I’ve been running Beers With Mates for two years now and when we went through the process of creating the logo and slogan, a few mates and I put our heads together and came up with Solid Chat: Stronger Contact. Now, what this means for me is that, as you start to open up to your mates about what’s really happening in your life, they’re given the opportunity to step up as mates to support you.
At the same time, once you open up, it opens the door for them to do the same and you’re able to now become more honest with one another which forges a much stronger friendship. I’ve been pretty open about my struggles with depression and I’ve shared that story previously but, if I’m really honest, that’s not my key struggle when it comes to mental health and some of my close mates will know that.
Today, I’d like to walk you through the full story of what’s been happening with me because:
I’m lucky to now be in a secure job where my boss knows the story and is open with me sharing it; and
In learning to better manage my mental health, it was these stories from people with shared experience that really helped me, so I hope to be able to do the same.
I went over to Canada in 2013 looking to try something new and I certainly had plenty of interesting experiences. I worked in commission only sales roles in finance and real estate with some amazing people and I was met with what I considered to be some of the first few real failures in my life. It scares me to share this and I’ve kept most of it hidden, although a few people will know parts of this story.
My ex-girlfriend, Jess, and I had just bought a house at the start of 2016. I’d made the decision to leave a real estate team and work on my own. I had an idea to expand upon some content that was already out there to develop a video series to help people answer a few key questions and combine my disciplines of financial planning and real estate. They were:
Should I rent or buy?
If I buy, how much can I afford?
If I spend what the bank tells me I can afford, will I still be able to live a good life and retire at a reasonable age?
My mate, Chris, is a marketer and he helped guide me in pulling it all together. I stopped all cold calling during this time to work on it and I wrote the script, much like I’ve done here. Now, without really knowing about it, this video series really helped sell me on real estate. Once I understood the long term figures and could see the investment concept then I understood it all better.
A couple of weeks into starting this series, I remember being on a bus heading to a party north of Toronto with a mate of mine from Brissie and telling him my plans. I was excited and he was excited for me. I had an amazing weekend that culminated in me breaking my leg around midday on Saturday after a great first night on the Friday. Everything was looking up until then.
After I broke my leg, I finished my real estate video series and Mum and Dad came over to Canada to look after me. The videos helped me learn a lot but they didn’t really get me the results I was looking for. I went in to work each day and worked towards building a list to cold call but didn’t really make many calls. Dad worked on a few projects improving our new house while Mum helped to tidy up and decorate. It was great to be able to have them be a part of my life in Canada.
When they left, my mental health went downhill and this where the story really starts. I was so annoyed with myself that I wasn’t making money and I couldn’t hold myself accountable to make the calls to generate leads and sales. In the back of my head, I remembered my cold calling experience at Scholarhood and I realized that the leads didn’t exactly come quickly. If I worked at the same effectiveness but couldn’t make the same number of calls then it was going to take me even longer to generate sales leads.
It didn’t really make sense but I just gave up and considered leaving real estate until I had a chance to join the Real Estate Brothers team where they would hold me accountable. I became more productive and I improved my skills through their training but I still really questioned whether this was what I wanted to do with my life. Now, in saying that, the role play training I did with the Provencher brothers and the team were some of my most enjoyable moments in real estate. I was much more excited about the training than the doing. I started seeing a therapist at the time and we spoke about it. A lot.
At the same time, I picked up a medical marijuana license because of the pain meds I was on with my broken leg. I’d never really smoked weed before so it was fun experimenting. When I went into the shop, I’d have about 10 different strains of weed to choose from and I’d typically leave with the strongest indica or the strongest sativa and I figured I could just mix the two for something in between. I’d only buy a gram or two at a time and I never really needed much weed to get high with my vaporizer.
As for the weed experience, I realized fairly quickly that it didn’t affect me the way it affected my similarly excitable girlfriend. While it would put Jess to sleep, it would wake me up and I’d sit there playing music and thinking for hours on end. At the best of times, I’m in my own head a lot but this was next level. I’d just sit there thinking about possibilities and opportunities and brainstorm how things could work out.
During this time, I decided that real estate in Canada wasn’t for me and I set aside more time to think about next steps. This also meant that I started smoking more. When I was high, I wasn’t depressed. The weed actually lifted me out of my depression and enabled me to think more positively. In fact, it just kept lifting me until I was excitable most the time and felt like I really didn’t need to sleep, even when I wasn’t high. I came up with a heap of business ideas and URLs during that time, including Beers With Mates and a brand that would later become We Wanna Wine. I didn’t really know what I would do with these URLs at the time but I felt the need to buy them. I used to sit there on our L shaped couch nursing my sore leg, that was now out of a boot, while I danced around in my chair and thought about things.
