Miss Chatterbox: Fire

Fire by Miss Chatterbox [acrylic painting]

Transcript

[This is about] my experience living in domestic violence. Towards the end of me living [in my parents’ home], it was just chaos and I was filled with lots of rage. That's kind of why I've done, like, fire colours, you know, like the red and orange and yellow.

[I wasn’t coping] with the realisation of what had happened [domestic and family violence] for my entire life, and then the realization that it was still happening and. Yeah, the kind of... grief that you go through... you feel very hard done by it because ... I grew up with all the adults around me saying, you know, ‘ohh if anything ever happened to a child, I would be, you know, there to support them and do everything I could to make sure that a child was safe’ and it was all about children being safe. ... I was very, like, upset by the idea that no one in my extended family ever saw signs of things. They would have had to have been signs because the violence was perpetrated for over 2 decades.

...I would wake up and see red before I left the house. Because I would just hear my parents’ voices and yeah, I would be so filled with anger at the things that they had done. And that lasted even when I left for a few months, I'd say, because people would bring them up and ask me questions, and it would put me back into this pit of fire... It never really went away.   

Even now, depending on who I talk to, what I'm talking about like that valley of fire can still rise because that anger. Is still there and it's not something I can really get rid of because there's no reconciliation, in my circumstance, and there's no desire for that. But there's also no acceptance on their behalf and like they aren't going to take accountability for what they've done and things like that.