it. It scratched the itch in my head that I had been trying to reach for years.

I’d crossed a line I could never uncross. And once you’ve crossed it once, the idea of doing it again doesn’t feel as impossible. So when the weight came crashing back — only a month later, but so much heavier than before — I found myself in the same place, with the same thoughts, and the same broken logic: if I couldn’t kill the addiction, maybe I could kill myself and take it with me.

I can’t explain why, but in my second attempt, I didn’t take as many pills.

Which leads me to believe that perhaps some part of me had come to realise that I really didn’t want to die.

The question then, of course, is why try again?

I can’t explain that either.

And maybe that’s the point. There was no coherent logic to any of it. One part of me wanted the pain to stop. Another still seemed to want to survive it. Both of those things existed at the same time.

All I can say for sure is that the second attempt was an extension of the same suicidal thoughts; another desperate attempt to relieve a pain I no longer knew how to live with, without ever fully knowing whether I actually wanted death itself.

And again, by some undeserved miracle, I woke up. I had slept through an entire day of work — much to the deserved panic of some co-workers — but aside from that, I was unscathed.

No flashing lights, no frantic phone calls, no one even knew. I opened my eyes, dragged myself into another day, and after I had lied to my bosses about the events of the night prior, the world kept turning.

And holy fucking shit, is that rough to type.

Just like that, I’d tried to end my life twice in the space of a month. There was no drama, no cries for help, just… darkness. Loneliness. Levels of despair that were now directly causing a complete indifference to how my death would affect others in my life.

I had never been more scared or alone.

As I reflect today, what unsettles me most isn’t that I tried to end my life twice. It’s how easily life just… kept going. I still went to work, saw friends, and wore the same mask I’d been wearing for years.

No one suspected anything, because there wasn’t a reason to.

For years, I had believed that there were only two ways my story could end. Either I somehow managed to stop gambling, or I stopped existing. There wasn’t a third option. And because I had become incapable of imagining myself ever managing to stop, I was only left with option two: erasure of self.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

It got better.

I don’t really remember the many, many times that people tried to tell me this. That life would get better. What I do remember, however, is the first time I believed them; probably not because they were saying anything any differently, but because I’d finally heard it over and over and over again.

Actually, scratch that, I also remember the amount of times I wished people would stop fucking telling me things would get better. So… I apologise for telling you the same thing.

It was a powerful shift, because for the first time in years, I could actually see it: a life outside of my addiction.

It was no longer some vague idea that other people kept telling me was possible, or a shitty Instagrammable-recovery slogan reserved for people who were stronger, wiser, or less fucked up than me.

Once I accepted that my life could exist without gambling, I stopped aiming for some perfect, pain-free future and started aiming to show up and be honest.

And slowly — painfully slowly — things began to change. I told the truth about my addiction. I slowly let friends and family back in. I found a room full of other gambling addicts where nobody flinched when I said the word ‘suicide’, or told them about just how deep into rock bottom I thought I was.

Instead, they just nodded because they’d been there too.

That kind of acceptance cracked something open in me that shame had kept locked shut for years.

Recovery has been messy, ugly, and often humiliating. But it has also been the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done. Because of it, I get to now live a life that isn’t controlled by the result of a football game, or by the thought of ending it all.

If you’ve ever been where I was — staring down a choice you think is only between continuing to live like this or not living at all — please read this: you are wrong.

There’s another option.

There’s help. There are people who will pick up the phone, drive to your house, and sit with you until the storm passes — and the storm does pass.

There is a life for you beyond whatever has convinced you that you are trapped. Maybe not amazing. Definitely not perfect.

But worth living.

And I don’t mean that I wake up each morning grateful to be alive.

More often than not, I wake with some levels of dread, and exhaustion, and disdain for the day.

But let me shower, drink some caffeine, and speak to another human being.

Let me gather up my insecurities and toss them into the furnace the sun sets ablaze each day as it rises — and it always rises — and I will be okay.

I tried to kill myself twice. But I never actually wanted to die.

I just wanted the pain to end. And today, I wake up — not like in the movies, not in a hospital bed, not with people rushing to hold my hand.

I wake up in my own bed, breathing, alive. Albeit barely — I really do need to get my sleep apnoea checked.

And that’s more than enough.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. In Australia, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14. In the United States, call or text 988. In Canada, call or text 9–8–8. For support in other countries, visit Befrienders Worldwide to find a local crisis helpline.

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Let me cut to the chase.

I fucking hate Bush Dances.

And look, before I lose your viewership to my wayward use of the F-word, I want to assure you that I tried not to do it. I really did. I mean, my own grandmother reads some of these things, for crying out loud.

But, my Church has forced my hand.

First my right, then my left. Then my right hand to my left shoulder, the—

They’re doing it again.

I’m a fun guy.

I promise.

I enjoy getting sweaty and too close for comfort with an entire congregation of people just the same as any other guy.

Where I draw the line, however, is doing it to the dulcet tones of a 3-piece fiddle band. There’s a reason Cotton-Eyed Joe has been banned from hell, and it’s not just because it’s a highly flammable insurance nightmare.

The plans for my Church’s 50th Anniversary were the final straw. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why the Church is so pathologically obsessed with this particular brand of torture, and I think I’ve finally connected the dots. I have uncovered the dark truth.

The Bush Dance isn’t about “fellowship”. It is a tactical strike against the human libido.

Which raises the obvious question:

“Can we not just sit around normally and, I don’t know, just talk to each other?”

Talk to any evangelical Christian, and they’ll all give you a similar response.

There is a danger here of “The Spark.” In the quiet stillness of a Sunday afternoon, people might actually connect. A gaze might linger. A conversation might drift toward a shared interest.

Before you know it, two unmarried adults have exchanged phone numbers without the approval of a small group leader.

This is a gateway to the throbbing lust of a healthy relationship. If you give people the space to be attractive to one another, someone might actually end up on a date — rather than just marrying each other on the spot.

The Church knows this.

The Bush Dance is the ultimate safeguard against this. It is a calculated ploy to wipe out any form of sexual connotation by making every participant look like a confused, perspiring marionette.

No human being has ever watched their romantic interest perform that specific, jerky little four-step shuffle, while wearing a sweat-soaked shirt, and thought to themselves:

Ohhh, yeah. Tonight is the night.

Tonight we hide ourselves from God’s eyes under a blanket in the backseat of my parents’ Hyundai Getz, and discover the universe together.

Wake up Sheeple.

For a group of people who seemed so concerned about the possible health effects of the Covid vaccine, the Australian Church seems to overlook the fact that even just touching an accordion makes a man infertile.

And don’t even get me started on the sweat. Or the smell. Nobody seems to notice the smell. I know it’s a Bush Dance, but we really don’t need to come in character — especially when that character is always wet sheepdog.

I’ve checked the Gospels. Jesus loved a good party — especially one with an excess of drinking water, wink wink. But even the man most at peace with the world didn’t allow himself to be besmirched by the Heel and Toe.

You might read this and think I’ve gone too far. That I’m mildly psychotic, and need to learn to just move on. That’s okay, I forgive you. But my therapist says the same, and if I’m not going to listen to any of his advice, what makes you think I’ll listen to you?

David may have danced before the Lord with all his might, but had he even looked like he was about to launch into the Chicken Dance, the Heavens may just have rained fire, there and then.

So yeah, I’ll be attending.

Because I love my Church. I love its people. And after fifty years, it deserves to celebrate.

But if somebody tries to get me to Strip the Willow, I will publicly denounce my faith.

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Note: The following is a speech I delivered at a gambling recovery conference six months ago. My topic was “Unity Step 1: Fear”.

Hi. I’m Sean. I’m a compulsive gambler.

Before I walked into these rooms, my entire life had been dictated by fear. I got in trouble at school a lot as a kid, and so I was regularly afraid of how my parents were going to react to the letter I had in my bag describing that day’s classroom performances.

By high school, my anxiety was purely speculative: I was terrified of what people were thinking of me.

I was a sweaty, pimply teenager; good at sports, but with none of the muscles to back it up.

Heck — I was a ginger living in Queensland. Enough said, right?

I went straight from school into University. And that was where fear really started doing lasting damage. Up until then — despite all of my anxiety — I had remained pretty straight-laced.

I came from a fairly conservative family, and I genuinely only drank alcohol once before I turned 18.

I didn’t seek anything out from gambling.

That is to say that I didn’t look at it as a numbing agent, nor a distraction from my anxiety. My friend and I were together at a pub watching our football teams play — something we had done numerous times before — when I tried to sign up to a bookie on a whim, following a TV ad.

And despite starting slow, my gambling quickly ramped up in both frequency and monetary value.

When I gambled, I stopped thinking about what other people were maybe saying or thinking about me. But the medicine quickly became the poison. Fast forward to the year leading up to my last bet — when I was absolutely off the deep end — fear had been ruling my life for years.

Not only were my old fears not absolved in any way, shape or form — in fact, they were now magnified — I also had new ones. Our disease thrives in isolation. And for me, that isolation was a fortress built entirely out of fear.

I was terrified of my family finding out. I couldn’t let my friends find out, lest they see me for the absolute loser I thought I was. I couldn’t tell work, because they’d know that I wasn’t just slow and steady — I was stealing company time to gamble.

Fear told me there was no alternative route to the one I was on: I had to keep doing it alone.

And so, when I finally hit rock bottom for about the 27th time, and made my way into these rooms (not forgoing great internal bitchiness), the concept of a ‘group’ in any form was completely foreign to me.

The idea that I could be completely transparent about everything I had done, the time and money I had wasted, the lies I had told… and somehow still be able to maintain any form of relationship with somebody else — let alone unity — was a joke.

But I stayed. And as I’ve mulled over the Unity Step 1 over the years, and examined it through the lens of fear, I’ve been reminded that it was addicts exactly like myself who wrote it.

When we look at Unity Step 1 through the lens of fear for enough time, we can see that it was actually birthed in fear. The founders of the fellowship weren’t ignorant to the fact that we are, at our core, emotionally-driven people.

They were terrified that if they didn’t get along, they would all start gambling again, and ultimately die. Unity wasn’t a choice made out of kindness; it was a choice made out of survival.

When we look closely at Unity Step 1, we can see two types of fear at play.

Firstly, we can identify healthy fear — that which acts as the glue that forces the group together. When I sat in those early meetings, still terrified of what people thought of me, something shifted.

