Welcome to First things first, I'm Brookletting. My pronouns are she and her.
My Maddie Mills, my pronouns are he and him. And before we get started, we'd like to acknowledge the custodians of the land on which we recorded today. For me, that's the gattigal people of the urination.
And for me it's a warrandry people of the coolin nation Google. So I have to give a little bit of a shout out to a recent film that I watched, which actually was like looking at your life through or like a bird's eye view of your life or.
Looking in their mirror. It was such a reflection.
Of my own childhood that it was kind of creepy and spooky in a way. Obviously different experiences, but the general vibe and the feeling of it was so one nostalgic two so relatable and connection and owfool that it just yeah, we need. It makes me so inspired to create more films like this. HL So it's called Like My Brother, and it's basically a story of three girls, Jess Rider and Rena, who are pretty talented AFL players.
They play. They're from the TV Islands and they're wanting to.
Get drafted to the AFLW and they have to travel a long way from home to do that, and luckily they get picked up with the Bombers Bombers Scout Soeston Bombers, and they get to sort of train and test and play a VFL season with the Bombers and you move away from home. But one of the common themes that I, I guess felt in this film, and I guess is a common theme for our lives is the sorry business and grief aspect.
Oh yeah, it really hits our communities totally. It's so sad to say this, but it's the time where we connect the most as mob. Like. It feels like whenever I'm around family, it's always for sorry business. You know. There's not that many weddings that I can say that I've been to where I've connected with my family. It's more like funerals.
That's I guess why I was so excited to become a marriage celebrant, which I will be still, but it's just taking me a bit of time because I got so much other shit.
Going on total.
But I want to like do those you know, cultural ceremonies where it's like a wedding. I want to start more ceremonies that were to celebrate love and care and consideration rather than death and grief and sadness and fucking loss.
Like, I'm over that, But it's just a thing that we have to live with, isn't it? In our lives?
And every time I sort of talk about my life, people say, wow.
Like you really we have lost a lot of people.
Yeah, And I don't even I'm so desensitized to that word or even the feeling, because I'm like, yeah, I have, but I don't know, just get on with life really anyway.
That's a tough person. I think that somebody who has lost direct family members like that at such a young age, I feel like you do grow like a tough exterior. Yeah, you know. And it's a weird thing because I think what people would necessarily expect from somebody who's gone through so much trauma at such a young age is a broken person and somebody who crumbles easily or is visibly
affected by that grief and trauma all the time. Yeah, But it's like the thing about the human experience is that you do find ways to get through stuff, and you find ways to.
Cope yeah, I agree.
Yeah, how do you think, Like, I know that you've gone through a lot in your life when it comes to loss, Like, what are your cope mechanisms? How do you get through your grief?
Well, grief is a lot like just life in general. And I think, you know, life moments go up and down, and you can't always have good days, like you have to have shitty days to appreciate the good ones. You can have good days appreciate why the shitty ones exist. And I think grief is a bit similar to that. I think you kind of might It might not hit you in that.
Moment of losing someone. It might come later.
You might And you know, there's this experience of grief is that there are seven parts of it and you know they sort of can come at any time. They're not you know, in level of order. I guess you know. One of the first things is usually shock and that could come later. Anger, denial, Yeah, you know. And I think for me personally, how I've dealt with it is when I was much younger, you know, I didn't realize that I had suppressed some of it, and then some of it I you know, made it.
A motivation in a way.
So, and then some of it was I was fucking angry at and I experienced a lot of anger. So my coping mechanisms haven't always been the most healthy. But because I'm in such a healthy mindset now and I can look back at those experiences and look how I am now, I can see what I did then was only in my capacity, and I was a kid, and I just had to sort of get on and deal with it. And now I'm sort of dealing with the effects. But grief affects me every day. I guess in some way.
I have moments of these, you know, sad moments where I feel really joyful and so happy that I'm like, Wow, my god, I can't believe I have just achieved that.
And this is such a great moment.
