Read the full transcript of Dr. Gregory P. Smith’s talk titled “Forest Hermit To Professor, It’s Never Too Late To Change” at TEDxByronBay 2021 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
## A Traumatic Beginning
I look just like an ordinary person, don’t I? When I was two years old, my father picked me up by the leg and threw me hard against the wall of our home. As a result, I’m profoundly deaf in that ear today. My life got worse from there. At the age of ten, my mother gave me away, abandoned me and my siblings to an orphanage. **Abandonment leads to anger. Anger leads to action.** I spent many of my formative years venting that rage in inappropriate and antisocial ways. This of course had consequences.
Minda Juvenile Detention Centre in Sydney is one of the places that I frequented as a teenager. In fact, upwards of 60% of my youth was spent locked up in one fashion or another. In the early 70s, trauma wasn’t really recognised as a medical condition. In fact, the acronym PTSD didn’t even exist back then. It’s strange to consider that because we all know trauma is very real. While the effects of trauma weren’t recognised by the medicos at Minda, sociopathy was. At the age of 17, I was diagnosed by the state psychiatrist as a sociopath.
Don’t get me wrong. It takes a lot of hard work to live up to the label as a sociopath, but it did have its advantages. Finding a communal seat or a seat at the communal dining table wasn’t that difficult. People were just downright afraid of me, but I often wondered if their fear matched the internal terror that stalked me. At the age of 19, I was ejected from the homes and the punitive institutions for the very last time.
The state had done its job. I was then expected to take my place in society. What place? How? With who?
## Disconnection and Violence
The fruits of my childhood were beginning to show in the adult I was inevitably becoming. I suffered a complete and utter connection to the society I was supposed to join. This created a great void, a terrible void that I filled with a burning hatred of myself. The social disconnect and loneliness fed a massive hole within me. Violence was the only form of release I knew. A sideways glance from a casual passer-by, a curious passer-by, was seen as a threat or a challenge, and I dealt with them swiftly and brutally.
Add alcohol to the mix and I detonated like a bomb. Size didn’t matter. As a child, I’d survived many rounds with my father. I had no fear of fighting to the death if need be. This little sociopath didn’t know what self-preservation meant. I was volatile and dangerous, and yet I truly longed to fit in. I tried to integrate into society as much as anyone with severe mental and emotional trauma could. I saw other young men taking wives, building homes. Instead of taking a wife, I took a hostage. Poor Julie. It wasn’t long before she realised she’d made a terrible mistake, and she ended it.
Not long after that, I ended up in the psychiatric wards. And then on the streets. Not for the first time, and not for the last time. Over the next few years, I bounced along the bottom of society, looking up at that ladder of success, unable to grab hold of that first rung. I tried and failed over and over again to get a job and start a new life. I even tried to start a painting business, and that ended with a big bang. Well, it was more of a giant fireball started by me. Suffice to say, when the smoke cleared on that particularly bad day, I was homeless again. I had no idea how unwell I was.
## Escape to the Forest
And then, quite unexpectedly, when I was about 35, I found a place that I felt quite at ease. It was in a moment when I was squatting on a wet, leach-covered floor in a mountaintop rainforest not far from here. Night was falling, and so was heavy rain, as it tends to do in a rainforest. But I’d never felt safer in all my life. And then I realised the reason I felt so secure is there was no one else around. **I had successfully left society wholesale.** I decided I’d stay up on that mountaintop a little while longer.
I became a forest-dwelling hermit, alone, angry, paranoid, traumatised, stoned, drunk, homeless. Still, I convinced myself that I would stay in that little secret hideaway place in the forest. After all, I had everything I needed up there, fire, plenty of ferns to sleep on, and an endless supply of alcohol. Green beer, I called it, made in a plastic garbage bin with homebrew and often foul-smelling creek water. I grew my own crop of dope. By then I’d become a fully-fledged alcoholic and drug addict, self-medicating to kill the pain of a shipwrecked and shattered life.
I would sit in the bush for hours, staring down at the valleys of my forest home, wondering why my life was so cursed. Food was an issue, of course. In the early days, I ate whatever I could catch, bats, worms, lizards. Eventually I started to drift up into the towns like Byron Bay to trade my crop for food and supplies. And I’d get drunk in appalling chemical benders, and then I’d scurry back to the mountaintop with my fire and my bush bed until the next time I needed supplies.