The terror of my disease — the realization that my ‘medicine’ was actually going to kill me — finally outweighed my fear of being judged. That healthy fear glued me to my seat, and it glued me to this fellowship.

But… as we get a little clean time, the fog clears. The immediate crisis fades.

And that is when the acid starts to drip.

The acid is that ego-driven fear that returns when we start to feel “well.”

It’s the fear that tells me, “Sean, you’ve got this now. You don’t need to listen to that newcomer’s 20-minute rant. You’ve got bills to pay, you’re important, your time is more valuable than the group’s welfare.”

Ego-driven fear is the fear of losing my status. It’s the fear that if I’m not the smartest person in the room, or if the meeting doesn’t go exactly the way I think it should, then I’m not safe.

When I’m in that fear, I start to look for differences instead of similarities. I start to judge the way the treasurer handles the bills, or I get annoyed at the person who relapsed for the tenth time because they’re “bringing the mood down.”

That is the acid eating away at the glue.

Unity Step 1 tells us that our common welfare should come first.

Why?

Because the founders knew that a gambler’s ego is a heat-seeking missile designed to destroy relationships. If I put my ego, my preferences, or my “rightness” above the unity of this group, I am effectively pouring acid on my own life support system.

If this group cracks — if we become a collection of individuals fighting for control rather than a fellowship surrendered to a common cause — the door closes.

And if that door closes, where does the next “Sean” — the terrified guy with the secret in his bag and the bookie on his phone — go? He goes back to the isolation. He goes back to the fortress of fear.

So, how do I stop the acid?

I stop it by realizing that my personal recovery is not a solo achievement. It is a gift I am allowed to keep only as long as I am willing to protect the space where it was given to me.

Today, I try to practice Unity Step 1 by putting aside my “need to be right” for the “need to be together.”

I show up when I don’t want to, I listen to the person I might not always see eye to eye with, and I remember that I am never the most important person in the room — the group is.

Fear used to be the thing that kept me alone in the dark. Today, through Unity Step 1, a different kind of fear — a healthy, humble respect for the power of this fellowship — is the thing that keeps me in the light.

The glue is stronger than the acid, but only if we keep applying it every single day.

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I used to think thanking God for my recovery from addiction was insulting.

Not to God, of course.

But to the people who had actually carried me through it. My psychiatrists. My gambling counsellor. My mentor. Heck, even myself. After all, we were the ones doing the work — weren’t we?

Plus, I can say with absolute certainty that nobody in my life was blaming God when I relapsed, time and time again.

So why was everyone so quick to give God all the credit for the good stuff?

I first voiced this frustration to my mentor, as we sat sipping coffees one Saturday.

“I just don’t get it,” I said, exasperated.

“Everyone keeps telling me to thank God for my recovery. But I’m the one sitting in psychiatrists’ offices three times a week. I’m the one white-knuckling urges. I’ve been the one dragging myself into Gamblers Anonymous. My counsellor showed up.

You keep showing up.

If anyone deserves thanks, it’s them — it’s you.

And, shit man, it’s... me.”

My mentor listened patiently.

When I’d finally run out of things to complain about, he smiled.

“Take every one of those moments,” he said. “Every appointment and conversation where you’ve felt supported. Every room that’s received you with love.

When you’re telling your story, and you see love...

That’s where God is.

That’s what God is.

God is and has been wherever you can see Love in your journey.”

Which, if I’m honest, was a really fucking annoying answer.

Because it required me to do more wrestling, when all I felt like doing was running away.

Plus, it was so disarmingly simple.

I’d been carrying around what felt like a genuine theological crisis, and his response wasn’t a philosophical argument or a Bible study. It was an invitation to look at my own story differently.

Naturally, I nodded like I completely understood him.

I didn’t.

Back then I had an unfortunate (stupid) habit of pretending I’d grasped things long before I actually had. I’d call myself a people-pleaser, but I can’t remember a single person that I pleased whilst I was actively gambling…

Anyways, the conversation ended. We finished our coffees. Life moved on.

But his words kept repeating in my head.

God is love.

I remember not being angry at God — I didn’t think that He’d abandoned me or anything.

Looking back, I can see that I had played a significant role in the distance I felt from Him. What I really couldn’t understand was why He deserved any credit for my recovery.

Whenever I would send my friends updates about my recovery, I’d often receive the same reply of “Thank God!”.

And I’d think, Really?

I hadn’t exactly been involving Him.

The people who deserved thanks had names. They had faces. They had given up evenings, weekends and emotional energy for me. They had answered phone calls they didn’t have to answer. They had sat with me after relapse after relapse and somehow continued believing that I wasn’t beyond saving.

Calling all of that “God” felt like it cheapened what those people had done.

It felt like taking the spotlight away from the ones who had earned it.

And for a long time, I had left the conversation there. I didn’t challenge my friends on their divine misdirection of gratitude.

But that day in the park, what my mentor said to me started to change my way of thinking. As I looked back over my journey, I began making sense of his lesson.

Every significant turning point in my story had another person standing in it.

A counsellor who refused to give up on me, calling me multiple times a week just to check in.

A mentor who spent his Saturday mornings sitting in a park with someone who wouldn’t stop whingeing about the situations he kept putting himself in.

Friends who let me stay in their spare room when I was at risk of taking my own life.

A dank church hall in Brisbane, full of recovering gamblers who welcomed me back every single week without asking me to earn my place there.

I had spent years asking where God had been.

I had completely overlooked the fact that love had been showing up with astonishing consistency.

Growing up in church, I’d heard the phrase “God is love” more times than I could count. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t believe it — I thought it was a definition.

It turns out it was an invitation.

“Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (1 John 4:16). I’d always read that as a description of God’s character.

What if it was also a way of recognising His presence? What if my mentor hadn’t given me a clever metaphor over coffee, just to shut me up? What if he’d simply reminded me to look for the thing Scripture had been pointing towards all along?

That doesn’t mean every kind act is automatically a miracle, nor does it erase the extraordinary work done by psychiatrists, counsellors, mentors and loved ones. If anything, it’s just made me appreciate them even more.

I’m trying to stop thanking God instead of the people who carried me; I’m trying to thank God for them.

That shift has changed so much for me.

I think that, for years, I wanted God to show up as escape.

I wanted Him to instantly remove the addiction, erase the depression, quiet the noise in my head and somehow teleport me deep into the other side of recovery.

Instead, what I got was presence. Not the kind of presence that magically removed consequences, mind you, but the kind that refused to let me carry them alone.

I think that’s why my mentor’s answer took so long to make sense.

I kept looking for God as a feeling, but he kept pointing me towards love.

It’s given me a radically different mindset.

Yesterday, I drove past a primary school during lunch.

A group of kids were pressed against the fence, enthusiastically waving at passing cars, hoping somebody — anybody — would wave back.

So I did.

The excitement on their faces made me audibly giggle all the way home. I was genuinely radiating the joy that I had seen in their reaction.

Years ago, I would have simply called that a nice moment. Heck, years ago I would have flipped them the bird, thinking I was a comical genius — I was a real dick, whether I meant to be one or not.

Today, I think I call it something else.

Love.

And I’m finally beginning to understand what my mentor was trying to tell me all those sweaty Saturday mornings in the park.

For years, I felt alone.

Abandoned by God.

I thought God was distant from me... yet here He was, sitting across from me in the park. Sipping coffee.

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I am currently in the midst of moving house for the 10th time in as many years.

Literally that many times, by the way.

I cannot convey to you just how much I hate doing this

But, the room I was just renting was in a house that was cheap, and as we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or a cheap mould-free roof).

I don’t often have moments in my recovery that really make me dwell on the money that I lost to gambling. I usually focus on the non-monetary things I gambled away.

But this has felt different.

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If you’ve been following the Australian Senate inquiry into online gambling this week, you may have been shocked by some of the allegations.

Former NRL player Luke Bateman told the inquiry he was allegedly offered illicit drugs in exchange for depositing into particular betting accounts.

The allegations have rightly made headlines. If true, they’re deeply disturbing.

Personally, I find Bateman’s testimony believable.

But for the sake of being balanced  —  and to avoid having the pants sued off me  —  I’ll let the people in charge figure that one out.

The existence of VIP treatment for high-volume gamblers isn’t exactly news, mind you.

If you gamble enough, you’ll often be treated like royalty.

Depending on how valuable you are as a customer, a personal account manager will be assigned to you and given a budget on how much they can spend ‘greasing the wheels’ to keep you betting with them.

Think flights to major racing carnivals. Corporate boxes at the State of Origin matches. Luxury accommodation.

Free meals and unlimited alcohol.

It sounds amazing, right?

That’s barely a rhetorical question, by the way. Free lobster is free lobster. I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise.

The minor, inconvenient detail, of course, is that if you are being treated this way, you’re paying for all of it. You already have — and then some.

At this point, some of you might be wondering why I’m even bothering to explain something so painfully obvious.

“Who on earth falls for this?” Surely gambling addicts can’t be that stupid.

And honestly?

Most problem gamblers aren’t. They know exactly what’s happening. I certainly did.

Even at the height of my gambling addiction  —  where I was arguably the most disillusioned  —  I knew exactly what bonus bets were. I knew they only existed to give me a fix when I couldn’t afford it, and entice me to keep coming back.

It wasn’t as though any of this was hidden from me either.

The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t see it: it’s that I didn’t care.

And look, my story differs slightly to Luke’s because I was never a VIP customer.

Probably because I never stuck with one company long enough to give them enough cash to spend back on me. The reason is moot though, because the reality is that they simply never had to buy my loyalty.

They already had it — and they knew it.

Despite this, I can still recognise that it’s an incredibly interesting development in the world of VIP gambling customers.

Because I can at least acknowledge the argument for the special treatment that VIP customers have been receiving up until this point. ‘Rewards points’ are just part and parcel to the consumer-driven world we’re currently in.

Think airline frequent flyer points, or FlyBuys at Coles. The premise is exactly the same: spend enough money whilst staying loyal to a particular company, and you’ll be rewarded.

Where the comparison begins to fall apart, however, is that Coles doesn’t reward you for buying groceries that are destroying your life.

As Bateman told the Senate inquiry:

“Before getting there, the VIP manager would offer:

‘Hey mate, what drugs do you want? Do you want a couple of bags (of cocaine) for this weekend? We’ll organise that for you. We’ll have that ready for you when you get here.’”

I think it’s fair to say that, if this is true, we’ve moved well beyond complimentary lobster luncheon.

Personally, I know what happens when gambling and substances mix because I’ve lived it.

