Zac Seidler

And I was not aware of that until, yeah, my later teens.

And when I did become aware, it did kind of all start to make sense, I think, in some ways, because he had this softness, this vulnerability, but he was ashamed of it.

Yeah.

I remember that day I was overseas and, you know, woke up to a number of calls and I knew immediately before I even answered what had happened.

How did you know?

He'd been unwell for a while and I was already in third year of psychology so I thought I was, you know, I knew what was going on.

And I'd had some conversations with him that were extremely uncomfortable where I said, we need to talk about this.

It's not going away.

You need to find a way to get this out of your head and into the world.

And I think that those conversations, as difficult as they were because I became parentified,

I had to see this man who was an unbreakable pillar in our family and in the community.

I had to see him really crumble in front of me.

And he kept promising me that it would just fix itself.

It would just turn out okay.

He just needed the medication.

So when I found out, I think it wasn't surprising, sadly, but...

my idea of the future, my vision of how our family was going to move forward suddenly kind of crumbled in many ways.

And I remember sitting there thinking about my sister and my mum and future weddings and grandchildren and, you know, I really became very overwhelmed with the sense that

So much was unsaid and I wondered what would have been possible if only he'd had the ability to access some of this stuff that he was harbouring for so long.

It is one thing, but it's not everything.