My parents separated when I was around five years old, and I hadn’t seen my father since I was about six. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, he was almost a stranger to me.

After growing up so isolated and sheltered from the outside world, I reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore. Following an argument with my mother, I made the decision to leave.

In the middle of the night, while everyone was asleep, I ran away from home and went looking for my father.

I had no real plan for what would happen when I found him. I just knew I had to leave.

I still remember turning up on his doorstep. I had hitchhiked nearly 600 kilometres, it was zero degrees, i froze as i slept under a flax bush that night. Running on little more than determination and a need to find answers.

When he opened the door, he didn’t recognise me.

I was his son, standing right in front of him, and he had no idea who I was.

Once I told him who I was, he asked me where my mum was.

I told him I had just hitchhiked all that way to find him.

Without much hesitation, he put me straight in the car and drove me back towards the farm. I remember the silence during that drive and the weight of everything unspoken between us.

When we arrived, I recall my mother saying to him, “No, you have him now. I’ve had him for the past nine years of his life. He’s a bad influence on his younger siblings. He’s from the devil.”

Being described as “from the devil” wasn’t a complete shock to me. I had heard my mum’s church elders speak about me in those same terms on several occasions while I was growing up.

But this time was different. I felt rejected by my mother and cast out for running away, yet I didn’t exactly feel wanted by my father either. At fourteen or fifteen years old, I suddenly found myself caught between two parents and two completely different worlds, without really feeling like I belonged in either of them.

For years, I had heard my mum tell me, “Your dad’s a bad man.” But as I got older, I had convinced myself that perhaps she was simply a woman scorned. I wanted the opportunity to know him for myself rather than judge him through somebody else’s eyes.

So I stayed with him.

It didn’t take long before I began to realise that my father lived in a world completely different from the one I had grown up in.

A couple of weeks after I arrived, Dad asked if I wanted to go for a drive with him. We got into the car and headed to Flaxmere. Eventually, we pulled up outside a state house.

One of the first things I noticed was a dog at the gate with some of the worst mange I had ever seen. We walked past it and towards the house. The front door was slightly ajar, and we went inside.

Nothing in my childhood had prepared me for what I saw.

There were three people passed out on a couch, surrounded by drug utensils. I had never been around anything like it before. I didn’t really understand the world I had just walked into.

But something about it was strangely familiar.

Growing up in a deeply religious environment, I remembered seeing a drawing once or twice of Jesus with his arms wrapped around a person injecting dr#gs. Until that moment, dr#gs had been something distant to me, almost like something that existed only in pictures or stories.

Now it was right in front of me.

That was when I began to understand what my mother had been talking about. My father lived a very different kind of life.

And that visit wasn’t the only exposure I had to it. Marijuana and other substances were around me during those months. I can still vividly recall the smell in the kitchen when other substances were being cooked up. At the time, much of what I was seeing and smelling was completely foreign to me. I had gone from barely knowing this world existed to suddenly living around it.

Dad enrolled me in a local school. After years of isolation and very little conventional education, suddenly being thrown into a normal school environment was incredibly difficult. I was shy, withdrawn and socially awkward. I was the outsider, and I knew it.

The school itself was rough, and I had very few of the social skills other kids my age had developed naturally over the years. They had grown up around other children, television, music, trends and everyday life. I hadn’t.

I was trying to learn how to be a normal teenager while, at the same time, discovering a side of the world I had barely known existed.

Marijuana and other substances were part of my surroundings during this period, and they certainly influenced what came later, but they weren’t filling some great hole inside me at this stage. I wasn’t yet the person I would eventually become, and addiction hadn’t taken control of my life.

For around six months, I stayed with my father.

Those months opened my eyes to an entirely different world. I had gone from one extreme to another: from an isolated and deeply religious childhood to being exposed to dr#gs, and a lifestyle I had never witnessed before.

In one world, I had been told what to believe and sheltered from almost everything outside it. In the other, I was suddenly exposed to things I barely understood.

Neither world really taught me where I belonged.

And before long, something happening back home would pull me towards my mother again.

She was getting sick.