And then I'll have this rush of sadness because of the feeling that my mom doesn't get to experience this with me, and I'll feel sad even though I'm feeling so happy, I feel this hint of sadness because she doesn't get to dwell and live in.
This with me.
And I guess that's just living with grief, right, That's just living with that, and it affects you at different points in your life.
Yeah, what about you.
I guess you've also, you know, have lost so many family members, you know, your brother recently more so. And do you feel like, as an adult you've been able to learn to deal with it better or do you think you're still kind of just going through the waves of it all.
I just remember having such a weird experience with grief. When I was young, I was told that my dad had died. So I grew up with the belief and the grief of somebody who that I believed was dead and gone. And I remember how sad that was for me as a young kid, and how empty I felt, thinking that I would never get to meet my dad or experience life with a dad. And then all of a sudden that all turned in on itself and it
was false. And it's like all that grief that I experienced as a kid, and the lies and the trauma that came with that, the emptiness that came with that, it felt like it was all for nothing, Like who
would put someone through that? Then, you know that sort of I had this weird moment where when I met my dad when I was in care for the first time, it was the weirdest feeling of like I was elated, you know, like it was like an outer body experience of seeing this man and having this interaction that was just never on the cards. And I think that that
healed like a lot of that grief really quickly. Experience of getting to know my dad healed a lot of that loss and that disconnectedness when I was a young kid, but then getting older and experiencing grief. I think what I've realized is I try and experience joy a lot when it comes to my life. And I think, yeah, and I think that that's yeah, and that's why I do what I do, Like I really believe that I have a job that I experienced joy in and so I.
Don't want to be dwelling in the mind right.
It's it's the counter attack to what I've been given, the cards I've been given. Yes, I have to I have to produce joy in my life and that's my job. I think I get so much joy out of being able to live out my dream in my career that it's like the counter action to what cards I was dealt. It's heavy not just on me, but I see it when I go home with my family, like there's a lot of grief, especially recently around my brother. You know, how I've seen grief affect someone really half is my dad.
Yeah.
My dad was a really strong, like determined, loving kind man, and grief has made him deeply depressed, bedridden, debilitating. You know, grief has been debilitating to him to the point where he's ended up in hospital for weeks on end because of grief. And I feel like, if you don't have the coping mechanisms, or if you don't have the resources or people around you to support you and take a bit of that weight off, if.
You just go by day by day kind of cold.
And it holds you down. I think that there are so many of our communities that are drowning in grief. Yeah, I think about my community back home of cold out just being in that place, I feel it.
I remember someone telling me that grief is like having a rock in your pocket, and some days you feel it and some days you might not notice it. And sometimes it feels heavier and some days it feels lighter. And I think that's a great sort of analogy of how I sort of see grief is that in the moments when you feel really strong and you're feeling really empowered, and you're feeling liberated, you're feeling supported and loved by people around you. The rock doesn't feel so heavy. The
thing is it actually never really goes away. Yeah, you know, it's not like this're thing like, oh I'm healed and I'm grieved. It's like you've lost something, You've lost a bit of you. And I think that's what I realized when I was younger, is that I felt like I was always trying to strive to be back to the same person that I was before something happened, and I was striving to get back to that. But that's kind
of what grief does. Unfortunately. I feel when you lose someone, you do lose a little bit of a part of yourself, and you have to acknowledge that it doesn't change you or make you different or anyway, but it does affect you and you're not always going to be the same person. It's such a complex issue, grief, but we don't talk about it a lot.
I feel like it's a universal experience we all experience. I think that in our community we experience it a lot because of the disadvantage that we face. And I think that colonization has contributed to massively contributed to that disadvantage. So there's a lot of issues within our community that grief stems from. You agree, a lots of disconnection, you know, when that isn't just about people, but that's about land, environment, culture.
I think you become lost, and I think that there's this sense of trying to find something that you can hold onto or belonging, and grief is something that sometimes can deny you from that.
