John Charles

About

I would rather you knew this from the outset: the goal is not to stop being affected. It is to stop being controlled. Those are different objectives and conflating them sets people up for a disappointment that was never necessary. Nobody becomes a person that nothing happened to. Survivors who do well are not the ones who erased it; they are the ones who stopped letting it dictate where they can go, what they can do, and who they can be close to. That is an achievable target and it is what we aim at, rather than a complete absence of any reaction ever again. Earlier in my working life I held nonprofit and social-work adjacent roles, where I met people living full lives alongside difficult histories. It is entirely possible. If you have been aiming at erasure, we can aim at something better and more reachable.