Gregory Smith · 51 min
Abandoned at ten, institutionalised, diagnosed a sociopath, and living alone in a rainforest for a decade, Gregory Smith rebuilt his life from nothing to earn a PhD and his first tenured academic position at sixty-four, proof that it is never too late to begin again.
Hear this story
Gregory Smith's earliest memory is of violence. At two years old, his father threw him against a wall. By ten, his mother drove him and three siblings to what she said was an auntie's house. It was an orphanage. Over the next decade, he moved through reform schools and boys' homes, fighting preemptively because he was small, spending weeks alone in concrete cells. At seventeen, a state psychiatrist labelled him a sociopath. At nineteen, he was released with $2.25, secondhand clothes, and a warning not to come back.
Gregory spent ten years alone in a Queensland rainforest, brewing alcohol and growing herbs to numb the pain he carried. Psychosis crept in. When three strangers challenged his plan to die there, asking what his sisters would feel if he disappeared, he reconsidered. He left the forest at forty, weighing forty-two kilos, hit by a car on his way out. Months later, sitting on a park bench at forty-five with nothing but a backpack full of drugs and alcohol, he had a vision of himself wielding a sword against an invisible enemy. He realised he had been fighting himself his whole life. He walked away from that backpack and never looked back.
What followed was harder than survival. Gregory took a free computer course at TAFE and discovered he loved to learn. At forty-six, he had his first coffee with another human being. A lecturer offered him work before he finished his degree, on condition he continue to honours. He completed a PhD at sixty-four and received his first tenured university position that same year. He is now sixty-seven, a father, and a consultant to major organisations. The gold in his cracks is not what happened to him. It is what he chose to do next.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses abuse & exploitation and addiction & recovery, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Blue Knot Foundation (complex trauma): 1300 657 380 · blueknot.org.au • 1800RESPECT (family, domestic & sexual violence): 1800 737 732 · 1800respect.org.au • SMART Recovery Australia (addiction): smartrecoveryaustralia.com.au • ReachOut: au.reachout.com
“Stop fighting. As painful as it is, as scary as it is — stop fighting. Don't give up. Don't ever give up. And trust yourself.”
“I was 64 years old when I received my first tenured position. Now I'm 67 now and I've just had the birth of my son.”
“I got up from the park bench and I walked away and I left that backpack there. I've never had a drug, never a cigarette or a bit of alcohol since that day.”
The hero, today
Gregory learned in the forest that the cycle of abuse and trauma stretched across his family line, and that understanding his parents' own pain did not excuse them but freed him from repeating it. When Gregory walked away from the backpack on the park bench, he made a choice to stop being a victim of his circumstances and to have agency over what came next, even though that freedom was harder than the life he had been living. Gregory identifies his two most valuable possessions as his name and his word, and he holds himself to the principle that what he says and what he does must be congruent. At 46 years old, in a classroom at TAFE, Gregory had his first coffee with another human being, a simple moment that marked the beginning of learning how to be part of a community. Gregory stopped interfering with his life and learned to paddle with the current instead of against it, which brought him more of what he wanted and less of what he was resisting. Gregory carries a gold teddy bear ring as a symbol of becoming the responsible parent to the hurt child inside himself, and he emphasises that symbolism can be very powerful in recovery from trauma.
Yes. Gregory Smith is a real person who shared their own story in their own words. Kintsugi Heroes is a not-for-profit that shares first-person stories of overcoming adversity, told with the person's consent.
Kintsugi Heroes, a registered Australian not-for-profit. Every story is shared with the hero's own consent and reviewed under Kintsugi Heroes' trauma-informed content standard before it goes public.
Gregory learned in the forest that the cycle of abuse and trauma stretched across his family line, and that understanding his parents' own pain did not excuse them but freed him from repeating it.
When Gregory walked away from the backpack on the park bench, he made a choice to stop being a victim of his circumstances and to have agency over what came next, even though that freedom was harder than the life he had been living.
