Thread by @Info_Aus

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past week about whether I should go ahead and begin work on an autobiography next year. I kept coming up with fears about how people might respond. I realised that my first 25 years is basically a string of abuses against me. 1/

I realised this meant that if I write about this time in my life, I'm potentially picking a fight with everyone who abused me: school, family, community ie, everyone. I've been worried about repercussions. 2/

Then I realised that yes indeed, everybody did either abuse or neglect me to a damaging extent & that it is probably finally time that I stood up to that so instead of feeling fear, felt the anger on my own behalf that is warranted. 3/

It's a complex decision to look back on a history of abuse, where you were the person with the least amount of power & decide to turn that on its head, to make claims about other people & wonder how it will be received. 4/

The whole problem is that no one stood up for me. No one fought for my safety (with limited exceptions, perhaps). It's why I've spent my life fighting for vulnerable people & groups. 5/

It is why I can't abide the abuse of other people or bullying regardless of who it is against or how they are perceived. It is why I have patience (at times) where other people are angry. It is why I have so often stood up regardless of the consequences to me. 6/

It's because I can only be 'destroyed' once and that happened a very long time ago.

It's why I don't have anything. Because when you destroy people, you take away from them their capacity to expect anything from other people. Though also being a victim makes you so much more empathetic & that makes you constantly ask why do I deserve this more than someone else?

When you and everyone you & they know has nothing, it is difficult to justify why you should be entitled to step out of that frying pan. You understand the injustice of poverty on a very personal level.

Other people also think this and police your welfare. Other people withhold what you could have or trip you up. They tell themselves that undermining you is justified by all the people left behind. So you remain in poverty unable to get out of that dark well.

So even when you try to 'take' what you are entitled to instead of give for once, you are policed either by policy or by personal decisions, pushed back down because you are no longer considered vulnerable enough to deserve the help. It's just a vicious cycle.

Incidentally, I'm considering writing my autobiography because I began re-evaluating my life choices after the bush-fires & that brought music back into my life. That in turn has forced me to reconsider my past which started out in music, forced me to reconsider what happened.

After deliberately not thinking or wanting to talk about what happened to me as a child, I finally started to research the issues around it & realised that there was a whole narrative to what happened that I was unaware of & that things have changed in the decades since.

So what I used to see as a threat to me (looking at the past), I can see now is not the way I feared it was- and I'd like to tell that story because I want to explain why people end up in the situations I found myself in as a child or young adult.

I'm sick of all the stereotypes. I'm sick of the assumptions that have always been made about me and people who have had hard lives. I'm sick of the othering & the condescension.

And also I want others to get to know me as I am and through that also get to know MYSELF as I really am. So it's for me that I want to do this as well as other people, as a way to acknowledge the person that I am and have always been.

I should probably add that for my regular donors, if I do decide to go ahead I'll be telling everyone formally & providing a lot more info so people can make decisions about it. I just wanted to share the reasons why it isn't a straightforward decision for me.