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Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 7 (out of 10) - Suppression
Subheadings w durations
Pred
Prednisone Roller Coaster
Suppression
Service Station
Allergy Boy Attempts ‘Sensitive Man’hood
Death and Grief
Travel
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In this episode - I white-knuckle steroid use to become a new person. I'm still trading short term gain for long term pain. I go out into the world and realise many others are struggling to exist. Grief explodes my life. I travel Australia and the world to escape it. It follows me into hurricane Sandy in NYC.
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not east to inhabit. It will be released an episode each week for a few months. Citing neuroscientists, philosophers and modern-day poets (rockstars) and exploring the 90s popular culture that shaped me (its music, movies and video games), Shedding Skin is a rollicking, humorous ride of self-analysis about the confusion and alienation of growing up with chronic health battles, the disorientating effects of coping mechanisms (like alcohol and drug dependencies), and my eventual flailing attempts to understand how to live a deep life whilst struggling with new parenthood.
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Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023
Chapter 7 - Suppression
I'm not sick
But I'm not well
From the song Flagpole Sitta
by Harvey Danger (1997)
Pred
Prednisone is a hydrocortisone or corticosteroid, a synthetic version of cortisol which is a hormone produced in the adrenal gland. This hormone is part of the endocrine system and is used by the body to regulate a large number of systems, including your metabolism, sleep cycles, and your immune response. Cortisol is released throughout the day into your body as you come up against ‘stress’ to give your body the ability to function. The ‘stress’ that I speak of is not necessarily ‘I can’t pay my mortgage’ stress (although that would surely qualify as requiring a big bunch of cortisol production), but any stress that your body or mind goes through in a normal day. The first one is waking up. You need to get moving, so your body floods your system with cortisol. Next it could be ‘stress’ related to exercise, being hot or cold, being busy, having an emotional load to process (like parenting small children), being hungry, being tired, just being - all the normal things that occur for everyone, every day, put a load on your body and require some cortisol to manage your systems.
When you take cortisol artificially to manage health issues, you are doing it to reduce your immune system’s reaction, and this is called immunosuppression. If, for example, you had an organ transplant, your doctors would put you on a high dose of prednisone to suppress your immune system’s response to the new organ so that your body doesn’t attack and reject it.
Just prior to taking prednisone I was relating to myself in the following circular way:
· Obsessive thoughts about my unreliable body
· Compulsive actions to try to manage the obsessive thoughts
· Fear that my life was being taken away from me because of these things (it sort of was)
· Embarrassment at my body
· Disgust. This was the big one. I was disgusted by my own body and therefore at ‘me’
All of that vaporised almost overnight when I started taking prednisone. The steroid was very effective at suppressing my over-active immune response and this helped in clearing up my skin so it was far less angry and reactive. My skin felt different under my own hands, it was smooth, and it could stretch, like it had been moisturised by one of the miracle anti-aging formulas that I had seen advertised on TV in the 90s. I felt like a new person. It didn’t happen overnight, but it did, eventually, happen.
I immediately went from my life being in constant crisis, to it being ‘solved’ by the mediation of this medicine. I was literally busting out of my skin to get out into the world and make up for lost time. I enrolled in Uni, I moved into a share house, I took more hours at work, I hosted a party for my 23rd birthday and I met, for the second time, on the veranda of our 3-bedroom Queenslander rental on Baroona Rd in Paddington a lady who would end up marrying me (the first time I met her is detailed below). Everything was sped up – not just because of the steroids coursing through my veins, but because I was opening up to the world for the first time as an adult and I wasn’t hamstrung by my obsessions and my faulty way of relating to myself. I was walking Robert Frost’s road less travelled, a road where I could largely ignore the ailments of my body and be in the world like ‘normal’ people.
Far off in the distance I could vaguely hear my doctors warning me of the long-term consequences of oral steroid use, to which I could be heard to say “yeah, yeah, yeah sure sure sure, it will be fine, I’ll deal with that later, just give me the script!”. The impatience of youth, a youth starved of life experience and any long-term wisdom he might need, would echo down the long road of my 20s and 30s. Right now though, in this moment of relief and release, none of that mattered.
The reason I was not prescribed prednisone earlier and the reason that it’s use was accompanied with many warnings and concerns and caveats and regular blood work and hawkish monitoring from my doctors is because using prednisone to treat skin inflammation is akin to using an atomic bomb as a street cleaner. You are hitting your body hard with one of the biggest, ‘last resort’ medicines that we have - fully suppressing your entire immune system and its response, to suppress what amounts to a quite small part of your system that is malfunctioning. Yet, the current state of treatment for extremely reactive eczema did not offer much else to sooth an angry immune system such as mine. It would have to be the last resort, the atomic blast.