Gregory identifies his two most valuable possessions as his name and his word, and he holds himself to the principle that what he says and what he does must be congruent.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 00:07
Welcome to the Kintsugi Heroes Podcast, where we share inspirational stories of everyday people going through different challenges and how they overcome them. Please be aware that the story you're about to hear may have moments of deeply felt emotions and personal experiences. If anything you hear has a triggering effect please reach out to someone who can help keep you safe. If you love this conversation, we'd love you to like and share it with your friends so we can continue to share more inspiration and hope to as many people as possible. Now listen up for our next hero's story. In this episode, I met with Gregory Smith, It's the kind of story that you would watch in a movie or read in a fiction novel. And yet Gregory lived this, and it is one of those stories that just stays with you for a long time. Very moving. He had not the normal kind of childhood, a lot of violence, destructive home environment, ended up in an orphanage. He tells his story in graphic detail with reverence, compassion, and clarity. Because of the way that he was brought up, he had no life skills and ended up becoming a recluse at one point, living for many years in a rainforest on his own. Despite those things, he was also a sufferer of addiction. He made a very big turnaround in his life in his later stages of life and ended up at university and became employed by the university at the age of 64. Krikori does have a TED Talk where he talks about his story. It's a lot shorter than this one. This, this story with us goes for into a lot more detail. It's a fabulous story and really drives home the point that we can change our lives and that we're never too old to do something. If you think that, oh, it's too, it's too late for me to do this or do that, absolutely not. It's, if you want to do something, then you should do it. And Gregory demonstrates that and proves it in, in his life. What a wonderful conversation this was with Gregory, and I really appreciated the detail, the clarity, and the depths that he went to in telling his story. So that we all can learn from this. So please sit back and enjoy this conversation with Gregory Smith. Here we are. I'm Aveline, and here we are for another episode of the Kintsugi Heroes Podcast. I'm here with my guest Gregory Smith. How are you, Gregory?
REPLAY · 02:49
Gregory Smith (Guest): I'm very well, thank you. Yes.
More stories
This site is part of Kintsugi Heroes. Visit the main site for the full podcast. If any of these stories hit close to home, support is out there, you don't have to sit with it alone.
Read how we handle these stories ↗
Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗
At 46 years old, in a classroom at TAFE, Gregory had his first coffee with another human being, a simple moment that marked the beginning of learning how to be part of a community.
This conversation includes born into violence, the car ride that was not what it seemed, solitary confinement and a diagnosis at 17, released with 2 dollars and a warning, ten years alone in the rainforest and three strangers make him reconsider.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 02:52
Lovely to have you here. Thank you for joining me.
REPLAY · 02:55
Gregory Smith (Guest): Thank you for the invitation. It's a privilege.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 03:00
You're welcome. I am really looking forward to getting to know you a bit better. And, um, obviously this is, you know, this is all about telling stories of, of our lives. You know, we're humans and we go through things that sometimes are not that easy. And, um, I know that you've, you've come here to share. And I just want to thank you before we get started, uh, for being here. So can you take me back to, I guess, explain the context of where you were in life, uh, at the time or just before this adversity or the challenge struck, hit you?
REPLAY · 03:41
Gregory Smith (Guest): I was an early starter in terms of trouble. I was born into domestic violence, alcoholism, um, and at the age of 2, actually, my father picked me up by the legs and threw me up against the wall, struck my head against the wall. That was my first serious traumatic episode, and then my life got worse from there. So You know, there was just this, you know, I had 4 siblings. I'm the oldest and 4 siblings came along. And there was just this constant violence in the house, anger, alcoholism. And, you know, I mean, a part of that reality is for me it was normal. And that's a very important thing to understand because if we don't understand something that's different, We have no benchmark by which to measure it. And then, you know, I progressed until the age of 10. And at the age of 10, my mother gave me away, me and 3 of my siblings, gave me to an orphanage. And I say gave me away because it was never explained to me what was going to happen or what her intent was. You know, the The messaging I received was, you know, jump in the car, we're going to go and visit an auntie in Amada. And, you know, an hour later we pull up at this great big Gothic-looking building and these ladies dressed in black and white come walking down the stairs. And I'm thinking, well, Aunty Muriel dresses very strange and lives in a very big house. I mean, at 10 years old, you do have some understanding of who you are, and you have some expectations around you. But in those days, young people were expected to be seen and not heard, and there was very little reason to explain anything to them. So that was a very disturbing moment in my life, and that set me off on many, many years of rebellion, of anger, social discontent. After the orphanage, um, you know, I became a problem child, and I was placed into various corrective institutions, boys' homes, Reform schools. Um, the interesting thing is I never reformed. So, um, and I knew inside of those places, I knew that I was kind of special because, um, I was the one always in trouble. I was a very angry boy. I would get into lots of fights. I always fought preemptively because I wasn't, I wasn't great in stature, but I was very fast. And so I saw someone as a threat, I would always take the initiative and, um, move in it before they had the opportunity. That's seen me spend a lot of time in solitary confinement, concrete cells, sometimes for a week at a time, uh, with one meal a day.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 07:23
Sorry, how old were you at when, when this was going on?
