Waiting for Someone Who Cared - June 2022

8 June 2022

By June 2022, I had been fighting for years to be heard. I had reported workplace harm. I had tried to engage with my employer, the insurer, regulators, lawyers and elected representatives. At every stage, I believed that if I simply kept explaining what was happening, someone would eventually step in.

Instead, I found myself waiting.

• Waiting for phone calls.
• Waiting for meetings.
• Waiting for someone to follow through on promises that had been made.

One of those “promises” was a meeting with Cherie Burton (See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-day-i-almost-didnt-come-back.html). 

As the days turned into weeks, uncertainty became its own form of suffering. I didn’t know whether the meeting was still happening, whether anyone was advocating for me behind the scenes, or whether I had simply been “forgotten”.

On 8 June 2022, I sent the following message to the Kogarah Electorate Office:

“I’ve been used and abused an entire life. Was organising a meeting with Cherie Burton a false promise too? Do you remember my first email where I said what’s the truth about the government… is there someone who cares… do you?”

See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/03/chris-minns-and-kogarah-electorate.html for that part of my story, when I first contacted the office of my local state MP for Kogarah, Chris Minns, on 15 October 2021. 

Those words were written in despair.

People often think trauma comes only from the original event. What they don’t always understand is that prolonged uncertainty can become traumatising in its own right. When you’re already struggling, every unanswered email, every delayed response and every broken commitment reinforces the same devastating message:

You don’t matter.

That single email captured something much bigger than a request for a meeting. It captured the gradual collapse of my faith that the systems and elected representatives I had trusted, would protect ordinary people, when they were at their most vulnerable.

This wasn’t simply about one meeting. It was about the emotional exhaustion of continually reaching out, only to be met with silence, uncertainty or betrayal. Every time hope was raised and then disappeared, it became harder to believe the next promise.

That is one of the least understood aspects of institutional harm.

The injury is not only caused by what happens.

It’s caused by what doesn’t happen.

The meetings that never occur.

The commitments that quietly fade away.

The emails that remain unanswered.

And the person left wondering whether they ever mattered at all.

This email remains part of that record.

It captures a moment when I was desperately trying to hold onto the belief that somewhere within government, someone genuinely cared enough to listen—and to act.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 354.