I knew of, and was warned of, the reckoning that would eventually come, but it wasn’t possible to appropriately weigh up the benefits that I received now to the cost that I would pay in the far off, distant land of the future. I needed the relief now. I needed the gratification of a semi-reliable body immediately so I could have a chance at figuring out who I was beneath all that inflamed skin. Would anyone else be able to accept the continuation of their ever-present pain and suffering in opposition to living now and pushing the pain and suffering down the road? Bully for them if they could! As we’ve seen, I was programmed as a ‘gimme the good feelings now’ kinda guy from way back.
I’d never experienced anything like this before, and whatever cost I had to pay down the road was worth being able to live in this moment and function somewhat normally – the thing I had always dreamed of.
There were a few things that were never explained to me about Prednisone use, that I figured out whilst taking it for 2 decades:
It will increase your confidence
It will ‘pump you up’ and give your body ‘more energy’ to use
It can make you a bit manic
It will make you addicted to sugar (already a problem for me)
It will disrupt your sleep
It will wreck your teeth and your bones
Prednisone Roller Coaster
Most people take prednisone in a ‘short course’, for 4 or 5 days in high doses in order to resolve some issue with their health and boost their immune system during that period. For eg, you might find yourself battling a chest infection or in some other physical state that requires some immune assistance - you're weak, inflamed, your own body is attacking itself as it attempts to clear up a malady.
This is what taking a short course of Prednisone feels like.
On the 1st day, you feel your body lifting, strengthening, but you’re still wracked with inflammation and are slow, fatigued, but on the up.
On the 2nd day, you are a god incarnate. You've barely slept, but whilst that would normally matter, you're running on steroids now, so it doesn't. Strength courses through your body - you could swing Thor's hammer Mjolnir before breakfast whilst listening to nu metal music in your headphones and frantically cleaning the kitchen. There are things to do around the house and suddenly you have the energy to do all of them!
Your mind is firing on all 12 cylinders, plus an extra 12 you never realised you had. A sort of 'connection mania' emerges in your thoughts, clarity appears where there was none, you figure things out, sometimes profound things, and many things make sense that were otherwise obscured. Goddam human life makes sense. Realisations fall on you about your purpose and your primary relationships. You have access to information that will now inform the remainder of your life - purpose, meaning, connection!
You rush around outside putting palm fronds in the bin that have been laying in the garden for many weeks.
Your visual system is 'cleaner' – as you look out into the world with steroid eyes ordinary things have an intense edge to them, not so much a hardness, but a vividness, a visual clarity that makes the world 'pop' and reveal itself in more of its fullness and rich palette. The frequency range of electromagnetic light spectrum that you can process through your visual system has widened, as has the colour gamut. All things seen are seen in a superior way. Blinking is rarely required.
On the 3rd and 4th days, your body and mind begin to tire from being too connected to this inhuman source of strength and energy, but abnormal things are still happening. You can keep the unrealistic promises you’ve made to yourself about your new life and how to live it. Eventually, energy starts to turn to hecticness. Urgency starts wilting towards fatigue. Your eyes and brain start to waver and drain, a tiring ‘manic-ness’ sets in.
Another day, and things start to make less sense. Realisations begin to feel hollowed out and the sense that you've been shadow boxing with the cosmic forces of enlightenment emerges. Emptiness replaces fullness, you're depleting, you've snuck into the enchanted garden and drunk one to many times of the sweet and nourishing elixir of the fountain of youth. You realise that the things you've figured out about how to live require the power of 'full bezerk Prednisone mode' to be enacted, and as that power seeps from your body and fades like a distant memory you recognize your life must be lived in this aching, heavy, sagging meat sack instead.
Another day and your body feels like the crumpled, discarded brown paper that previously held freshly cooked fish and chips but that is now a useless, oily waste product with no further purpose. Frailty fills your veins and bones where rivers of steel once ran. Everything hurts, your bones ache, your muscles are sore, your thoughts are scattered like falling autumn leaves.
Remember you have barely slept, and you're weening yourself off these life-giving molecules, feeling your body crash back down to terra firma. Your body tears at itself as it tries to figure out why the source of all the goodness has vanished and why it’s replaced by vacant sensations of emptiness, like an echo of your soul bouncing around the cavern of your depleted body.
After a few days, your body returns to normal and accepts that prolonged access to the God Molecule is not in its best interest, until next time at least.