REPLAY · 07:27
Gregory Smith (Guest): Uh, yeah, this was between the ages of about, um, 13 and up till I was 19. At the age of 17, I was diagnosed as a sociopath by the state psychiatrist and Put that into context, trauma wasn't really recognized, was just on the psychological radar, the medical radar. And, you know, and we have our veterans from, from Vietnam to thank for all the contributions they made to the understandings of trauma. And, you know, I was presented before this the state psychiatrist, who was kind of stumped as to give me a label. And so he put his hand in the hat and pulled out sociopath. And that's who I was. I was a sociopath. And after it was explained to me what a sociopath was, there was a certain amount of relief inside of me because now I knew what was wrong with me. And it gave me a sense of understanding. Yes. Now, of course, today I understand that all these assumptions were misaligned and the diagnosis wasn't necessarily correct. But at the time, it was because I was confused. I didn't belong to anybody. I was given away. I was always angry. I was always in trouble. And to have a label to explain all that is actually really important, or it was at the time. But I mentioned earlier that I was in those institutions until I was 19. Now most young people left at the age of 18. They called it the Queen's pleasure, and the Queen must have really liked me because she kept me there for an extra year. But it was a week before my 19th birthday, I was released, and I was called up to the office and given 3 things: $2.25, set of secondhand clothes, and a piece of advice: don't come back. The advice I took. The money, I went and bought some drinks within a pub. That was my first taste of alcohol. What that did to me was just for a moment in my life, after drinking that alcohol, I felt calm. It just— there was a release of tension. And that was a feeling that I was to chase for many years after that. It was just that piece of calm. But that, uh, that wasn't to be. When you always try, it was Once I was out of those places, I tried to do the right thing. I really did. But some of the things in those institutions, they don't teach you how to get a job. They don't teach you how to find somewhere to live. They don't teach you how to pay the bills. And for myself, having spent so much time in solitary confinement, I nearly— I never really learned how to communicate. Or be a part of, um, with other people. For much of my life after that, I was always on the outside. I was always that, that odd person that didn't fit in, you know. And that, of course, creates, um, emotion and trauma, more anger for me. That went on until I was, you know, I tried to get married. And today I understand, you know, I, you know, most people take, most men take a wife. I took a hostage. No, I was still angry, you know, but fortunately she was a little bit smarter than I was at the time, and she got out of that relationship very quickly. And all credit to her for that. But then I just wandered around, I, you know, trying to get jobs. You know, the best I could do is a cleaner job or, um, gardening, a bit of gardening, seasonal work picking fruit. And that was me. I always wanted to do the right thing. I always wanted to be a part of, but I never had those skills. At the age of about 35, quite by chance, I found myself sitting in a rainforest with leeches all around me and the rain coming down. And when it was all said and done, it was just a moment of peace. Now, when I stopped and thought about it, the reason that I felt so peaceful in that forest is because people were a long way away and I didn't have to be a part of them. I could just be me. And I liked it. I liked it a lot. I like it so much that I decided I'd stay there for a while. In that forest, you know, I learned to survive. I learned a new way of surviving, and it was an adventure for a little while because it was different. I was independent. I didn't have to rely on anything. Nobody was telling me what an idiot I was or how disgusting I was or anything like that. You know, there was just me. And the problem was that when I went into the forest, I took me with me, which meant that I took all that pain, all that trauma, all that hurt was living inside me. And so I still needed a means by which to kill that pain, beneathnitize myself to a point where I can actually survive. Now, over time, I developed techniques which are probably not mentionable on the social podcast, um, to barter with hippies and other types of people, which actually gave me quite, quite a substantial way of life. You know, I learned to brew my own alcohol up in the forest and grow my own herbs, shall we say, in the forest. The problem with that is, you know, I had this unlimited supply of alcohol and herbs. And, you know, I was eating a lot of the herbs and washing them down with alcohol. Which made me very sick over the years. After 5 or 6 years, psychosis started to move in, and I started to become quite ill. But it turned out I was in there for about 10 years. And, you know, what moved me out of the forest was I lost a— I lost an argument with some aliens. Basically, they arrived at my campsite one evening and said, you know, because I, you know, I would verbalize my thoughts on occasions. One evening when these people arrived, they said to me, you know, so you want to die in the forest? And I said, yes, that's right. They said, you don't want to hurt anyone else and that's why you're living in a forest? I said, yes, that's right. And then they used my own logic against me. And they said, well, if you die in a forest, your body will rot and there's a possibility nobody will ever find you. I said, yes, that's right. That's what I want. And I said, but what about your family? What about your sisters that you haven't seen for 20 years, 25, 30 years? You'll hurt them. They'll never have closure. They will never know what happened to you. And that actually touched me. It actually got to me. And I felt that they, at that point, they had the upper hand. And the deal was that if I lost that argument, I had to reconsider my position and give society another chance. And I lost that argument.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 15:56
How many, how many of them were there?