My girlfriend was concerned, of course, and we had a couple living in our house and one of them had a history of depression. He told Jess that he thought I might be manic and, based on my memory of walking down the street with the dog we were puppysitting in my arms and walking into my therapist’s office with the dog where I proceeded to ramble, he was probably right. Jess came to meet my therapist during my 12th and final session and they agreed that they couldn’t follow my thought process because of what I now know is called flight of ideas.
In this state, you just flip from one thing to the next and keep extrapolating on each previous thought. It’s actually pretty fun for the person doing the thinking. We agreed that I should go to the hospital to get checked out. I’m pretty interested in psychology and neuroscience so I figured that would be fine. Until I got there.
I remember them putting my belongings into a bag with a hazardous waste symbol on it and I didn’t think that it was appropriate for a place of healing. In the hospital, I met a few other people who were also in their flight of ideas stage. I remember sitting with a guy where he told me all about this idea he was working on and I basically just sat there and asked him questions to help him expand on his plans. I now know that this is really one of my key skills and I use it in my podcast series and sales conversations.
I first learned this skill when listening to podcast hosts and practiced it in my role play training in real estate. Now I was practicing it in a different setting. Of course, I didn’t just listen, I had ideas of my own to talk about and he listened and pushed me to expand on them as well. I was moved from this facility into a different hospital with a psychiatric ward. There were only about 4 of us in this particular section of the hospital. One of them was a woman who had been a stockbroker all her life and was now retired. She showed me photos of her when she was a young woman and it’s true that she was beautiful and she was likely very intelligent in her chosen line of work as one of the few female stockbrokers at that time. In her current state, she looked as if she’d just been shocked with a thousand volts. She seemed very tense and couldn’t speak freely and she told me she’d been like this for almost a year. I can’t remember her name but she had a big impact on me. She made me realise what it could be like if bipolar disorder really got hold of you. I understood just how bad it could be.
At that time, the hypothesis was that I was in a manic state that had been induced by smoking weed. I hadn’t yet been diagnosed as bipolar. I had friends of mine, Silke and Bernd, come visit me and give me gifts to help me heal. Silke is a trained psychiatrist and had dealt with people in my situation plenty of times before. Bernd is a neurologist and had his own insights to share. They were in touch with Jess every day to help answer her questions and help her better understand the situation. They gave me some materials to draw and sketch to help me express myself. That was the first time I’d really ever drawn anything since I was in primary school. I also remember someone on the ward showing me a headband to help me calm my mind. It was from a Toronto based company called Muse and gave you an audio output that matched your brain signals. If your mind was busy, it may sound like the wind blowing. If it was calm, the air would be still. If it was really calm, you could hear birds chirping. In this way, it trained you to be able to calm your mind. I would buy one of these devices a few years later and it was able to significantly help a mate with his anxiety by training him to meditate. I lent it to him after it helped me do the same.
I got moved to a different section on the ward and I met a guy who used to walk the halls all day long, so I walked with him. He’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic and he said that God had told him he couldn’t eat. Nothing the doctors had done so far had helped him improve at that stage so he continued to lose weight. They were recommending electric shock treatment and he was completely against it. He was a lovely guy, very thin and gentle with long hair and a beard but he was determined not to eat and it would likely kill him eventually if he was unwilling to make a change.
During this time, my mum came to visit me in Toronto. She met me at the hospital and was eventually able to bring me to our home on the Danforth where I continued to recover and the medication slowly calmed me down. Understandably, it was very difficult to see her son in a mental ward, especially after everything else I’d been through in Canada. She was determined to make me come home to Australia. I can’t quite remember how long she was there with us in Canada but it was winter at this time and I remember her remarking that she’d hardly seen blue skies since she’d been there. She wondered how I dealt with it and, really, it wasn’t something that I’d actively noticed but it’s likely that it had affected my mood.
I had my last Christmas in Toronto that year and I planned a going home party. It was my last chance to see everyone before I left and I’m happy that we made it happen. I had mates from a whole lot of different parts of my life come and visit me that night and we all shared beers, wine, food, rum and cigars. My French mate Adrien came with a bottle of Champagne that lit up and had sparkles in it. It was the last thing we drank on the night, before Mum & I flew out the next day. That was January 2017.