During my addiction, alcohol and benzos became part of my escape. They didn’t make me want to gamble — that desire was already there — but they removed any remnants of restraint or control that I had left.

The voice in my head spent the day screaming at me to ‘get help’ suddenly quietened the moment I swallowed that first pill, and placed the first bet. The more I drank, the bigger the bets got. The decisions got faster. The consequences became easier to ignore.

I would hazard a guess 90% of the time I was making my biggest and most destructive bets, I was heavily intoxicated.

And so the allegations that Bateman’s testimony included are exceptionally concerning:

The issue isn’t that someone was allegedly given drugs, it’s what those drugs may have enabled.

Which is why I think that Luke Bateman’s testimony might actually change the landscape when it comes to gambling in Australia — VIP gambling, anyways.

Because if the allegations are proven true, then this isn’t simply about making gambling attractive.

It’s about something so much darker.

There’s a huge difference between saying,

“Come gamble with us!”

and,

“Come here, and we’ll remove everything that might make you stop.”

The thing most people misunderstand about problem gambling is that we don’t gamble for the gambling.

We gamble for what gambling does to our minds.

Speaking from personal experience, the instant I placed a bet, my brain went numb. The loneliness and anxiety and shame I felt about my life disappeared, if but only for a second.

That’s what the Gambler is chasing.

And so anything that further lowers a person’s inhibitions should be deeply concerning to every single one of us; especially given who was (allegedly) supplying it.

Because for someone in addiction, the barriers to another bet are already frighteningly thin.

At the time of writing this, Bateman’s testimony is just that: testimony.

Whether the gambling companies did any of the things that he spoke to the Senate inquiry about yesterday is yet to be proven.

But one thing is impossible to ignore:

Luke Bateman is not the first “VIP” to describe feeling exploited by the gambling industry.

There are countless people who have stories of being encouraged to continue gambling long after it became clear they were struggling. People who were targeted with bonus bets when they had asked for a break, or advertised to after expressing a desire to seek help.

People who were treated as VIPs when they were, in reality, vulnerable people.

When all is said and done, however, perhaps we do need to cut these companies some slack. Every business has a few rotten eggs, after all.

An explanation that would be a lot easier to accept if the allegations were simply about one rogue person crossing a line.

But according to yesterday’s testimony, this wasn’t just one person. As Bateman said himself — whilst discussing one of the exclusive events he was invited to on the Gold Coast — at least the CEOs and ‘top dogs’ distance themselves from this heinous behaviour.

…right?

“And the entire C-suite of the company was there. All the management team administration, and they were all in a backroom doing drugs together. And I was out in this room doing drugs with all of them. This is like the CEO, the founders, the VIP managers,” Bateman said.

Well.

Fuck.

That’s not good, fellas.

I am currently moving house, and it is bloody expensive!

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Otherwise, the cliche ‘like and restack’! definitely helps. :)

It’s been 1061 days since my last bet. One day at a time.

Like any healthy adult, I started my day today by scrolling through a few hours worth of short-form videos before rolling out of bed.

I stumbled upon a clip from a 60 Minutes interview with a psychiatrist, who was being interviewed about his clients and their gambling addictions. In this particular short, he referred to patients who had gone so far as to place bets whilst in the shower.

To me, this wasn’t shocking. I can’t really remember a time as a gambler where I showered without doing this.

But to the comments section, it was. More than shocking, actually ——it was unbelievable to most.

The consensus was swift and cynical. One comment in particular, which had racked up hundreds of likes, summed it up perfectly:

It’s not often that a symptom in this vein of addiction is viewed as too outlandish and unbelievable by internet trolls.

When my gambling was really bad, there was no chance a shower would stop me.

More than I can remember, I’d have placed a variety of bets on a particular game before getting in — then prop my phone up on a bottle of shampoo so I could stare blankly ahead at it.

I mean, really, out of all the places I would dissociate whilst gambling, the shower felt like one of the safest. It was certainly the most comfortable.

But I don’t want to romanticise it — I’d liken this “comfort” to being handed a pair of sunglasses whilst in hell.

And I’m not writing this to call out all the comments on that video — it was unironically a great thing to read those comments.

It was kind of refreshing, because the comments section on videos like these are always full of trolls obsessed with “meme-ifying” gambling addiction. I’m sure you’ve seen them:

“You only lose at gambling if you stop betting!”

“Everybody who quits gambling was just one bet away from a big win!”

It’s easy to laugh at the memes. It’s easy to play the part of the “degenerate” for likes. But the reaction to that 60 Minutes video revealed a massive disconnect.

The trolls — and even the casual observers — seem to discount the absolute, suffocating grip that online gambling has on a person.

They can fathom losing a house.

They can fathom losing a car.

They can imagine losing everything.

But what they can’t imagine? Losing control of themselves.

They can't fathom the loss of agency required to prop a phone against a shampoo bottle just to place another bet.

Is it ignorance?

Probably.

I’d like to think it is, anyway, because ignorance is not inherently malicious.

But I want to acknowledge the danger birthed in this ignorance that fuels the usual meme-y comments.

The danger in people calling my reality a ‘lie’ isn’t that it hurts my feelings. I’m way past that — if nothing else, recovery forces you to develop obscene levels of self-awareness about your own insanity.

No, the danger is that it creates a false sense of security for everyone else.

Because addiction almost always looks reasonable — and unrecognisable — from the inside.

Every addict has a mental line they haven’t crossed yet.

“At least I don’t gamble before work.”

“At least I don’t borrow money.”

“At least I don’t bet in the shower.”

The problem is, of course, that the line keeps moving.

So when we treat ‘betting in the shower’ as an impossible extreme or a therapist’s tall tale, we give the person who is ‘only’ betting at their desk or ‘only’ betting at a child’s birthday party a reason to say, ‘At least I’m not that guy!’

But I’ve been that guy.

If you’re reading this, and wondering if perhaps your gambling is becoming a bit too much, then I feel as though the shower is a pretty good marker. And by ‘marker’, I mean holy shit, get some help, immediately.

I don’t want to come across as arrogant or judgemental here. As I said, I’ve ticked that marker off a hundred times, and sunk even lower than gambling in the shower.

I suppose I just wanted to write this to validate those who may see similar videos; who then see their story/struggle depicted in anecdotes, only to have them belittled or wrongfully falsified in the comments section.

If this is you, I don’t want to chastise you for it, nor excuse it as normal behaviour:

I just want you to know that I see you. I hear you. I acknowledge you.

If you’re new to acknowledging your personal struggles with gambling, and want to use the fact that you aren’t currently shower-betting as an excuse to keep going.

All I can say is you’ll probably be doing so before you know it. Or maybe it’ll be when you’re at parties. When you’re at work. When you’re driving.

Because if you’re anything like me, then the distance between “only gambling on a weekend” and propping your phone up against a shampoo bottle is a lot shorter than a YouTube comment section would have you believe.

Day 1055.

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Most of my friends who don’t gamble say the same thing when we chat about my addiction:

“I could never become a gambling addict. The first time I bet, I lost $10 — and I’ve never forgotten about it!”

Which immediately presents us with one of the biggest differences between them and me: Losing money for the first time didn’t even make me flinch.

Six weeks after my first bet, I lost an egregious amount of money. All I felt was numb. Which was an oddly refreshing change, considering the amount of anxiety I was experiencing in my day-to-day life as an 18-year-old.

This numbness was fleeting. Intoxicating, but fleeting. Within an hour of this first major bet losing, I was immediately wagering more money on a different match.

I didn’t really gauge it at the time, but my entire thought process had changed in the 80 minutes of the first game. It shifted from “well this is a fun little hobby”, to “holy shit, I need to win back that money I just lost right now”.

That was the moment I began chasing my losses.

Which is when the real trouble first started.

Because in order to win the money that I had lost so far back — at the speed I felt I needed to — I had to drastically increase the stakes of my bets.

And so $1 bets became $10, $10 became $100... and so on.

Single bets, i.e. a bet on a team to win a game, became multi bets — enhancing the odds and thus potential winnings, but also drastically reducing the likelihood of winning.

Which is exactly what happened: I began to lose a lot of money.

“Why chase? Why not just… stop?” you might say.

I don’t think this question is ignorant, by the way. I think it’s really the only logical reaction from any sane members of the audience.

I “didn’t stop” because — in the early stages, at least — I was convinced that I would be done if I could just win it all back. If I could claw my way back to a nice and neutral $0 overall, then I would quit and never gamble again.

I prayed for that a lot, actually. I knew deep down that it wasn’t how God worked, but I was beyond desperate.

In the now-obvious enlightenment of retrospection, my ‘Net Zero’ plan was never going to be the case. My future track record would prove time and time again that it didn’t matter how much I was up or down in any given period of time, I was always going to continue gambling.

Because it wasn’t about the money. It never was.

It was about the relief from the “itch”.

The “itch” started as my everyday problems.

At 18, this was pretty extreme general anxiety, misdirection in life (like most adolescent males, mind you), and an overall poor sense of self-worth. Amongst other, smaller things.

But as life continued to march forwards, so too did my problems grow.

As I’ve written about previously, after my first year of heavy gambling I had a period of incidental abstinence. I say ‘incidental’ because I didn’t actively attain this. It was a combination of entering my first real relationship, and — unrelated to this — crashing my parents’ car, and not being able to afford a replacement.

But after about 1.5 years of this gamble-free period, life was falling apart at the seams.

The relationship had led to an engagement, but this had fallen through — leaving me heartbroken. That break-up took me about 4 years to really get over.

Work was getting busier and busier, and the one reprieve that I was banking on to cure me — a month in Japan — had been cancelled indefinitely due to COVID.

I fell into a bout of depression for the first time in my life; and after nigh on a year of becoming one with the vinyl couch in our living room, I contacted my GP asking for help. To cut a long story short, the anti-depressants I was prescribed made things immediately worse. I was yet to be diagnosed with ADHD, and so the SSRI I began to take was the completely wrong course of treatment.

Perhaps the worst side effect of the new medication was my development of suicidal ideation. These were daily, vivid images of my brain imagining ways that I should kill myself.

But when I gambled… these problems didn’t seem to matter anymore. I could escape them. I could numb them out.

And so I gambled. More than I ever had before, in both monetary value and quantities of bets. I wasn’t in quite as much distress when I gambled, and any alleviation to my pain was priceless to me.

Of course, this self-prescribed cure for the itch eventually only made things worse. Because I never worked through these issues properly — choosing instead to just numb them out — they remained.

