Hello,
“Chris, I reckon if I’d been loved as child, I might have been okay.”
I agreed but felt a bit, I don’t know really, I guess a bit shaken.
So many of the people who find their way to LandWorks have shared very similar journeys and experiences. Any semblance of being involved in their own lives was removed from them at a very young age:
- Put into care.
- Moved here, there, and everywhere. Often with no notice or explanation, “ghosted”!
- Estranged from siblings, often forcibly separated.
- Abused.
As Joey so eloquently says, “It was like the f#cking choice of the choiceless.”
Kids leaving the care system make up around 50% of all under 21 years olds in the criminal justice system!
Joey is 35, he’s been in and out of prison, hates authority. He won’t work with anyone, but he will come to LandWorks.
And talk, loudly!
The care system can/often does inflict trauma, building a sense of alienation and compounding feelings of rejection from family and society.
Ask yourself this… wouldn’t you feel angry and anti-authority?
Joey tells me something as we are talking about others here at LandWorks, “Look Chris, these lonely hearts, they beat for some affection.”
It was in the 1970s that Philip Larkin’s poem told me, and the nation, that it’s your parents that f#ck you up.
It was January 2024 when Joey shouted across the table telling me and anyone else sitting there… “It’s the care system that f#cks you up.”
“Chris, can you hear the voice of the voiceless?”
I certainly hear you Joey, is what I thought, but didn’t say just then. I was trying to remember another lyric, something about… “Making a noise for the noiseless?”
You may recognise some of the above chat, bits of lyrics from a singer songwriter Jamie Webster, who, it turns out, Joey and I both listen to, and we agree Jamie says it better than we can.
Or maybe that was just me. I think Joey could be a (loud) voice for the voiceless.
Chris
18th January 2023