To love is TO EMPOWER and perhaps this is never so pertinent as when talking about someone who is in their last months in the body. Read the rest of this entry »

Ya never know how the shitola of the past becomes one’s best asset… when the chemo stops working I’ll be leaving my breathing machine off, taking a muscle relaxant and a few sleeping pills with a sake and night night to the world.

My wild reckless homeless teens gave me all the practice… accidentally overdosing, drinking myself unconscious, playing with death like life was far scarier than death ever could be… and as an adult about to turn 53 I’m so glad I was that teen because it is so hard to actually let oneself leave like that. This is not actually suicide, for I did not come into this world with a failed respiratory drive. It was damaged when I was 2-4 years old and failed further when I was 46 then further again when I was 47-48. So I would merely be letting my failed respiratory drive do its thing, much the same as someone choosing not to take their medication or use their walking stick. I’d just be ensuring my failed respiratory drive does its thing as I leave my machine turned off. Nevertheless its still a full on thing to confront. But a slow death from cancer is the alternative.

Thanks to the gift of a failed respiratory drive from a mother with Munchausen’s By Proxy and the blessing of my chemo and two mastectomy related general anesthetics in 2011 pushing that to a point I only breathe on my own in my sleep without my machine for a few minutes every 30-120 minutes, I found myself blessed to HAVE a choice about the length of my ending.

I just wish every other person at their end had a humane choice, the kind we give our fur babies. A choice is not obligatory, people can do the long drawn out ending if they wish. But it is my wish that as a society through talking openly about death and the end processes in incurable slow deaths, that we can look at the issues with sanity and humanity and not the knee jerk me-me defensiveness of those in power with religious ‘beliefs’ who are not in this position and do not, and should not, represent all without their beliefs.

Polly Samuel (aka ‘Donna Williams’)
Author, artist, consultant and presenter.
http://www.donnawilliams.net

I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of this country throughout Australia, and their connection to land and community.

Louise Hearman and the Archibald Prize fail to truly capture Barry Humphries . To capture Barry Humphries you’d have to have been the 8 year old autistic child experiencing attempted rape at a party in his Barry MacKenzie heydays. Read the rest of this entry »

The ‘I am autism’ trend is narrow, ignorant and passé. The stalkers and trolls and obsessed are frankly frightening people who feel that those who don’t identify the entirety of themselves with being ‘an autistic’ (some actually feel it is a crime against THEM if anyone publicly doesn’t identify this way or address them and ‘theirs’ solely in terms of these politics). The ‘we autistics’ is so disrespectful to the entirety of any one of us by making irrelevant the vastness of what makes each of us who we are that I hope we can all get over that ignorant and passé trend too. Read the rest of this entry »

The government knows the facts yet continues to lie to the public because fear and hatred keeps people loyal to the party. 
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Are you helping Isil? Read the rest of this entry »

Australia’s offshore ‘detention centres’ don’t make logical sense… Read the rest of this entry »

Care about refugees? Then listen to them. First survey shows Syrians are fleeing from Assad, not Isis. Nearly all want to go home. The results are crystal clear. Read the rest of this entry »

We think of domestic violence as something done by deranged men. But it is something done by everyday people. Sometimes the perpetrator is male, other times female. In our house, growing up, it was my father’s violence that snatched the headlines. My mother’s violence was considered ‘justified’. Read the rest of this entry »

Look at the definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

“Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a Cluster B personality disorder[1] in which a person is excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity, mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing to themselves and to others in the process. It is estimated that this condition affects one percent of the population.[2][3] First formulated in 1968, NPD was historically called megalomania, and is a form of severe egocentrism.[4]”
from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

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