Most importantly, being on Prednisone creates an 'altered state of consciousness '. You are mightily changed by this drug, it affects everything about how you feel and think. You are still yourself, but wherever you happen to be on the roller coaster (slowly grinding to the top peak or whizzing down the other side) you don’t feel like ‘yourself’ (whoever that is).
It took me a really long time to figure out that being ill is also an altered state of consciousness, the problem again being a recognition that you are ‘altered’, or ‘not yourself’ requires an ability to self-reflect and remove yourself from your first-person view.
Fortunately, I was taking a low to medium dose of Prednisone every day, so I only rode the Prednisone God Incarnate roller coaster a few times a year if I had virus or got extra sick. Normally, I was just pumped up a bit, not hugely manic.
Think less Hulk Hogan and more Paul Hogan. (Quote)
It is a big responsibility to control the power of such a molecule, deciding how much you should consume each day. I literarily held van der Kolk’s nervous system ‘accelerator’ in my hand each morning, and this was too much power for a weak-willed person such as me. If I took more, I’d feel better (and perhaps in the future suffer some far-off consequence that was impossible to quantify as I pictured what sort of day I wanted to have right now). If I took less, I’d feel worse – my brakes slammed on.
These were tough choices. Or, they were easy ones. One pill to rule them all.
My life was stretching out before me, all the possibilities that had previously felt contained were unleashed by these small, white, energy giving pills that I gulped down each morning.
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
Bullet With Butterfly Wings by Smashing Pumpkins (1995)
Sung by Billy Corgan,
Suppression
Prednisone works by suppression.
If a lion is chasing you through the savanna, your body will pump cortisol (and adrenaline) into your system, and this has the effect of re-routing your biological systems in order to prioritise – there will be no you to be concerned about if the lion eats you, so rerouting all available energy to being ‘pumped up’ and ‘fighting’ or ‘flighting’ (in this case flighting) can ensure your survival by redirecting precious energy from other processes (like digesting food or your metabolism or your immune response). You do not have time to feel ill and heal your body or digest your last meal if you are being chased by a lion, so pump, cortisol, pump.
Whilst Prednisone suppressed my body and my angry immune system, it didn't address the mental patterns created by two and a half decades of tearing myself apart. So I was reborn (in a way), but with no sense of duty towards my still vulnerable body and no ability to look after myself, I could simply ignore all of that and latch onto this new found sense of ‘me-ness’. Because if that, of course I continued to drink alcohol and eat sugary foods because, well, I was addicted to these things and couldn’t stop.
One of the issues with alcohol is it also works by suppression.
It is a nerve system suppressant, sometimes referred to as a depressant, but this is less because it makes you depressed (even though it can), and more relates to how it effects your nervous system. It retards your nervous system’s ‘ability’ – this seems obvious considering we legislate that people who have consumed alcohol cannot be trusted to pilot an automobile. They are too impaired by the suppression of their nervous system, their ability to react, to think clearly, and make good choices is reduced. This also seems obvious when we spend time with people who are drunk whilst we are sober – drunk people forget what they have said moments earlier, repeat themselves often, slur their speech and can’t walk straight.
This is all totally acceptable behaviour of course – not just accepted, promoted!
Drinking some alcohol is not necessarily a bad thing, the nervous system suppression feels relaxing in combination with the neurotransmitter chemicals the alcohol helps your brain release. The problem occurs when the previously suppressed nervous system ‘bounces back’ the next day. It wants to be suppressed again, because the ‘normal’ state it’s now inhabiting is comparatively stressful to the lovely, intoxicated, and suppressed state flooded with dopamine and serotonin. Just like my speed addicted friends these patterns of up and down mean that ‘intoxicated’ becomes a bit more normal, and ‘normal’ becomes a bit more awful.
I slowly began to realise I may have a problem with alcohol when I’d find myself having dejavu at the pathology lab. Taking prednisone, I was required to have a lot of blood tests. I’ve had as many or more needles in my arms over the years as my long-lost frenemies from the late 90s who were searching for good feelings in that strange, brownish liquid.
The dejavu would occur as I was holding one of those plastic numbers, sitting in the small red waiting chairs at my local Sullivan and Nicolaides pathology lab, and I would ‘find myself’ hungover.
“You seem a little dehydrated” the nurse would remark as she attempted to get blood from my anaemic and chronically parched veins.
Strangely, given my high level of skin related disgust, needles never worried me. According to anecdotal evidence (ie me asking the pathology technicians), 90% of people cannot bear to watch when they give blood, whereas I would much rather be aware of when a thin slice of metal is inserted into my epidermis than be caught off guard by its sting.
