What is all the drama about?

There is a lot of drama surrounding my book. And a lot of people trying to shut it down. For an honest, personal story backed up by a lot of recorded and publicly available stats it seems to have flagged the misinformation police one too many times. I don’t care which side of the fence you sit on but can we all agree that not having two sides to a story is dangerous. And it is not just me being flagged, it is all of us that have a different story to the narrative. Some of these people doctors, nurses, police and ambulance officers. Even the front page of the UK Telegraph who reported on a genuine study that could in the future arm everyone with vital information to save lives. I know a lot of you in the media in Australia and this is a call to say DO SOMETHING NOW before it’s too late.

5 min read…..

If you personally know this current version of me, you know I hate drama. Yet society feeds off it and so too does social media.

I’m interested in real stories of genuine people. Getting their perspectives and helping them understand the power in their own voice when used correctly.

I ask questions regularly, I rarely assume. Sure I vent like everyone else, but I use the fuel it creates to come up with constructive ways forward. And if i’m stuck in a venting rage I ask others for help, those that will also question me. If that fails I spend a lot of time in silence until I figure it out. Sometimes too much time.

This is independent thought. Something that is so important to each and every one of us yet we are never trained to have it because we become too hard to control. And I don’t just mean by the standard authorities. Simple sales, marketing, social media and its algorithms all rely on us being easy to tell what to do, what we care about, what’s popular and show what side we are on. Independent thought has to be something you learn, at times on your own and often through some pretty tough life changing experiences.

Highly educated people, CEO’s, managers, business owners, protesting students and everyone in between believe they have it. But rarely is it displayed. The ability to choose a side independently of others opinions is not the same thing as independent thought.

Independent thought is not clear cut. It doesn’t sit in one camp or the other. If you are independently thinking, there is no camp to sit in. No team that selects you to be part of their side. It requires putting your ego aside and knowing that you could never possibly know everything there is to know about a topic. Therefore you ask questions and you arm yourself with as much information as possible from both sides until you understand. It’s fundamentals are based in the idea that you will learn something new everyday, even about subjects you already have in depth knowledge of.

This book I have written is about independent thought. It is about knowing that everyone has come to how they present themselves today from their own journey in life. They all have their stories that can both hinder and protect them, their traumas, their triggers and beliefs of who they are in this world and where they want to go from here. You can not deny someone their story. You can listen, you can thank them for sharing a part of themselves and you can challenge them respectfully on some of their opinions held too tightly which have been shaped by the emotions they are still attached to.

Independent thought is the most dangerous thing you can have in a society yet individually is your strongest asset.

For a book about independent thought it has certainly created a lot of drama. Not from the people who have read it, but from those who haven’t and want it shut down.

Instead of reading it there are those who have already tried to give their opinion to others about what it contains. Instead of reading it there are those who want to be told who was mentioned and what was said without a thought to actually finding out for themselves. Instead of reading it there are those who have jumped on my social media feeds to view all the content i’ve posted and then reported some of my posts. You may not follow me but your recently created, your psydoneum and your workplace accounts are suddenly hanging around my ‘who to follow’ section like a bad smell.

This book about my own life story has suddenly become dangerous to society. So what is in it exactly?

It is an honest, personal account of my time spent in Melbourne’s 262 record breaking days (and then some) of stay at home orders. It also gives readers the chance to tell their own story along the way. The journalling aspect is a vital part of this book for the good of all. It allows people to address the hurt and suffering they have experienced and help them shift their emotions surrounding it so our society doesn’t continue down this path of divisive destruction. The written word is my story. It doesn’t ask for an apology, it asks you to forgive yourself. It is accurate, it has been backed up as much as it can with various listed facts, resources, articles and even a letter from my own neurologist supporting my stance. It has a disclaimer about ‘official stats’ that shifted overtime due to current records now using different parameters than they did during the moment. But even those sliding scale facts have been backed up by archived press conferences and published resources. If those archives don’t exist by the time you read it, I have various backed up copies.

It is my honest story and it has been flagged several times over the last three weeks as misinformation. The picture on the cover and the words in the bottom right hand corner have been flagged. Quotes directly from the book on my social media have been flagged. Hashtags I used have been flagged. People have struggled to follow, share and like content without an error and even my link to book sales failed for a period of time. I even reposted an image from the front page of The UK Telegraph and it was flagged. The article was published in a newspaper, it was about a genuine study currently reviewing findings, it was a photo of that article discussing the findings of the approved study, it was then shared by a cardiologist and it was still labelled as misinformation. What part of any of it is misinformation.

It’s not misinformation, it’s information that doesn’t fit the narrative and god forbid might encourage independent thought.

It is so easy to think you have independently come to a conclusion of a person you know little about based on who and what they follow and share on social media but most of you stop at what the topic is and don’t actually engage in the content created. Anyone that follows any of my social media would see I follow varying people from all sides of the fence, it is the only way I can come to independent thought by actively seeking it out by those I choose to follow.

I ask you these questions. Do you want to know as much as you can about the biggest period of change in your life? Do you want to know honestly whether it was worth it and if it was the right course of action for the smallest amount of harm? What is really more important to you, the death of your ego when you are presented with facts that may now go against what you originally believed or the death of another friend, family member or colleague because you are not allowed access to this information?

Regardless of what side of a fence you sit on we should all be concerned that the other side of the story is not being told. Not just my story but the information now contained within a bunch of world wide available stats, new scientific studies, a larger pool and longer time frame for genuine research that shows real information on effectiveness, survival rates, excess deaths and life changing behaviours and attitudes to countries all over the world.

Not having that information presented to us is what is dangerous. Not my book and certainly not a real study published in mainstream media with a different outlook.

Do you feel safe knowing that these things are being kept from you? I certainly don’t.

For those I know in the media, which is many of you, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. The other side might end up playing a part in your story. Don’t wait until it’s too late.