I’m Leaving the Performance.

Not the Work

Something has shifted in me and it’s time to name it clearly.

I’ve realised that the way I’ve been showing up online hasn’t reflected the whole of who I am as a white working-class woman raising a mixed-heritage daughter.
Someone who’s spent decades in youth work, mental health and community settings learning from Black and brown educators, aunties, Elders and colleagues who shaped my understanding of justice long before social media turned anti-racism into a trend.

The fire in me is real.
But it isn’t the only truth.

Offline, when I’m working with young people or sitting with a parent trying to make sense of their child’s experience of racism, my approach is relational, grounded and steady.
It holds tension without collapsing.
It invites people into accountability without making their fear the centre of the room.

But online, the version you’ve met has often been shaped by urgency and exhaustion, the part of me that reacts to the violence I see, the silence I recognise and the patterns I know too well from my own upbringing in a white working-class environment where racism was normalised, minimised or hidden behind “common sense.”

That’s not the version I want leading this community.

And something about my phone dying in my hand this week, after a long day spent removing my work from platforms complicit in state violence, forced a pause.
A reminder.
A recalibration.

Travelling home on a train without a screen took me back to myself.
Not the online persona.
Not the exhausted educator.
The real me, the one who believes white people can unlearn, if we stop performing awareness and start practising change.

This is the shift:
I’m not leaving the work.

I’m leaving the version of myself that was shaped by survival, not intention.

I’m moving into a tone that reflects:
• how I speak to white parents behind closed doors
• how I hold accountability with care, not coddling
• how I learned to sit with discomfort instead of outsourcing it to Global Majority people
• how I show up for my daughter, who deserves a world better than the one my generation inherited

If you’ve been feeling the pull to deepen, not to perform, not to appease, but to actually unlearn the reflexes white supremacy built into us, then stay with me.

This next chapter is about:

• truth without theatrics

• responsibility without self-centering

• community over individual guilt

• repair over reaction

• courage over comfort

This is where we go next, together.