When I got back home, I was still a bit excited from the mania but I was sure that everything would work out for the best in the long run. I hadn’t factored in the possibility that my now ex-girlfriend might not join me in Brisbane. Yes, she bought a house in 2017 and had a new job and had all her friends in Toronto, but I was still unwilling to accept the possibility that we would split up. I’d just put so much effort into trying to make things work in Toronto and it had been so hard. Why wouldn’t she see the light and realise that Australia was the better option? As it turns out, she had LOONG list of reasons as to why she wouldn’t join me in Brisbane but I knew there was really only one reason. She’d stopped believing in me. She was convinced that I wasn’t going to be able to turn my life around, or at least I couldn’t do it to suit her timeline.
I left Toronto with a large debt to her and, being an accountant, she had a spreadsheet for it all. With my savings over the next few years, paying her back was my main goal, and I accomplished it. For someone who’s always had money, it’s hard to know what it feels like to have nothing. I was certainly lucky to be able to have my parents let me stay at their house and to have a job that is still my highest paying role to date but it was only after I paid off my debt to my ex that I could really relax.
During this time I also found myself single for the first time in years. It was time to make some changes. I weighed over 100kg for the first time in Toronto and I was closer to 85kg when I went over there. I started an accountability group to help me lose some weight and it worked. I’d had my confidence knocked massively by a few years of low earnings which I deemed to be personal failure and then it lead to depression, mania and ending up in a mental health ward. It’s not exactly the kind of story you want to bring up on a first date. I did have a pretty cool job though. I got to travel Australia selling Adina watches and I could talk about my travels in Canada.
It was dating that really helped me rebuild my confidence. I had plenty of opportunities to meet new people and, with each new person, you get better at telling your story. I also had 150 customers who also wanted to know more about me so I got better at expanding on the positive and minimizing the negatives. The next few years really were a lesson in getting better at selling myself. It also meant that I got pretty good at glossing over some of the more difficult, depressing details. That’s part of the reason why I want to get clear on some of the finer details now.
When you have zero money and it feels like you have very few opportunities, you cling on tight to everything you have. You go into survival mode. Over the previous few years, my body had gotten used to living in survival mode. I needed to learn how to live again and to trust my ability to make things happen. The accountability group was the first part of that. I realized that personal accountability was one of my key issues in Canada. I needed to trust that I could get results so I raised the stakes and made my goals public and looked to pull a team together. This whole time, I had this Beers With Mates brand in my head and this idea that I’d seen executed in the form of The Powerful Group in Toronto with Stuart Knight where people met regularly and had interesting conversations. I was wondering how I could make something like this happen.
I was also on the search for a replacement for my ex-girlfriend. There were times there when I wondered whether I would be single forever but, generally, I knew that I was much like the Rip Curl brand. I was on The Search, not for the perfect wave but for the right girl for me. I treated dating like a part time job. It was the first time I’d ever used Tinder and, for me, it was dating’s equivalent to online lead generation. It gave plenty more options but it would also require much more sorting.
I met a girl out one night who I became close with and I was attracted to her because she was really much different to me. I’m generally very analytical and spend a lot of time in my head while she was more present and was able to tap into her intuition more. It was something I wanted to learn and she served as a great teacher. I talked a lot while she just got a vibe about things. She didn’t feel the need to explain things. She just knew. She’d also grown through some difficult times and became a much stronger person, both physically and mentally. We shared a joint together one night and I figured I’d be fine. I had a hypothesis that it was the sativa weed that had caused the problem for me in Toronto and it was more likely that the weed in Australia would be weaker and more like indica. I was wrong.
I got that familiar buzz again, had a great night and went off to work the next week on a tour down to Sydney. I took a book on Intuition with me on the road trip and read it every night. I really enjoyed the book and, as intended, it kind of took me on a journey into the world of intuition and showed me how it works and how I could develop it. I also felt more and more positive throughout the week and I started to feel like my intuitive abilities were developing. Toward the end of the week, I became less interested in doing my work and more interested in following my hunches. I remember visiting a town called Toronto in New South Wales and climbing a hill there in the dark. It felt like I was facing my fears. Toronto was still a really scary place for me at the time.
