The April Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse – Along the Path of Healing was posted a few days ago and I read through it all planning to write a longer commentary, but you can find them all by following that link. Here are just a few highlights…
- Tracie’s Who Votes for Skipping April? about her grief when her abuser died, which I’ve always found is something others find difficult to understand.
- Several highlighting that healing is about having choices, about the complex ways we untangle our personal agency from self-blame, and about digging around in the pain to find out “who the abuse has made you” .
- A Glass Half Shattered’s “Goodbye Autonomy” about taking her first meds and concluding that “I’d rather say goodbye autonomy than goodbye life. “
- Marj’s post (and the comments thread there) about wanting counselling, not just “therapy”.
- Ethereal Highway’s The Shame Manifesto
And there is much more than that worth reading.
I had also intended to write about my Anzac-Day-ambivalence-bordering-on-repugnance, but aside from my personal family history it has been covered elsewhere. Bob Ellis’ Battles lost, minds won and Jeff Sparrow’s Evolving history over at ABC Unleashed are both worth reading, as is Airminded’s Australia forgets (although I’m not comfortable with some of the phrases used in his last paragraph). And for a response to those Tweets which were offensive even to those of us who don’t like Anzac Day, I recommend reading An Open Letter to Catherine Deveny. (If you missed that controversy, there is a screengrab of the Tweets in question there.)
For a complicated discussion of cultural identity and racism, I am still mulling over all the issues raised by Koraly Dimitriadis’ Overland post Wog – why whisper it? and the ensuing comments thread. And Stephanie Convery’s post Canine country… Well, it just needs to be read.
And then of course, there are my unfinished thoughts on the whole blog writing vs. print debate raised by the publication on Miscellaneous Voices. I will get to that.
I did, however, start work on a new short story.
Indeed a burning theme… We should speak more about it. Thanks