About

I’m a writer, photographer and anti-oppression mental health advocate from Trinidad and Tobago— a very dangerous nation in the Global South. My lived experience of having spent decades in an incredibly violent part of the Global South, deeply traumatised by borders, informs so much of my work and perspectives on trauma, disability and healing.

I’m a survivor of gun violence, IPV and CSA. I regularly hold space for other abuse survivors and I organise material support for survivors through mutual aid as often as I can. I dream of a world in which care is not a scarce resource for survivors, but flows abundantly through communities. I long for a world in which survivors are actually cared for by their communities, instead of abandoned, or where communities automatically outsource their care to professionalised services.

I’m a descendent of Indian indentured labourers who were kidnapped and displaced under colonialism from their homelands and abused by those in power over them, which has resulted in extensive historical and intergenerational trauma and diasporic grief that I still work through.

I believe in liberatory harm reduction, disability justice and Mad Liberation. I long for a world in which people are not pathologised for the ways that they survive violence and oppression, but where our survival strategies are honoured and valued. Where we can sit with and hold space for madness, for large, uncomfortable displays of pain, for emotional expressions and expressions of trauma that do not make sense to us, instead of immediately resorting to carceral responses.

Several years ago, I founded The Not Okay Movement based in Trinidad and Tobago, the first of its kind to develop significant national mental health resources, such as the Guide to Understanding Mental Health Disabilities in the Workplace.

I’ve also been an advocate for years for people diagnosed with ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’, most of whom are abuse survivors, to be cared for through anti-carceral, non-pathologising approaches and frameworks, and I work as a consultant to mental health practitioners who are in need of more support in caring for people diagnosed with BPD.

I’m a writer and I’ve been a photographer for almost ten years now— both of these being the things that I may have centered my life around in a radically different world, one in which we didn’t have to dedicate so much of our lives to protecting one another from violence and supporting one another in accessing our basic needs.

I hold a BA in English Language and Literature from King’s College, London, and have taken trainings on Disability Justice, harm reduction, radical mental health, anti-carceral approaches to care, decolonial approaches to grief, somatic trauma therapy and the Medical Industrial Complex from The Embody Lab, Fireweed Collective, IDHA, Project Lets, and Health Justice Commons.