Writing Beyond the Wounds

So here I am, writing about why I am barely writing.

I recently saw an Instagram post that made me smile:

“Don’t use AI for writing. Use trauma, like all good poets.”

So here I am, writing about why I am barely writing.

It has nothing to do with AI, or maybe everything to do with AI. I will return to that separately. This piece is about writing, where my writing has historically come from, and the growing sense that much of it came from wounds, individual and collective.

I have written from the scars and hurt that shaped me. Writing was often how I made sense of things. It helped me understand experiences that felt impossible to understand while I was living through them. While my subjective experience of class is still deep beneath my skin, much like the quote goes:

“Class is something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your reflexes, in your psyche, at the very core of your being.” Annette Kuhn (1995)

As those scars hurt less, I sometimes wonder if I have less to say where I am at the centre. I am also more in my life now than reflecting on it. People are happy to talk about individuals, and not systems. I want to talk about class and what upholds the systems of oppression.

That realisation has also changed how I think about why I wrote in the first place, but when you’re from a social class that has endured generations of harm, how does one unwrap the wound from experience?

It would be unfair to dismiss my writing as purely self-indulgent, because much of it was rooted in a genuine desire for a more equal and compassionate world. But it would be equally dishonest not to acknowledge that I was meeting a need within myself, too, to know myself. A more vulnerable me would also say to be understood.

I was trying to understand my own life while also working to contribute to the changes in conditions that shape others' lives.

The non-judgmental and rebellious thread that runs through who I am has remained constant. What has changed is that I have less to say about myself, and even more to say about the communities, lives and brutal systems of power that impact us.

As I have matured, healed old wounds (somewhat) and come to understand my ADHD more deeply, I have become less interested in being heard in a personal sense. Not because I have become quieter, but because I have become more curious and focused.

For many, and to my surprise, violence intervention, drug policy, artificial intelligence and class politics appear unrelated. Yet I find myself returning to the same question in each of them: who gets to belong, who gets to decide, and who gets blamed when things go wrong? And why are those with power so slow to change that (silly question alert)

The more seriously I take that question, the more uncomfortable it becomes. It requires extending the same curiosity, dignity and humanity to people, whether they are popular or not, close to us or far away. It is easier to build a politics around who does not deserve compassion. It is much harder to build one around the belief that compassion should not be spared.

In efforts to fully explore this, and in refusing to target any particular underserved or minority group with exclusion, suspicion or blame, people who have loved me for that very trait can sometimes turn away from me when my hand extends to other oppressed groups. I have resolved myself to extend solidarity regardless.

The more time I spend in violence intervention work, the more I understand that violence begins with violence, systemic violence. It begins with state violence, exclusion, poverty and the quiet (getting less quiet) message that some lives matter less than others. Over the last decade of elected politics, the more I engage in debates about drug policy, the more I see how easily and willingly we criminalise people while ignoring the conditions and policies that make drug use harmful in the first place.

Even my work on artificial intelligence has brought me back to familiar questions. Who designs these systems? Is AI now the largest form of colonisation?

Who gets left behind? Technology is often spoken of as though it exists outside society, something transformative (in a positive sense), but it carries the same power imbalances that have always existed. Class does not disappear because something becomes digital. It just becomes even more unaccountable.

Perhaps that is why I increasingly refuse podcast invitations, radio slots and requests for articles that want a neat version of my personal story. I understand why people ask, and I know there is value in sharing lived experience. But I often leave those conversations feeling frustrated. The story is no longer the most interesting thing to me. The work is. Power is too, and these quieter years of mine aren't about accepting that; it’s an attempt to know where my identity begins, and the work starts.

I want to talk about what happens when communities are trusted rather than blamed or controlled. I want to talk about why violence persists despite decades of punishment. I want to talk about why people who use drugs continue to be treated as they do even though substance use and its impacts thrive under current policy.

Most of all, I want to better understand how power operates and how value is denied or protected. And I want to do this without ostracising (within already ostracised groups) myself in an ever more polarised world. It is not about rejection; while that’s a difficult pill to swallow, I think it's about the belief that we can all be one. It is a rejection of them-and-us, while recognising that accountability needs to remain at the core.

The more I read, the more I learn about struggles in other places, the more I understand that the same questions keep appearing in different forms. Whether it is violence in a community, the criminalisation of people who use drugs, the concentration of power in emerging technologies, or communities fighting for recognition and respect, the thread is always similar.

People want safety, people want dignity, and people just want to live the best possible version of their lives in peace.

When my own wounds no longer demand all of my attention, I have more capacity to look outward. To centre the connections between people, places and systems. I have become less interested in telling my own story and even more interested in understanding how all of our stories intersect.

Maybe I do not have less to say.

Maybe I have simply stopped being the subject.