Reflecting on what it means to be disadvantaged in the literary field I hope many writers, artists, and readers will watch or have watched award-winning memoirist, novelist, and editor Alice Pung’s address at the 2021 “State of the (Writing) Nation” on 16th November 2021.”The State of the (Writing) Nation is… Read More »Commodifying diversity
Seeing through a fog of privilege Lately, perhaps as pandemic anxiety eases in some places, rhetoric rights have been compromised or denied seems to be on the rise again. With the urgency of mortal risk being either normalised or minimised, the agitation about other concerns is given space. Most often,… Read More »Rewriting rights
I didn’t say Goodbye I couldn’t sleep deeply last night and managed a couple of brief naps at most. My body was simply ‘alert’ all through the night. I recognised it was my body knowing something my conscious mind did not. Confident I would figure it out in the morning,… Read More »When they left
Pandemic Conspiracy Theories On the conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus that leads to the COVID-19 infection: Can we stop propagating racist rhetoric and pretending it’s in any way innocent? People of *Asian* descent or even ‘suspected’ of looking that way are being assaulted in countries all over the world.… Read More »It’s just a story…
ReflexIVE Thinking I wrote a reflection on ‘self-care’ in November 2019, early into my time being largely confined to bed as I recovered from major cancer surgery. I understood, at that time, that I was likely to face a longer recovery journey than most given my complicating pre-existing conditions. It… Read More »Self-care
The Antonym of Gratitude is Oblivion There are aspects of asking and receiving that I grapple with to the point where it feels worse than the myriad shifting physical pains I live with daily. In many ways, I would rather go it alone and struggle harder keeping my challenges invisible,… Read More »The quality of being thankful
Isolation doesn’t have to be lonely Edited 18 March 2020 to add more resources/tips Edited 18 April 2020 in response to changing isolation conditions and to incorporate more resources/tips As the COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO), on 11 March 2020, begins to drive more people into… Read More »Cave time
On the face of it I am often mistaken for Eurasian and interestingly, very few strangers guess that I have any Chinese in me. I have read, heard, and digested multiple accounts of racism, specifically Sinophobia since the initial outbreak of COVID-19. Much like the 1918 pandemic, commonly referred to… Read More »The enemy is not your neighbour
Shifting goalposts Those of us unfortunately familiar with forms of psychological abuse are likely also familiar with the device of shifting goalposts where you can never speak or act in such a way as to meet the standards required to avoid retribution, rebuke, or violence (verbal, physical, or otherwise) because… Read More »Lost in pursuit of perfection
Permission The current conversation in Australia (and beyond) is fraught with damaging perspectives, underlying assumptions, and riddled with mythologies about the domestic terrorism that is the experience of intimate partner violence (which includes emotional, mental, religious, financial, verbal, sexual, and the more often visible and broadly understood physical forms of… Read More »Giving to myself