About Mysite 1 Shiannonlc Wixsite Com

Leo Migdal

-Nov 20, 2025, 12:24 AM

Words begin with ideas and ideas, in my opinion, begin with education and experience. Neither one is more important than the other. I'm educated, yes, but my experience of life has shaped my opinion more than my university education could ever hope to. To have experience is to have empathy. To have suffered and experienced the worst that life can throw at you can give you enormous empathy for others. Formal education is just a leg up to be able to do something positive with that empathy.

To help others you have to be able to help yourself and my life has been a learning curve into helping myself and enabling independence around chronic illness. I am fortunate that I have managed to avoid some of the many curve balls but I am not so self-absorbed to not see that people cope with different stressors in different ways. There have been stages in my life where I have not been able to physically help others but I am able to advocate on their behalf, which is now what I am working towards. Writing also helps bring areas of darkness into the light. Writing helps to organise my thoughts and pull into focus issues that are systemically corrosive in society. My continued frustration with our political system has led me to become outspoken on social media and become involved in political campaigning in my local area.

I continue to see and experience the maliciousness of unfetted corruption and power in politics and what a friend described to me as "the arrogance of the unacountable" time and again. So here is an idea. Why should we not hold them accountable? If they are not held accountable by our disappointing and often complicit media, then it falls to us. I will endeavour to research and bring together articles and opinion in an effort to influence more learned opinion. I am, of course, only one person but it has to begin somewhere.

Unlike some people, I don't just think about homelessness via a news story here and there regarding the statistics, the blight on a city's image according to the authorities, or - in rare instances... My homelessness is a bit like PTSD in some respects. It's never going to completely go away, it brings on nightmares, impacts on my anxieties and it affects my living choices even now. I was 15 when my father sold up everything and uprooted us to the other end of the state in order to buy a business. We were living above that business in the accommodation provided to us there - which apart from being substandard for a young teenage girl, with a communal public bathroom, no privacy and no security... By the time I was 16 they were going their separate ways.

Neither of them asked me what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. The original half-baked plan was for me to go to my grandmother to live one thousand miles away with her in her house. Unfortunately during this time, my grandmother rented her house and was living in a cabin in the back yard with no indoor bathroom or toilet facilities. The people who lived in my grandmother's house were on a very good wicket. They had cheap rent in return for looking after the property for my grandmother. They couldn't find accommodation they could afford anywhere else and my grandmother was a soft touch.

When I turned up expecting to see my grandmother in the house and live with her, they took it upon themselves to embark on a campaign to twist the narrative to the point where... One of my earliest memories in my young life was sitting at Mum's feet in the lounge room while she did the ironing. Mum had bought me a pile of scrapbooks, pencils and crayons to keep me entertained and to 'explore my creativity'. I must have been about 3 years old at the time - before Mum went back to work and before I started kindergarten. I remember being so proud of my creations and Mum telling me how good they were. I certainly have no idea whether they were good or not, as they are long gone now - but it set the precedent for the future.

I would excel in the arts, English and creativity in school. Mum also encouraged me to write and bought me journals along with the latest Macquarie dictionary. As far as Mum was concerned, if I was going to put my thoughts into the written word, I was going to know how to spell each and every one of them. Mum would continue to do her best to be the mum she imagined herself to be - which was a big ask for somebody who lost their own mum when they were eight years... I'm sure she felt the inadequacy of true nurturing in her life - and combined with the ultimate mother-in-law from Hell, my grandmother, who had an opinion on everything - it didn't make it... By the time I was born eight years after my brother, her self-confidence had been eroded to a shadow of her former light.

Of course I knew nothing of my mother's heartbreak at that young age. She did her best, as always - and continued to be there for the rest of her life for me, no matter what the circumstance. My eccentric spirit at times drove her to distraction - and as I approached my teenage years we didn't always get along. My own issues relating to others also became a problem at this age. It had always been difficult for me to pick up social cues and fit in with my peers - and it became a source of frustration for me, as I wanted nothing more than... Mum saw it as likely hormonal angst and I saw it as a lack of empathy and understanding on her part.

I didn't know what was happening to me and why I had always felt different and I couldn't explain it to anybody. It just existed and was endured - like a metaphorical red flag frenetically flapping above my head to let everybody know that I was not like them. Autism as such wasn't even a consideration back then unless it was markedly in your face - and I was not diagnosed until recently - and for that in hindsight I am grateful. I learned to develop coping strategies and skills that would continue to help me as I matured. I learned to channel my feelings into creative pursuits. I went back to study and university as a mature-age student and learned the discipline and delight of structuring my ideas into essays and designs.

I learned I was bright and skilled. I found myself - and Mum was always there with her advice and the unflappable common sense that made her who she was. She became a reliable source of family history and often told me stories about her childhood and her experiences growing up. In the last 30 years of her life I learned more about my mother than I had in my first 20 years. We were comrades in arms, conspiring against Dad and his hair-brained hobbies - taken up with gusto and great expense only to be forgotten after a few months when he found another object of... My dad was an entirely different fish.

The will-o'-the-wisp swirling haphazardly around Mum's rock-steady foundations and carefully thought-out goals. Throughout my life he forever remained the same. Somebody who was untroubled by the complexities of life and who never held a grudge. A little naive perhaps, he could be childlike in his delight of his immediate surroundings and his newest adventure. He constantly lived in the now - and would forgive a slight in a second once the dust had settled. I remember some of the ignorant and hurtful comments that were made because of the colour of his skin.

Dad moved on far more effectively than I ever did. Those moving-on skills also equated to the brushing over of life's responsibilities. How he survived into old age had always remained a mystery to me. In his lifetime he had ridden many motorcycles, horses and he and his family lived off the land during the years between the Great Depression and World War 2. He left school at a young age and gained a trade. In his twenties he travelled to New Guinea for a new adventure, sight unseen, signing up for a few years to work on the gold dredges there.

He rode motorcycles at breakneck speed on what amounted to little more than goat tracks and he played representative football as five-eight for Papua New Guinea. He survived the jungles, a couple of motorcycle accidents and a decent amount of duty-free alcohol. Dad also survived two more serious car accidents over the years back home, plus a housefire that left him with third-degree burns and a heart attack in his seventies. My name is Shannon Roche, and i'm from a valley in South Wales called Maesteg. I am currently studying Photography with an integrated foundation year in Bath Spa University. I enjoyed photography as a hobby for many years before i decided to expand my knowledge when i took Photography for A levels, and further again in university.

I have experimented with a few different styles of photography- for example; Marco, landscape, reflections, architecture and portraiture. My favourite style at the moment is portraiture. Contact: drshannonbarnes@tranquilitycounselingserv.com How to describe oneself in a paragraph? I'm a writer, a photographer, a student, a worker, a wife & mother. I'm an observer of life & a champion for the underdog.

Never let it be said I didn't stand up and have a good crack at doing the best that I could do. For a change of pace, once a month I will publish a random shot of my travels or the people I have met and photographed, and dogs I have loved.

About Mysite 1 Shiannonlc Wixsite Com

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