When I reached the top of the hill, it felt like I’d conquered my fears and slayed my dragon, so to speak. I posted something on Facebook, a Paul Kalkbrenner song, Sky and Sand, and it had somehow alerted my family that something was wrong. They wanted me to go to hospital. I remember driving past the hospital and thinking that I’m not going back there again, so I drove on to Sydney where I was going to be staying at my Cousin’s place. They had been forewarned that there could be problems.
I was energized. I felt like I was on a mission and, really, I was. I was processing all that had happened to me and I wanted to conquer my fears. In short, I was becoming manic again. The weed had set me off again. I remember waking up in the morning, driving to the beach listening to Jay Z’s Magna Carter Holy Grail album. I felt like I could feel the energy of the cars, trucks, cyclists and drivers around me. While at Adina, I’d been on a mission to find the best pie in Australia. I usually ate them for breakfast or lunch. I remember I went to Upper Crust in Collaroy and had one of my favourite ever pepper steak pies. I then headed off to the beach nearby.
When I got to the point to the North of the Golf Club, I headed down towards the water. There was a path through the water that headed towards a rock in the middle of the ocean. I took my jumper, jeans and boots off and headed into the water. When I made it to the rock, I felt like Moses who had just parted the red sea. When I get onto the rock, I knew I needed to dive into the ocean because I was afraid of the rocks, so I did. When I dove into the ocean I started swimming in a panic to ensure I didn’t hit the rocks. Eventually, I calmed down, realized I was well clear of them then I needed to build up the courage to get back onto the rock. I did, but I cut my right thigh in the process. Still, when I got onto that rock, I felt like I was Rocky with my arms in the air and had just accomplished something huge. I walked back over the red sea and decided I no longer needed those clothes and old boots. In my mind, I was shedding the old me.
I took my keys, wallet and phone and walked back up the hill and towards the car, petting dogs and chatting to people along the way while in my undies. I jumped in the car and proceeded to follow my nose. I ended up at some sort of outdoor religious assembly area and I saw a sign for coach parking. I’ve always been interested in coaching so I decided that it was a spot for me. In that state, I didn’t quite comprehend that a coach is like a bus, not a person’s title. I walked towards the assembly area where a few people wondered what the hell I was doing so I said G’day and walked back to my car where I headed back towards my cousin’s house.
I remember driving to Hope Street, which was the key thing I was looking for at the time, hope, and I decided I was going to door knock a house to see if I could get a listing. Now, this particular Hope Street was in St Ives in Sydney which is a very nice suburb and this was one of the nicest houses on the street, definitely worth at least a couple of million dollars. Now, I didn’t have a real estate license at the time but doorknocking was certainly a fear of mine. I remember walking up to the door in my undies, introducing myself and asking if they were looking to sell in the near future. The owner told me to come back in 3 months time. WOW! I just knocked on one door in my undies and got a positive result. It must be my intuition. I know when people want to sell their house. This is going to be amazing!! And then I drove home, walked past my cousin, Tim, in the front doorway of his house in my undies and headed to my room in his house. I’m sure he wondered what the hell was going on but he didn’t really ask too many questions. The whole family were very patient and supportive of me.
Not long afterwards, I was in hospital again in Sydney in late 2018. This was the first time I’d been in hospital in Australia and, as you can imagine, when you walk into hospital talking about your heightened intuitive abilities that you learned from some book you read, they look at you kinda strangely. I told them that I’d been in hospital before and that I was manic because of weed but this time they diagnosed me with bipolar. This was when I realized I really had a problem and that I was going to have to do something about it. My parents came down to Sydney and visited me in hospital every day. I decided to start doing 50 pushups every day, which was the origin of what would later become the pushup challenge. I came up with 5 different hand grips and it was, effectively, my prison exercise regime. I shaved my head, first with the clippers and then with a razor. One of the other guys did it with me. My energy must have changed because, in the last week I was there, I had 4 people try to start fights with me. They changed my medication during that time and eventually let me out.
The day I got out, I ran the longest I’ve ever run (16km) from my Uncle and Aunty’s place in Sydney and felt like I did it easily. I’d put on a considerable amount of muscle in less than a month and I was sporting a lean, mean haircut. I looked and felt like a completely different person. Next step was to head back to Brisbane. When I got there, things didn’t really go to plan. I had what I described as Parkinsons symptoms with my hands clenching and I felt awful. I couldn’t relax and the only way I could feel some relief was for me to do some exercise to tire me out, like squats or pushups. I remember listening to a song I loved, Jubel by Klingande but it was haunting rather than enjoyable. Typically, I listen to the tone and sound of the music rather than the lyrics, but, looking at them now, maybe they had some meaning for me at the time.
