Standing outside Channel 7 studios in Martin Place, Sydney - September 2011
So, this is my entry into activism. The story goes, I was living on the street in Sydney, I hadn't even met the good 'ole anarchists yet. But I was reading alternative media and I was enraged by the mainstream media blackout of the Occupy movement whose key objective was to expose the fraudulent practices of banking institutions.
I did this myself, I had no one telling me what to do.
It felt like the right thing to do.
I stood for the entire afternoon until it went dark. I evaded many many cold stares and I got a lot of attention including a 'kick me' sign on my back and a time lapse photo. A shot of this act was later shown in a montage on a mainstream channel at the end of the news stories.
From this point, I met a bunch of very interesting people, and life started to shift exponentially.
My journey from this September in 2011 to now in June 2019 has been one of finding true ways and means of being effective in society.
So many things that I once assumed effective, including many traditional methods of activism, I have proven to myself to be ineffective. There has also been so much internal pain I have had to deal with in order to find the real motivation behind my actions of apparent altruism.
My conclusion after this journey is that being and remaining authentic to self and honest to the self is the only way of being effective.