It does, yeah, and then if you don't I think if you don't acknowledge it.
When you acknowledge it, there is a bit of pressure that is relieved. It's like, oh, okay, because you're seeing it for what it is. Yes, it has power in the sense that it can affect you in how you operate. But if you acknowledge it, it's like when you have a list of things to do, when they're all in
your head and you're like, oh, I feel overwhelmed. As soon as you write them down on a piece of paper, Immediately, all of a sudden, it's gone from here to here and there's a weight that's been lifted and you feel like, oh, that is achievable. I know exactly what I need to do to get that done.
Well, okay, when you think of your grief.
Who So, when I think of grief and the word grief and I think, oh, yeah, is my sister comes up a lot, and I think it's because I felt like losing my sister.
You know, when it's a sibling, you're so close, and my.
Sister is always the feeling that I when I'm not feeling well, I like know that I'm still grieving that because it's my most recent and I haven't been like, oh, well, it happened three years ago, should be fine. I'm like, actually, no, I'm actually still not okay with it. And that's pretty I'm okay with that actually because I know that that's a slow process and it actually probably changed me the most.
Yeah you know what I mean, Like.
That I had gone on this massive high. I thought I'd be the happiest of my ever, you know, just picked David from the Bachelorette. I was excited about the future, and then all of a sudden, I'm reminded of something and then sort of straight back to the real reality of my.
Life.
In what happens so quickly, I guess, not just in fastinations communities, but families in general.
Obviously, like things can just.
Change, and that reminder is just so jarring sometimes. And in that moment, I was like that it actually like changed me as a person. And I have thought, oh, I need to get back to that brooke and I need to get that back. I'm like, I'm actually not that broke anymore.
No things change you. It's like heartbreak in a relationship that changes how you love. If somebody hurts in a relationship, it immediately changes how you love, yeah, and how you experience love and the doubts. But when I think about grief, I always think of obviously my brother, and I think the process of that, the severity of like somebody's actions being so cruel. The hard thing about the scenario is that I didn't allow it to be real. The experience
of like having a brother murdered. I always felt like I it was never real. It was like a something that happened to me that I just shut off, never ever dealt with, you know. And only recently has it become less numb. And I put his photo next to my bed a few months ago and as a reminder of him and his life, and it was the last photo we took together. It was me, him and my dad, and I put it in black and white, and my
partner said, why is it in black and white? You need to give him color, give him life, you know, And it was, and so I ended up reprinting it in color. And I haven't ever experienced grief like that, where like it's been so deep that you don't even want to look at it, Like I before that moment, I couldn't look at photos of him. I couldn't really talk about him or say his name, like it was
too hard to go there. And as soon as a memory would come up or I'd get flashbacks to his body, you know, Yeah, days before the funeral, I would just shut it out. It was like I just jumped that hurdle and leave it. And that's how I knew that grief was way too hard to even like connect with. You know, it's like too hard and I'm just gonna push it down. But recently, with a bit of justice, came a bit of acknowledging, you know, the severity but
the reality of what happened. And I think that justice has allowed me to be more open to working on that grief. It's still something it's like two years on.
Was it like a closure? Like, is it like a.
It's closure to the fact that I need to worry about somebody paying the price. They are paying the price now. Yeah, never enough and it will never be enough, but they are paying for what they did. That little bit of justice has given me, I don't know, a sense of connection to being.
Able to now, Yeah, to heal like it it's like an acknowledgment. It's like an invitation or an acceptance, like to.
Worry about what happened. It's more about now focusing on healing. You know, this particular grief will stay with me forever, but I can do things to combat it and make sure that it doesn't become like a barrier to my mental health or success.
Yeah, because that's what it can be.
And I see that actually quite often in the young girls that I work with, it being something that stops them from doing something and stops them from believing in themselves. And I guess you know, I was that little girl once upon a time, you know, experiencing grief in the Aboriginal community. You experience it at such a young age, don't you reckon? Like you're going to funerals when you're really young. I was lucky. I say that I was lucky. But my fucking first funeral was my mom's.