Save me, save me, save me, save me
You think I don't laugh, oh
Do things I can like so
Why are we losing time
I don't want to get up, oh
Bring me what I need so
Why are we losing time
It's like I've seen the light, but you have never known
Save me
And I swear that the last save me lyric sounds more like just take me, so, suddenly, I was afraid of one of my favourite songs actually being a song about suicide, which was something I didn’t want and I’ve never actually been serious about doing.
We went back to the hospital for them to sort out what was wrong with me. Initially they thought it may be due to my lithium levels but they were fine. They couldn’t work out anything in Emergency, so they admitted me. Only in the psych ward, did a psychiatrist acknowledge that this could be a side effect from the antipsychotic I was on, Abilify. They took me off those drugs and switched me on to Seroquel. Eventually, things improved. I was lucky enough to have a mate to kick the soccer ball around with during that week.
My cousin, Mike, came to visit me in the hospital and he said I couldn’t speak properly and I couldn’t move properly and they obviously had me on some sort of tranquilizers and I still couldn’t relax to sit there and talk with him. We did laps of the ward while trying to have a reasonable conversation, despite my inability to speak properly due to the drugs. I guess this gives some indication of the drive you feel when you’re manic. I now know, Bipolar people are typically very driven and goal oriented individuals. This is one of the blessings of the disorder. My cousin has helped me understand it more over time as he has quite a few mates with bipolar.
My boss from Adina, Grant, also came to visit me during this time and, as you can imagine, he was pretty shocked when this had all happened to his fairly new sales rep and I couldn’t attend the Jewellery Fair in Sydney. I hadn’t told them about what had happened in Canada in relation to the mental hospital. I thought that was going to be a one off for me. They were understanding though and I was very lucky in that regard. He could tell that there was something different about me during my drive down to Sydney. My language had changed and I was becoming more easily distractable along the route. At one stage, I became particularly excited about a church in Glen Innes that I thought the family could buy, renovate and turn into an investment property with its multiple rooms. I now recall that I had also stopped taking my medication during that week.
Once I was out of hospital, I transitioned back to work and was soon on another road trip, although this time I had Dad with me to ensure everything was OK. It was a lot of fun being on the road with Dad. One of my fond memories was having a 1kg steak each at a country pub then staying onsite in a room at the pub. I looked over to Dad at dinner thinking I’d get a chance to finish his steak, but he had it covered. I don’t know what it’s like to have a child that’s sick but I know I’m lucky to have had parents who care. In all the hospitals I’ve stayed in, I was typically one of the very few people who had a regular visitor.
For many people with mental illnesses like mine, they’re drugged up on antipsychotics and can’t live a normal life. The guy I kicked the soccer ball with in the ward was a lovely guy, excitable like me, also diagnosed with bipolar. For the last few years, he’d been on abilify with symptoms that were really hard to live with. I wasn’t willing to live a life like that. As much as possible, I wanted to do everything the old me could do, before my diagnosis.
When I got out of the hospital in Brisbane, they had me on a new medication, Seroquel. Now, antipsychotics often make you put on weight and you need to sleep more but with this one, I really struggled to wake up. Normally, I’m a morning person and I enjoy my morning coffee as much as the next guy but I found it almost had no effect. I remember walking into a shop in country Queensland with my suitcases full of watches and saying G’day to the owner of the shop. I then proceeded to stumble over almost every word I said.
Now, what good is a salesperson who can’t bloody talk!? I’m sure he was thinking to himself, “Mate, have you come here to sell something today? How bout you just go outside, grab yourself a coffee then come back in when you’re ready to bloody sell something.” My mind was so foggy, I couldn’t respond quickly, I had no banter. This wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t be walking into shops half asleep where I couldn’t do my job properly. If there’s one thing about me, I take pride in my work. If I’m no longer interested in working out how to do the job as well as possible or finding ways to improve, then I may as well quit. I rely on my wits to get by and it’s my ability to talk and build connections with people that allows me to sell products and services. If I’m in an encounter, I want to be the one bringing the energy, otherwise there’s something wrong.
