the village – Kokoro 心 Heart

I am stoked to announce that I’ve been offered a casual position as a Peer Support Worker at Safe Space, a program of Neami National. I will be using my lived experience to support others experiencing acute psychological distress …

… which when I say it out loud is actually kind of daunting if I’m honest, I don’t think it really dawned on me yet that I’ll be working with some of the most distressed and dysregulated members of our community. Sharing my story, helping others to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I love this image: a person who has travelled some way “further” down the path, turns around and sees a fellow behind, turns around, and brings their lantern to illuminate the way forward through this confounding and confronting world. That’s peer work … ancient AF.

The peer support worker is a non-clinical, advocacy-based role, where I’ll be supporting health-seekers to pursue recovery from mental illness on their terms, helping them to navigate the mental-health system and “carrying the lantern” a bit.

I’m very excited about it, because I have been gravitating toward this work as a volunteer in the last couple of years anyway, and this will be a great chance to get direct experience of working with individuals and learn how to help.

Thank you to everyone who has graced my path on this journey.

(The title of this post should be sung to the tune of “For Whom The Bell Tolls” while imagining James Hetfield doing the splits.)

We’ve got a situation here. This last week our domestic environment exploded in fits of verbal violence that leave my family and I mostly displaced from the dwelling that was intended as a shared home. We’ve been spending the days in our car or with family, coming back to sleep fitfully at night. Our son has thankfully avoided a lot of the fallout, though not for any positive reason – his friend is missing, so Zane and his mates have been roaming Brisbane to find him. Things are calming down now – the main aggressor is talking about moving out, which is a huge relief.

These events are the symptoms of a maligned culture in demise – they are the cracks that result from collective ways of being that are unsuitable for our nature. I say this not to exonerate myself from my part in the verbal violence – I made the mistake of retaliating, yelling, have accepted my responsibility for the maladaptive reaction I contributed to the escalation of a situation that could have been avoided if I and others had been more skillful, and I resolve to learn from this how to do differently next time. There’s more of that at the end of this draft.

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