And the more I gambled, the more problems I had — the more fuel I added to the fire. The itch soon consisted of all these things prior, plus money problems, a constant state of flux between withdrawal and numbing, and the fact that — due to the sheer size and quantity of my problems — no longer wanting to live.

Obviously, I wanted to stop. I was desperate to stop.

But I wanted to keep getting what gambling was giving me more than I wanted to stop.

I wasn’t actually addicted to the gambling; I was addicted to what the gambling did for my head. I have lived with a social anxiety that has flooded my brain for as long as I can remember.

Just as I assume an alcoholic drinks, or a narcotics addict uses, a gambler wagers to disappear. My problems evaporated from my mind the moment the bet was placed. In that liminal space between the bet and the result, I was able to access a complete dissociation.

It was how I felt in this space—in this complete numbing of my psyche — that I became addicted to.

Actually, it was more than this: gambling finally gave me an excuse.

To be late to events. To be sweaty and nervous at events. To not show up to them at all.

Things that my anxiety had caused me to do/feel for years at this point — but that I’d never been able to understand why it had.

Suddenly, I could rationalise these symptoms of anxiety by looking at the money I was losing whilst gambling. Which felt like a godsend at the time.

The problem was that the quiet never actually lasted very long.

Nor was it instantaneous — it didn’t arrive the moment I placed the bet.

No, see the game wouldn’t need to start for the anaesthetic of the bet to begin to kick in — I would just need to know that I would be placing it. My anxiety would begin to quieten as soon as I deposited money into my account.

But as soon as the game’s result started turning against me — or the final whistle confirmed I’d lost — that quiet didn’t just leave me: It came back louder and harder than before.

Because now I still had all the problems I’d started with, plus another one.

The only thing I’d ever found that could silence the noise had just become another source of it.

And yet the fact remained that it had given me some silence.

So — desperate for this “inner peace” to return — I placed another bet.

Perhaps, you yourself can find this silence in a good movie, or by immersing yourself in a good book. Some people I know find their inner peace whilst climbing a mountain at sunrise. To which I must add a note exclaiming, “how the fuck am I the clinically diagnosed lunatic here?”

I can only say that for myself, it took problematic levels of gambling to overcome the constant droning of my brain. And whether this means that our brains are inherently different or not is not an argument that I am qualified to have. I can only speak of my experience.

It’s honestly something I still really struggle with today — shutting my brain up. I’m genuinely trying to find what works for me, but the ‘easy ways out’ continue to beckon.

Part of the reason they do, is because in Australia, gambling is less of a hobby, and more of a constant droning in the background of everyday life.

Online platforms mean that betting on sports, horse/dog racing, or pokies are available almost 24/7.

Pokies (slot machines) are open at pretty much every pub until 4 am every night. Entire ‘Casinos’ run 24/7 online — you can log in and play table card games via a live camera feed at any time of the day.

Which is a lot of examples to say that if you — like me — are a compulsive gambler, you can no longer rely on the world to step in and tell you, “uhhh mate… I think you’ve had enough”.

I think the concept that money is not the primary reason problem gamblers gamble is so vital for people to understand.

Because it radically changes the conversations that we should be having with both those struggling with gambling, and those who are trying to help them.

So often, the warning labels that I see after a Gambling Ad on TV completely overlook this fact.

“Imagine what you could be buying instead” is one of the most common.

“Think. Is this a bet you really want to place?”

“What’s gambling really costing you?”

The problem with these slogans is two-fold.

They assumed that I could make ‘normal’ financial decisions. I couldn’t.

They assumed I had the ability to weigh things like groceries and petrol against gambling, and come away making the right decision. I didn’t.

They assumed that I was still experiencing money as money. I wasn’t.

At a certain point in my addiction, money lost all its worth to me. I have no idea when, or whether it happened all at once or slowly. Had I known that I would one day be writing about my addiction, I’d like to think I’d have taken more notes. I apologise.

The only way I can explain it is that at some point, I stopped recognising the figures in my bank account as money. I saw them as just that — numbers.

The emotional attachment to these figures was completely and utterly gone.

If they were there when I hit refresh on my banking app in the morning? Fuck yeah. Time to deposit into one of my accounts and start gambling for the day.

If they weren’t? Fuck. How am I… what am I going to sell… who can I message and ask for money so that I can start gambling for the day?

Money was no longer “rent” or “groceries” or “breakfast out with a friend”, it was just the thing I could deposit into an account and bring the numbness and quiet back to my head for just a little bit longer.

If I was to try and summarise this a little better, I’d say that it was maybe not just that money lost its value to me, but perhaps that the numbness I was chasing from gambling no longer had a price I wouldn’t pay for it.

And it still progressed from here. Because where I originally never imagined taking out loans to fund my gambling, I did. I got a credit card for the first time in my life, and quickly cash advanced to my limit.

When banks stopped lending to me, I took out payday loans (dodgier, higher interest). When I had exhausted the payday loan companies available to me, I sold things like my computer monitor, and pawned a signed cricket jersey.

And finally, when all these avenues of accessing money were done — I cashed in my most valuable and expensive item yet:

My word. Other people’s trust.

I messaged friends lies, saying that I needed to borrow money for groceries or for petrol or for rent.

A lot of them knew I was a gambler at this point. They knew I was in trouble. So the fact that I was messaging to ask for money wasn’t completely out of left field, and they simply wanted to help me.

But the money I received from them never went to whatever other bullshit excuse I had attached to my drunken message the night prior — I gambled every cent of it.

How these people remained my friends during this period only speaks absolute volumes about their ability to love me and forgive me.

This unconditional grace wasn’t earned, and I didn’t expect nor dare to ask for it. But it was there. And it held up a mirror that perhaps finally showed me the person I had become.

This juxtaposition between my actions and my friends’ grace has become the bedrock of my recovery; if for no other reason than I am trying to pay them back for their part in saving me.

As I mentioned earlier in the piece, I’m still struggling with the noise of my brain — with the constant “itch”.

I always imagined it would disappear when I stopped gambling. But that’s when I also thought that the itch was my gambling.

The simple reality is that the noise, the itch, whatever I want to call it — this will always be there for me. Life is life — inherently messy and noisy.

I need to keep recognising this as truth, because I need to remember that numbing or drowning this noise out is only temporary, and thus futile. I need to learn how to live with it, and keep working at hearing it in a different tune.

For now, writing seems to be really helping me find this peace in the chaos. It forces me to examine my mental and spiritual health regularly, and continues to remind me daily that I am not alone in my struggles.

If I can try and give you one thing to dwell on from this piece, it’s this:

If we’re going to help problem gamblers, we have to stop pretending they’re making sane, financial decisions.

Because I wasn’t. I was just trying to buy a little silence.

And I was so desperate for it that I almost gave everything I had.

It’s been 1050 days since I last placed a bet.

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I’ve always loved sport.

I think I love it so much because of its unpredictability.

In a world run by algorithms  —  where what I want always takes precedence — it continues to become more and more of a refreshing change.

It’s been something I’ve reflected on a lot recently, especially the other week, when I reached 1,000 days gamble-free  —  an addiction where most of what I gambled on was sports.

It was a milestone that forced me to look back at how my relationship with sport shifted from a source of genuine joy to a highly clinical obsession and then, slowly, back to something I love.

The Games Before Gambling

One of my fondest memories growing up was watching Australia participate in the FIFA World Cup.

Growing up in Brisbane meant that the Socceroos never played during prime time. To watch their games meant waking up before the sun, in the freezing middle of winter. And by “freezing”, I mean roughly ten degrees Celsius. We’re not a particularly tough bunch up here.

As kids, we were only allowed to watch the games that started after 4 a.m. I remember our dad waking my older brother and me up  —  sometimes multiple times, as we would immediately fall back asleep  —  and we would sit together in the lounge room, huddled under blankets.

I played football (soccer) at the time, and so it was incredibly exciting getting to watch my literal sporting heroes on the pitch: Craig Moore, John Aloisi, and Mark Viduka  —  to name a few.

Back then, sport was pure, and it was enjoyable.

Back then, sport was enough.

Grandad’s Sporting Religion

My grandad introduced me to most of the sport I still watch today.

His sporting trinity has always been simple:

Cricket.
AFL.
Rugby League.

Honestly, can you get a more Australian line-up than that??

When we slept over at my grandparents’ house, Friday nights belonged to rugby league. Grandad would be sitting in his chair watching whatever game happened to be on.

Saturday afternoons belonged to AFL.

Come Sunday, the rugby league would be back on the TV.

If Australia happened to be playing a Test Match, the cricket would find its way onto the television too.

Grandad has never been one for complicated sporting loyalties. He supports Brisbane in rugby league. Brisbane in the AFL. Queensland, whenever Queensland are playing. Australia, whenever Australia is involved.

He’s 81 this year, and ridiculously funny without trying to be. He tells the same stories over and over again, though he’s at least self-aware enough to begin most of them with:

“I’ve probably told you this one a million times before, but…”

Maybe he has. (He definitely has). But I’ll never tell him.

The Moments I’ve Missed

I discovered sports betting when I was 18.

My mate and I used to head into the city on a Saturday night to watch the English Premier League matches on the big screen at one of the very generic British pub chains, called The Pig and Whistle.

We were genuine supporters — for me, it was Chelsea, for him, Liverpool; we both supported PintsOfBeer FC.

In 2015, near the end of the year, our teams played against each other. Moments before the game started, an ad flashed up on the pub television for one of the many online sportsbetting companies here in Australia. I figured “What’s the harm?” and started to sign up so I could place $20 on Chelsea to win.

Over the next eight years, I learnt the hard way just how much harm gambling can cause.

Not just financially, either.

At first, it felt like gambling made sport more exciting. That’s the lie gambling sells. Suddenly, every game mattered. Every goal felt important. Every result carried weight.

But pretty quickly, something shifted. I stopped caring whether Chelsea won — I cared whether or not my bet won. Close games lost their excitement — their buzz — because they were now way too stressful.

And so I stopped watching football altogether. Instead, I’d sit and stare at a website displaying live scores from around the world. Twenty matches at a time with constantly updating scores.

The scoreboard no longer told me if my team was winning or not. It told me if I was going to be able to afford my groceries later that week.

The Championship Quarter

A few months ago, Grandad and I went to watch Brisbane play Adelaide on a fairly sunny Sunday afternoon.

The Lions played excellently.

The Crows? Not so much.

