I’m very excited to announce that I will be coming to California towards the end of June 2017! I have been booked to speak at an event and I’m very looking forward to it. This will be my first time in America so I’m open to suggestions about travel, accommodation, people to catch up with, things to do and see. 🙂

So, if you are in America and would like to invite me to anything; to collaborate on a project, set up some training or education, facilitate a workshop etc then please get in touch! You can learn more about my work here. There will never be a better time as my expenses will be very low given that I’m already in the country. I’m also looking for an opportunity to host an art exhibition while I’m visiting. Talk to me if you have any ideas!

Poppy is still breastfed and Rose is my anchor so we are currently trying to work out how we can put together the funds to bring them both along. (Star has a flight phobia so she won’t be joining us)

This really does feel like my year 😀

I’m doing a lot of thinking for work at the moment and it occurred to me in the small hours recently that sometimes I’ve missed something important about being authentic. It’s a beautiful and tender kind of vulnerability to show one’s imperfections, lacks, losses, and pain. The soft underbelly we have all learned to hide, the tears we cry in secret. But it’s another kind of vulnerability to show our gifts, what we are good at, where we are shiny and brilliant. I’ve wrestled with that. I recall being in therapy at one point talking about how I developed the model for the peer based support group for people with multiplicity and/or dissociation and how I facilitated it, and having the trauma psychologist gravely inform me that I was describing highly skilled work for which I should be getting recognition and pay, work that few people could do. I filed that away and still struggled to write glowing resumes or really capture and share what I can do.

Right now my artwork adorns postcards and the website for the SA Mental Health Commission and I’m secretly afraid of people calling up to yell at the Commission for not choosing a better artist. Right now many of my friends employed in community services are looking for work in a sector struggling with the new NDIS funding model. So, after years of them being employed while I’m job hunting and trying to define my skills and find a place I fit, things are reversed. I’m so full of passion and joy. I’m a little afraid of sharing how wonderful things are when people around me are hurting. And I’m afraid of showing how brilliant I can be when most of us learn as kids that the fastest way to be hated is to get top marks on your assignments. I get wonderful news and run around to all my friends like a puppy dog – will you still like me if I’m successful? Tall Poppy Syndrome is scary.

The only reason I even know about the artists I love so passionately like Tim Burton, Michael Leunig, or Amanda Palmer are because they found a place in the world for their skills and some kind of success. It didn’t make them lesser people, it makes me lucky to be able to share in their work and enjoy what they do. So I’m being brave and putting some more language to my skills. And people around me are being kind about how scary this feels to me and helping me figure it out. I have finally taken the next step in my brilliant career! It fits with my commitment to be human and show in public what we hide in private. I love what I do and I’m good at it. I’m eyeball deep in frameworks and models and designing brilliant approaches. And my art is on display, communicating ideas in the universal visual language. Life is wonderful.

America, here we come!