ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Ruby Riethmuller grew up on a farm outside Wagga Wagga, in the Riverina, with the whole place to herself for eight years until a sister turned up and she became the eldest. She came to boarding school in Sydney for her last few years. When she was flat or homesick, she didn’t go to a teacher and she didn’t ring home. She went down the corridor and sat on the end of an older girl’s bed.
In this hour she takes Duncan back down that corridor, and tells him what an older girl could say that an adult couldn’t. She talks about not realising it was anxiety until she was about sixteen, the label she didn’t want, and how long she let it wait. What helped was a friend who knew all of her. “It made it so much lighter to carry.”
Six years later, after a friend told her to do something about it or stop talking like she could, she started Womn-Kind. It’s a social enterprise supporting the mental health of teenage girls and gender-diverse young people, through an app and programs in schools all over Australia. A panel of young people make the decisions alongside her. [COMMISSION] She is also Deputy Commissioner at the Mental Health Commission of New South Wales.
Then Duncan asks the question the hour is built on. She built the whole thing on the idea that nobody should carry it alone, so who does she go and sit with?
She ends with something for a kid listening on their own who has decided theirs can wait, and for a parent who can tell something isn’t right and can’t get their daughter to talk.
Her songs: Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart, Ribs by Lorde, There Will Be Time by Mumford & Sons with Baaba Maal, and Love Generation by Bob Sinclar, which plays us out.
beerwithDuncan doesn’t just tell other people’s stories. It changes the way you see your own. Episode 12, from Saturday 24 October at 9:01am on Radio Northern Beaches 88.7 and 90.3, and on Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube the same day.