You see, well before I was diagnosed with bipolar, I’ve always been excitable and restless. If I don’t have something to dive headfirst into and focus intently on, I get bored and distracted. I don’t do things in halves. I’m either really excited by something or not interested. I’m not very good at being the passenger. I don’t want to watch the players in a game, I want to be in the game. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve really been able to relax. I grew up listening to dance music and I’ll happily wake up and put it on. I used to feel most myself in the middle of the dancefloor on a night out on my own. When I was 18, I’d have a nap after dinner until midnight then drive into the valley to watch a big DJ playing at the Family Nightclub. I’d have a few drinks, get lost in the music and stay there til close. Even now, I listen almost exclusively to DJ mixes. When I was driving around Australia with Adina, I’d alternate between an audiobook to learn something and a dance mix. I really only switch between learning, chatting, partying and training. It’s not often I’ll sit there and do nothing. I don’t really watch TV and can’t stand listening to the radio. I find it too distracting. The focus gets me in flow.
When I was in Canada, I went on this crazy chase for information re. how to improve my life. If I wasn’t working, I was reading and often I was reading instead of working-distracted by my chase for knowledge. When you’re manic, you spend a lot of money. For me, I spent most my money on books. I’d come home from my road trips with bags of books on all sorts of different subjects that I felt drawn to. Most of them were used or on sale so they felt like a bargain. I filled two floor to ceiling bookshelves over those two years with all sorts of random non-fiction books. When I walk into someone’s house, the first thing I look for are the bookshelves. What are they interested in learning about? For me, I’m writing this because it’s helpful for me to reflect. I also know that someone out there will benefit from it. I wish everyone did this. Getting access to someone’s internal thoughts is so exciting. It’s a difficult question to answer, “how do you see the world” but it’s an answer you’ll find once you read their work long enough. I don’t really have any mates with bipolar but I’ve studied the lives of a few and it seems that this is how we are.
So, who might you now that’s been diagnosed with bipolar? Well there’s Mel Gibson, Catherine Zeta Jones, Russell Brand, Jean Claude Van Damme, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Frank Sinatra, Ted Turner, Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mike Tyson, Tyson Fury, Andrew Johns, Tim Ferriss and Robin Williams.
We show up in all sorts of professions and it’s these people who have really given me hope. When one of my idols, Tim Ferriss, opened up about his bipolar in a Ted Talk, I realized I could keep pushing to make things happen. Because of Kay Redfield Jamieson’s books, I now know that you can often spot the bipolar patients in a mental hospital by their range of different books, mostly unfinished, that they flip between. This is how I operate. When I’m on my own, I generally listen to music and think or I read books. Sometimes I do both at the same time. Schoolmates of mine will recall that I’d be next level at music festivals even when I was sober. I’d be running between sets to make sure I didn’t miss anything. This is where I really got to be myself. I’m really not a relaxed person, but I keep myself occupied with interests that help me relax. It’s fun to meet people who operate in the same way, but they’re few and far between.
Anyway, I got a little sidetracked there. I hope that better understand how I operate a little more. The reason I told you all that is because this medication had slowed everything down so much that I felt like I was only operating at 50% capacity. Even if I drank more coffee, I couldn’t speed it up. I ended up deciding to come off that medication because I thought that, if I didn’t smoke weed, I’d be fine.
In the first half of 2019, I was looking forward to going to my first personal development event. I was going to see Tony Robbins for the first time and I was pumped. For some reason, I had built this event up so much in my head that I was sure that this was going to be the time where I could really make something of myself. Interestingly, my psychologist does some work with Tony Robbins and she suspects that his boundless energy is due to the bipolar that he doesn’t talk about. I walked in that first day in a pair of fluoro boardies and a playboy t-shirt that I’ve never had the confidence to wear before. I was certainly excited. In fact, I couldn’t sit still. When the speaker was boring, I’d just leave the venue to go wandering around South Brisbane, where I now live. I got a haircut, had coffees, lunches and drinks and just generally enjoyed myself. Over those couple of days, it felt was like I was part of a dance track that just kept building and building. And I guess, with Tony Robbins as the last speaker, this was the whole point of the conference over a few days. It was building up to the main event of Tony doing his thing. I now better understand how affected I can be by people’s moods and the key mood in that room was excitement and elation. As someone with bipolar, that’s the level my body already wants to get to. This conference pushed it there much faster.