As always, Grandad arrived at the ground before I did. I arrived five minutes late, which for me is actually ten minutes early.

“Sorry, I’m late,” I said.

“If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have been late,” he replied.

He’s been saying that for years, and honestly? He’s right. (But you’ll never hear me admit that out loud.)

There was nothing particularly different about this afternoon — it followed the usual script of an afternoon with grandad at the footy. Charlie Cameron kicked one of the first goals, and the stadium speakers blasted “Take Me Home, Country Roads”.

You see, each player picks a song at the start of the season that will play whenever they score. Charlie picked the John Denver classic five seasons ago, and it quickly became a cult classic — the crowd always sings a repeat of the chorus after the music stops.

Even my nan gets excited when Charlie scores, despite having no interest in football beyond the fact that Grandad loves it.

Speaking of Nan, Grandad bought his usual half-time treat of chicken tenders and chips that day. I always wonder if it’s one of his favourite meals of the week — when Nan isn’t there to make him eat vegetables, or steal half of his chips.

As we sat and ate together, I pulled out my phone to take a photo of us — but it was turned off. At some point that afternoon:

I had spent the entire game with my phone turned off.

This was absolutely monumental.

I know, I know — it’s how it should always be, especially when you’re spending time with your Grandad.

But it hadn’t been.

When I was at the peak of my gambling, there was absolutely nothing that could distract me or fulfill me enough to stop. When Grandad and I watched games together in those years, I was always too focused on the result. How much would we win or lose by? How many points would the match total be?

Then, the instant the game was over — or my bet had resulted mid-match  —  I was immediately looking at my phone, focusing on the next bet.

And so to now be in a place where there was absolutely nothing I cared about more than being there with Grandad — no message I needed to read or score I needed to check… well, for someone who once couldn’t even put his phone down to have a shower, it feels pretty close to a miracle.

The Most Expensive Wager

My gambling addiction robbed me of a lot of things. I could tell you exactly how much money I lost to it.

But over the years, I’ve learnt that money is probably the least valuable thing I’ve gambled away.

The most valuable thing? My attention. My presence.

The most valuable thing I ever lost was the ability to exist in moments like this, with my Grandad. To sit and chat. To feel the excitement of the crowd.

Because I know that Grandad and I won’t be able to do this forever.

Which is why it’s such a blessing now to be able to be completely present — not just in the moment during the game, but in the moments afterwards.

Walking back to catch the bus with Grandad these days, I’m able to actually take in what we’re talking about, instead of being worried about the money that I’d just lost or how I was going to gamble away the money I had just won.

Being in recovery is fantastic for many obvious reasons. Financial stability is great. But it also means almost nothing to me, comparatively speaking.

Because when I really look back on what breaking free from my addiction has given me, I think I'll be most grateful that I got to spend so many years going to the football with my grandad.

I won’t remember most of the results, because they won’t matter. I hope that I’ll remember all of the stories he’s told me on repeat over the years, but I know I probably won’t. What I’ll remember is him telling them. His half-time snack order, and the feeling I get at the back of my throat when we watch a Charlie Cameron goal.

When I sit back one day and really think about it, I’ll remember that we were there, together.

Day 1049. One Day at a Time.

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When I visited the Louvre in 2017, I knew exactly what I wanted to see.

I’m a man of astute research, and so I’d already read a couple of reviews on Reddit about it: “Smaller than you’d think.” “There’ll be a massive line.”

Yeah yeah  —  shut up nerds. It’s art. I get it. I was praying for a better time than a week before, when I’d seen David’s devastatingly realistic anatomy.

I rushed through the Louvre, eventually finding the Mona Lisa. I took so many photos. Selfies. Standard ‘point and click’. I even tried to apply a funny filter to her face as I was taking a pic. Doesn’t work, don’t try it.

It wasn’t until I reached the next room that I realised something genuinely upsetting:

I don’t think I’d actually looked at it: at her, Miss Mona the Lisa.

Obviously, even just on the screen of my phone, I had. But I don’t remember lingering.

I’m struggling to be a consumer.

There are so many incredible stories that flood my inbox each day, from people I love  —  many of whom are complete strangers  —  writing about their lives.

And I want to read every single one of them.

I do.

The amount of articles I open and scroll through quickly during the day is incredible. I just don’t have the bandwidth to sit and commit, even just to one.

For a while I was blaming it on my ADHD. I’m fairly certain that my lack of concentration could probably explain this whole thing. But, I was diagnosed quite late in life, and whilst I truly did try to read up and research it using online articles…

Is it my ego? Perhaps.

Maybe I read others’ work and upon realising just how much better they are than I am at writing  —  usually something I identify within the opening paragraph  —  I metaphorically slam my laptop shut and hurl it out my front window.

And you might say, “Oh, but Sean, you’re a wonderfully talented writer, and I love everything you email to me.”

To which I can only respond by saying: I know, and I love you Nan. Thank you.

But, my dear reader, I must direct your attention towards my work in general. Heck —  to this piece itself. Would a truly ‘wonderfully talented writer’ (your words not mine) call a ‘writer’ a producer, and a ‘reader’ a consumer?

I doubt it. I don’t think they’d use the word ‘metaphorically’ as heinously as I do, either; and don’t even get me started on my inability to correctly apply a semicolon to my work.

My segues are frankly stellar, though, just like this one  —  which helps us transition very naturally into my next point.

Don’t get me wrong  —  I don’t want to actually consume everything that everybody that I subscribe to has to say. That sounds horrific.

But I want to make you feel seen and I want to make you feel heard. So many of you are writing pure poetry. You’re summarising the devastating beauty of life itself, and transferring lessons that life has cruelly etched onto your wrists and livers.

I’m sure there’s some wanky, capitalistic explanation for this, by the way. In fact, I’m certain of it. But if you’re looking for any form of comprehension of financial subjects or issues, then I have to back myself here and say that it’s unfair of you to be looking for it in an article written by a former gambling addict.

“But Dostoevsky was a gambling addict”, I hear you cry angrily. “And he certainly seemed to understand a thing or two about things and…stuff.”

Which I have to admit, Nan, is getting a bit intense for me. Ease up, turbo.

Heck, I doubt I’m even legally allowed to reference him as much as I do in my writing  —  I’ve only read one of his books, and it was the shortest. I also downloaded the PDF illegally… though to be fair, I would have done it legally, I just don’t know how.

Remember how good I am at segues?

I’d love to give you a big dollop of ‘here’s 3 things I learnt from this’ as the ice-cream conclusion a-top this apple pie of a piece.

I can’t.

Though, I suppose, if I was to be held at gunpoint and demanded to give an answer  —  lovely of you to pop by, Nan  —  I’d say that I think I’ve worked it out.

Reading somebody’s story here is so different to what I’ve become so accustomed to filling my spare time with — scrolling Instagram reels and losing at online chess.

Your stories demand attention.

When you publish something deeply personal, you’re trusting me — a stranger — with it. Which is an absolutely remarkable gift to give.

I think what I’m really struggling with, is that I don’t want to half-read it while waiting for my coffee, as I pretend not to see that girl I went to High School with and haven’t seen in a decade is also waiting for hers.

I want to give your story the attention it deserves, but honestly?

I can’t.

I doubt any of us can, really.

And I want to honour your stories.

Which is exactly why I keep scrolling past them.

Because even the shortest story deserves more of me than I seem capable of giving. An hour reflecting on it, a genuine comment that understands the piece and its context, and an unmarked check to pay you the deserved amount for sharing your story.

And I can’t give anything close to that.

Mainly because I can’t afford the check. Perhaps I am Dostoevsky, after all.

Buy Me a Coffee?

My Mum has spent years telling me I’m too rude on social media.

She’d see me arguing with strangers in comment sections and gently suggest that calling people “idiots” probably wasn’t helping.

I always brushed her off  —  mainly because I’ve only ever argued with people who were idiots.

After all, if someone posted something that goes against the things that I believe in, why should I pretend otherwise? Why should I engage politely with views that I considered ridiculous?

Lately, I’ve started wondering whether Mum was onto something. Because for a long time, I’ve been the ignorant one.

I feel as though it’s impossible to look at the current state of Australia Politics and not see the shadow of 2016 Donald Trump. Not because I think Pauline Hanson is Australia’s version of Trump, and not because I think One Nation is about to sweep into government.

But because I think we’re possibly making the same mistake many Americans made a decade ago: we’re confusing humiliation with persuasion. And those are not the same thing.

Because I highly doubt that anybody logs onto Facebook thinking they’re the unreasonable one. If we ignore that countless amount of fake accounts that are pervading the space, we have to see social media discourse for what it is  —  everyday men and women simply existing in the comment sections. And we all think we’re the sensible person responding to somebody else’s nonsense.

Which means that when political disagreements turn into mockery, very few minds are actually being changed.

Despite what my brain tells me when I’m entering into a one-way “debate” in the comments of a Sydney Morning Herald rage-bait post — I’m never going to teach somebody. I’m only dismissing them. And dismissed people have a habit of looking elsewhere for someone willing to listen.

I think we see that best in the overall system breakdown in Australian politics.

It used to be a two horse race; until the Liberal party tripped and fell so hard that we had to erect the green curtains around it, and load the shotgun.

At the 2022 federal election, the combined primary vote for Labor and the Coalition fell to approximately 68%  —  the lowest level in modern Australian history. In the late 1980s, the two major parties regularly attracted more than 85% of first-preference votes.

Which is a pretty remarkable shift.

It’s important to note, too, that Australians have a legal obligation to vote in politics at every level.

And so this isn’t a sign that Australians are abandoning politics — but more that they’re abandoning the traditional options.

In that same time-frame, satisfaction with Australian democracy has fallen sharply. According to the Australian Election Study, satisfaction peaked at 86% in 2007 before falling to 70% by 2022.

Trust in government has declined too. Only around 30% of Australians say people in government can generally be trusted.

And younger Australians often seem the most disillusioned.

I could rattle off statistics about home — ownership rates, housing prices, and cost of living here  —  but we all know the drill. People are frustrated.

Whether every frustration is justified is almost beside the point. People feel it. That’s the only fact that matters. Because politics is often driven more by how people feel than by what some wank economist says should be happening.

When enough voters start looking at the major parties and asking, Who exactly is speaking for me?, somebody eventually steps forward and offers an answer.

Enter Pauline Hanson, stage right (wing).

When Donald Trump emerged in American politics, many of his opponents treated both him and his supporters as a joke.

