My name's Chaya Vogelpoel-Rainbird, and I'm on the Lived Experience Partnership Group with the National Suicide Prevention Office. If you imagine someone goes to university, and they study for years, and they come out of that with a degree, and then they spend the rest of their career in that area implementing that knowledge, implementing the studies that they have looked at, that they've read, that they've written assignments on. Lived experience is not like that.
Instead, we are digging into the real depths of our trauma, of our pain, and pulling out parts of ourselves to better the situation, better the landscape. You will grow and learn from over the rest of your life, and what you bring in experience one year after a bereavement is going to be very different to what you are able to bring out 20 years after a bereavement.
And the same as someone who is caring for someone who is suicidal. What they're experiencing one year into that is very different to what they're experiencing 20 years into that. And as that landscape changes, they can, or we as lived experience representatives, we can bring such a richness in discussion, and we can bring the heart into it. You'll never really understand how many people you've impacted, how many people you've changed.
You sure notice the ones that you didn't.
And for every time I've spoken about my lived experience, for every document I've read, and impact that I feel like I've had, if there's one person that I think maybe I could have had more of an impact, they're the ones that I remember.
They're the ones that keep bringing me back. And ultimately, that real first feeling of what could I have done different, this is what I'm doing different, and I'll spend the rest of my life doing different. It's not going to change the initial outcome.
It's not going to bring my brother back. It's not going to bring my friends back. But if that means that someone else doesn't have to lose their brother, someone else doesn't have to lose their friends, I don't need to know. I don't need to know whose lives I've impacted.
But I keep coming back because hopefully, I'll make enough of a difference.