Heather Brooke Quotes

If you believe the promise that an authoritarian state makes that if it has enough knowledge on every citizen it will keep people safe. I think that’s a false promise. It doesn’t actually happen. If that was the case then East Germany would be a really incredible place to live and in fact it wasn’t, it was really horrible, most of these places were really horrible.

The survival of journalism in the digital age rests on its unique selling point: serving this public interest. Fail or forget to do that, and it has no future.

Journalists are, or ought to be, the public's hired guns sent out to collect information, question it, verify it and distil it to what is important and true. This takes time and skill, and is the only thing a journalist does that marks him or her out as a professional. It's also the reason why anyone would choose well-known newspaper's website over an unknown blog.

By making everything secure [governments] have degraded the quality of secrecy.

It is scrutiny by the general public that keeps the powerful honest.

So shame can help protect us, but it can also become a prison. It precludes change. As long as we remain invisible, as long as we dim our light, or hide behind a persona, we curtail our ability to be truly known by others and form meaningful connections.

Why do women go around feeling so embarrassed of ourselves? Why do we wind up feeling we have to be perfect, or pure, pretty or agreeable just to gain a modicum of acceptance? I think it’s because that’s actually the fact of being a woman in a patriarchal society.

What to do? In therapy there’s a saying that ‘the way through is in’. Instead of avoiding pain, go through it. My investigative mindset liked this and so I decided to investigate myself. I started therapy and also began writing more creatively. It’s how I wrote as a child until shame cloaked my ability to be seen.

Suddenly other people thought me admirable and important. When they did, I felt good. But also nervous because what if they suddenly changed their mind? I could see other famous people fall from the public’s favour, admiration turning to envy or hatred. People wrote admiring letters to me, but I couldn’t take it in because I thought ‘they don’t really know me’. They only knew the version of me I put on display - that of the tough tenacious reporter, battling for the people’s right to know. They didn’t know my aching emptiness, my deep hunger to be known. I learned that being seen is not the same as being known. Outsourcing my self-worth to total strangers, I realised, was not a good idea.

The need to be seen is fundamental to all humans. In healthy development, a child gets appropriate amounts of attention and recognition, which leads to a secure sense of self worth. If we are also accepted in our fullness then we’ve hit the developmental jackpot and become superbly well-adjusted adults. But many of us didn’t get that level of attention, attunement or acceptance. In my own case, I was left with a hunger and yearning to be known and valued.

In elementary school, I loved Show and Tell. I loved to hunt around my house for an object I could bring to school with a story. It’s not hard to see why I was drawn to journalism - being a reporter is the grown-up version of Show and Tell. I also loved to show off and perform bike and roller-skating stunts. Yet somewhere along the way I lost the joy of being seen. Instead, starting in my teenage years, the desire came coupled with shame, dread, anxiety, embarrassment, even outright mortification. I don’t think I’m unusual in this, especially among women.

One of the big breakthroughs came when I started gardening. Nature is always the best teacher. It IS the universe. It IS life/death/rebirth. Trees fall, plants die, but all the time they’re also being reborn. I can’t help but notice the universe has provided all the conditions for life not just to survive but to thrive.

As a newspaper reporter, I covered crime, then politics then investigations. None could be described as abundant with happiness. Yet I didn’t feel unhappy reporting on these realities. They were truths that needed to be told. Truth needs to be told regardless of how it makes people feel, and more often than not it makes people feel bad before it makes them feel good. It’s crucial to get through that initial pain, because only by doing so, and seeing reality as it is, can we learn and change.

I used to be suspicious of happiness. It’s not that I yearned to be unhappy, but too often the quest for happiness was, to my mind, tied up with delusional thinking. It involved putting on blinkers, so the darker, sadder, more disturbing aspects of reality were blanked out. I’ve always had a ravenous curiosity for truth. I want to understand life and get to its essence, so putting on blinkers was not for me.

This moral superiority reveals something important. This group isn’t dealing with reality, which is nuanced and interdependent, but with absolutes. And they aren’t interested in compromise or solutions, but moral purity. Their idea of moral purity. You can share the same overall goal - be that an end to fossil fuels, sexism, racism, capitalism, you name it - but these groups demand fealty to their language and their specific interpretation of the problem. They aren’t interested in any views other than their own. You know what that sounds like? Totalitarianism.