Early contact with public systems

My life intersected with public systems early.

I was a child in an environment shaped by violence, instability, and addiction. I spent time in care. I was assessed, categorised, recorded, and discussed by professionals whose role was to manage risk, not to imagine who I might become.

Like many children in similar circumstances, I was known to systems at my most vulnerable. My distress, reactions, and survival strategies were documented at moments when choice was limited and safety was uncertain.

Those records existed long before I had language, agency, or power.

They did not determine who I became.

What systems could see — and what they could not

Systems could see behaviour under stress, disruption, fear, and the impact of adult decisions made around me.

They could not see full context. They could not see the meaning behind survival strategies, the capacity that had not yet been allowed to emerge, or the person I would become once danger reduced.

I was encountered at crisis, not at calm. What was recorded was real — but incomplete.

Growing beyond the record

As I grew older, the system’s version of me changed slowly, if at all. Records rarely update at the same pace as people. Early narratives tend to harden, even as circumstances shift.

I learned that I was expected to regulate myself, adapt, and manage risk — often without support — while still being understood through earlier assumptions. That tension followed me into adulthood. It shaped my awareness, but it did not define me. Choosing agency where none was given. What systems could not account for was choice.

I chose to think critically rather than internalise labels. I chose to understand how systems operate instead of accepting how they treat people. I chose structure over bitterness, and analysis over silence. I did not reject accountability. I rejected reduction. Turning experience into understanding. Over time, I began to recognise patterns not only in my own life but across others.

Crisis treated as character.

Records outliving reality. Responsibility shifted onto those least protected. What I experienced was not unique. It was structural.

Why I write about systems

I write to explain mechanisms, not to assign blame. My work focuses on how systems categorise people, how narratives harden, how harm becomes procedural, and how individuals continue to carry burdens long after systems withdraw.

This is public-interest journalism informed by lived reality — not personal grievance.

More than the moment I was recorded

Systems often encounter people at their worst moments. What they struggle to do is let go of that version.

My life is evidence that people are not static, not reducible, and not owned by their past. I am not who the system first met.

I am not who the record froze.

I am who I became — deliberately and against expectation.

The system did not determine that.

 

I did.