Each previous hungover blood test moment would return to me, and the cogs of my mind would grind forward, sluggishly asking “How many did you have last night?” And then “Idiot! You knew you had a blood test this morning, yet here you sit, the poor pathology tech forced to turn you into Swiss cheese to extract a few measly drops of claret!”
Prednisone also increases your appetite. And not just little bit. It becomes impossible to satiate the feeling that you need more food, even as your stomach and digestive system struggle to process what you have already thrown at them. I began a ritual of waking in the middle of the night, my systems crashing and crying out for sucrose, and half asleep, would sit on my bed and guts lollies like slimer from ghostbusters. Oftentimes I’d wake in the morning and only then see how much I had eaten, my half comatose body often raising me from the bedroom and out into the kitchen to raid the fridge for dairy snacks or sweet yogurt whilst semi-asleep.
So these patterns of drinking alcohol, and not sleeping well and being overstimulated by steroids and then crashing from a lack of cortisol would eventually run my life during my twenties. But first, with my fresh all seeing steroid eyes, it was time to go out into the world to see what it was all about.
We are young, we run green
Keep our teeth nice and clean
See our friends, see the sights
Feel alright
We wake up, we go out
Smoke a fag, put it out
See our friends, see the sights
Feel alright
From the Song Alright (1995)
by Supergrass
Service Station
With my brand new suppressed immune system and my dehydrated veins, I was able to function ‘in the world’ somewhat more normally, and quickly got myself a prestigious and high paying job working at a service station. You cannot imagine a more rewarding time spent watching the human animal and its decision-making skills than working a job selling flammable liquids to upright primates.
It appeared at first glance that humans would go out into the world and leave their brains sitting on the couch watching TV. I would observe them agonisingly put the perfect amount of fuel in their cars so that the dollar value was exactly at 50 with no cents. Then they would march in with their singular crisp, yellow note (back when people used to carry cash more frequently) and slap in on the counter, only to be told they had put in exactly 50 litres by mistake and the cost was $54.65. Watch the angry, confused human get upset at me, the bearer of the bad news.
I would watch as they would be happy to lift the fuel pump hose up over their heads, getting their hands covered in filth whilst jiggling the nozzle for minutes on end, dancing and shaking to extract the last few teeny drop of fuel that they desperately wanted into their tanks. Take that mega oil conglomerates!
I would never tire of being shouted at for how high the fuel prices were.
I would never tire of explaining the physical properties of fuel vapour to people:
“Excuse me, you must get off your motorbike whilst you fill it with fuel, because there is fuel gas pouring out of the fuel tank and surrounding your entire body with flammable vapour, and it’s the fumes that catch fire, not the liquid.”
“Excuse me, you must take your jerry can out of the back of your sedan and put it on the ground before you fill it up, because you are filling your boot with flammable vapour and it’s the fumes that catch fire, not the liquid.”
“Excuse me, you can’t fill up a bucket with fuel and then drive it down the road to your friend who ran out of petrol, it needs to be in a sealed container because it’s the fumes that catch fire, not the liquid.”
“Excuse me, you’ll need to put out that cigarette you’re smoking whilst filling up your car because, fucking hell.”
One man argued with me that diesel is not flammable at room temperature (which is true) as a justification for smoking a cigarette on the forecourt of a petrol station with no smoking signs plastered everywhere, that housed 18,000 litres of subterranean fuel tanks under his feet, where multiple people were pumping fuel other than diesel into their vehicles.
Then there was the time that a gentleman was so tired that he fell asleep standing at the counter whilst paying for his groceries. I was running the graveyard shift at a big roadhouse on the Ipswich Motorway at the time, and there was always a select group of humans that preferred to shop for rations when 99% of the rest of the population are asleep. These people were generally skinny, slow moving, and preferred to use the bathroom at the roadhouse for its conveniently placed needle disposal bins. They had sensitive nervous systems too and needed them modulated.
He drifted off whilst putting some coins on the counter, his systems partially shutting down. I waited, then gently tapped the counter, not wishing to startle him from his warm, heroin induced upright siesta. He opened his eyes and continued putting the coins down as smoothly as if he had never drifted away.
I sometimes wonder what he dreamt of in the few moments of rest he snatched whilst out in public interacting with another person. It must have been a disorientating dream because he finished paying, walked out, got in his car, then proceeded to drive the wrong way up the off ramp back onto the motorway. I ran out waving my arms and screaming as loud as I could into the cold morning air, but he was too tightly held in the embrace of his precious H bliss to hear me. It was inconvenient that no cars happened to be coming the other way to alert this man of his error, so I stood and watched his taillights getting fainter as he continued off into the night on the wrong side of the motorway.
