Sunday Blog 169 – 26th January 2025
For most of this week I’ve snuck off into a log cabin to work on edits of my memoir, prior to flying out to Carmel-by-the-Sea next week for a writing retreat. I wanted to take a better draft of the memoir there to work on. A retreat before my retreat if you will. You may recall that I am now using the journal gifted to me 44 years ago for my 16th birthday for my day-to-day journalling. (You can read about it here in the Permission to be Cringeworthy blog. Lol.)
There are just a few entries from the past in this red journal with a golden sun, but mostly, it’s blank pages. When I do find an entry from the past, I end up writing to my young self, filling in the gaps, connecting the threads of myself across the decades.
And this, I’ve discovered in this week of editing, is what’s important to me. Once I thought I would write to effect social change. But really, what I want to do is connect. Me with myself. My reader to themselves. Us to each other.
It’s Australia Day today, and this is a day for disconnection, especially on the socials. For our First Nations people, this is the date when colonisation began in the east and eventually spread across the nation. #NotADateToCelebrate. Even our mainstream media notes that some people spend Australia Day attending reflection events, and that’s what I did. It wasn’t a protest, nor was it a celebration. It was a time for sharing culture, for truth telling, for showing up to hear just a fraction of what stolen generation survivors have experienced. To imagine, just for a moment, what it would be like to have your own child taken from you.
Perhaps it’s a phase, but I’ve currently lost my taste for protest, for activism. I find myself unwilling to engage in any kind of debate that makes me right and you wrong. That leads to disconnection.
So in that field, beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, beyond social media and its economic model to engender and encourage arguments between us, I’ll meet you there.