David Hunt: Inconvenient Life and Legacy + Hilary Gavin: Self-Worth

Whenever I catch a private story told sincerely, I’m touched by how very important it is that not a single one of us be silenced. Writing (click here for about my novels to-be-published), podcasting, and blogging about what others would prefer we keep silent is how we heal ourselves and find community. We’re all connected, and our stories matter.

David Hunt has guested here and here before. Recently, on his outstanding podcast, he discussed, “The Inconvenient True Life and Legacy of Pauli Murray,” which I urge you to hear by clicking here. His site prefaces it with…

The Trump administration continues to rewrite history, scrubbing official websites of any mention of transgender, queer and gender nonconforming people and causes. Critics have called its efforts a digital book-burning, reminiscent of the public bonfires staged by the Nazis in the 1930s. The latest target of this growing right-wing cancel culture is Pauli Murray, a pioneering human rights leader whose childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, is a National Historic Landmark.

Today’s guest blog post is by Hilary Gavin, a journalist/blogger in Chichester, UK, who is “…on a mission to revive local journalism, and by extension local democracy.” Here she shares a difficult personal experience…

Self-Worth by Chichester, UK

HOW can I measure my self-worth today when those in power once deemed me so worth/less that they silenced me, locked me up and – to use a well-worn idiom – threw away the key?

Of course, I wasn’t thrown in jail for life after being convicted in a British Court of Law for committing a heinous crime twelve years ago. Rather, I’d been picked up off the streets in the genteel ‘Georgian city’ of Chichester by community police officers for being, quite frankly, “different” – different in the eyes of those in authority, at least.

In hindsight, I could measure my own self-worth today by breaking down the word worth/less itself. Being worth something or worth/less in society isn’t a dichotomy, it simply means those in power at that time in history consider your viewpoint on life to be less important to theirs, so they throw you on life’s slagheap.

Today, I still ask myself the question ‘Why?’ Had I frightened the very people I should have revered by asking too many awkward questions as a freelance journalist? Or did a brothel madam in Buckinghamshire and a high-class West End escort in London share too much information with me during my unpublished stint as a ghostwriter?

Twelve years have elapsed since the traumatic events sketched out above and Sussex Police still haven’t explained why my portable computer hard drive went missing in a locker outside my cell of the custody suite in my home city of Chichester in 2013.

Back then, I wrote to local police asking them to search for my satchel containing my computer hard drive, but I can only assume they deemed this request to be the rantings of a madwoman when they wrote back insisting that I’d been mistaken, and I’d never had my satchel in detention with me at Chichester.

Of course, time proved me right and the police wrong as the Duty Sergeant on the front desk in Chichester phoned our home landline two years later to say he’d found my satchel under a pile of old police uniforms at the station.

Yes, time had passed, but I was too traumatised by those earlier events to pick my belongings up from the police station myself, so my sister went in my place. Admittedly, my satchel had all its contents inside, but my computer hard drive no longer worked.

To this day, I don’t know whether my hard drive had simply been damaged, or the police had deliberately wiped my data. It’s still a mystery to me.

To be honest, I cannot let myself off the hook because the stresses and strains of life had made me ill in late 2012. I was unemployed and saddled with a hefty mortgage living in a cottage in the tiny village of Send in Surrey before finally selling off my home and clearing my debts to return to my family in West Sussex.

Thankfully, I had escaped a dysfunctional relationship but my elderly parents, who were being cared for expertly by my elder sister, were now dying. My sister – who is very different in personality to me – found my behaviour bizarre, as did I, at that time.

I have to hold my hands to admit I was suffering from mild psychosis brought on stress and internet and social media addiction twelve years ago, but I was sane enough to know that I’d had my satchel and hard drive with me when police detained me.

And I knew that the police were lying when they told psychiatric doctors and nurses at the mental health unit in Chichester that I’d been caught setting light to a bin in the city.

You could say that I’ve been intimidated, silenced and compliant for twelve years now but my burning question is: “How much is the truth worth to those in power today?”

Has anyone with power over you tried to silence you?