Then there were the car crashes. So many car crashes. One lady drove onto the forecourt, smashed straight into the gigantic beam holding up the forecourt roof, backed up, and simply drove away. Another lady pulled up after closing time when all the lights were off, put the nozzle in her car, and once told that the pumps were off and the service station was closed and being packed up, she got back in her car and sped away with the nozzle still in the car. It snapped out of her fuel tank, and flicked back at speed, smashing into the fuel bowser, fuel pouring everywhere as she continued on her merry way with her mangled car.
We had trucks coming through that were too high and smashed into the forecourt roof. We had people renting trailers and driving off with them not hitched correctly and dragging on the ground, sparks flying. Every week there was some incident worthy of a re-watch on the servo’s CCTV recordings.
The most memorable event was when I was working a Sat evening shift on Moggill Rd at Taringa, a 10-minute drive from Brisbane city. A group of young gentlemen were driving out of the city, most likely after leaving the Regatta, a nearby watering hole, when their car understeered, mounted the curb, and pitched them over an 8-meter embankment down into the inbound lane near the service station where I sat. I looked out into the dark evening to see a vehicle emerge from the scrub above the embankment and launch through the air into the oncoming lane, pitch downwards and crunch bonnet first directly in the middle of the road. Miraculously, the car didn’t roll, it sort of teetered there, then slumped back on its haunches. Even more miraculously, there happened to be no cars traveling on the road at that time - unusual for that time of night.
The 4 occupants then leapt out of the car and ran off. It felt like it was happening in slow motion fast-forward – I’d never seen reaction times as quick as those fellas bolted out of that car (sweet cortisol!), but it was such bizarre behaviour that it felt like an eternity. It took me a few minutes afterwards to realise they were most likely drunk or stoned and didn’t want to get busted by the police. It took them a good 30 meters of bolting before they remembered “oh that’s right, the evidence of our wrecked car is stranded in the middle of a major road at 9pm on a Sat night”, so slinking back, they pushed it into the servo car park, and high tailed off into the night, never to be seen again.
Upright hominids having trouble regulating their nervous systems, piloting large vehicles, and filling them with flammable liquids – everything in its place and totally normal.
Then one night something incredibly important, something life changing, happened. It was a Saturday evening, and as I gazed out over the forecourt (the area where cars pull in and pump fuel) I saw a beautiful young lady struggling to get fuel into her off-brown Toyota Camry sedan. This inability to pump fuel was a feature of our service station pumps – they were a bit like me, over sensitive - they would constantly click ‘off’, prematurely halting the flow of precious dinosaur juice much to the frustration of our customers.
Any newfound confidence I had in that moment to assist young ladies with their fuel could be wholly chalked up to my pumped-up prednisone powers. Gallantly, I rushed out to assist her, knowing that the nozzle had to be slightly removed and tilted to the right just so in order to prevent the ‘stop fuel’ sensor from triggering. After I had, ahem, filled her tank, she asked me if there was something wrong with the way she was doing it, or if there was an issue with the pump. I casually offered “It’s always the user”. (This is an old IT-support joke, most likely lost on this poor young lady who was obviously quite keen to continue on her merry way into Fortitude Valley to listen to live music.)
This was a bold gamut for a skinny, boy-faced, pre-teen looking goon who had never been touched by a woman. A few months later, this woman did touch me, when she kissed me on the lips after I had stayed over at her house (no less) but hadn’t found the courage to put a move on her (we were taking it slow!). Many years later we would get married and eventually we would decide to create new people together, which we did.
The service station where I met Cate, the Mobil on Moggill Road at Taringa, cannot be visited to reminisce about our ‘romantic chance meeting amongst the fuel vapours’. It was torn down because the fuel tanks were leaking fluids for years into the storm water system for hundreds of meters underneath the suburb of Taringa.
Allegy Boy Attempts ‘Sensitive Man’hood
Allergy boy was now collecting the powerups needed to become Sensitive Man, still searching for the strength and wisdom he needed to navigate the still cruel world out to snuff him. These powerups where still alcohol, and legal pharmacopeia and the ever dependant rush of sugar, but now also synthetic cortisol. He didn’t realise, but he was trapping himself because he was becoming most allergic to the choices he was making, choices he subconsciously locked in back when he was a boy in an attempt to conceal his weaknesses and turn away from his disgust as his own body.
How could Sensitive Man treat himself so poorly and drink alcohol and take drugs and mess with his health knowing full well his system was different and sensitive and needed more care, that he was still, in part, Allergy Boy? He finally had a chance to live more normally and to care for himself whilst still enjoying comparatively good health.