## The Breaking Point
With each passing year, it was becoming quite obvious that I was getting sicker, physically and mentally, until the aliens stepped in. It was painfully obvious that psychosis had taken hold. I was sitting at my campfire one night, and these two very tall, thin, gothic white aliens appeared. And using a simple logic, they argued that if I was to die up in the forest and nobody found my body, the family that I hadn’t seen for so many years would experience great pain. So with this, they convinced me to give society one more chance, and I left my forest home.
I’d been up there for 10 years. I was emaciated. I weighed 41 kilos, half the size of the guy you’re looking at here today. I lost most of my mind and most of my teeth, and I almost lost my life up there. I was hospitalised and slowly recovered. When I was released, I realised I was in the exact same place that I was the day before I went to live on that mountaintop, lonely, angry, traumatised and homeless. The only difference was that now I was 45 years old, a little bit long in the tooth to be starting out again.
## The First Steps to Recovery
Something had to change for me. First I had to get well. It was painfully obvious that drugs and alcohol were doing me untold harm. They had to go. I quit them cold turkey, a year-long odyssey that delivered me to a healthier, clear-headed place. Now I could really start in society afresh. All I needed was a job. For some strange reason, employers weren’t looking for a middle-aged, statiopath with bad beer-brewing skills. And all the sartorical elegance of Charles Manson. Charles Manson. That’s what they used to call me in the soup kitchens up on the Gold Coast where I frequented.
Every single application that I’d put in was either rejected or ignored. After a while I realised the reason I wasn’t getting any work was I had no skills. I had no qualifications. My education, which ended at the age of 14, was fleeting and short-circuited by the horrors of domestic violence. If I was going to survive in this new world, I had to get an education. I had a basic primary school level grasp of reading, writing and maths, but the only books I’d ever read in my life were the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the trilogy.
## The Education Journey
I found myself a free Cert I computer course and threw myself into it. I learnt two things from that course. One, I don’t like computers. Two, I love to learn. Next I thought I’d go and do the Year 10 school certificate. Dad had pulled me out of school before I could earn mine and I had long considered it to be the pinnacle of academic success. I asked around the colleges and the TAFEs if they did the school certificate. They didn’t, but I learnt about a bridging course that if I did well enough would get me into university. Me? Go to university?
To my amazement, I was accepted into the course. I threw myself into it. I had no idea what I was doing, but at least I was doing something. And at the time that was very important. Study gave me purpose and something to do through the day. I was still sleeping rough, but at least I was a very busy rough sleeper. My dedication to study, usually in the makeshift home in the sand dunes of surface paradise, paid off. In 2003 I graduated. **I was 48 years old and this was the first meaningful achievement of my life.** And I had enough marks to get into university.
My first day at university I was intimidated, but very proud that I’d made it. I chose to study sociology, hoping to learn why I hated society so much. Maybe then I could learn and understand how to live in a society that I still really didn’t fit into. To my amazement, I realised I didn’t hate society, I’d just never learnt to be a part of it. I remained homeless until 2005, halfway through my degree. When I graduated, I received a phone call from one of my lecturers offering me work marking and tutoring. Meaningful employment and my name on an office door.
Yet for all the glittering milestones and achievements, I still felt like an uneducated sociopathic loser. That feeling remained with me until I was conferred with a PhD in early 2016. In Australia, it’s estimated that 1.2% of the population have a PhD. As a homeless person, I was one of the 0.48% or the 116,000 homeless people that sleep rough every night. This truly meant that I was coming up in the world of percentages. Meeting Dr. Gregory P. Smith was a surreal moment in a long and fragmented academic journey.
## A Path to Healing
Along the way, I’d not only learnt to read and write properly, I learnt to let people into my life, into my heart. I made some strong connections with my university peers who became beautiful and special friends. They encouraged me, forced me to see myself as I truly was. Not as a hermit, not as a homeless man, not as the sociopath. To them, I was just a man, just another person doing the best I could. Sure, I’d had a rough trot in life, but I wasn’t the only one.
My doctor meticulously studied and gave voice to what the Australian Senate in 2004 called the Forgotten Australians, upwards of 500,000 people who had suffered abuses in out-of-home care, much like I did. In a way, I’d found my tribe, my mob. The wounds of trauma run very deep, very painful and very complex, and very difficult to heal. **But I’m living proof that no matter how far a person goes off track, there’s always a path back, and it’s never, ever too late.** Thank you. Thank you.
