For Ella, growing up in Bondi Beach wasn't the seaside paradise of tourism brochures. An athletic, active childhood was interrupted by a serious knee injury at age 11. With her leg in a cast for a year, in constant pain and gaining weight, Ella's self-esteem withered, and in its place the tendrils of self-loathing began to take root. At age 12, Ella started smoking cannabis. This brought on, as she puts it, ‘an overwhelming sense of relief' and a 'quietening of the head': a reprieve from her relentless inner self-critic. This was followed by a gradual escalation of substance abuse, with all the associated miseries and – to be fair – some strangely productive phases: ice-fuelled, four-day sleepless essay-writing sessions that resulted in a double degree! But apart from these few highs, the trajectory was ultimately downward, and in this episode Ella describes the darkened rooms of those lower levels. Finally, hitting a floor of exhaustion, having spent two thirds of her life in addiction, Ella decided to get clean. And she did. And she is.