Back to Movember, A Decade Later

01 Nov, 2026

Content note: this post talks about losing my dad to suicide, and about depression. If that's not something you can read today, that's fine. Support details are at the bottom.

I've done Movember twice before. 2011 and 2013, both times with people from work. I'd never grown a moustache and wanted to see what would happen. Not much happened, as it turns out, but we raised some money and had a laugh about it. That was the whole point.

The following year, my dad died by suicide.

Death wasn't new to me. All of my grandparents had died before I turned eighteen, and I've lost two pets. In a strange way, it had always felt like part of life.

I was in Sydney when I got the call from home. I was in my mid twenties, a couple of years into my career, and I didn't know very much about anything. I remember crying a lot and not knowing what else to do. My flatmate helped me book the first flight out the next day. I went home, hugged my mum, and we cried. I'll leave that part there.

Except for one part. Not long after I got home, the police came. They thought my brother and I might have had something to do with it. Being treated as suspects while we were grieving our dad is one of the hardest things either of us has been through.

It was only once I got home that I learned he had tried before, about a year earlier, and survived. My family decided not to tell me. I was on my own on the other side of the world and they didn't want to put that on me. I understand why they made that call. It still sat with me for a long time. Somewhere in that same stretch, I'd been growing a Mo for a laugh.

What I Did Next, Which Was Nothing

I went home for a week and came back to Sydney as if nothing had happened. I didn't see anyone about it. I didn't talk about it. I mostly shut down.

For the next few years I lived as two people. There was the version that went to work, did the job and showed up to things. And there was the one underneath, who was angry at everyone and at life in general. The first one did a convincing enough job that most people never knew the second one existed.

What I didn't realise at the time was that I was depressed. It doesn't always announce itself. For me it showed up as the slow disappearance of the things I loved. Drawing, painting, video games, laughing. None of it stopped. It just stopped being enjoyable. I lost the ability to enjoy things, and then I lost the ability to notice I'd lost it.

What Actually Helped

A few years in, I accepted that this wasn't going away on its own. It was building. So I went to a psychologist, which I should have done years earlier.

Therapy helped. My psychologist recommended a book called The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb, which I'd recommend to anyone. It explains depression in terms of what's happening in your brain, and how small changes can start to reverse it.

But the thing that made the biggest difference was harder to pin down. At some point I realised I was in a downward spiral, and I decided I wanted out. Until I got there, therapy, kind friends and well-meaning words mostly bounced off. Once I got there, they started to work.

I want to be careful with that, because when you're depressed, wanting things is exactly the part that's broken. For me the decision wasn't a big moment of resolve. It was small. Booking the appointment. Turning up to the second one. If you're reading this and can't imagine wanting anything right now, telling one person, or calling one of the numbers below, counts as the first step.

In the past year I was also diagnosed with ADHD. It runs in my family, and I'd suspected it for a long time. Having a name for it explained a lot about how I think, how I feel, and sometimes how I don't. It's helped me be a bit kinder to myself about the parts of me that work differently.

A side note on music. There are three songs I keep coming back to on bad days: Somewhere I Belong by Linkin Park, This Fire Burns by Killswitch Engage, and A Greater Foundation by As I Lay Dying. I relate to the lyrics of all three. When I'm down, they're my pick-up songs.

Where I Am Now

I'm not out of it completely. I still have bad days. I'm a private person, I'm not great at explaining how I feel, and there are some feelings I'm honestly not sure I have. I've overthought most of this, probably more than once.

People sometimes tell me my life looks pretty good. Nearly twenty years in Sydney, a business built and sold. Building another one. I usually tell them they don't want my life. It's been hard to live. But I'm in a middle place now where I understand myself a lot better than I used to, and I think that's worth something to someone else.

Why Movember, And Why Now

Every November since Dad died, I've thought about doing Movember again. And every November I didn't, because I hated what the month brought back. Something I'd done for a laugh had become tangled up with losing him.

This year feels different. Movember funds men's mental health and suicide prevention, alongside prostate and testicular cancer. So I'm growing one again, and I'm writing this because I've kept it quiet for more than a decade, and keeping quiet didn't help me.

I'm not going to pretend my words will fix anything for anyone. But if you're going through it, here's what I know. You can go through a lot of shit and life can still be okay. Sometimes good. It took me years, it took help, and it took deciding I wanted it.

If you'd like to support my Mo, you can donate here.