If they weren’t joking about them, they were condemning them; when they weren’t condemning them, they were diagnosing them. Trump voters were portrayed as backwards, gullible, ignorant, or morally defective. The intention was often understandable. Many people genuinely found Trump’s behaviour alarming.

But ridicule turned out to be a terrible persuasion strategy.

For millions of Americans who already felt ignored by political, media, and cultural institutions, being mocked simply reinforced the belief that nobody in positions of influence actually cared what they thought.

The result wasn’t less support for Trump: it was more.

And look, I know  —  Australia is not America.

Our political system is different. Our compulsory voting system changes incentives in important ways.

But human nature isn’t geographically restricted. When people feel ignored, and then get mocked for feeling ignored, they don’t suddenly become more reasonable. They get angry, they dig their toes in, and they vote angrily.

Which is possibly why Pauline Hanson remains politically relevant after all these years.

Despite decades of controversy, One Nation secured more than 4.3% of the national House of Representatives vote at the 2022 election. In Queensland, the party received more than 7.4% of the Senate vote, comfortably retaining Hanson’s seat.

Those numbers are not huge, but they don’t need to be.

Her critics often point to controversial statements, poor policy ideas, or a lack of political polish.

And look, some of those criticisms are completely fair.

But they overlook the fact that many voters aren’t looking for polish, they seem to now be looking for authenticity.

When trust in government is low, polished politicians can sound scripted. I’ll admit, I’m sick to death of anything political — it’s all just carefully managed media appearances and sloppy handshakes.

So I can totally see the appeal of a politician who says exactly what’s on their mind  —  even when it’s messy, blunt, or offensive. And I think that’s one of the lessons many people missed about Trump.

His supporters weren’t necessarily voting for perfection — they were voting against a system they believed had stopped listening.

Which brings me back to my Mum.

I still disagree with plenty of people online  —  probably more than is healthy. (Definitely more.)

But I’ve woken up to the now seemingly-obvious reality that nobody has ever read one of my terrible Facebook replies and thought, “You know what? He’s right. I am an idiot.”

And yet, knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to stop.

When I scroll through social media and see the inevitable clickbait and rage-bait posts about One Nation or Pauline Hanson, the comment sections are a shit-show. And if I’m being honest, when I read the brutal, ferocious comments dismantling Hanson or her supporters, I agree with them. I find myself nodding along and enjoying them.

But that is exactly where the trap lies.

But that satisfaction has nothing to do with persuasion. It’s just self-gratification disguised as political engagement.

You don’t have to agree with One Nation voters. I don’t. You don’t have to vote for Pauline Hanson. I won’t.

But if our strategy is to mock, shame, and exclude everyone who thinks differently from us, we shouldn’t be surprised when those people stop listening. Because every time we treat political disagreement as evidence of moral failure, we create exactly the conditions that populist movements thrive in.

And if Australia wants to avoid its own Trump moment, we might need to spend less time enjoying the feeling of being right and more time understanding why so many people feel unheard.

Even if we think they’re idiots.

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In Australia, we are taught from a young age how to survive the surf.

The most important lesson is the signal: if you are caught in a rip and you’re in over your head, you raise one arm as high as you can and wave it toward the shore.

It is a simple, life-saving bit of communication.

Without that raised hand, a surf lifesaver will watch you from the beach and assume you are just swimming. They will assume you’re having fun.

They will assume you are safe.

During the eight years I spent gambling, I felt like I was caught in the inescapable rip that was pulling me further and further from the shore.

I was drowning — but my arms were tucked firmly by my sides. I was working overtime to look like I was enjoying the water; when really — it was about to kill me.

The Seven-Day Miracle

One week into my first successful (and currently maintained!) attempt at gambling abstinence, I sent a message to my group chat. I was celebrating seven days clean.

To my friends, it probably looked like a small milestone. To me, it was a miracle. In eight years of addiction, I had never intentionally gone a single week without a bet.

Months later, a close friend confessed something that stopped me in my tracks: “I didn’t realise how bad it was until I saw how much those seven days meant to you.”

This was someone who had seen me hundreds of times during my 8-year stint as a professional gambling-flop. We had been to weddings, parties, and church services together. On almost every one of those occasions, I was either actively gambling on my phone or consumed by thoughts of the next bet.

She was right there beside me the whole time. But she had no idea.

How Shame Fuels Gambling Addiction

I used to wonder how I managed to gamble myself into such a catastrophic hole without anyone noticing. The answer is simple: Shame.

Shame is the architect of the invisible prison. It convinced me that if I were transparent, I would be met only with judgment. So, I worked overtime to keep the walls high. I invited very few people into my inner world, then felt a strange, bitter resentment when they didn’t offer to help.

In hindsight, I realise how unfair that was. I was drowning, but I was doing it while pretending to swim.

Today, I am grateful my rock bottom was deep enough to force change. If the hole hadn’t been so deep, I might never have been forced to take the radical steps necessary to reach nearly three years of sobriety.

Helping Loved Ones Understand Your Recovery

When we are in the thick of addiction, we develop unfair expectations. We want the people who love us to be mind readers. We want them to see through our lies and save us, even when we are fighting to stay hidden.

Earlier this year, after a conversation with a loved one, I wrote the poem below. After hearing from them just how hard and confusing it had been trying to support me through my struggles, it finally clicked with me:

They had been wanting to help the entire time. I was the one who had been refusing to wave at them, signalling my distress.

As I wrote, I tried to map our collective experience to the stages of grief — each stanza showing the denial, then the anger, and eventually, the search for acceptance.

I’m yet to give it a title.

“I’m always a phone call away,
I’m there for you, anytime or place.
Just call if you need;
If I can help at all I will.”

As I recall these promises,
Partnered for years with your goodbyes,
I try to picture a single one fulfilled, but cannot.
Where were you, when I needed you most?

I don’t mean initially — I didn’t need you then.
When I merely laid on the floor, frozen but safe.
Only dreaming of snowy vision and never-ending naps.

But… WHY weren’t you there when THEY started?!
I cry angrily.
To tell those voices that I AM loved,
Saving me from the cold bottles I drowned them out with instead.

I… needed you. That night.
I sob.
To take those pills from my mouth and flush them.
To re-cap the pen; throw away the note.

All those promises to be there were lies.
Reduced to a whisper, I search your face for signs of remorse.
Had it been you struggling, I’d have been there daily.
Driven all night just to keep you safe.
SO WHERE WERE YOU?

“I was by the phone — too afraid to reach out.
Scared the mere existence of my words would bring you to your knees.
Cripple you on days I was hoping so hard that you might be finally standing.
Every day I sat praying for you, terrified, searching for wisdom.
My promises to you of support were never broken.

I was there daily, weeping, waiting for you to call.”

The Onus is on Us

It took me until 2024 to realise that my loneliness was, in part, a product of my own secrecy.

Because my addiction was all-encompassing, I felt that if my friends weren’t asking about it 24/7, they didn’t care. But how could they? If I didn’t know how to love or care for myself, how could I expect them to know the “right” way to handle my crisis?

If you are feeling hurt, forgotten, or misunderstood in your recovery, I have a gentle challenge for you:

Before assuming they don’t care, ask yourself: Have I let them in?

Have you honestly told them about the depths of the water you’re treading? People cannot reach what is kept hidden. Even when you share everything, they may still not fully understand — addiction rarely makes sense, even to those of us living it.

But if someone says they love you and they are there for you — believe them. And when you need help, reach out first.

Don’t wait for them to guess. If they’re anything like mine, they are likely standing by the phone, waiting for a sign that it’s okay to call.

Give them that sign. And for everything else that feels too heavy to carry? Give that to your higher power in an act of surrender.

People cannot reach what is kept hidden.

If you need help, raise your hand.

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Last week in Canberra, a parliamentary inquiry into men’s suicide rates recommended banning gambling advertising outright.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the argument to fracture. Industry groups were quick to push back — politicians were quicker to soften language — and the public began to debate if advertising could realistically be linked to suicide at all (ok, admittedly I only checked one comments section on Facebook, but believe me when I say: that was enough).

The recommendation has already shifted the conversation. This change feels significant, albeit only slightly.

Because it’s one of the clearest lines that has ever been drawn between gambling advertisement and male suicide. Prior to this, the link has really only ever been discussed in relation to gambling in general, not advertising specifically.

The inquiry into men’s suicide rates heard evidence suggesting gambling harm is not just a financial issue, but a contributing factor in the gradual deterioration of mental health among men and boys.

Problem gambling is associated with several risk factors of suicide, including drinking alcohol at harmful levels, depression among men, financial distress and shame.

Section 4.51.: Inquiry into men’s suicide rates, p. 40.

That framing matters, because it shifts (problem) gambling from being treated as an individual behaviour problem into something closer to an environmental risk factor.

It also moves away from the traditional narrative, where gambling has only ever been seen as a financial problem.

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It’s an exciting change.

But it also reveals something pretty uncomfortable in the data.

Because a big problem is that the figures in the report still rely heavily on something that is easy to underestimate: self-reporting. Honesty/recognition of behaviour whilst (possibly) being in active addiction.

And that’s where things get complicated.

If I had been surveyed during the years I was problem gambling, I would not have been able to identify as a problem gambler. Not because it wasn’t true, but mainly because I would have been too ashamed to admit it. Not to mention that I was also still heavily in denial.

I also would not have disclosed that my suicidal ideation was connected to gambling, because at the time, I didn’t understand that it was.

And I highly doubt that I’m alone in all this.

Which means that the question becomes not just what the data shows — but what it misses.

Because much of the research informing this debate depends on people being able to accurately label their own behaviour, in real time.

I don’t think that there is a way to really improve this, by the way. I can see that for anything subjective, research will always have its limits.

But it’s important to point out, and to keep in mind when we view data like this: The chances are that the number of those affected is far, far higher than what we’ll ever know.

Frankly, though, I’m not bothered at all by what this report might incidentally miss.

I’m just excited that the conversation is happening at all.

Because any and every conversation that is had about problem gambling in the public eye, should be celebrated for what it is:

A step forwards for Australia.

If you want to read more about the inquiry in general, I wrote about it on Medium here:

For Medium members

Free Link for Non-Medium members

Dan has been writing on Medium since 2019; where he started out posting poetry that he himself describes as ‘angry and sad’. After he tried his hand at a long-form post and it went mega-viral, he first realised the power of storytelling.