REPLAY · 15:59
Gregory Smith (Guest): There were 3 of them. Outnumbered. So I made that commitment and I packed up my belongings in the forest and I left. The ABC did a little documentary on me. When they did their research, they actually found the day that I left the forest because, as it turns out, as I was leaving the forest, I got hit by a car. And so I was run over and I, um, somebody called an ambulance, so I ended up in hospital. And yeah, I mean, I had trouble staying in the hospital. Um, I ended up doing a bargain with them because it had been a long time since I'd been indoors, so I wasn't coping too well with confined spaces. Um, and I, you know, we, we negotiated that I would be an outpatient And this was, you know, but when I walked out of the forest, I was 40, 42 kilos. So, um, about half the weight I am today. So I was in a lot of trouble. I needed a walking stick to walk. Um, I had a beard almost down to my belly button, and now I probably hadn't showered for years.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 17:24
Did you swim in a creek when you were in the forest? Did you?
REPLAY · 17:27
Gregory Smith (Guest): Yeah, there was a creek there, and in the early days I would take regular baths in the creek and that, but the sicker I got, uh, or I became, the less frequent those, those baths and those sort of, yeah, those washes occurred.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 17:46
And when you say sicker, you mean the psychosis?
REPLAY · 17:51
Gregory Smith (Guest): Psychosis, scurvy, malnutrition. Um, yeah, there was, there's quite a, quite a few things. And I mean, the trauma as well, you know. So, um, I was also dealing— but I mean, one of the things that I did in the forest, and this is really important, the forest, you know, when I, in the early days especially, I would sit around the fire or sit at the fire of a night And I would explore my past and I would try and understand what had happened and why it happened. I didn't have— like, I, I had the, the thoughts in my mind, but I didn't have the language to describe or to explain what was going on inside of me or what my understandings were about what happened to me. This, I mean, there was a lot of this, you know, I mean, years of this and trying to understand. Um, and it was in that forest that I started to understand that, um, and it's no excuse for my father, but I started to understand why he was like he was. Because he was traumatized and he was angry and he didn't understand what was happening to him. Yeah, and so I had to look past my father to his father, and I started to see more and more deeply that, that cycle of abuse and trauma within family lines, or within my family line. And I could see with my mother as well, because my mother would agitate my father to the point of, um, explosion. Yeah, and I could see when I started to look at her ancestry. I could see all that trauma in her lines as well. All of a sudden it was about not blaming people, but understanding what was going on. And not saying that it was appropriate, absolutely not, but saying that they didn't understand what was happening to them either. And all of a sudden, and this is while I'm in that forest, I'm seeing that I'm actually developing an understanding that I have to be able to change things within me. The orphanage that I was in was run by the Sisters of Mercy, and they were very, very cruel. They were very, very cruel people. I would often find myself locked under the staircase in a little closet and going without meals. Admittedly, I did run away every weekend. I mean, that contributed to the trauma as well. But so all these understandings, and I, you know, today I understand that I needed to spend that time in the forest, or anywhere away from people, so that I could start to explore myself. And I could start to understand myself. What I did, I gave myself the gift of time to begin to understand who I am, to explore myself, and in some ways to do— to decatholicize. Because up to a point in that forest, everything I did was a sin, and my guilt was so heavy, it was such a burden that it was almost impossible to carry. So I needed to pull that apart and look at, look at that and understand, you know, morality versus, um, intent versus a whole lot of those philosophical understandings. Yeah, and I was able to do that. Sorry for the interruption. This is Ian Westmoreland, the founder of Katsuki Heroes, and thank you for listening to this story from one of our amazing heroes. Our mission is for these stories to provide hope and inspiration to people experiencing life challenges and to also educate the broader community on how best to provide support. If you would like to help us to continue to produce more hero stories and cover more diversity themes, we would welcome all donations. These can be made via our website, kintsugiheroes.com.au. The donate function is at the bottom of the home page. We'd also welcome any feedback. You can email me direct using ian@kintsugiheroes.com.au. Now let's get back to the story. Well, you know, I'll go back to, you know, I left the forest. Once I started to gain a little bit of health through the hospital system, the social workers were absolutely brilliant because I'd forgotten who I was. And they were able to establish my identity, register me for Disability Support Pension because I was expected to die. You know, within a year or so I was that sick. Here I am, I was up on the Gold Coast in Tweed Heads area, and on this income that I hadn't, you know, I hadn't seen that much money for a very long time. And, you know, there's a simple understanding here. What does a practicing alcoholic drug addict, homeless, do with all this money? Because they backpaid me about 3 months. Well, the obvious is, you know, you go and buy a new backpack. In my case, I have a sack. And then you fill it up with everything you love.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 23:44
Hmm.
