MY LAST DRINK – DI YOUNG

Professor Ross Fitzgerald is proud to say that he has been sober for over 50 years. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the support he found among its members. As a prolific author, Ross Fitzgerald has again taken up the subject of recovered alcoholism in a new book My Last Drink, co-edited with Neal Price, an artist and writer who now lives in Hobart, Tasmania. The book brings together the stories of 32 recovering alcoholics and offers a window on a world of diverse backgrounds, experience and occasions of drink. To gain an insight into the contributions in the book, trauma-informed therapist, Systemic and Family Constellation practitioner Di Young and Art entrepreneur Tim Olsen joined Ross Fitzgerald on Monday 31 October 2022 to tell something of their stories.

MY LAST DRINK

DI YOUNG

Thanks for the opportunity to be here. It’s a privilege. Thank you Gerard and Anne and Ross and Neil for putting together the anthology. When Ross asked me to say a few words, he said, “Just tell them a bit of your story”. I thought, “I don’t think I can really do that, it’s a bit extreme.” But he’s been insistent. So, I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself.

It’s in the book – an edited version. I suppose what I want to say to you is that I’m probably slightly unusual in that now I’m sober a long time, but I  became sober at a very young age. I came from a family that were alcoholics; my mother was an alcoholic, my father was a chronic gambler. I had no limits in my life. So I was out playing up at quite an early age. I didn’t particularly think there was anything wrong with that.

I loved alcohol because of what it gave me. For those of you that drink with control, and you’re not alcoholic – it gave me those same things. I would drink, I would feel better about myself, I thought I looked better, I was sexier, I looked like I could hold a conversation a lot easier, I was more intelligent. Of course, I was prepared to pay the price for quite a while because I got so much out of it. I’m a product of the era in which I grew up, and I used drugs the same way that I used alcohol. I know that’s not what we’re talking about tonight, but it is a big part of my story.

Hence, I stumbled into Alcoholics Anonymous at a very young age. I was 17 ½ years old. Now, I look at 17 ½ year olds and I think, my God, they’re young. I didn’t feel young at 17 ½; I felt old, I felt worn out. I met a man at a pub – of course, where else was I going to meet one – and he took me to my first AA meeting. I was very unwell one night, and he decided to tell me his story.

One of the things that happens in Alcoholics Anonymous is there’s a lot of sharing of your story, what happened to you. And that’s how we get the identification. I, now, for my sins, work at South Pacific Private Hospital, which is a private psychiatric hospital on the Northern Beaches. They treat people with alcoholism, drugs, PTSD and mood disorders. The clients will often, when they’re talking to psychiatrists be very happy to talk about all sorts of things. But it’s not until they sit with someone who’s just like them, that they get the identification they need. And the same thing happens in AA. People will walk into a room, not dissimilar to this, with a cross section of the community, not dissimilar to you, and somebody will say “How are you going?” And they’ll talk a little bit about themselves. Without judgement, without criticism, there’ll be some sort of, “Yes, I know, that’s what happened to me.” Or, “Yes I’ve been there.”

Now, I don’t know about your lives, but there are not many places you can go in your life today and actually tell the truth about yourself to someone you’ve never met before and not be judged. It’s a big statement. That’s the kind of identification that people get from Alcoholics Anonymous. I went into AA, I mucked around with it for a while, I was very young. I decided that I would go out and try again, do a bit more experimenting.

I came back into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous for two reasons. One, I had nowhere else to go and the second was that I had been around the rooms for eight months and I had seen it work in the lives of people like Ross, Neil and other people here tonight. You can tell me all you like, you can tell me what I should do, you can demand that I behave a certain way. But if you show me what you do and how you recover, that has a much bigger impact on me. And that’s exactly what happened.

So, I came back into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. For years and years, I guarded my anonymity. In my Federation Press Publishing days, I guarded my anonymity very carefully. I don’t much mind about it now. My daughter’s older; she’s a 32-year old woman with children herself. I don’t feel like I have to worry about any of that stuff anymore.

The people that cared about me just before I got sober were the police. There was nobody else that was much interested, apart from them. They seemed to be very interested in my wellbeing. They finally did catch me; I was moving a bit slow one day and they caught up with me. I eventually came back into Alcoholics Anonymous and started to get well. I was homeless, jobless and friendless. So, I had a lot to do to put my life together – and I also needed to find a job to pay for the barrister’s fees, to try and stay out of jail. It wasn’t a prospect I was particularly keen about.

I said to Ross, “What do you want me to tell them?” He said, “Tell the Mr Perkins story.” So, I’m going to tell you the Mr Perkins story. I went for a job as a shorthand typist – there will be people in the room, just looking at the audience, that will remember what shorthand looked like. And you can remember the typewriters that you used to do this with. If you made a mistake, you had to rub out on three different layers. I had forgotten how to do shorthand; it was a bit of a disaster.

