To hell and back
MY Mum is losing her memory as she gets older. Many conversations seem like Groundhog Day.
We often go over the same information maybe six or seven times. Sometimes in the same day.
We both acknowledge it, laugh about it. We work with it and have a bit of fun. But other people find it irritating, showing mum their frustration with eye-rolls and critical sighs. As if it’s something that she can control.
I wonder, if she’d broken her leg, would it exasperate these people that she couldn’t run up the stairs?
It reminds me of the mental health awareness video where people’s physical health problems are met with the responses typically given about depression or mental illness.
The diabetic fellow injecting insulin is asked with a quizzical sneer, “Do you really need medication for that?” and the person throwing up in the bin is told to just, “Get over it”.
I remember clearly a dark time in my late teens when my parents were living overseas and I was living with my slightly older sister.
I seemed normal, went to uni and worked in nightclubs, but I struggled desperately with a raging eating disorder and all manner of anxieties.
I slept a lot during the day and fought the constant nasty, nagging, negative voice in my head for nearly five years.
But I didn’t tell anyone. Because I didn’t know it was a “thing”.
Read the Play is a Geelongbased program raising awareness of the fact that a quarter of all young people will experience a mental health issue in any given year. That’s one in four kids between 15 and 24 years old.
Read the Play encourages kids to understand mental health, look out for each other and to seek help through the many available support services.
The program has been incredibly successful in our local sporting clubs, bringing to light a conversation that had long been hiding in the dark.
Many AFL footballers have recently shared personal experiences with mental health problems and it’s now without shame or judgment that players can go public about a broader spectrum of health concerns.
We are all learning to read the play.
In an exciting and uncanny alignment of stars, the guest speaker for the annual Read the Play fundraising dinner on July 18 is Susan Alberti AC.
I say exciting because Sue is the leading light for women’s football, the vice-president of the Western Bulldogs until last December and Australia’s most important philanthropist for diabetes research.
Uncanny because I’ve just finished writing Sue’s authorised biography.
So I know the details of this impressive lady’s inspirational life.
If there was ever anyone who understands the challenges of recovering from physical health setbacks and indescribable emotional trauma, it’s Sue.
When Sue was in her late 40s, her husband was killed by a hitand-run driver. Not only did Sue have to contend with her personal grief, she had to assume sole leadership of their multi-million dollar construction business immediately.
Less than six years later, their only child died in her arms on a flight home from the US from complications of type 1 diabetes.
To this day, Sue is driven to find a cure for the disease that took her daughter, Danielle.
Sue’s public battle with media giants over comments made on The Footy Show in 2008 made national headlines, but what people didn’t know was that she was recovering from cancer during the court proceedings.
She won the defamation case and beat lymphoma, but her weight slowly soared to the point of morbid obesity.
A heart attack in 2014 was a wake-up call, but it was when her kidney specialist told her she would die if she didn’t lose weight that Sue knew she had to act. Within two years, she dropped from 120kg to 65kg.
Through all the personal pain, Sue has never stopped giving, never stopped working for others and never given up on her three dreams: a cure for diabetes, a flag for the Bulldogs and women’s full participation in AFL.
For more insights into this amazing life, keep an eye out for The Trailblazing Story of Susan Alberti due for release in November.
More immediately, if you want to hear Sue’s story in person and support Read the Play, tickets are available online at: tickets.readtheplay.org.au/events/fundraisingdinner
The intensely lonely and everpresent feeling of depression can be hard to detect from the outside. But resilience is in all of us and recovery is always possible. Just ask Sue Alberti.