REPLAY · 23:45
Gregory Smith (Guest): Booze and drugs, you know. I think in that backpack I had, you know, a cask of Fruit Elixir, a couple of bottles of bourbon, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, a little bit of amphetamine, just in case. And I think that explains what my priorities were at that time. Kill the pain. Kill the pain. Kill the pain.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 24:09
So even though you'd been in the forest, you'd faced, you'd deconstructed all the things, you'd faced who you were and the why and the past and, you know, you still had pain because after you came out, you were still seeking. Like you said, you had a party in your backpack to numb all that pain. So it was still there.
REPLAY · 24:30
Gregory Smith (Guest): Look, the pain had intensified because I had done all that deconstruction. So I had a better understanding. And it got to a point where, about February 2000, I was sitting on a bench behind the Tweed Heads Hospital looking at the Tweed River. It's a beautiful view there. I'm sitting there and I've got all this, you know, I've got my backpack next to me and I've got all this stuff next to me in the backpack. I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, you know, and this is a really important moment because I thought, if I only had one person that I could tell all my troubles to, I'd be okay. That was not a good thought for the loneliest man in Australia, because all of a sudden it struck me with devastating clarity of my situation. You know, I was 45 years old. Everything I owned was in that backpack next to me, and I had not one friend in the world. That was the product of my life, 45. And I had a little reflection, and that reflection was, you know, when I was just a, you know, a babe, you know, 5, 6 years old, I remember there was a passion in my gut. It was a passion for life, dreaming of being the fireman, dreaming of being, you know, the doctor, being the hero. Yeah, and that passion burned at that age. But as I sat there on that park bench, the only thing left of that fire was a tiny little Amber. But as I thought that, I suddenly found myself in a cloud of fog. I couldn't see past my nose. I became aware that I was really, really angry. I was really, really tired, but I was ready for the next fight. All my life, I was ready for the next fight, always. Then this fog started to recede, and as the fog receded, I could see my hands. In my hands, I held this great big double-edged sword, and the fog receded a little bit further, and I became aware I was, you know, I was ready to wield that sword. I looked around and I couldn't see anybody to fight, and the fog receded a little bit further, and I could see all this devastation and all this destruction all around me, but there was still no one to fight. Then the fog receded all the way to the horizon, and the destruction and devastation went as far as the horizon, but there was no one to fight. And then all of a sudden I realized all my life I've always been fighting myself. There was never ever anyone else to fight. Every fight I had was against myself, and that's what created all this devastation. That's what created all this destruction. I tried to throw that sword away, but I couldn't. And I dropped to my knees, and I'm thinking, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. And all of a sudden, I was sitting on the park bench again. I could see the river. It was a nice sunny day. I was thinking, I made a decision, and my decision was no matter what I had to do, I wasn't— I did not want to be that person that I was sitting on that park bench. And I was willing to do whatever was necessary to change who I was. So I got up from the park bench and I walked away, and I left that backpack there. I've never had a drug, never had a cigarette. Or a bit of alcohol since that day. The interesting thing is, I thought my life previously was pretty tough. My life was just about to get a whole lot tougher because I had to learn how to be somebody in a society that I didn't like. The difference between the past and future was, in the past, I didn't understand and I had no control. Over what was happening to me. I was a victim. I was a victim of my circumstance. I was a slave to my emotions. I was a slave to my past. I was a slave to the alcohol, the drugs, other people's emotions. Going forward, I was no longer a victim. Okay, I suddenly made a decision to have choice. That wasn't easy because I had to learn discernment. There were lots of things I had to learn, and I didn't have role models. I had to conjure up the idea of a role model. Who do I want to be? Who do I want to model myself along the lines of? For better or for worse, I chose a medieval knight. And you know how, you know, What would this knight do in this situation? What would the chivalry be? Yeah, what would be the morals, the ethics going forward?
Aveline Clark (Host) · 33:37
And whose Mercedes was that?
REPLAY · 33:39
Gregory Smith (Guest): Public Transport, you know, Mercedes buses. Oh yeah, that's the way I was thinking at the time. It was like What a great world, you know, the way I'm thinking. Yeah, yeah. So everything's beautiful, every year, an experience, an adventure, because it's all new. Yeah, yeah. This is better than having to saddle me horse, put me armor on, and ride up. I can just jump on the Mercedes and get chauffeured.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 34:10
Yes.
