My story isn't simple, and it isn't finished.

Beginnings

I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1975 — an only child, and, I'm told, one of the first babies delivered at the brand-new Ninewells Hospital. Football was in the water: my dad played for Dundee, and when I was about eighteen months old we packed up for the other side of the world after he signed for Sydney Olympic.

What followed was a free-range Sydney childhood I still love thinking about — beaches and football grounds, dogs and beer-garden bands, always somewhere, always with Mum. We moved to Melbourne when I was nine or ten, and that closed the first chapter. Before life got complicated and heavy, I loved my life — and that matters, because it's the baseline everything else gets measured against.

The day everything changed

In May 1994, at nineteen, an accident changed the shape of my life. Both legs were badly hurt, the left far worse — a compound fracture of the shin and a shattered ankle that took round after round of reconstructive surgery, arterial grafts, and a long stretch in hospital. Then the infections came: repeated MRSA, osteomyelitis in the bone, septicaemia in the blood. For a while it wasn't a question of how well the leg would heal, but whether they'd be able to save it at all. They did. I went in as one version of myself and came out as another — slower, in pain, and forced to rethink almost everything I'd assumed about my future.

Recovery and what it cost

Recovery wasn't a clean arc that ended with me "better". It settled into post-traumatic arthritis, a deformed ankle, a leg that ended up shorter than the other, and chronic pain I still live with three decades on. The salvage options on the table now include fusing the ankle and, down the track, possibly amputating below the knee. More recently the deterioration forced me to stop work. That's a strange weight to carry — but it took me years to stop fighting it and start building a life that actually fit it.

The years I lost

There's a chapter I used to leave out, because it's the one people judge hardest: I was an addict. It started, of all places, in a hospital bed — six months on morphine and pethidine after the accident, then discharged with the infection and no help at all for the dependency they'd built. I chased that high for years afterwards: heroin, then party drugs, whatever was going. I lost years I'm never getting back, and I won't dress any of it up.

I finally gave up the heavy drugs at thirty, when I had kids — the first thing that ever mattered more than the high. Getting clean was the hardest thing I've done, harder than the surgeries, harder than the pain. If you're in it now: it isn't weakness, and you're not beyond reach. Reaching out is the strong move.

What actually helps the pain

Living with chronic pain, I spent years being handed pharmaceuticals — endone, oxy, Tramal, even antidepressants — the same family of thing that started my addiction in the first place. Given my history, that road frightened me more than the pain did, so I've given it all up. What I use instead is cannabis, and for me it's been the single best thing: it takes the edge off without the fog and the spiral the pills brought. I've used it since I was a teenager, and I've come to think it does more than dull the pain — it slows a brain I suspect has always run on undiagnosed ADHD down to a speed I can actually live at. That's my own read and my own experience, not a diagnosis and not advice for anyone else. But honesty is the whole point of this place.

Family, and its breakdown

Later came marriage, children, and eventually separation — and the brutal machinery that can come with it. I've been accused without proof, served with orders, put out of my own home, and separated from my kids. I've sat in the kind of depression that comes from being treated as guilty by default and losing the people you'd die for. And I've known the particular helplessness of worrying about your children's world from the outside, with no power to change it.

I won't name anyone or relitigate any of it here — that's a promise, and it protects my kids more than it protects me. But I'll write honestly about the systems, the toll, and the lessons. Never the individuals. That's where some of the hardest writing on this site comes from.

Building something of my own

Through all of it, I've run my own business in IT — fixing the practical problems people bring me, on my own terms. Work has been a steadying force: something I could control when a lot else felt out of my hands.

Back to study, later in life

More recently I went back to university to study ICT, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and the systems quietly reshaping all our lives. Being a mature-age student is humbling and clarifying at once. It's also where a lot of the questions on this site come from.

Faith, doubt, and doing better

Faith has been part of my life — not as easy certainty, but as something I've questioned, lost, found, and questioned again. I don't think doubt is the enemy of faith; I think it's part of taking it seriously. That same posture — honest, questioning, unwilling to pretend — is what I've tried to bring to everything here.