TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSES SELF HARM & SUICIDALITY
I have had my longest relationship with death.
I’ve danced the waltz with its reaper so many times, that I’ve lost count.
In my darkest days, I lit fires across my body trying to purge my skin of men’s non-consensual touch. I’ve sliced perfect surgical slices into my arms, my thighs and my stomach just to watch crimson pools spill from my body. I’ve swallowed cocktails of pills and lay down prepared for eternal rest. And I’ve driven a car into a tree, expecting the metal machine to collapse like an accordion folding me up like a perfect little origami crane.
However, no matter how many times I’ve fallen, I’ve gotten back up, dusted myself off, and lived to see another day. But death has stayed an omnipresent feature on my shoulder, whispering into my ear that it’s always the obvious option for someone like me. Imperfect me. Unworthy me. The absolute, complete fuck up that is me.
Life and love haven’t been an easy ride, but lately, the reaper’s voice hasn’t been as loud. I found a family in the people around me who have provided a safe place I could rest my head, people I trusted who could talk me down from the metaphorical edge, and for the first time in my life, they asked for nothing more from me, than to be who I was.
But the darkness is back. It’s like a summoning. And strangely, it’s the most comforting welcome home I could have imagined after being away so long, because, well, it’s so familiar. I know this game. I know its rules. I know this feeling. I know it better than I know myself, even.
I know that in the coming days, I will descend into a dark, spiralling hole until I finally reach rock bottom. Sunlight will be nothing more than a teeny, tiny pin hole. There will be no other life forms, and I will be all alone, but that won’t phase me. It’s a state I am comfortable with, accustomed to, even.
What will seem logical to me, will seem anything but to the ones around me, so I will keep my plans, my thoughts and my reasonings locked away in my chest, behind my rib cage, nestled next to my crimson heart that will grow blacker each day. And I will spend all of my nights thinking and trying to untangle the thoughts that strangle my brain and muddle my mind.
But of course, I will not be able to unravel the chaotic ball of wool that is my brain. It’s a battle I have never won. Largely because I have trouble living beside and within so many aspects of my life, because I have not been the author of so much of it.
One of the things I struggle the most with, is living with a criminal record that I was not the architect of. A criminal record that follows me around like a stray dog – a stray dog with mange and fleas.
While the world reads stories of my violent past, my evil schemes, my wrong doings, my deception, lies and fraud, they are actually reading someone else’s story. The salacious tales they gobble up with glee, is, well, quite frankly, fiction.
You see, as a family, my kids and I don’t talk about this publicly, because it is detrimental to my liberty to do so, but be fucked, I’m already in some kind of hellscape with fluoro lighting, what could possibly be worse?
Confession, I did not actually do the crime I am convicted of doing. The courts got it wrong, and I got sent to prison anyway – and now I am forever marked, forever judged and forever known by that record. Forever a fraudster. Forever a criminal. Forever a woman who lied, cheated and ripped off the state, harmed my children and deceived my friends and family.
Because of this record, everything about me has been called into question – who I am, who I am not, and I am forever doubted – so much so that sometimes I don’t even know what parts of me remain mine to define and what parts are up for public contestation and consumption.
Regularly, people think they can “out” me – and they do. I get doxed. I get social media exposes about me. I get angry, aggressive messages in my social media inboxes. And sometimes the noise, the sheer assault of it all, is just too fucking much. It’s this really big, fat reminder that I will never, ever be free of this shackle, and that it would be easier to bury my light in a pool of darkness.
Yesterday, Regina Bonner posted on her social media account (which I can only assume is, at this stage, a parody account ironically named, “Stop Black Deaths in Custody” given her main objective is attacking criminalised people, or as my son pointed out, attacking Aboriginal people, given she barely wages war against white people) a range of slides about me. My first response was sadness, my second was anger, and finally I settled on rage and pity. Rage at a system that creates a disposable caste of humans like me, and pity for Regina, a woman who spends her time making amateur Instagram slides and sub par tik toks attacking the very people working each day to liberate those they left behind in prison cells.
I moved through this range of emotions beside my kids. They were upset to see our family represented in this way and devastated to see these things written about their mother. Because what Regina did unto me, she did unto three innocent young people. Three innocent young people who have to bear witness to the violence from an Aboriginal woman with too much time on her hands, and her followers who think they know me and our family, but actually get most of their information about us from whitestream news articles.
The facts are that I have never even met Regina. I have never even spoken to her. We don’t follow each other on Instagram or any other socials. In fact, I didn’t even know of the post about me until five hours after it went live. She has never contacted me to ask about my life, my family, my past, my conviction, or my work. She has not even tried to contact me to confirm any of the facts in her posts, because, it would seem, that the truth does not matter when it comes to writing stories about criminalised people on social media – the more outrageous the better.
I want to make this very clear….
This kind of behaviour is thuggery,
and it is vigilantism.
It isn’t some noble act of holding someone accountable. Instead, it is the deliberate use of the tools of the colonial carceral state—shame, humiliation, and stigma—in an attempt to punish and degrade.
This kind of “outing” does nothing to serve justice or community. It mimics the same oppressive systems that imprison, silence, and harm people, especially those who are already marginalised. By engaging in this kind of behaviour, Regina is doing absolutely nothing to challenge those systems, rather, she is firmly aligning herself with them.
Regina and her followers, and those that slid into my DMs (including those with “abolitionist” in their bios), are no better than the screws who wield power over people like me in the most dehumanising ways. Accountability is not about public humiliation; it’s about repair, growth, and solidarity. If her goal was to uplift or challenge harm, this isn’t how it’s done. Instead, what she’s doing to myself and others, is perpetuating the violence of the very systems many of us are fighting to dismantle.
My record doesn’t define me, and neither will Regina’s attempt to weaponize it. This is exactly why abolition is necessary: to stop the cycle of harm, punishment, and control that Regina is now trying to replicate.
And so, I will go dark for a while, because when I am faced with the kind of violence I suffered in prison, I have no other tools at my disposal. The only way I know how to stay alive is to wrestle with death. So far, I have won each battle I’ve waged, so my odds are good.
However, while my brain is in absolute overdrive, I am left wondering…when Regina lays her head on the pillow at night, and all her followers (aka cheerleaders) do the same; do they think about the people locked up in cages in this country? Can they count the ways they have worked that day to liberate them? What have they done in a very practical way to dismantle white supremacy? Can they reel off all the many ways they have put their own liberty on the line to actually free people? Because that’s what we are doing Regina – every single one of us you are attacking. Every day I get up and I work towards liberation. I am freedom focussed. Every night, I remember each person I left behind. I can tell you all their stories. I can tell you about their kids, about their dreams and aspirations for the future. I can tell you how they like their coffee, and what the first thing they will do when they get out.
What the fuck have you done this week to dismantle the colony? Or are you too busy picking us all apart like we were last week’s left over dinner that you’ve actually forgotten who the real enemy is?
Now that’s what I call, gammin.
PS; DON'T FREAK OUT, I AM NOT SUICIDAL, JUST ANGRY AND DARK