Harri and I meet at a café in south of the city. It’s a balmy February morning in the subtropics and the place is bustling with students. While lively and youthful, it’s not the best spot for an in-depth conversation, and besides, there is a step to get into the building rendering it inaccessible for Harri, who uses a wheelchair. We opt to walk to a nearby library. Harri is young, energetic, and bubbly; all funky clothes and cropped hair. Harri is into vintage at the moment, they tell me. They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. ‘I switch from male to female every, every few days or so because I don't feel like a guy or a girl. I just feel like a person.’ Among their many interests are writing, poetry, criminology, and volunteering. While I don’t say it at the time, we are close in age and have similar pastimes. Whether it’s our hair, our clothes or our thoughts and ideas, I feel like we are giving each other ontological permission. They are currently studying. They would like to work but lament the many barriers they face gaining employment, despite being skilled, enthusiastic, and capable. Like other participants in the research, Harri is always thinking about how their experience can be leveraged to prevent poor treatment of others. They want to make sure others don’t feel alone. Their story brushes up against issues of belonging, inclusion, and the support required to survive experiences of abuse. ‘If it happened to me, I can make sure it doesn't happen to somebody else. So that's why I do interviews and I do um, things like this so that, that my voice is out there and it leaves a mark and it says, “Hey look you are not alone in this”, but also “this doesn't need to happen.”’ They are planning to move out independently as housing becomes available in their desired suburb. Until then, they are living at home with mum, Loraine, who is their close confidant and supporter. Loraine assists with many aspects of Harri’s daily living, including managing their finances which she will continue to do once Harri moves out, as they require help to budget and pay rent. While Harri is a young adult over 18, Lorraine is their primary carer and guardian. Harri also has a rotating door of carers who assist with community access. ‘It's just whoever they assigned to me that day. But I usually have the same carer on Wednesdays.’ The experience of disability, for Harri, is as unique as they are. They experience functional impacts on mobility and use an electric wheelchair to get around. They have an acquired brain injury that went undiagnosed for a decade, which has had impacts on tasks like managing finances. Their daily experience of pain often leads to exhaustion. Harri also experiences periods of mental distress and has previously been diagnosed with multiple types of personality disorders. ‘I was leaping between me and other people’. We talk about the many intricacies of relationships with family, friends, and partners which have impacted them in myriad ways. Our conversation touches on the intertwined and inseparable nature of mental health and the things that happen in our lives and happen to us, with relationships at times exacerbating mental health challenges. Paradoxically, cutting off connections may improve personal wellbeing, while also presenting other challenges including lowering social capital.
Some of the distress they have experienced was due to being severely bullied by other young people and being excluded from the paternal side of their family. Lorraine has always been their go-to person and while they feel deeply grateful for the support, it is accompanied by guilt and regret at times. This is the focus of their poem, Mama, written in 2019. Harri uses poetry to express and process their experiences; the poems are autobiographical. ‘We are our own words.’ Mama switches between perspectives from them to their mother’s, and between different timepoints, from little girl to adult. ‘[I was] very heavily suicidal… And she had to put up with a lot of it and there were a lot of times where she literally walked out on me ‘cause she just couldn't handle it.’ Despite facing significant challenges to their mental health and wellbeing, the poem is written as an apology to their mother for saying and doing things they ‘don’t mean at all’, reflecting the guilt and shame which can accompany the offer of support to women with disability. Harri felt excluded by paternal family, who would pay for expensive gifts but disallow them from visiting. Contact was minimal, ‘a couple of phone calls here and there, a present here and there to keep me on the line’. Harri took out a no contact DVO against family after they accused Harri of stealing money and credit cards, despite Harri receiving a university scholarship at the time and being financially self-sufficient. Cutting contact with their abusive paternal family; this had a positive impact on their mental health. Around this time during high school, Harri also managed to extricate themself from a group of people who were ‘heavily bullying’ them. While they describe experiences of exclusion by friends and family, they also note this did not feel isolating for them: ‘I always had my mum, and I had her my whole life… And it's only just been me and her for so long.’
