Dear Carers (paid and unpaid),
I know your suffering is immense, unending and life destroying. I have lived the pain of being shunned by the NHS, the key stakeholder responsible for the safeguarding of ALL PATIENTS under their treatment and care, and that includes you.
By anonymously sharing your stories, you become able to expose the injustices lived and endured with utter frankness and transparency. Every story will become permissible in a court room one day, one that pays the carers their worth and value as unpaid stakeholders in the government’s agenda to take care of the vulnerable. I lost my job, not because I became ill, but because suddenly a family member needed too much help and so I was forced to stop working. If someone needs that much care, should a then 32-year-old have to quit the profession of primary school teaching to become an unpaid advocate and carer for someone that was frighteningly unwell? The answer is no. Just no.
Becoming a carer led to the loss of my life as I knew it. We both have no chance at present, of regaining our right to independence, nor health and the ultimate safety that it provides, including financial security. I have counted the damages owed to me, they are many and varied. Count yours too. We shall present our pain to the world in the form of a collective advocacy anthology, one with all names and locations changed. With such a transparent display of the suffering born from loving someone living in perpetual need of NHS treatment and/or care, we may just see direct impact when we repurpose your stories for a collective action law suit, one provoked upon the exposure of criminal levels of negligence.
We can, together, bring an end to the cycles of uninterrupted suffering endured, and seek remedy for the damages already incurred, including those inflicted upon your own health and financial safety. Â I suspect the pain touches lives by the thousands, maybe even the millions; let us find out, and find safety as a demographic of unpaid, overworked, key government stakeholders, by coming together in writing, via our oldest tradition, that of storytelling. Let us, in this instance, not be weighed down by words like ‘evidence’ or ‘prove it’, let us simply be who we are and know what we have lived as a collective of sacrificed human beings; let us tell our stories, and trust my publishing partners, Faith in Change, to do the rest and grow a purpose out of all of that pain. Even if all we get is a cathartic motion of vindication, let that be enough.
We cannot know the destination, but without taking steps towards change the scarier thing happens… everything stays the same.
With love and utter compassion,
Ana Maria Santuario.
p.s. Faith in Change Publishing are launching with 12 Collective Social Anthologies. You may download the letters inviting The People of the UK to write for their health, safety and freedom, here:
© Santuario, Ana Maria (2024). An Invitation to Write, for Faith in Change Publishing, London.
Let us write to save ourselves! In transparency, do we dwell no longer in the shadows? Let the light be found in reality, truth, integrity and respect, for one another, as well as ourselves.
Do you have a letter that you wish to send to the world?
Submissions are open at Faith in Change Publishing, who are creating anthology, after anthology, of UK-focused human interest stories. By claiming our right to our Freedom of Speech in this professional, unguarded, potentially anonymous manner, does the age old tradition of letter writing lend itself to the call for equality, freedom, safety and change?
Collectively, Ana Maria Ltd., The Ana Maria Foundation and Faith in Change Publishing Ltd., work to gather intelligence by embracing the ancient wisdom and power of storytelling. Such powerful data collection can do nothing but provoke change and force forward motion. It is only in the denial and silencing of reality that suffering persists. The foundations have been laid, let us see what we can grow when we work together, for the good of everyone on our soil.