His own special version of the veneer was as such – a built up coping mechanism laid down over decades to escape his tormenting body as often as possible. This could not so easily be forgotten, these patterns were deep, and even when his health was much improved with the use of suppressive steroids, he found himself mistreating himself again and again at the hands of addiction and compulsion, his own personal veneer. OK, that may not be the last time that I weirdly talk about myself in the 3rd person.
My veneer didn’t count on 2 very powerful human inevitabilities, earth shattering events that cracked me open.
The first was a death. The second was a birth.
And I wonder
When I sing along with you
If everything could ever feel this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again
From the song Everlong by Foo Fighters (1995)
Sung by Dave Grohl
Death and Grief
In my early 20s I met a group of young entrepreneurs and we started working together running businesses. We rented a huge old tram substation in Petrie Terrace and setup and ran our different companies in this old, exposed brick hipster-hangout, sharing resources and helping each other’s businesses grow.
It was a very exciting time of my life, I was out of my cocoon of suffering, released somewhat from the burdens of my health.
One of the young men I met was an engineer by the name of Scott McKay. We immediately shared our love of computer systems and our desire to support businesses to get the most out of them – I was always destined to be an IT support guy, the years of editing the autoexe.bat and confis.sys files to get my Sound Blaster audio card working to I could play Prince of Persia
Scott and I quickly teamed up, became business partners, and he and I built a boutique IT support consultancy catering to design agencies and other creative businesses in Brisbane who ran both Windows and Mac computer systems.
I quickly developed a strong sense of identity around my work, a version of myself that I used to prop myself up and make sense of my life – I was working hard, the business was growing, I was doing well in my role, I was making money and solving problems. We grew to 10 staff and had big plans for the future of our little IT company, called WolfByte.
Have you ever had some sort of success, and thought to yourself “This is where I am supposed to be”? That feeling of finally arriving? As if the model in your head of your potential suddenly is matching what is happening in your life? And that’s its deserved somehow?
This is what these years felt like to me.
I was finally ‘getting somewhere’ I thought to myself, making up for lost time, feeling proud of myself (a new sensation). I always knew I wanted to work with computer systems, and now I was doing it.
Scott, the 6 foot 2, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Managing Director of Wolfbyte, became like a brother to me. We spent endless hours together planning out the business, working through client dilemmas and helping each other personally. Scott’s indefatigable ways, his boundless energy to work on things and make things ‘better’, his passion for fitness and his beaming smile filled up the hearts of those who he worked with. His dynamism was infectious and spurred me towards being a better person.
Scott was a passionate skier and travelled to the snow most years for a ski trip with some friends, and it was no different in 2009. The business was going well, and he had planned out a trip to Niseko in Japan with the other guys from the substation. ‘Brittle-boned Nick’ had no business breaking his spinal column on a ski field, so I borrowed his car after dropping off his skis for the trip and saying goodbye so I could stay behind and run the business whilst they jetted off.
I waved to him out the window as I drove away from his house, and that was the last time I saw him.
Scott went missing in the early hours of the morning in Niseko, after celebrating a long day skiing with a few hours’ revelry at a local bar / watering hole. That night there was a lot of snow, and the following day and night was blizzard-style weather, so when he didn’t turn up at his pension (his Japanese accommodation), my friends were immediately concerned for his safety. I have never been to Niseko, but photos of that night show snow piled up 3 meters high on the narrow roads, with temperatures minus 10 degrees overnight.
Scott left the bar on his own to walk back to his accommodation, but he never made it to his bed.
I was in our townhouse in Red Hill in Brisbane on a Friday evening, 24 hours after Scott didn’t make it back to his accommodation, frantically communicating with my friends in Japan as they worked with authorities to begin searching for him. This was only a few hours after I had been alerted that he was missing. It became clear that we needed to contact his family, so I dialled the number of his younger sister Julie, someone I had never met nor spoken to previously, to have the most unforgettable phone call of my young life. She was out with friends when she answered, I explained who I was, and that Scott was ‘missing’ despite that not really making sense even as the words left my mouth.
He wasn’t missing, he was in Niseko.
I was floating 3 meters above my body, completely disconnected from physical reality, as if I was back driving the nauseating Adelaide hills as a boy. I had to reassure her numerous times that I was not the type of person that would pull a prank or make a joke of something like this, and that there truly was something unfolding involving her brother that we did not understand. Julie went home, and we connected on Skype, and sent messages all night and into the next day about what was happening as the authorities in Japan got involved.