I’d been there for a couple of weeks, and I’d go into his office, and he’d dictate shorthand. I’d have my pad under my desk, trying to write very fast what he was saying. One night he stayed back. I thought he was going to sack me; I’d told a few fibs to get the job. He was standing over me, and I was sitting down at my desk, and he said, “How are we going, Diane?” I said, “We’re not doing very well, are we?” He said, “No. What seems to be the problem?” I said, “Look, I’ve been unwell, I’ve been drinking too much and taking too many drugs and I’m trying to put my life together.” I said a few other things. He said, “How are you doing it?” and I said, “I’m going to AA”. He went “Really? You’re going to Alcoholics Anonymous?” and I said, “Yes.” He asked, “How often do you go?” I said, “I go every day.” That was true. He said, “Well, will you go to night school and learn to do the things I’m paying you to do?” I said, “Yes, I’ll do that, I’ll go to night school. Then he said, “Wait a minute. You said you go to meetings every night. What happens if you don’t go to meetings?” I said, “Well I suppose I’ll drink.” Now, I didn’t mean that I would drink if I went to night school, but that’s how he took it. He said, “Forget about the night school.” Then he taught me shorthand. He’d take it very slowly, “Dear… Mr… Smith. Have you got that?” This was the first person outside of the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous who’d had any faith in me. My family had given me away because I’d behaved so badly. We continued on.

Many of us have an enormous fear of failure, especially if we’ve made a mess of our lives – I had, anyway. So, there was a part of me that wanted to do well. I worked very hard for this man, and I was very grateful for all the opportunities he gave me, and he gave me many. He was a practising Catholic with nine children, interestingly enough. After a couple of years of working for him, my trial came around. They take that long. I went into his office, and I said, “I need to be with you, with the door shut.” That meant it was serious. He said, “What’s happened?” I said, “I need to resign.” He asked why and I said I was going to jail.  He was stunned so I filled him in and told him I had not wanted to worry him when he was helping me with work.  He said, “Leave it with me.” He came back to me a few hours later and said, “I don’t want you to resign, I want you to take annual leave.” I said to him, “I don’t think you understand.” And he said, “No, no, no, just do what I’m asking you to do.” So, I took annual leave.

I worked in a large office – an insurance office – with 30 women. This is the time in Australia when Number 96 was the thing on television – at morning tea, we would talk about Number 96. Abigail featured quite largely on that – do you remember Abigail? I never saw it, because I was always in a meeting. So, I’d have to try and make up and pretend I knew what was going on but I had no idea what was going on. The trial came on. I was in Silverwater Women’s Prison for two weeks while the trial happened which was just awful. I can’t begin to tell you how horrible it is. If you think anybody’s having fun in those places, think again. There were a number of women from the streets there. I’d been two years sober, missing from their lives. But when I walked into the Remand section of the Silverwater Women’s Prison, they went, “Di, how are you? Where have you been?” It was like I had gone next door for a day or two. We were found guilty, of course. And the judge, God bless him, said “Alright, we’re going to put you back in jail for the weekend while I consider what the sentence is going to be.”

I subsequently worked with many of them in the legal publishing world, and they would have been horrified to know who they were working with. You know the beautiful building, the courthouse in Darlinghurst? It’s just gorgeous. Underneath that beautiful building is a labyrinth of small walkways and cells. When you’re in that court, they back the truck up, open the door, you get out and you go straight underground. I was in the paddy wagon on my own. They pick you up at 5am in the morning and you go underground when they finally get you there from Silverwater. There were these two very burly, big prison officers. Without thinking, I said out loud, “What’s that smell?” One of them, towering over me, said to me “It’s fear”. I thought I would never forget that day as long as I lived. I went through, there were men everywhere. A very junior constable saw me and put me in a tiny little cell on my own. He said, “You’ll be safe in here.” I have never forgotten the kindness of that man. Because he could have put me in any of the other ones.

Now, you come up through the bowels of the court to the dock. This particular day, a Monday morning, when they’re going to pass sentence, they were calling for character witnesses. I thought, “This is a disaster. Nobody has told me that I’m supposed to have a character witness speak for me.” The three men I was involved with in this court case had character witnesses; counsellors, mayors – I thought this was a disaster. They finally got to me, and the judge said to the barrister, “Is there anybody to speak for Diane Young?” The barrister said, “Yes, Mr Thompson.” Mr Thompson was Mr Perkins’ boss. He had come in, with Mr Perkins sitting next to him, to speak on my behalf. I’d worked for them for two years, I hadn’t had a sick day, I’d done everything they’d ask me to do and more, but I didn’t expect this. Mr Thompson got up – with a lot of credibility; he was the manager of a very large insurance company – and said all sorts of things about me. The judge told the barrister to stop talking, and he said to Mr Thompson, who was in the dock, “If I let her go, will she still have a job?” He said, “Absolutely, she will.” I’d also had a lot of narcotic addiction. And a deputy matron from Manly Hospital got up and spoke for me. I didn’t know she was going to be there.

The judge stopped the barrister again and said to her, “When she was detoxing, did she do it cold turkey or with methadone?” This was very unusual since few knew about this stuff back then. The barrister replied I had done it cold turkey. I ended up  with a 5-year bond, and I reported every week for 5 years. The caveat was if you miss one, there’s a warrant put out for your arrest, and you can go straight in and do the whole lot. I didn’t miss one ever.

The only reason I tell you that story is that somewhere in the midst of all of our lives, when we’ve been on our knees, we often talk about the kindness of strangers in Alcoholics Anonymous. I talked earlier about if you walked into a room of strangers and you were on your knees about anything, and you told them something about yourself that you didn’t want to talk about with everybody. You would feel not judged and welcomed. It was the same with those two men. I owed them much, they owed me nothing. They were the ones that stood up for me. There’s been many other things since that time and I’m very grateful that I was given those opportunities to have those people in my life.