After many years in the grip of heroin addiction and a couple of failed attempts to get clean during futile stays in rehabilitation centres, Sarah Rhind finally found salvation at Phoenix Futures in Glasgow.
“It’s a therapeutic community,” said the former Hamilton Academical Women goalkeeper and current Street Soccer charity coordinator during a chat about her extraordinary new autobiography Scars Under The Jersey on Thursday morning.
“It is effectively run by the people who are in there with you. You have living examples right in front of you of folk who are a little bit further ahead of you in the programme, are doing well and are back living in the community. So recovery seems achievable, reachable. I looked up to them. I was in awe of them in fact.”
The reader finishes Rhind’s brutally honest, often shocking, frequently harrowing but ultimately uplifting memoir – and this correspondent raced through all 26 engrossing chapters in a solitary sitting – with exactly the same sense of wonderment about the author.
Her book will doubtless prove to be an inspiration to many in the years to come too – and not just those who are battling against drug addiction either.
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Anyone who has experienced difficulties with dyslexia, who has struggled to overcome mental health issues, who has resorted to self-harm as a coping mechanism, who has suffered the loss of a loved one and been consumed by grief, will find passages which resonate deeply with them. That is certainly the reason she decided to put pen to paper and tell her life story.
“As a society, nobody talks about stuff like this,” she said. “Nobody opens up, everyone just stays in their own personal torture, their own hell. I think it would be healthy if we spoke more, if we were more honest and compassionate and less judgemental.
“That's the whole purpose of writing this book. I am saying, ‘You know what? This is everything that I've gone through. But it's everything that I've come through as well’. If I can help one person it will be worth it.”
Rhind looked the picture of health as she sat in a bright pink White Fox hoodie and sipped a coconut milk latte in the Costa Coffee at the Robroyston Retail Park on the outskirts of Glasgow earlier this week.
She is still, at the grand old age of 42, turning out for Bishopton Ladies in the SWFL Central/West League and it shows. It is, though, remarkable that she is here at all never mind playing football.
Her personal problems began at a young age when she was growing up in Westhill just outside Aberdeen. Her dyslexia went undiagnosed for many years and she endured a tough time at school as a direct consequence. When she was 13, she started cutting her arms with razor blades.
Football, which she found she not just loved but excelled at, provided a release of sorts as well. But she had soon discovered another far more destructive way to numb her senses.
“As far back as I can remember, I always had a high level of anxiety,” said Rhind. “I had a fearfulness about situations, people and life. There were times I could be really confident and outgoing. It depended on my environment and who the people around me were. But the crazy overthinking was always there.
“The dyslexia just compounded that. It was another thing feeding into all the negative thoughts that I had about myself. I would think, ‘You're stupid’. Dyslexia proved it to me in my own mind. It took until secondary school for me to actually start getting some support.
“One of the things I remember vividly about my childhood was a teacher in primary school saying to me that I was bone idle. I didn't know what she meant, but I knew by her facial expression, her body language and her tone of voice that she wasn't giving me a compliment.
“I'm 42 now and I can still remember that moment, the environment I was in, all of it. I've got a very clear picture of it in my head. People don't realise how damaging and lasting words can be. I left school halfway through my fifth year because there was just zero point me being there.”
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She continued, “I dabbled in a drugs, speed, eccies, stuff like that. But very quickly I found I liked the downers. I started taking dihydrocodeine, which is an opioid, a painkiller. I liked that wee warm glow that it gave me, I liked the quietness in my brain. It was the first time I had ever had that.
“The first time I took heroin I loved it and I hated it. I hated it because it made me so ill. I was completely out of it. But I loved the fact my brain was silent. I didn't have to listen to this negativity 24-7. I had found an escape.”
For many years, Rhind was a functioning heroin addict. She managed to hold down jobs, study for qualifications and play football to a decent standard. Her involvement in the sport prevented her from disappearing down an abyss.
“I was very good at hiding it,” she said. “I don't think anyone knew even though I was out of my face quite a lot of the time. Everybody's got their own stuff going on as well. It actually made me a better goalie in some ways, which is ridiculous when you think about it.
“When people think of heroin addiction, they think of someone gouching (a slang phrase for being heavily sedated). But it had the opposite impact on me. It had a really weird effect sometimes. I was usually flying, completely focused. It depended on what I had got that day.
“Heroin was my biggest addiction. Crack, which I started using after I got into heroin, was pretty much up there with it. But I always needed heroin before I needed anything else.
“I played right through to when my addiction really kicked in. I was living in Glasgow and playing for Maryhill Ladies. That was the last team I played for before things got really bad. I just left, just disappeared.”