Since then, Dan has amassed well over 100,000 followers on Medium, whilst his publication “The Backyard Church”, has over 60,000 followers. (It’s also an online community, which you can find by clicking here).

Despite all this success, Dan remains incredibly humble. I genuinely mean this. He credits his success mainly to one self-discovered trick: writing everyday for over 7 years.

Yes, it really is that simple!

But after spending time talking with Dan, I’m increasingly convinced that consistency is the closest thing writing has to a cheat code.

Dan has spent years learning what works (and what doesn’t), and he’s recently launched the “Blogger’s Academy”, on Skool, where he’s sharing the lessons and strategies that he’s picked up over the years. (You can also find them here on Substack — I’ve written a piece or two for them about my own writing journey!)

I'm a part of the community there myself, and I've found it incredibly valuable. Dan is an absolute wealth of knowledge when it comes to writing online. One of the lessons I’ve found most helpful has been about SEO, and how to best utilise it to help your writing reach an audience that actually wants to read it.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to grow your audience, I think you’ll get a lot out of our conversation in the video above.

Until next time!

Disclaimer: Peter and I were both paid $300million each for this interview. I received a $50million bonus for really stressing just how humble Dan is.

Murphy's GoFundMe His English Lessons

Less than 48 hours after I tried to take my own life, I woke up, showered, and drove to work.

Which is a little insane, but not for the obvious reasons.

I remember expecting my coworkers to ignore the fact that I had simply not shown up the day prior. I hadn’t called in sick; primarily because I had been in a self-induced coma until about 4p.m., which is usually when my shift ends. Nor did I call my manager after I had woken up.

So from everybody else’s perspective, I had just… ceased to exist for an entire day.

But to me, my suicide attempt was such a non-event.

It had to be.

I couldn’t tell anybody what I’d done; that on a random Wednesday night in the January of 2023, I had consumed enough lorazepam, seroquel and vodka in a bid to end my life.

Because if I told them that, I would have had to tell them why I had done it:

That I, Sean, was a gambling addict.

That I had been gambling for the better part of six years at that point. That I had lied to them — both directly and indirectly — in almost all of our interactions during that time. That I was in way over my head, and needed help. And there was absolutely no way that I could do that.

Today — the 5th of June, 2026 — I’m celebrating one thousand days since I last placed a bet.

1000 days.

And I’m doing that in an awfully familiar way: I’ve woken up, showered, and I’m about to head in to work.

Rock Bottom Isn’t Quite Where You’d Think.

Any sane person would expect that the night I overdosed would be my rock bottom. The moment that made me finally wake up, and realise, “Oh shit, this addiction is actually going to kill me.”

But that ‘final’ rock bottom moment wouldn’t happen for another two and a half months, on the day of my good friends’ wedding.

By then, I had hit a point where I was gambling constantly.

Where I had once been still able to attend social outings — and pretend to be a functioning member of society — I no longer could.

I was barely sleeping. I would wake multiple times through the night to check on bets I had placed before falling asleep, deposit more money (as these bets had usually lost), before haphazardly throwing together a few outlandish bets, and passing back out asleep.

I hadn’t been able to stop staring at my phone — at the live ‘in-play’ animations of sporting matches I was betting on — for longer than I can remember. Nothing in my life could get between me and gambling.

And so when I woke up on the morning of my best friends’ big day, a sniffly nose was enough for me to “chuck a sickie” and decide to skip it.

The part that still shatters every fiber of my ego is that I was in such need of external validation — of social ‘acceptance’ by my peers — that I messaged my friends to tell them.

On the day of their wedding.

No amount of apologising or forgiveness —both self and otherwise — has alleviated the shame from that particular moment.

But that was the extent of my self-centredness, shame, and sickness at the time. I spent every moment of the day crippled with an overwhelming fear of being caught out. Shame had convinced me that I was simultaneously a worthless piece of crap, and the absolute center of everybody’s universe. I was utterly convinced that my absence would not only be noticed, but discussed; investigated.

That if I skipped the wedding but didn’t tell everybody why I wasn’t there, then they would all be talking about me. And as they discussed me over the wedding meal, somebody would connect the dots and realise that I was a complete and utter fraud.

The now obvious irony, of course, is that nobody was thinking about me. They were celebrating two people they loved.

And I’ve realised:

I wasn’t afraid of being missed.

I was afraid of being seen.

It’s the Shame That’ll Kill You.

Shame has dictated so much of my life.

Shame continues to dictate so much of my life; even today in recovery.

The fact of the matter is, gambling was never the problem. I had a gambling problem, yes. It was all-encompassing, absolutely.

But my problem was, and has always been, primarily centered around shame. Gambling was what I believed was my solution to this shame. I know it’s an odd concept to understand; especially for those who have never struggled with an addiction.

For the majority of my gambling — where I was really off the deep end — I wasn’t doing it to get rich. I wasn’t even doing it to win the money back that I had lost.

I was doing it because gambling completely and utterly numbed my brain.

If you don’t have a history with a clinical addiction, I think the best way to try and understand this is to look at what you turn to when life gets a little too loud. When your brain starts to overthink.

Maybe it’s fast food. Maybe it’s alcohol. Online shopping. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unhealthy, either — it could be working out on your rest day, or volunteering excessively.

It’s whatever you do to drown out the voices in your head that tell you that you aren’t good enough. That you aren’t doing enough. That you’re lazy, or insignificant, or unworthy of love. Whatever you turn to rather than actually face these thoughts head-on and just sit with them: that was what gambling was for me.

The cruelest thing about gambling was that it worked.

For a little while, anyways. For a few fleeting moments after I hit “place bet”, I didn’t have to think about whether I was good enough. I didn’t have to think about the lies I’d told, the money I’d lost, or the person I was becoming.

But gambling didn’t remove any of my problems. It multiplied them.

Every bet created new reasons to feel ashamed. More debt. More lies. More missed social events. More evidence for the story I was already telling myself: that I was fundamentally broken.

And as the noise grew, my bets did too.

I gambled to escape the shame.

Then I felt ashamed that I had gambled.

And so I gambled again, and again, and again.

The Betting Was Gone. The Shame Wasn’t.

It would take me 9 months, another suicide attempt, more lies to loved ones, and a rapidly increasing financial debt before I would finally give in. Five days before the Christmas of 2023, I called my Psychiatrist’s office, and told him I needed to self-admit to a Psych Hospital. The poor guy was on his last day before the festive break.

Two days later, I was peeing into a cup so that the nurses who would be spending the next couple of months looking after me could check for anything suspicious in my system.

I then slept for 3 days straight.

I was sicker than I had ever been.

Which was such a confusing moment for everybody, myself included.

Because as I checked into hospital, I hadn’t gambled in three months.

A few months prior, I had walked into a dank church hall, and sat on a squeaky blue chair. It’s somewhere that I still call home weekly, even today. With the help of those present and their own stories of gambling addiction, I had found what I had been searching for since I placed my first bet at 18 years old:

I had found a room of people who shared experiences just like mine, who understood me, and who looked at me with only love; irrespective of how many of my darkest secrets I admitted.

I didn’t just find the unconditional love which I had been searching for my entire life: I finally heard it spoken in a language I understood.

I found a space where I wasn’t afraid to be seen.

The scales of shame had lifted, and I could see! It took a few weeks, but with this new-found support, I had some of the hardest conversations that I have ever had in my life.

I told my parents everything. My friends too; though some already knew bits and pieces. And in the act of admission to those who loved me, I finally allowed them to join me on the metaphorical island that I had banished myself to years prior, and help me.

It wasn’t instantaneous, and it wasn’t without relapses nor more lies told, but on the 9th of September 2023, I placed a bet for the last time. Hopefully, forever.

And life was good.

For a while, I genuinely believed that my honesty had fixed everything.

After all, my gambling had stopped. My secret was out, and the people I loved hadn’t abandoned me, like I had spent so many years paralysed by fear thinking that they would. In many ways, life was objectively better than it had ever been.

Which made my hospital admission incredibly difficult to understand.

What none of us understood at the time, was that all I had done by placing my last bet was just that — stopped gambling. The reasons that I had gambled for so many years remained.

The shame. The self-hatred. The unease with being myself. The inability to sit in life’s daily gross moments.

I had removed the one thing powerful enough to distract me — albeit only for moments at a time — from the reasons I no longer wanted to keep living.

Perhaps even worse was that now everybody knew my secrets. I had shone a light onto the parts of myself that I had recently believed so firmly would render me unlovable for life. So unlovable that I didn’t deserve life.

Which is an un-truth that I’m still trying to unlearn even today.

The Opposite of Addiction is Presence

I always imagined that the opposite of a full-blown addiction would be complete sobriety.

But now? I’m not so convinced.

I think the opposite of addiction is presence.

Because I still get the itch.

The itch to gamble. The itch to swallow a handful of pills. Not in a suicidal way, but in a numbing, completely escaping way. The itch to disappear. To take off in my car one day and just drive. The problem, of course, is that I wouldn’t be escaping my biggest problem; my biggest problem would be the one sitting in the driver’s seat.

The itch persists, because my shame persists.

I am embarrassed to pick up the phone and call those closest to me, even on my good days. What if they think I’m too needy? Or too boring? I’m ashamed of the thoughts that still flood my brain. Disgusted by some of my desires.

I seem to fight a daily forgetting of my own humanity, and it’s in this that shame jumps in and does its thing — telling me that somehow I am the exception. That every mistake I’ve made, or could ever make, is evidence that I was never worthy of love in the first place.

But I know that I’m getting better. I saw it just this week at work, in my self-allowance to feel some of life’s striking pain.

A patient attended what is most likely their last appointment — cancer has all but stripped them of their moxie. Despite it all, their trademark smile remains.

I found myself choking up in the middle of the appointment. I love this patient, and I have loved being even just a small part of their life for so many years. When I was done examining their eyes, I led them back out into the waiting room, closed my door, and sobbed. Absolutely bawled my eyes out.

After barely two minutes, I found myself returning to my phone to scroll, and upon feeling the all too familiar ‘numbing’ sensation course through my brain, I chastised myself for it. But as I sit and I finish this reflection today, I realise that I was wrong to do so.

Because even if I only let myself feel for 120 seconds; that’s an infinite amount more than I could handle feeling on that dark Wednesday night back in January 2023.

And that presence, I think, is the key. My ability to sit in the now, and just feel.

Feel happy, or sad, or depressed, or overwhelmed, or joyful, or anxious, or terrified. To be able to just exist in whatever that very moment of the day has me feeling, without turning to gambling or alcohol or pills to escape.