That was really hard.
I didn't even know how funerals worked or run or you know, writing a eulogy when you're eleven years not eulogy, but writing, Yeah, it's eulogy, right, like when you're eleven years old. Yeah, it's like such a fucking surreal moment. But now the young girls that I'm working with are doing similar things, and I guess, like, I'm really lucky that I've got the skills now to be able to help and support them, and it's a sort of full
circle moment. But I just think, you know, grief has affected my life so much, and I really don't want.
It to affect theirs. But at the.
Same time, I know that they'll be stronger for it in some ways because I was myself. And I think, you know, if you look at the sort of light at the end of the tunnel, or you know, look at the lightest optimism and hope that an experience will either make you stronger or make you learn something.
You know what I say. Yeah, people say you win or you lose. No, you win or you learn.
You win or you learn, I agree, or you learn because I will choose not to lose.
The losing isn't even a thing, like, yes, it is a thing in terms like okay hate when I say it's not a thing, and then I go, yes, it is a thing. What I mean is every failure, failure in quotations, or everything that isn't meant for us is a learning Yes, it's a learning experience. And I've learned. I think that's the best piece of advice that I've ever been given. You either win or you learn, because like, losing isn't a thing.
Yeah, And I think you've built that obviously. You know, you've built that resilience. And I think that's what I'm worried about young kids these days, is that they haven't had time to build that resilience. Like, you know, phones have created this stimulation constantly that they're getting this like really big dopamine hit. You know, that they're not being
able to sell, soothe, self, manage. As soon as their phones are out of sight, out of mind, They're in the real world pretty much now, and they don't know how to deal with that. And I think it's really affecting our young people like overall, and I think when it comes to grief and our young people, especially the girls that I work with, the self manage and the self soothing is their phones and technology and that's not realistic, no, And you know they're not seeing things or you full
information around grief. They don't know what grief is. And so you know, if you're dealing with this like shock factor of losing someone, you go and do the sorry business you mourn. It doesn't just end there like I think. You know, people think, oh, so you do sorry business and you stay there until you're healed. It's not the case. You stay there until you feel like you can properly move on in life. I guess in a way where
your function, you know, and you allow that time. That's what that time is for which we are lucky that we give our kids the opportunity to do that. But I guess this documentary that I had the pleasure of, you know, doing a moderating a Q and A four was just so realistic to the rawness of young girls moving you know, away from home, which I feel was
myself and wanting to pursue a dream. But then sorry business and grief pulling them back to community and not being able to you know, suspend into the pursuits of you know, pursuing their dream kind of thing.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it being a barrier and I know that sorry, business is so important, but at the same time, I do feel like sometimes we we have to understand that it can pull back and pull back too far.
Yeah, does that make sense?
You know, it's equally as important self preservation, Yes, yes, self preserve.
That's the other side of it, right, that's the other side.
Yeah, And there's a balance there of being a part of ceremony and culture and understanding sorry, business and supporting family, but also don't do it to the detriment of your own mental health if you're not in a position self preserve. Yeah, it's super important.
But that's one that's one great tip.
So I guess with you know, we've spoken a little bit about our experiences with grief and then what we you know, how we feel it and what it kind of can look like. I guess what are some techniques or guess what are some techniques or I guess strategies that or advice even you would give to someone who is going on that journey of you know, experiencing grief sorry business or.
I guess wants to know what to expect.
Yeah, in a way, I think it's unique to everyone's experience and it depends where you're at in life, with what resources or what you're capable of doing. But I know that there's been different stages of my evolution in terms of my life where I've been at different points in my life where I've been able to handle certain things. Like when I was younger, I obviously saw a lot of went to a lot of funerals.
And even how many funerals do you reckon you've been to? Just a number, like, just to throw it out.
There, probably around thirty.
Fuck, that's a lot.
That is a lot, thirty not even thirty thirty yet, Yeah, that's one a year.