REPLAY · 34:10
Gregory Smith (Guest): So I went up to Southport TAFE, and I went in there with all my arrogance. And I asked them to sign me up for it, and they said, no, it doesn't quite work like that. This is a paid, um, a fee-paying, um, program. You know, you're going to have to pay your fees. I'm, well, you know, I don't have a lot of money. I said, can I pay it off? And they looked at me, and they went out— person went out and brought someone else in, and I had a bit of a chat with them, and we arranged, yeah, we, we We had an arrangement. Each Monday morning I would come in and pay a certain amount of money and for that week they'd teach me. So my negotiation skills were improving. And that was about an 8 or a 9 month course.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 34:57
Yeah.
REPLAY · 34:57
Gregory Smith (Guest): And a lot of things happened to me during that time because I was a part of a classroom. I was a part of people sitting around having a bit of lunch together, having a chat. I had my first coffee ever with another human being during that time. It's the first time I ever sat down and actually had another coffee with another human being.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 35:19
And sorry, how old were you at that time?
Aveline Clark (Host) · 35:25
Okay.
REPLAY · 35:26
Gregory Smith (Guest): Yep.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 35:27
Wow.
REPLAY · 35:27
Gregory Smith (Guest): I was invited to my first ever barbecue. At the same time, I was still sleeping down on the beach. I was still homeless. And if somebody asked me where I live, I said, you know, quite flippantly, down next to the beach, got a nice place down there. Just sort of gloss over that. People didn't need to know.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 35:49
Did you do that out of choice because you were just more comfortable there?
REPLAY · 35:53
Gregory Smith (Guest): Um, no, look, I actually approached the counsellor at the TAFE telling them that I really wanted a place to live, but I didn't know how to do it. And I don't think she understood what— quite what I was trying to say. Because what she said to me is, well, you get it on real estate and you can have a look in the real estate. I know this. I've never done it. I've never been taught. That's the difference between those mechanical skills and that theory. I mean, I can understand theory. Theory. I'm very good at theory. That's probably one of my strengths. But when it comes to hands-on mechanical actions and processes, that's a whole different thing for me. My sister, on the few occasions that I spoke to her, at one point she said to me, Gregory, you're a very intelligent man, but the problem is you have absolutely no common sense. I took offense to that and I never spoke to her for years. Today I understand what she meant and I totally agree with her. But so, but I mean, there was a— that TAFE course was a really mind-opening exploration for me, and I got through it and I actually ducked the pass. So, you know, I did— I actually met the Gold Coast Mayor. Yeah, I have no idea who it was. Might have been Ron Clark, I think. And I ended up with a pretty good grade point average and I got into university. And I had no idea. And that's one of the scariest things I ever did, was go to university. And I was still homeless. I was homeless until halfway through my undergrad. It was a long time before I was ready. Because I lived in survival mode for so long, it took a long time to transition into community, to transition into a sense of, um, being okay, feeling safe, being safe. Yeah, I did have a little place on Chevron Island for a little while. And it was just a tiny little flat, one-bedroom flat, in amongst all these great big skyscrapers. And I couldn't live there. I couldn't live there because it was so claustrophobic. And first or second night there— the first night was horrible, it was actually absolutely horrible. The next night I went and I liberated a steel hubcap off a Volkswagen so that I could— and collected a whole lot of sticks so I could have a little fire in the place so that there was a little bit of, like, connection there. And I did that. I had a little fire every night for about— for as long as I was there. But I had to pack up and leave. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. But I learned IKEA skills there because I didn't have any furniture. I liberated milk crates and I took the bathroom door off and laid it on the milk crates and that was my bed. And because I didn't want to sleep on the floor anymore, like I'd slept on the ground too. So, you know, the bathroom door on some milk crates, perfect for a bed. If there was a good table and a lot of different uses actually. You know, I did, you know, going through university, I did okay.
REPLAY · 39:40
Gregory Smith (Guest): I studied sociology, social sciences. Towards the end of it, and the irony of this does not escape me, towards the end of it I received a phone call from one of my lecturers offering me work. It was like, I couldn't get a job. That's how I ended up in university. And now I've not quite finished my undergrad and I'm being offered work. You know, I'm not even looking for it. The condition was that I go on and study, so I go on and do an honours, which I did. I ended up with a first-class honours, um, which gave me an Australian scholarship award. To go on and do a PhD. So, um, now when I completed my PhD in 2015, I never gave up, you know, I never gave up. I was 64 years old when I received my first tenured position. Now I'm 67 now, and I've just had my— the birth of my son. I work for a lot of different companies. The second largest medevac provider in the US, which is basically Medicare provider in the US, has sought me out to be a special consultant to them on specific niche areas. You know, I work on the, I've worked on the New South Wales Premier's priority projects. To end street sleeping. Life's a wonderful thing.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 41:21
Gregory, at what point did the pain go away, or at what point did you realize, I'm not in pain anymore?