I also remember that Tony actually mentioned bipolar in the opening stages of his talk when he said that people may try to diagnose you with it just because you’re energetic, happy and positive. That was certainly an eye opener for me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. On the last day, I was wearing a t-shirt with a screen print that made it look like a pilot outfit. After the event, a girl there approached me to swap shirts with her. I left there wearing the t-shirt with her brand on it and I gave her my pilot t-shirt then we went to dinner. As it turned out, she’d been through some serious trauma in her life and had some physical disabilities as a result. I learned all about it over dinner, as well as her business, and how she’d been able to work with people like Tony. It was a great couple of days.
The next day, my parents took me to hospital and it was there that the staff made the decision to admit me after entering through Emergency. I’d come home wearing another person’s shirt after a an excitable few days which really felt like a music festival for me. I can admit it was weird but I didn’t want to go in. I ran for the door and they tried to lock me in. Now, I wasn’t about to run away from the psych ward but I wasn’t interested in going in easily. I’d read almost 300 business and personal development books over the previous few years and I’d just been to my first ever personal development conference. Of course I was excited.
The guards came out and I decided I’d at least put up a fight. One came towards me and I started play wrestling with him. I remember my mum screaming for me in concern. About 5 of them brought me to the ground. I remember getting a chance to roll over and I thanked them for letting me put the ball back, as if it was all just a game of rugby. One of them put their knee into my ankle where I had a surgical scar from Canada, so I of course screamed at him. They brought over a needle and I remember thinking to myself, what’s the worst that could happen? They’re not going to kill me. They injected me with sedatives and brought me into the ward. The security kept a firm hold on me the whole time.
That was the last time I ever went into a psych ward. They put me on new medication to help me manage my moods and I met a well-dressed psychiatrist with a shared affinity for watches who helped me out over the next few years. I was only in there for a week but this time really hurt me. I was annoyed that it seemed there was no way for them manage my moods apart from putting me into award and disrupting my life for a week or more. I decided I needed some time away from home so I booked a month of accommodation in West End. It was the first time living in my own space since I got back from Canada. My parents were against it, my Mum in particular, but I figured I had to grow up eventually. Now, at this time, one of my main past times was dating. It was what I’d been doing to fill in most of my free time over the past few years. Unfortunately for me, these new antipsychotics rained on the parade by making it very difficult to get and maintain an erection. On one of them I couldn’t use my mind and on these I couldn’t use my manhood! What the hell was the point of living if I couldn’t use either of those!?
Interestingly, this was a bit of a blessing in disguise. It meant that I started focusing less time on dates and directing more time toward mates. In particular, it made me get serious about getting Beers With Mates off the ground. Also, this was the first time I went on a road trip with work while I was renting accommodation. Of the 4 weeks rent I paid, I only lived there 2 weeks. I realized I could be living at my parents place forever if I stayed in that role and it was also going to be difficult to run Beers With Mates consistently with the constant travel. I had to find another option.
The interesting thing about manic periods is that you forget about all your reasons for not starting things so you get the ball rolling on a project, tell everyone about it and then you need to work out how to keep it going when you no longer have the same level of energy. It’s a blessing and a curse. It’s a time when you make decisions quickly and keep moving. If you do it right, it can be a very productive period. At is worst though, it can be far more destructive than productive.
Now, back to the flaccid penis problem. It’s one of the major concerns for men. You do a great job with the introductions and the conversations and you make it back to the right location and then you can’t convert! Everything’s been going smoothly and then you can’t seal the deal. There was one particular occasion with a girl I was pretty keen on where it really annoyed me. It took the fun out of dating. How was I going to fix it? I went back to see my psychiatrist and told him my story of woe. He knew that this was a side effect and he was happy with my progress otherwise so he halved my dose. It still didn’t work. Now, as far as I knew, I was on the lowest dose possible and this was not the way my life was going to play out. Along with music and learning, sex was one of the most enjoyable things in my life. I started wondering if I was going to have to come off the meds again.
Now, the real issues with your manhood not working is that it’s not like you get many second showings so I just had to keep trying with new people and hope for the best. As anyone who’s gone through these problems before will know, you also start to psych yourself out of it. I went back to the psychiatrist again and asked if there was anything else I could do. Now, fortunately, I had a good relationship with this guy. We got on well and he could see that I was doing reasonably well in life with a new job in finance. I obviously also wanted to have a sex life. I was surprised when he told me that I could halve my medication again and see if that improved the symptoms. That was around September 2019, which would have been my 34th birthday, Over 2.5 yrs after I got home from Canada. Luckily for me, my sex life improved and I’m still on the same regular dose of risperidone.
