Video Transcript: What should you think about before joining the Network?

[Acknowledgement of Country: We acknowledge that our work takes place on lands that are under colonial occupation and that sovereignty has never been ceded. We hope to pay our deepest respects to Boon Wurrung Elders, past and present, and wish to extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People across this Country we know as Australia.]

June (Switchboard): We don’t have anything to prove to anyone and so we should really, yeah, do what feels right for us and I feel like, when I remember that, I’m able to re-centre myself.

[Title sequence - Switchboard’s Victoria’s National LGBTIQA+ Lived Experience Network: What should you think about before joining the Network?]

LEN Member 3: I guess the first thing you often think about is, look, I think people need to have all their issues solved before you come, and I don’t think that’s important at all. I think what really LEN has to offer people is exactly what it says, the lived experience - that people are able to bring all of themselves.

LEN Member 4: Which is quite a unique thing in life, I think, to have that beautiful feeling of being connected and accepted for who you are.

LEN Member 5: I know so many of us have benefitted from having a network around us. I think it is important that the Lived Experience Network is here for you at the time that is right for you.

Mia (Switchboard): In life, there are lots of ebbs and flows and that can correspond to our suicide experience.

LEN Member 4: It can stretch you a little bit, which in a growth kind of way is great, and it can offer a lot of support while that learning happens.

Joe: You know, we as individuals, we interact like a heartbeat, but we’re also part of a chorus and a choir. You’re all singing, but you just don’t take a breath at the same time. You take a breath at different times, because if you all took a breath at the same time in the middle of the music it would be like [big breath in] and that would ruin the performance, but what you do in a choir is you take breaths at different times, but the tune is carried on the whole time, and that’s about having faith in the person that’s standing right next to you, that they are singing when you’re not singing, and you will sing when they’re not singing, and I think that that is community, that’s the Network.

June (Switchboard): We make these spaces our own and I think that’s the main thing that I would encourage, is not coming in with the expectation that you need to mould yourself to the space, but actually that the space will mould itself to you.

LEN Member 5: If you feel ready to think about your story and telling your story, if you think that you see your experience with suicide, if you think that you see your experience with suicide in terms of how it connects with our community, I think those are all positive reasons to join.

LEN Member 2: There’s no pressure to do a certain thing, you can be part in different ways. You could possibly send through your written words, or you could talk, or you can just connect in making little differences to individuals lives, but I think it also actually makes a difference to your own life and you don’t realise how much it actually does help you in your journey until you become part of it.

[End Titles:

The National LGBTQIA+ Lived Experience Network is a community of LGBTQIA+ people with lived experience of suicide, working to share their story and experiences to help advocate and shape LGBTIQA+ suicide prevention work.

We would love to have you join us.

Visit charlee.org.au or email livedexperience@switchboard.org.au to learn more.

Filmed and edited by May as Well Productions.]

End transcript.