Former heroin addict Kate Holden says Chan and Sukumaran deserve a second chance

FORMER heroin-addicted sex worker Kate Holden has spent plenty of time contemplating death. She knows what it’s like to hit rock bottom, and knows what it’s like to come back.

Author Kate Holden is a former prostitute who has written candidly about her sex life in two books.

FORMER heroin-addicted prostitute Kate Holden has spent plenty of time contemplating death. Now a celebrated author and relishing her second chance at life Kate writes for News.com.au why Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran deserve a new horizon.

“I suppose if my five years of heroin addiction had killed me, I might as well have been executed. Dead is dead.

A life chopped short is as devastating whether it happens silently in a lounge room, or in front of a firing squad in Indonesia. My family dreaded my death as the families of convicted heroin smuggling masterminds Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran dread theirs.

For any young life to end is horrific; for that tragedy to come from a mistake is always haunting. Because mistakes are part of life, and they can be terrible, but we also learn from mistakes, even better than we learn from successes.

A mistake may be the best gift we can get — that is, if we’re allowed to go on with the lesson.

There isn’t a soul on this planet who hasn’t made errors — serious errors — in their youth.

Young people’s brains are unfinished, their owners so easily led into stupidity.

Whether it’s getting into a car with a drunk friend, or taking a dare to stay up for three days, dive into a dark river or kiss your girlfriend’s sister, young people will inevitably find something to test themselves with, terrifying, thoughtless or simply silly.

They are hungry for newness, suckers for excitement, and desperate to prove themselves special and brave.

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Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran deserve a second chance, says former heroin addict Kate Holden.

Their reasoning is incomplete, and everything seems urgent. For a young person, doing something dangerous and forbidden is the quickest way to show themselves that they are growing up, just as everyone is always telling them they should.

That’s probably one of the main reasons I walked into a room when I was 24 and offered my arm to a syringe full of heroin. I knew it was stupid but somehow it seemed the right — even the best — idea at the time.

I’d show how courageous I was to do something that scared me so much. Five years of exhaustion, danger, unhappiness, endless work and my family’s constant horror later, I thought otherwise.

There were moments when I was utterly alone, cold, hopeless and frightened; when I needed help but was despised by everyone in society; when I didn’t care if I died. If I had, I wonder what might have been said at my funeral, when the reality of addiction might have been too complicated to explain, and mourners might have quietly thought I had brought all my troubles upon myself.

There might even have been some who told themselves I was better off ‘at peace’, all my troubles ended and everyone free to go on with their lives.

But I didn’t die, and I changed my life around. The difference between my experience and that of a quadriplegic ex-hoon, a teenage boy getting an incurable sexually transmitted disease, or a young woman facing jail, is that I was able to get off heroin and book myself a second chance.

I have been grateful for it every day in the fifteen years since then. I got to pay back debts, see my family’s worry and anguish smooth from their faces and be replaced by joy and pride.

I went on to forge a life so happy and productive that the ordeals of my drug years seem like a terrible dream. Now I often give talks to audiences which include people in miseries that seem hopeless, and they tell me, to my humility, that examples such as mine are a help to them.

It is possible, I tell them, for a life to turn around. Horizons can open again. Those horizons will glow like the most beautiful sunrise.

Chan and Sukumaran made a very big mistake, perhaps an unforgivable one, when they arranged for other young people to smuggle heroin out of Bali. No one thinks their acts should go unpunished. But death only steals and saddens.

There is no lesson to be learned from the destruction of young people, except the wrong one: that they are right to live in a hurry and grab for any risky thrill now, in case they don’t get a second chance.”

Kate a Holden is a writer and public speaker. She is the author of In My Skin and The Romantic