Pass it on

My last blog, "This Is Bullshit", has sat with me for two days. And, somewhat unexpectedly, it seems to have been received exceptionally well.

People resonated with it. Not because I was telling them anything particularly new, but almost because I wasn't. The overwhelming response has been some variation of: I've thought this too. Some people had apparently wondered whether they were alone in thinking it.

Before I posted it, at approximately 11pm because apparently inspiration has no respect for sensible working hours, I sent it to a few friends and my mum. Mostly to ask: Is this too much?

Because it was ranty for me.

My mum replied:

"I've thought similarly many times... no darling not too much, just the truth that so many people don't see."

And that stayed with me too. Because how many of us are thinking things we don't say? How many of us are quietly looking at the world thinking, Does anybody else see this?

Then something interesting happened.

The next morning, after dropping my son at school, I came home, made a coffee and opened Instagram.

And there was Heather Williams.

I'd never heard of her before.

Now, we can entertain the possibility that my phone had listened to me banging on about the Epstein files the night before and the algorithm went: Have I got a woman for you.

Either way, there she was.

Her Instagram is @epstein.untold_sex.spies.speak.

So I clicked. And then I watched every video. Not a couple. Every. Single. One.

I started at the bottom of her grid and worked my way to the top. Then I went through the links in her bio. Then YouTube. Then I found interviews with her through Chance Meetings on Substack.

Some people might call this hyperfixation. I call it finding a passion point.

Because my heart ached listening to this woman speak.

Heather describes decades of the most brutal trafficking and abuse. She talks about things that are extraordinarily difficult to hear: torture, kidnap, being hunted, burning crosses, losing people she loved and abuse involving people she describes as powerful.

I don't need to reproduce the details here. In fact, I don't want to.

Go and look. Listen to Heather herself. Find the interviews. Follow the links. Look further.

Don't take my interpretation and make it yours.

This is just the seed. There's always a seed.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I found myself connecting with another passionate advocate for survivors on Substack: It's Time.

Even the name feels rather appropriate.

Enough. It's time.

And I found myself wondering something that has been bothering me ever since: why on earth aren't we screaming with outrage? Why aren't we demanding answers? Why aren't we refusing to look away? Why aren't millions of people saying absolutely fucking not?

My guess?

Not enough people know.

Or maybe more accurately, not enough people know enough to feel that visceral moment when something stops being information and becomes real.

And that's where I've realised something else.

I couldn't simply take everything I'd spent hours listening to and dump it into the laps of my friends and family. I'm intense. I know this. I go in hard when I'm on a justice search.

And if I arrived carrying all of that fury and horror at once, some of the people I love wouldn't hear the story. They'd hear me being furious.

As I said to my new 'It's Time' friend today, we don't all speak the same metaphorical dialect.

I'm spiritual and concious and "a conspiracy theorist". I've known about some of these subjects, at least broadly, for a good while. So I wasn't starting at zero. What I heard from Heather was still abhorrent. It was still shocking. It contained detail and allegations I hadn't encountered before, and I was appalled by what she described.

But imagine giving the most horrific details imaginable to somebody who has absolutely no prior knowledge of any of it. Where do they even put that?

Sometimes people reject information because what they're being asked to absorb is simply enormous. The nervous system goes into shock.

You can't plant a whole tree into unbroken soil.

You plant a seed.

And then something else happened here in the UK.

A little boy went missing. Three years old.

I am not going to use that little boy's story to make a political point, construct a conspiracy around what happened to him or take one ounce of attention away from his family. To his parents and everyone who loves him, I send every scrap of love and strength I have.

The loss of a child is unimaginable. There aren't words big enough for it.

However, seperately, watching people respond to his story reminded me of something.

We care.

People stopped. People hoped. People searched. People shared posts. People who had never met that little boy desperately wanted him to be safe.

And perhaps that tells us something important. Humanity hasn't lost its capacity to care about a child it doesn't know.

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So what about the children whose names we don't know? The children whose photographs we've never seen? The children whose stories never arrive on our screens?

One child should never become more or less valuable because we know their name.

Whether a child is lost through a devastating accident, disappears, is exploited, is trafficked, or suffers somewhere completely outside our field of vision, the absence of their photograph from our newsfeed doesn't make their life worth less.

We just don't know them.

And perhaps that's part of the problem. Our gaze can only land where it is directed.

When you begin looking into trafficking and exploitation, particularly allegations involving wealth, institutions and powerful people, the scale can feel impossible. Too big. Too dark. Too deeply embedded.

What could I possibly do about any of that?

I'm one woman sitting in NW England with a coffee and a Substack account.

But then...

There are billions of us.

And that changes the question.

Because perhaps none of us has to take on "the establishment." Perhaps none of us has to expose everything. Perhaps none of us even has to convince anybody.

Maybe we just have to speak.

I write in my dialect. Someone else writes in theirs. A survivor speaks from lived experience. A journalist investigates. An advocate campaigns. Someone makes a video. Someone has a conversation with their mum. Someone sends a friend an article and says: Have you seen this?

Someone who would never hear me might hear you. Someone who wouldn't hear you might hear somebody else.

And maybe all those different voices weave together. A tapestry made from a thousand different dialects, carrying the same basic message:

Look. Care. Don't look away.

I don't know whether one person can change the dynamic of this world. I'm increasingly convinced that's the wrong question.

There are billions of us.

So here's my request.

You don't need to know everything. You don't need to shout the loudest. You don't need to overwhelm somebody with the entire tree.

Find the seed you can carry. Plant it somewhere it might grow.

And then?

Pass it on.