Yeah, I've been to a lot.
You wouldn't. And what's the earliest age that you went to a funeral? Do you reckon?
It would have been when I was about seven, Yeah, wow, six or seven six? I think I went to one before I went to foster care, and then the rest have been after.
So between the ages of seven and thirty, you've gone to roughly around thirty funerals.
I want to spy around twenty I think like twenty twenty five.
So one or two people a year pretty much.
Yeah, like I've had, I don't.
Lose that many people.
No, people don't go to that in their lifetime exactly.
Just I'm just putting it into perspective because I mean our listeners will probably listen to and be like, I've not been to a funeral ever, or I've not been to a funeral in five years, and we're losing family members every year, even every six months.
Yeah, it's that's a reality chock. The harsh reality of being a First Nations person is that in this country, like we lose a lot, we see a lot more than in terms of things that affect our mental health. I feel like we see way more you know, horrible shit. Yeah, tough stuff to consume. But I also want to say, you know, this has been a tough episode, and this
has obviously been a heavy one to chat about. So yeah, you know, if anyone is listening and they want to, you know, connect with someone, there's a really great hotline for mob It's one three yarn and it's a part of Lifeline, its whole own department where there are First Nations callers who can chat you through any experience that you want to onto them about. So yeah, reach out if you want to.
They listen non judgmentally, you know, non bias. But if you're non not First Nations, I guess you know, Lifeline is a really great hotline as well to call thirteen eleven fourteen. We'll put it in the show notes if you need some more resources and some other lines if you need. But no, I agree, I guess, And you know my advice would be with grief is again, you know, it's a very different experience for anyone.
Is to take it slow.
It's I know that's so simple, but it's to not have an expectation on what it should look like and what your healing should look like, and to I guess in the moments when you are feeling I guess a bit sad and you and you're like, oh this must you know, you maybe be more aware of those memm moments that you are a little bit sad because I do and I feel like, oh, oh I really miss my mum today, and I just like little I don't dwell in it, but I see in it for a
little bit and I think, yeah, I feel it, and I will have a little cry look at a photo of her burn a little candle. I'll just you know, have that little moment because I think that it's not gonna it takes maybe you know, twenty minutes out of my day to feel that's.
A healthy, healthy, healthy way to do it.
And you know, it's funny because in acting, it's like the emotions. Emotions don't take you, you take them. And I think that's really powerful that if you do have an emotion that that comes, you get to choose whether you take it or leave it.
And I feel like that's really important.
But I choose to take it every time because I think taking that it's not gonna it doesn't feel like it's gonna cost me. If anything, it's gonna, yeah, make me feel a shit, like a little.
Shitty for a little bit.
Yeah, but I'm gonna give it a time to feel shitty. You know, I'm not gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna feel shitty for a week, because that's not going to be healthy. And I guess this is a very pragmatic way of looking at it at some points as well. But yeah, like taking the emotion, that that rush of emotion, letting it happen, feel it, sit in it, reflect on it, and then say, okay, this is I've given enough time. Now I can get on with my day and if
it comes up again, let it. But then if it keeps coming up, being aware of that also, because if you're feeling sad for one week, two weeks, feeling sad more than two weeks, you know, maybe you need to go see someone, or maybe you need to talk to someone, Maybe you need to reach out and actually ask for some support. And I think that self awareness is really important to to your grief. You know, you're you know, learning how to grieve. There is a great resource. I
think it's also out there. This is book I read and it's actually how to Grieve by the Little Yellow Book.
I'll find it.
Pop it in the show notes. That's what we have time for today. You know, if anything that we've spoken about has affected you and you want to talk to someone, make sure you reach out. We will pop some resources in the show notes. But if you love what you hear on our pod makes you leave a little of you and give us a rating.
Yeah, if you want us to cover anything else on the pod reach out via our socials. My handle is at brook dot Blutton and Maddie's handlers at EA's Maddie Meals, and we will see you next week.
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