REPLAY · 41:29
Gregory Smith (Guest): There are two types of pain. I think there's a song about it, Pleasure and Pain. Yeah, I'm not sure who sang that, but there's a, there's a pleasure in certain types of pain. Because there's an understanding, there's an outcome. The pain that kept me in the darkness ended on that, that park bench that day that I walked away from that backpack. The pain going forward was, bring it on, let's get this sorted. There were things I needed to learn. I needed to learn how to communicate with people. I needed to learn how to be a part of. I needed to learn how to grieve. I needed to learn how to be sad. I needed to learn how to be disappointed. I needed to learn lots and lots of things, but some of the biggest things that I learned is what other people think about me is none of my business, but what I think of other people is my business. And if I start thinking dark things about other people, that says more about me than it does them. One of the things that's really important to me today is understanding pathways through trauma. It's understanding that, you know, sometimes the simplest bridges can be built. To guide us through that. But what's required, regardless of who we are, is a willingness to be open-minded and to be honest with ourselves.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 43:13
It sounds to me like that's what you did on that park bench. You know, I've often thought, you know, when I've looked back on my life at the times when, you know, I might have thought that I am trying to create the new me or create a new part of me. In fact, what I was doing was figuring out who I really was.
REPLAY · 43:35
Gregory Smith (Guest): They're probably all clichés. One of them is I have a very clear understanding that there's only two things that I truly own. One is my name. In a thousand years, if they choose to talk about me, that's what they'll use. That's what, you know, that's, that's who I am, my name. The other one is my word as a human being, and I own that, and I put that out there for other people to either trust, not trust, to accept, to judge me by. So my word is very valuable to me. What I say and what I do need to be congruent. Mm.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 29:59
Does that— is that, um, reflective of that earlier desire you had to be a hero?
REPLAY · 30:07
Gregory Smith (Guest): Possibly. Yeah, but I think it was more along the lines of I needed direction. I needed comfort in that direction because, to be honest, the worlds in which I traversed through, there were not a lot of good people. And if there were, I certainly— and there probably were, you know, I mean, I couldn't see them because my world was so dark. So I had to start to turn the lights on in my world, start shining take the bushel off the candle, so to speak.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 30:47
Were you still experiencing pain even after? Yeah, okay.
REPLAY · 30:52
Gregory Smith (Guest): Absolutely. I say those next probably few years were the most painful of my life, but my attitude was, bring it on, I can take this, bring it on. I had to learn how to communicate, how to talk to people. I had to learn how to accept help from people. That was big. I also decided that, you know, if I was going to live in society and I was going to give society another chance, I needed to work. So I didn't want to be on this disability support pension. I didn't like that concept of disabled disability. In that first couple of years, I applied for hundreds and hundreds of jobs. But I couldn't even get an interview. Nobody was interested in, you know, an ex-hermit with very bad beer brewing skills and horticulture skills actually. But it's just not what employers were looking for, you know. I mean, I could track through the forest. I became a very good tracker, reading sign. And I learned that there were some skills transferable into the modern society. Reading sign was one of them. And I can do that quite well today. Where that led me was, you know, I was in a soup kitchen up on the Gold Coast and the goss was computers were the way of the future. I mean, this is, you know, 2000, 2001. Computers were the way of the future, you know, they were going to be a big ping and all this stuff. I thought, oh yeah, okay, well, I better get onto this boat. And I found a 6-week free computer hardware course at Kingscliff TAFE. And so I signed up for that and I learned 2 very valuable lessons from that. Firstly, I hate computers. Mm-hmm. Secondly was I love to learn. I'm actually quite good at learning. And so I decided to go and do my school certificate. Because that was the, you know, in my world, that was a pinnacle of success, school certificate. So, but it turned out I couldn't really do that. TAFE didn't do it anymore. Community colleges really didn't do that. But up at Southport TAFE in Queensland, I was offered, I learned of a, what they call a tertiary preparation course. The only word I understood in there was course, right? I had no idea what tertiary was, and I had no idea what the idea of preparation was. Anyway, I went up, I got, you know, um, I got chauffeur-driven up there in the Mercedes.