There is a powerful section in Scars Under The Jersey about the day that Rhind finally turned her back on the game. She had returned home from a nightshift at her job as a support worker and had five minutes to get ready before the Maryhill team bus arrived to take her to a match. But she was experiencing “the rattles”, severe withdrawal symptoms, after going 12 hours without a fix.
“In the time it took me to smoke enough gear without spewing my guts up, the five minutes had passed,” she writes. “I was getting phone calls on repeat from my team mates. I hung up and launched the phone off the wall with a force I hoped would smash it. I knew then that was it for me.”
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Rhind said, “That was at the point I realised that I'd lost football. I couldn't go and face them, I knew I had let them down. I was an addict, but I still had a conscience, still cared about other people, still cared about my team mates.
“Football was always a huge, huge part of my life. But addiction takes everything away from you. You try to hold on and think the things you love the most will be the things that will last. But they go eventually.
“I was living a double life. When I say I was a functioning addict, it's quite a loose term. It was always a challenge. It was a constant battle. It was like being two different people. My addiction controlled me and controlled a lot of my actions. The deeper I got into addiction, the harder it became to do normal.
“The realisation that I was saying goodbye to football was a real drop off for me. I didn't think I was going to get back to it. It made me give up hope. It was always somewhere I could escape, could get a release. Suddenly I didn't have that any more.”
The death of her father Dr Stewart Rhind, an internationally renowned scientist who specialised in mammalian reproduction and carried out groundbreaking work on nutrition and environmental contaminants, in a tragic motor accident devastated her. It was several more years before she checked herself in to Phoenix Futures.
“When I had gone in to rehab before I didn't want to be there,” she said. “I wasn't going for the right reasons. It was breaking my heart what I was doing to my family and they all wanted me to get clean. But I didn’t fully want to stop using so it was never going to work. But by that stage I had really reached rock bottom.”
As her recovery progressed, she was tasked with filling 16 hours a week with outside commitments. One of her key workers told her about Street Soccer Scotland. She had nearly lost her right leg a few years before after developing deep vein thrombosis due to her intravenous drug use. But she went along to a drop-in session and kept on going.
After a few months, she was stunned when David Duke, the co-founder and chief executive, told her she had been chosen to represent Scotland in the Homeless World Cup in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She loved the experience, helped her national team to finish seventh, forged lifelong friendships and even met Hollywood actor Colin Farrell.
For the past 10 years, she has worked full-time for the charity and has helped countless women the length and breadth of the country who are struggling with similar issues to those she has faced and overcome.
“We have all been on different journeys,” she said. “But loads of my peers have come through Street Soccer and are doing amazingly well, are really settled in their lives. It is incredible what football can do for people.”
Rhind eventually returned to playing competitively as well. But she never expected to scale the heights that she did. She helped Hamilton to win promotion to SWPL1 and competed against Scotland internationalists in the elite division for a spell despite being in her mid-thirties.
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“It surprised me massively,” she said. “I never thought I would play in the top flight. It wasn’t even a pipe dream. From where I came from, just getting back playing and getting a level of fitness and ability was an achievement. But I am super-competitive. I always want to push myself and get better.”
When Rhind’s beloved sister Jo passed away after a lengthy illness in 2020 it broke her. She drank heavily, started cutting herself again, began suffering from panic attacks and was prescribed anti-depressants. She wrapped bandages around her scars, hoped her wounds wouldn’t open and continued to work, train and play.
She writes in glowing terms about the support she received from David McCracken, the former Dundee United, St Johnstone and Falkirk centre-half who is now the wellbeing development officer with professional footballers’ union PFA Scotland, during this dark period. She is now in a far better place.
“I will always be an addict, I will always be in recovery and I will always have those coping strategies,” she said. “Going back to using just isn’t on the table. There have been times when I have said, ‘I don’t self-harm any more’. I told them that when I was in recovery. Two days later I was cutting because I couldn’t cope with the overwhelm.
“It has cropped up many times in my life. It is a coping mechanism when I don’t address things. But I now have a deep emotional intelligence and understand myself so much better than I did before. I know the things I have to do to maintain balance. But I also know that life is life. I don’t ever say that I am completely done with it.”
The high regard that Sarah Rhind is held in by her friends, family members, former team mates and colleagues was highlighted by the impressive turnout at the launch of Scars Under The Jersey in Waterstone’s in Glasgow on Tuesday night. What would the primary school teacher who told the undiagnosed dyslexic girl in her class that she was bone idle have thought?
“Part of me would like to give her this book,” she said. “But not in a smug way, in an educational way, to show that there was a bigger picture that she didn’t see. There has been healing in this process for me. But my biggest hope for this is that it helps others. As I say, if I can help one person it will be worth it.”
Scars Under The Jersey: Addiction, Loss And The Game I Love by Sarah Rhind is published by BackPage Press and is available to buy now.
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