I Failed at Getting Clean Three Times Before It Actually Stuck
I want to start with the part most people leave out: before I actually got clean, I failed publicly, three separate times. This isn't a story about one decision that changed everything. It's a story about never quite giving up, even after failing enough times that most people would have stopped trying.
The First Attempt: Running to Queensland
The turning point that finally got me moving was rock bottom, plain and simple — a police raid on my house, failure to appear at court, assault charges stacking up, and nothing to show for years of my life, financially or otherwise. When the police finished their search, I got in touch with a mate working in the mining industry in North Queensland and saw my one shot to get out.
I packed the car — partner, dog, whatever I needed — and drove, deliberately avoiding planes, trains, or anything that would put my name on a record. It was genuinely by the skin of my teeth; I was running on fumes by the time I made it. I lived off protein powder and two-minute noodles to scrape together enough for mining inductions that cost a fortune, and my first real job was twelve and a half hours a day scraping grease into a barrel in a confined space. I didn't care. I was out of the environment that reminded me of everything, and that alone felt like fresh air.
That lasted about six months before the relationship fell apart, the mining boom made housing impossible to find, and I ended up evicted for trying to sneak my dog into a pub room with no bathroom. That's how I became homeless — sleeping under a bridge through the day because it wasn't safe at night, staying awake with my dog for almost three weeks straight. A mate eventually drove me all the way back to Victoria.
Coming Home Empty-Handed
I came home with no dog — he'd been stolen — no partner, and had to face my mum, who'd been holding everything together alone while caring for my grandmother, whose health was failing fast. I'd told people I was leaving to change my life. They'd laughed, told me I'd be back. Confronting that, after everything I'd lost trying to prove them wrong, might have been harder than the twelve months away.
That's when the shame hit hardest, and that's when I relapsed into methamphetamine for the first time — not because it made anything better (anyone who's used it knows it doesn't shut your brain down, it wakes it up so you can stew on every failure for days straight), but because I didn't want to sit in the shame of what I'd put my family through while trying to change.
The Second Attempt: A Different Kind of Trap
Failed attempt number two looked completely different from the outside — a new partner, a nine-year relationship, a proper career driving haul trucks, a move to the Sunshine Coast and then WA. On paper, everything was going right. No drugs during that Sunshine Coast stretch — a genuine first, proof I could handle hard situations without immediately numbing them.
But once things got calm enough, something else surfaced. I'd spent so long trying to become this "straighty 180" — the cool, calm, collected bloke nothing fazed — that I didn't notice I was fawning instead of actually dealing with anything. Everything looked fine, so I couldn't understand why I still wasn't happy. That confusion is worth naming directly: doing everything "right" doesn't automatically resolve what you haven't actually processed. It just makes the unprocessed part harder to explain, even to yourself.
Alcohol crept back in as the gateway, and once I was drunk enough, meth followed. That relationship ended after nine years, and the end of it stripped away everything I thought I was — my self-worth, my identity as a man, gone. I hit full victim mode: why me, why does this always happen.
The Turning Point That Actually Held
I was thirty-six, and I'd failed publicly three times already. But that collapse — losing every friend, the partner, the future I thought I had — is exactly what forced me inward with no other option left. There were days I sat on the couch with just my two dogs and cried for hours asking myself how I'd ended up here again.
What was different this time was the ownership. I stopped pointing at everyone else and took full responsibility for why my life looked the way it did. I remember looking in the mirror, hating what I saw, and telling myself it was time to stop being a bitch about it and actually fix things. That's when I started genuinely learning — shadow work, patterns, the fawn response, whatever I could find, applying it, watching what worked and what didn't, and just not stopping.
Failure had stopped scaring me, because there was nothing left to lose that hadn't already gone. I spent close to a year and a half in near-total solitude — turning down mates without over-explaining, protecting the one thing that actually mattered: not ending up back here in another twelve months.
What It Built
Slowly, things stopped repeating. Better people showed up. A healthier relationship followed, and even though it eventually ended too, there's no hatred there — we're still friends, and that's only possible because I'd become a genuinely healthier man by the time it happened.
None of this was one decision that fixed everything. It was refusing to fully give up, relapse after relapse, failure after failure, until it finally held. If any of this sounds like where you're at — know that on the other side of the fear is the life you actually want. It just takes one step forward, even if you take two back first.
Related reading: Comfort Is the Slow Killer Nobody Warns You About and Rock Bottom Isn't the End. It's the Beginning.