To be here. To feel loved.

One day at a time.

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For most of my life, I thought Pride was unnecessarily loud.

I looked at rainbow flags, queer-only spaces, and Mardi Gras celebrations with a kind of detached confusion. Why did identity need to be so public? Why did it need to take up so much space?

Then, I identified as a gambling addict.

And for the first time in my life, I began to understand what it feels like to need a room where shame can’t follow you.

For the whole of June, corporations across the globe will be doing as much as they can to support the LGBTIQ+ community.

They’ll do this by radically changing their entire digital identity: For 30 days (and not a second longer), their social media platforms will display a rainbow. #Allies!

The Table Built For Me

I have spent my life “fitting in” — by default.

Every Sunday, I sat in a church pew that was built to accommodate my exact lifestyle. I never had to fight for a seat at the table, because the table was built to my specifications.

I didn’t think I needed a “safe space”; because my entire world was a safe space for me.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you know my constant refrain: It’s the shame that’ll kill you.

During those years of active addiction, I lived in a state of constant, high-stakes performance. I was terrified of being found out. Every interaction I had was a calculation: How much do they know? How much can I hide?

I spent every waking second wondering if today was the day the mask would slip and people would finally see the reality of who I was. I lived with the bone-deep fear that if the truth came out, I would no longer be lovable. I wondered if there would still be a place for me at the table once everyone saw the mess I had made.

The Survival Signal

I remember sitting at my place in Calamvale with my friend. I’ve been incredibly grateful to have friends who have different views than mine, but aren’t afraid to talk to me about them.

During our chat, my friend started talking about the exhaustion of constantly having to filter yourself — of walking into a room and instantly feeling the pressure to tone down who you are just to keep other people comfortable.

As I listened, a parallel started to click in my mind.

I realised that the “loudness” of Pride that used to confuse me isn’t about vanity, and it isn’t about “shoving it in people’s faces.”

Perhaps, I thought, it’s a survival signal.

Just maybe, when you’ve spent your life being told — either explicitly or through the quiet exclusion of a world not built for you — that you should be ashamed of who you are, the only way to survive is to break the silence.

In recovery, we have to be “loud”. Things like going to meetings, wearing our ‘chips’ on our sleeves, and sharing our story helps. Why? Because silence is where the addiction grows. Silence is where the shame wins.

The Stakes

For the LGBTIQ+ community, the stakes are even higher. And here is where I have to be careful, because the parallel only goes so far.

There is a massive difference between my story and theirs: My shame was tied to my actions. It was tied to the lies I told, the bets I placed, and the financial wreckage I caused. In my darkest moments, I felt I had earned my depravity. I felt I deserved the dark because of what I had done.

And to an extent, I did.

But for the LGBTIQ+ community, the shame is an imposition. They are often forced into those same dark corners: not for what they’ve done, but for simply who they are. They are made to feel “wrong” for a love that is honest.

The numbers back up what I felt: in Australia, the queer community is six times more likely to face the same suicidal ideation that I did. It’s not a coincidence.

These aren’t just numbers; they are the result of people being forced into similar dark, shameful corners I lived in during my addiction. They are the predictable fallout of a system that forces people to carry a weight they never earned.

When the world makes it unsafe to be who you are, you will grab onto anything that promises to numb the noise.

This Pride Month

I didn’t begin to understand Pride until I understood what it felt like to finally come out of the dark and say, “This is who I am, this is what I’ve been through, and I’m still here”.

And in that beginning of an understanding, I want to acknowledge the queer community.

I want to acknowledge that while I was sitting comfortably at a table built for me, they were — and are — fighting and dying for the right to even be in the room.

I’ve learned that there are very, very few things one can do in this life to leave them too far from hope and love. I learned that by telling the truth about my addiction.

So this June, when I see the footage of the queer community celebrating at Mardi Gras, I won’t see “confusion” or “noise”.

I’ll see people doing what human beings have always done to survive shame: finding each other, telling the truth, and refusing to disappear.

I’ll see a community full of diversity, love, and stories, doing exactly what I do on a weekly basis — celebrating their survival from what almost took their lives. What took the lives of their friends. And what may one day take their loved ones in the future.

I’ll be asking questions. Listening to stories. And I’ll be learning from a group of people who — despite what I once might have ignorantly believed — have so much to teach me about my own journey through life.

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We live in a world that celebrates individuality, diversity, uniqueness. And thank God for it — only an idiot would argue otherwise.

Hi. I’m Sean. A compulsive gambler, and an idiot. Welcome to my mini TED talk, where I will attempt to argue otherwise. Please hold your applause until the end.

Don’t think I devalue any of the three aforementioned values. I just think that somewhere along the way — individuality, diversity, and uniqueness became the whole story.

We forgot about the part that binds us all together: the simple, boring, ordinary fact that we are human. That we share the same blood, the same fears, the same fragile, messy longings.

When I was gambling, I clung to the idea that I was special. That my situation was different. I wasn’t like those other gamblers, the ones you picture hunched over a Pokies machine at 2 a.m. I had a system. I’d read the form guides, studied the patterns, and convinced myself that I was the exception to the rule.

Of course, I wasn’t: I was the rule.

I blacked out from benzos and alcohol more times than I care to admit. And it was in this haze that I’d place bets I couldn’t remember. Sometimes I’d wake up the next day and scroll through my account in disbelief, trying to piece together what version of myself had been at the wheel.

That wasn’t genius, nor unique. It was the same story gamblers have been telling for decades.

And yet, I felt all alone in my struggles.

I missed a close friend’s wedding once because I couldn’t stop. Lied about it, and said I was sick. Which was partially true — I had a cold — but without gambling there, I know for sure that I would’ve still gone. The simple truth was, I couldn’t tear myself away from the next bet.

I sat at home scrolling odds while my friends danced. The next morning, I wasn’t hungover. I was hollow.

I thought I was the only one who could sink that low. The shame was suffocating.

But then I walked into a Gamblers Anonymous room.

And suddenly, my shame wasn’t unique anymore. It was ordinary. I heard my story told in a dozen different voices. Men and women, young and old, suits and hoodies. Missed weddings. Payday loans. Gambling under the table at family dinners. The lies. The husbands and wives that had fled relationships only ever built on distrust; the secrecy. The endless mental gymnastics to make it all seem rational.

I thought my pain made me different.

It didn’t.

It made me human.

That’s recovery. That’s what happens when you finally see yourself in someone else’s eyes. When you realise that the shame you’ve been guarding like a state secret is just the same old shame so many of us carry around.

And that ordinariness  —  what a relief.

Because shame only survives in isolation. Shame whispers, you’re uniquely broken, nobody could ever understand you. But the minute you speak it out loud, it loses its power. No one gasps. No one says, Wow, Sean, you’ve invented a brand-new category of failure. They just nod. They smile. They say, me too.

That’s the paradox: the more we chase being special, the more isolated we become. The more we accept our ordinariness, the more connected we feel.

It’s not that our differences don’t matter  —  they do. Your story is yours. Mine is mine. But beneath all the details, we share something deeper. We share the ache. We share the longing for relief, the fight against despair, the hope that maybe tomorrow can look a little better than today.

When I stopped trying to be special, I stopped being alone.

You’re not special. Neither am I.

And thank goodness for that.

Love,

Sean x

Day 994.

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If you’d like to support Murphy’s work in offering heavily discounted English lessons to students around the world, you can do so through his GoFundMe page here.

You can also learn more about his work by watching the video above, or by reading the blurb on his GoFundMe.

Outside of your donations, all of Murphy’s work through Peak English is self-funded.

Aleternatively, you can copy paste the link below into your browser:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/open-a-language-workshop-that-will-help-children

The best thing about writing online is 𝚝̶𝚑̶𝚎̶ ̶𝚖̶𝚘̶𝚗̶𝚎̶𝚢̶ the people I have ‘met’.

The comments, I’ve received, the messages on Instagram and Substack, and the people who regularly inflate my ego by reading every single piece I write. (And those who deflate it, by immediately unsubscribing after the first one they read.)

is easily one of my favourites. Despite being Irish, Peter is remarkably lovable. He’s a fantastic writer, moderately humble (so he tells me), and incredibly hard-working.

I sent him a voice message the other day, whining about my Medium earnings. They’ve never been great, but I had been especially proud of a particular piece, and Medium had rewarded my 2-hours of writing with a measly $0.09.

Murphy, in what I would deem as an almost coherent response — he is Irish, remember — said that his earnings had dropped too. “Which is frustrating”, he continued, “as I’m really trying to build my funding for my student’s English lessons.”

I had been whinging because I wanted the extra money to spend on myself. The juxtaposition of our motivation really made me stop and think.

Peter has a dream.

As per his GoFundMe page:

My name is Peter William Murphy, and I’ve been teaching English for over 15 years across Réunion Island, France, Ireland and Turkey.

I started Peak English because I believe good English education should be practical, personal and accessible. For many students, English is not just another subject. It can mean a better job, a university place, a visa opportunity, a higher IELTS score, or the confidence to speak in the world.

But private English coaching is expensive. Many motivated students simply cannot afford the support they need.

That is why I am changing this fundraiser.

Instead of raising money for a physical language centre, I want to use this fund to offer highly discounted online lesson packages to students who are serious about improving but low on funds.

The idea is simple: donations help cover part of the cost, the student pays what they reasonably can, and Peak English provides structured online support.

These packages may include:

• IELTS speaking and writing support

• Weekly online lessons

• Personal feedback

• Study materials

• Writing correction

• Voice-note speaking practice

• Exam strategy

• Accountability and guidance

This is not about giving away random free lessons. It is about helping committed students access proper support at a price they can actually manage.

Every contribution helps me offer more discounted places and keep Peak English open to students from different financial backgrounds.

If you believe education should not be a luxury, please consider supporting this project.

Your donation can help a student move closer to an exam goal, a job opportunity, a university application, or simply the confidence to use English in real life.

Thank you for helping make education more accessible.

This Thursday the 26th of May, at 3pm AEST, 8am Istanbul time, and 1am NYC time, Murphy will be joining me to chat live, here on my Substack.

We’ll be talking about his career in education, what his goals are for Peak English, and answering any questions that people may have for him in the comments.

I am not doing this in a paid capacity, in any way, shape or form. I merely believe in Peak English, Murphy, and his dream.

If you’d like to join me in supporting him, please consider donating via his GoFundMe by clicking here.