REPLAY · 35:21
Gregory Smith (Guest): I was moving towards 46.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 39:38
What did you study?
Aveline Clark (Host) · 44:19
I love that.
REPLAY · 44:19
Gregory Smith (Guest): That's really important. One of the things that I've learned is that I used to have a really bad habit of interfering with my life. And I had no idea, you know, what the universe had planned for me. And I would always interfere, and it would always cause grief and pain. So I've had to learn, put the paddle in the canoe, and just enjoy the view. And if the canoe comes up against the bank and I'm asked to get out and do something, I do it. And I have no resistance. While I was paddling against the flow, there was always resistance, there was always conflict, there was always hard work. I found that in a day I got very little done. If I go with that, if I go with the canoe, I don't try and go against it, I get a lot more done. There's less resistance, and I'm much happier.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 45:16
Well, there's, you know, those things in themselves are just worth so much. And I think, you know, I love, I love hearing that they're the, I guess, the gold nuggets. These are the silver linings of the things that you've gotten from the journey. And I'm sure there's, you know, a lot more, but those things in and of themselves are so powerful.
REPLAY · 45:36
Gregory Smith (Guest): What I'm communicating with others or sharing stories with others, because stories are about magic, and the words are about magic, you know. And when I, when I look up at that rear vision mirror of life, you know, I see what's behind me. All I see is treasure. There's no longer any pain. A lot of things back there that fit a situation. They're the right shape, they're the right fit for a given moment. You know, and if I'm sharing with someone, having a discussion with someone, and there's something back there that I can use that's beneficial to them, you know, that's great. And that happens a lot. I'm very fortunate because there's not one bad day that's behind me. Every single day that I have lived there's a treasure within that. All I have to do is be wise enough to identify and understand it.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 46:41
Yeah, acceptance, honesty, looking within.
REPLAY · 46:46
Gregory Smith (Guest): Yep. Everything is exactly as it is meant to be, right here, right now. My mission, should I choose to accept, is just merely Accepted.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 46:59
Yeah. What a beautiful, beautiful way to sort of almost wrap this up. I've got one last question for you, Gregory. I mean, your story brings out— there's so many elements to it. And, um, if there's someone listening to this who might be going through any, any aspect of what you've talked about, is there any piece of advice that you'd like to give them or share?
REPLAY · 47:23
Gregory Smith (Guest): Stop fighting. As painful as it is and as scary as it is, stop fighting. Don't give up. Don't ever give up. And trust yourself. Trust yourself. Don't, don't put your faith in others. Trust yourself in the first instance, because at the end of the day— I haven't got it on, but I I'll get it. He might need to just edit this, but I'll just grab it. I have here a little gold teddy ring. I'd never been given a toy as a kid, and when I was going to that TAFE and I just started university, I went out and I bought that teddy bear ring because I'd identified the hurt child inside. And I realized that I needed to become the responsible parent to take care of that hurt child. And so I gave that hurt child this ring. Symbolism is very important in a recovery, especially a traumatic recovery, PTSD. Symbolism. Can be very, very powerful. Yet so many of us shun it. Don't underestimate the power of desire. Don't underestimate the power of forgiveness, which is very important. For me to be able to forgive my parents has freed me. Yeah. It's also cut that chain or that, that cycle of abuse. So I don't need to be my— like my parents because I've understood that and I've forgiven. They're the things that are very helpful to understand.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 49:20
Yeah. I want to thank you for everything that you've shared with me, and there's just so much wisdom and just, uh, heartfelt knowledge and just things to process, things to, you know, I'm sure you have stunned a lot of people with your stories, and, um, because it is a road less traveled, of no one's ever traveled it, that kind of story. Um, and I just want to acknowledge, you know, your bravery. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for, you know, fighting the fight and getting to where you are today. So that little Amber that you didn't squash out, that was burning as a 5, 6-year-old, you know, has done well. And I'm really grateful.
REPLAY · 50:09
Gregory Smith (Guest): Thank you very much.
Aveline Clark (Host) · 50:10
Thank you, Gregory. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Kintsugi Heroes. Please like and share the show to your friends so we can get this out to even more people. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, please reach out using the contact details below. And join us next week for our next hero's story. Until then, keep being you, and remember that we are all heroes in our own unique way. Only when it's broken, only when it's broken When it hits you in the middle of the night and the truth burns so bright, only when it's broken, only when it's broken. Take pride in those cries, it's only for tonight, and then you rise. Only when you're broken. Only when you're broken. Only when you're broken.
Subscribe
Spotify
Apple