Anyway, 20 years ago, I was sitting on a low wall just outside Surfers Century, when a smiling middle-aged man walked up to me and asked confidently if he could share something with me. Whilst I’m not an unfriendly person, I’m also English – a mental health condition more than a nationality – and when confronted with public outbursts of distress or the earnest smiles of the emotionally available, my native instinct is to either try and pretend it isn’t happening or just walk quickly away leaving the collateral damage to fall as it may. I mean, I’ll call you an ambulance and wait until it arrives but chit chat about feelings and so on, I save for one of my many psychiatric appointments.
I’m glad, on that occasion at least, that my normally stalwart instincts failed me and instead I got to hear a story of bravery and resolve in the face of a terrible condition, and one I’d never heard before, despite the fact of my mother being an alcoholic, because she never talked about it.The guy said he’d approached me because, after 20 years of sobriety, he’d suddenly felt an urgent need for a drink, and couldn’t get to an AA meeting for some time and so reached out to the nearest person available. He said that some years earlier he’d been a builder on some of the many high-rises that either grace or besmirch the area, depending on your viewpoint. It was a time he said of great fun. Him and the guys were getting paid great money, the booze and the drugs flowed and, in the manner of these things, he’d ended up a broken addict, having lost everything.
He explained that he was a photographer now, and wanted to visit his old haunts and capture some images and what can be a particularly spectacular town. But returning years later had found himself immensely triggered and didn’t know who to turn to, lest he had another drink, with all the catastrophe, chaos and death that that may entail.
I was struck by this and admired him for it at the time, and realised that it must have taken great courage to approach a complete stranger and reveal something deeply personal in his quest for help.
Via a contortion of stiff English manners and not really knowing what to say, I learnt something extremely valuable from that encounter: that saying nothing is sometimes the right thing to do and is not necessarily the same thing as doing nothing, and that listening is an active and enabling act.
No further action of mine could have helped him, no well-intentioned, but useless advice was required. He knew what he needed, grabbed it, and I sensed it well enough, because the formula is simple and eternal: someone talks and someone else listens.
It wasn’t until much later in my own life, that I understood the probable severity of his situation and that, fundamentally, he was involved in a fight for his life. But our small passing coincidence was almost done. I ‘d been waiting for my girlfriend to pick me up. Not an unfriendly person, she didn’t know what was being said and beeped her horn a little too angrily. And it was done, the moment passed. I wished him well, and like all recovering addicts, he has my endless goodwill and compassion. I hope he made it through that day, because that is all we can hope for.
The irony isn’t lost on me that, twenty years later, in the same Gold Coast having moved there, not too far from where my exchange with the man from Surfers Paradise took place, I staggered quite drunk into my second meeting at Alcoholic Anonymous (the first hadn’t ended well), and at the end was approached by a different man, who said something like, ‘I’ve been sober for 25 years and I think I can help you’.
And the cycle of compassion, friendship and simple human decency began again.
Nick Jordan
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