In the next few months I decided tinder was no longer for me and I wanted to meet people only in person. On December 15th I went out with my old school mates to catch up for Christmas. On the same night, I met my girlfriend, Dani. Throughout this whole period, I learned the value of timing. I generally try to rush everything but, truly, things fall into place when they’re ready. At the same time, I was lucky to be able to stand up for myself and self-advocate. I’d had multiple issues with 3 different medications and each time I put my foot down and asked for a better option. Because I’m a salesperson, I’ve been trained to be able to get my point across but the training started well before then. I was also 3rd speaker on the debating team at school, so I like arguing. I also had an interest in psychology well before I was diagnosed with a mental illness, so I was able to speak with these people on their level. I was also fortunate enough to have a fantastic psychologist who encouraged me to stand up for what is right and took a keen interest in my medication. I still meet with her regularly.
I certainly realise that there are plenty of people out there looking to manage their mental health who may not have these skills or the professional assistance like I had with my psychologist. I also know that aggression and outright frustration won’t get you what you want in these situations. As much as possible, there needs to be a working relationship between the psychiatrist and the patient. Ideally, your psychologist will also help to make this work. You can only build these relationships by remaining calm, showing them that you’re doing the work to improve and aiming to express yourself in the kindest, most professional way possible. In these situations, just like sales, you may just need to keep trying new approaches until you get what you want. One step at a time, you will work towards your end goal, but it may take time.
The next step for me was to learn to be more aware of my moods in order to understand how to manage certain situations. It took quite a few months to put a process in place for me to follow if I felt like I was becoming manic, because I wanted to have some level of control in my mental health management. I needed to have multiple conversations with my doctor, psychiatrist and psychologist in order to pull a plan together. It was a frustrating process but it was worth it. There have been times since 2019 where I’ve needed to raise my dosage for periods of time in order to manage my moods but with that self-management has come self-confidence. Now, Dani and I manage my medication together. She knows when things aren’t quite right and she’s been a big help in me becoming more stable over time.
As I’ve become more stable, I’ve been able to become more confident with the responsibilities I can take on. As it stands, I’m now a real estate agent, host of Beers With Mates, We Wanna Wine and Brisbane Wisdom + President of the Villa Old Boys. All of these little endeavours I’ve taken on have been stepping stones for me to continue building my confidence. I went from cocky when I left for Canada in 2013 to confident in 2021. In my opinion, that confidence can only come falling down and getting up, over and over again. It’s also helped me a lot to have stability in a loving relationship and to work in a supportive environment.
It didn’t take me long to realise that Dani was different to everyone else I’d met. On one of our first outings, I decided I’d be open with Dani about my past and she did the same with me. I can’t quite put my finger on how things were different with Dani, but I just felt really comfortable with her. She could have turned and run early in the piece but she’s stood by me. Without having gone through everything that I went through, I may not have given her the same attention either. Coming to Australia with a Bachelors of Architecture and no English meant her options were limited and she grew as a person through the adversity over the next few years.
I feel like we’ve both been on a similar journey and I certainly realized that, while Dani is amazing, she’s still working towards where she wants to be here in Australia and in life. When I met her, I had a stable job but there have been a few changes since then. It’s been frustrating for both of us but she’s been understanding and I know we love and care deeply for one another. I feel really lucky with the way things have turned out for us. We can both understand the level of toughness that’s required to go through what we’ve been through and we now have the benefit of tackling each challenge together. We also recognize that, while things may be difficult, it’s important to remain happy, hopeful and optimistic. Again, I’ve found that the best way to understand your partner is to watch how they manage the difficult times. The more difficult times you’ve been through, the better you learn to roll with the punches and keep getting back up.
When you’ve been through it, you learn to spot the wounded warriors and appreciate them more. I especially appreciate the people who have gone through hell but have managed to remain happy and helpful. I’ve certainly met plenty of people who put on a brave front, but I’ll back the strong, silent type any day.
If you’ve somehow found this story helpful, I’d love it if you can share it with anyone you may feel could benefit from hearing it. As I said at the start, solid chat will lead to stronger contact. Opening up with mates will forge stronger friendships. Making the first step will lead to more honesty within the group. There will be people who may not respond positively initially but, worst case scenario, it’s a good sorting exercise. You’ll realise who your real mates are and who you can call upon any time you may need a hand. Thanks for listening. I’d love to hear from you soon. You can reach me on ando@andoandco.com or give me a call on 04 2468 ANDO (2636)
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