Dating as a queer person with disability can also be fraught with risks, as Harri explains. They have had three intimate partners, two of whom were male and one female. In one relationship, Harri experienced sexual assault, while the two other partners were also abusive, both physically and psychologically. In one example, Harri reported feeling dehumanised by an ex-girlfriend. In their three months together, they experienced putdowns and discriminatory attitudes toward their disability: ‘she’d had a bad experience with a disabled partner before me and so when she got with me, she started saying all these things about her partner that kind of also applied to me’. This speaks to the subtle ways in which attitudes toward disability and different at the macro level manifest in interpersonal relationship, with detrimental impacts to self-worth and self-esteem. Harri also notes the dilemmas arising from dating as a wheelchair user; to disclose or not to disclose before meeting. Harri explains, while they may experience discrimination if they disclose using a wheelchair, not disclosing may risk their personal safety. ‘I learned pretty quick that if I do not disclose some things that I could risk run the risk of being sexually assaulted or worse again.’
Discourses of burden are resonant in the ways in which Harri understands their relationship to family. ‘You feel guilty all the time for making your parents do everything for you, especially when you're disabled. ‘Cause it feels like you're a burden on them.’ They hold a systemic focus when considering how their experiences relate to others. They reflect on parents who may feel unsupported and unable to cope with caring for children with disability or young adults, necessitating respite care which must be provided by trusted workers; however, they noted carers can violate this trust at times, drawing on the example of a young neighbour who experienced abuse at the hands of their carer. Harri would like greater independence, but the barriers put in place can be discouraging. This includes stigma and discrimination, manifest in hiring processes. They note being a wheelchair use as the number one barrier to employment – even if your resume is ‘top of the list’. ‘When I turned up in a wheelchair, I never got the jobs that I applied for because of the fact that it was just put in the too hard basket.’ Despite these barriers, they acknowledge the opportunities they do have: ‘I'm lucky in this sense that I am independent enough to a point where I could live on my own with outside help.’ Harri thinks in layers. They consider how the old them, that is, their younger self, would evaluate the choices they have made to keep themself safe, the hard decisions to cut off from abusive relationships: ‘younger me would have detested but older me, me now is going, that was actually a very good idea.’ They have now been agnostic for several years. Their poem, Charlie, Charlie, illustrates experience of a time of ‘waning faith’. Harri was part of a religion at the time when a community member was convicted for child sexual abuse. The poem uses graphic imagery of violence, which Harri explains is conveying that there is ‘a lot of violence in the world but even though you’re being very violent towards me, I’m still going to appeal to the other side of you, which is the good side of you’. This is not to say Harri is saying to ‘forgive your abusers’, they explain, but rather drawing attention to abusers as a product of the wider culture and society which allows abuse to occur.
The past few years for Harri have been marked with the impacts of abuse, shame, guilt, bullying and mental distress. However, they report things are starting to ‘lighten up’. They have a regular psychologist. They are enjoying their studies. Harri now accepts that they may have to cut people out to avoid being dragged down by them. They remain acutely aware, however, the ‘the future can change’. While they are looking forward to the future, they need to remain adaptable and responsive. They have a strong sense of themselves, their capabilities, and independence is within arm’s reach. ‘I'm not gonna say my life is perfect. I'm not gonna say it's all sunshine and daisies and roses. Right now I'm stable. I'm in the second year of my degree. I'm lining up other stuff. I'm looking into opportunities. I'm doing the things that I want to do and I have the money at the [current] time to be able to do those things…’ Harri reads me the poem, Hands. It is about how families will come together around people and support each other, ‘most of the time’. To me, it feels aspirational. Through their voice and participation, it is a world Harri wants to ensure for others. It is saying ‘you're in my hands, you're in my world, you're in my heart, you're in my consciousness. I'm not going to leave you to be alone and suffer by yourself because you don't deserve that.’
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