Hello,
It’s been a while.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had the brain space for writing my own stuff most of the year. I write a lot for work and I work full-time.
Beyond this excuse, I just haven’t felt like expressing myself. Less than I have… ever, really.
Maybe because I am older and understand myself more? Maybe because I’ve been trying to sublimate my ego and expectations of life? Maybe because I am still reinventing, still unearthing what I planted a couple of years ago? This year has felt earthy, a weighted blanket, dark and simple — not depressing, just being held in the ground, allowing new sprouts to emerge, observing how they grow, trying not to judge the routes they take.
In May, I graduated with the Masters of Social Work (Qualifying) and signed a full-time contract to be a community health promotion officer with ACON in their new suicide prevention programs. I had worked in the role part-time during the degree, during which time I helped set up the suicide prevention digital hub, HERE. Believe it or not, it’s the first time an LGBTQ+ organisation in NSW has received funding for suicide prevention, which is a travesty considering our higher rates of suicide and the very obvious historical reasons for this.
This year, our programs included an online forum, which you can interact with and watch here. The forum outlined the aforementioned reasons for suicidality in LGBTQ+ communities and included a panel discussion with front line workers and policy and research leaders in the area. And over October and November, we ran a series of workshops (both online and in-person) called Co-creating community care, which taught community members skills in self-care, building care teams, understanding structural care, their rights and advocacy skills, and dreaming up the worlds they want to live in. These are what we term ‘upstream’ protective factors: we learn how to navigate the world in all its shittiness before we come to our next low point and hopefully we are better prepared for it.
Of course, there’s a lot to unpack with all of this. I have learnt so much about how we frame our lives, about what is and isn’t important. I have been with such a diverse group of community members, sitting with their joys and pains, listening to so much resilience, darkness, tension, absolution. I have stood as an adult in these spaces, responding to it all with reserves of compassion and resolve I could only guess I had in me. The feedback from participants overwhelmingly reflected the need for safe spaces to speak about their lives and their experiences with suicidality without judgement and threat of involuntary institutionalisation. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of humour in these workshops, too. Queers tend to squeeze out every last drop of irony and absurdity from life in trying circumstances. That’s survival, baby.
Our digital hub, HERE, won several awards during the year, including Social Impact and Digital Design at the Australian Good Design Awards, and the entirety of the suicide prevention programs won ACON’s own ‘Innovation — External’ award at our end-of-year celebrations. I am honoured to receive such praise in my first year of a new career.
It was a very work-centred year. But another highlight was a holiday some friends and I took driving around the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. I saw endemic birds, soaked in mud baths, went zorbing, and marvelled at snow-capped mountains. It was an awesome experience to have with adult friends all working in jobs that aren’t just stepping stones to something else. I guess that comes with getting older, but still a privileged place to be at.
OK — enough about me for now. This reflection has reminded me of a strand of thought I have been meaning to tease out in a long-form piece of writing, but I’ll save it for another post. I want to leave this post with some of the usual recommendations and shared resources, so here goes…
Gaza
As the devastation continues in the land of gauze and olives, the journalistic integrity of mainstream news (across almost all media outlets in Australia) has been disappointing to outrageous in its omission of context, history, and facts over propaganda. For young people in the English-speaking world (or ‘West’), TikTok and Instagram have illuminated so much that would normally have gone hidden or ignored. We have seen one of the biggest swings in public knowledge and opinion about the state of Israel and the Palestinian people in its 75-year-old history. One of the biggest contributors to this, besides the many history, genocide, Holocaust, Apartheid, Indigenous, and Middle East experts who have taken to video to speak directly on the conflict and recommend further readings, has been the young Gazan journalists caught up in their own ethnic cleansing, reporting on-the-ground and showing the world the everyday horrors. The main ones have been:
Motaz (now with over 17 million followers)
Plestia (before she escaped and sought safety in Australia with relatives)
I really value UK journalist, Owen Jones, who has daily updates on his YouTube channel, including interviews with experts. Everything is well-researched with proper citation. Ignore the hyperbolic text on the thumbnails of the videos — they are there for the algorithm and something which all YouTubers have to do for engagement.
Of course, Al Jazeera English and Democracy Now! are other good sources of news from the area and US perspective, respectively.
Music
Top tunes from the year (it was almost exclusively pop, which, given the subject matter of the year, is a no-brainer):
Until next time, have a great holiday period! Thanks for sticking with me.