Scott was missing for 2 months. His unexplained vanishing made national news in Australia and Japan. My friends and I sat around the TV at our little townhouse in Red Hill the few days after, air rushing out of our mouths in shock as we saw his face appear on the nightly bulletin, hoping beyond hope he was ok.
Scott’s body was eventually found in a creek bed as the snow began to melt with the change of seasons. He was found only meters from his accommodation. The cause of his death was hypothermia – he died in the snow that night. However, the cause of his death, how he found himself in that situation, the one that would take his life, is still a mystery to everyone all these years later.
Whenever I think of his last moments, I need the words of better writers than myself as comfort, so I think of Emily Dickinson’s elucidation of death, as if Scott ‘slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind’, floating away into the ‘drift called the infinite’. (59) I imagine this happened peacefully, the lights of this world flickering out softly in his mind’s eye, replaced by the ever-waiting, ever encroaching infinite dark.
That sounds like a place I’d like to go, the infinite, once I'm tired from running my race, have had enough of thinking, and my body can reach into the future no more.
Scott was 27 and was far from having run his race. His loss was a monolithic tragedy that belied comprehension.
As his friends and work mates, we had no guidebook, no set of existential instructions, no lived wisdom to help steer us through the shock and pain and grief we found ourselves living through. Scott was such a positive energy in our lives; his indefatigable presence, his willingness to help anyone with a problem, his drive to become a better person, always striving for an ultimately unattainable perfection. Striving, nonetheless.
From the very first minutes finding out he was missing, to the long sleepless first night, to the days that stretched to weeks, to the confusing months, all of time compressed and stretched around us. We became haunted by that hollow, ethereal and dizzying feeling that everything is changing so abruptly that our physical bodies (or is it our minds?) couldn’t catch up. Loss – the hollowness of it. A sensation defined by the thing that is no longer there, a deficiency of something once so important and vital to your functioning that its absence causes physical pain.
The community of businesses and friendships that Scott, myself and many others had built over many years, for me, was destroyed once Scott was gone. Some of us exploded together under the stress and pressure and grief, hiding our seething confusion in plain sight. And some of us exploded apart, flinging us overseas or to the far reaches of Australia. Some of us buried ourselves in work waiting for it to blow over. We were running away from the grief, we were running from the trauma, we were hiding from the finality of death and the ways in which the preciousness of life is largely ignored until it shakes you so hard you can no longer ignore it. The breadth of coping solutions seemed as varied as the people employing them. Most of us were on autopilot, subconsciously grasping for strength in whatever methods we could find.
The extent to which my individual sense of self-worth and the bedrock of my character was intertwined with the successes we had together and the community of businesses we had created would only fully be revealed once that community and those successes were lost to me. I missed him so much, it was unbearable.
I pretended I was ok for a full year, running the business and keeping clients happy and hiring staff, but it was doomed to collapse.
I’ve never really been afraid of my own death. And I was never afraid of death in general until Scott died. Losing someone so close, who knew me better than anyone bar a handful of people, I suddenly became very distressed that Cate would die too, leaving me adrift, lost. The pain of surviving another loss would have been too much for me, so my mind conjured imagined disaster scenarios that I would involuntarily fret over in an attempt to ‘control’ the uncontrollable.
It felt like in some ways it would be easier to die myself than to survive the shocking loss of someone I loved. That’s the curse of sudden death – Scott can rest eternally whilst the rest of us carry on with the burden of his absence, his sparkling blue eyes, his giant smile, his flashing pearly whites and his big bear hugs pushed to the confusing ethereal swirl of our memory banks.
One. More. Step, it's
Here waiting for you, now
Go. Slow, take your time
Leave. No. Mark
You lost your way
I hope you're watching me
From the song A New Day by Karnivool (2009)
Sung by Ian Kenny
Travel
Death and loss is a frame breaker, an altered state of consciousness. Things look unfamiliar through your familiar eyes. You’re forced into some reaction by death’s suddenness, its finality, and its creeping (but wilfully ignored) inevitability. Many human experiences could be labelled as ‘frame breakers’ – an experience that radically changes the way you perceive the world or your life. We are having them all the time, but some have much more impact than others.
Partly powered by exhaustion, partly by grief, and partly at the existential dread of grinding away at the stone of capitalism and ‘normal life’, my wife and I decided to leave Brisbane, hurling ourselves into a campervan and travelling around Australia for the next year. This was a gift that my parents passed to me, as I aspired to emulate their own fondly recounted lap around Australia in an original blue Volkswagen Kombi in the 70s. I don’t think this trip would have happened if Scott hadn’t died, the breaking of the frame of normality enough to push us out the door and into wide open landscapes; where the 360 degree lava lamp sunsets, beaches and brooks and birds and beasts roamed.
Travel is frame breaker.
"The only true voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." - Lao Tzu
The adventures contained in our own trip will have to be the subject of another book, however one thing became very clear to me whilst traversing this large, brown continent:
It was possible. I could change for the better.
I had transformed myself into a much more relaxed, present, and contented person. All I needed to do to maintain this new way of experiencing life, much healthier and free of anxiety, was:
a) Never work again
b) Spend 90% of my life outdoors in nature travelling wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, like some sort of roaming naturalistic hedonist
c) Never really deal with other people again, ever, and generally ignore world happenings, and
d) Limit decision making to whether I should meditate then softly strum a guitar before having a nap, or whether the nap should come first
So effectually become a modern monk, sitting quietly in contemplation under a tree revelling in the wonder of nature and closing myself off to the happenings and goings-ons of society, culture and people in general. Queue Eddie Vedder singing:
Society, you're a crazy breed
I hope you're not lonely without meFrom the song Society (2007), Eddie Vedder
When we inevitably returned home and slowly ‘integrated’ back into human society with all of its “How do you feel now you’re back?” and “What are you doing for work?” questions, the calm and transcendent ease with which I approached everything faded almost as quickly as the anomalous half tan I’d somehow managed to gain.
So then we decided to do the complete opposite of a campervan trip, and moved to New York City for a year.
The stories and adventures contained therein of our jaunt to the Big Apple will again be better served in another book, however one event is worth mentioning.
My wife and I were living in the East Village of Manhattan in New York City in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the region and caused major flooding and blackouts to the Southern 3rd of Manhattan.
The blackouts lasted 5 nights. Each day we would wake up, get dressed in our freezing and dark apartment, load up our backpacks and begin the trek North up Manhattan to find power, food and warmth. This would begin by climbing down 6 flights of stairs in the pitch-black building (there was no emergency lighting in our building of course, this was New York, but on the first day someone put a singular glow stick in the stairwell!).
Walking along a sidewalk in New York is an unusual experience even during normal times, so much city packed into so little space, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Much steel and concrete and glass hangs in the air all around, and it hangs all the more densely when the hulking structures are endarkened and emptied of the lights and the people that enliven them.
By the 3rd or 4th day we were the only people left in our building, everyone else had moved out to stay with friends or family.
We saw weird, weird things in that city during the 5-day blackout. We saw a pay phone that was so full of coins they were poking out the top, rendering this antiquated communications device useless, because the entire mobile network was down. We waited in line at a McDonalds for an hour just over the border of the where power was still on, only for the Manager to stride out and bellow “We have run out of meat”. We would lay in bed and play torch games with kids in other buildings nearby – flashing lights at them in sequence and watching as they copied and flashed us back.
On one of our treks we were walking up Broadway and emerged out near the iconic Flat Iron building into the public plaza which is a large intersection next to Madison Square Park with outdoor restaurants and seating. We stopped walking and stood just to the right of the Flat Iron building, looking North into the plaza and across into the park. There wasn’t a single person in sight. We were living in a post-apocalyptic version of New York City, it was a movie set and all the extras and had been cleared away in preparation for the cameras to begin rolling and Will Smith would leap out and sprint in fear from the horde of zombies chasing him. No one yelled ‘action’, and no one leapt out, it was eerily quiet and perturbing to the nervous system that such a bustlingly city could be emptied of the busyness of human life. In such a novel situation your tingling nerves are on high alert. It was in the realm of a peak experience because there was the sense that this was the most novel of circumstances that may never repeat.
Eventually the power came back on, and slowly the city returned to ‘normal’.
As the weeks turned to months, I found myself drinking, often alone, in any number of little whiskey holes and dive bars and jazz clubs, intuiting this was my last ‘hurrah’, that ‘big things’ were planned upon our return to Australia.
What do a couple of people do who are broke but in love, have travelled their home country and the world* (*a very small part of the western world), have indulged their senses with cultural delights and hedonistic pursuits for years whilst trying to ignore their grief and the loud ticking in their heads of their biological clocks, aware that something is missing, that their search for meaning and purpose was going semi unfulfilled?
They procreate of course.
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Thanks for reading episode 7 / 10.
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Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
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Vids, Links and References
Click below for the page of all the links, clips and references for this episode. Also, I sneak a clip of Pantera’s Shedding Skin (1994) track into the audio of this episode 7 - see if you can find it! 🎸
S1 Ep07 - Confessions of an Itchoholic