We’d been talking for a while over coffee (mine) and iced chocolate (hers). She had her notebook in front of her, in which she kept all the information she needed to give me and where she recorded what she couldn’t afford to forget.

She finished writing some notes and looked up at me. And then her eyes changed. She stared at me, and I didn’t know the person looking back. After a moment, the woman I had been meeting with for a few months was again sitting in the chair across from me at the coffee shop. This shook me and I became hyper-alert for the rest of our meeting, but nothing else happened.

This was the first, and only time, that I had seen a shift in personality that can be part of schizophrenia. My coffee partner was a woman about 10 years younger than me - highly intelligent and university educated - who had, because of mental illness, found herself in vulnerable housing and attempting to navigate various government departments in search of a safer place to live. She was often dishevelled and the drugs she was on had a number of side effects, including incontinence.

She’d reached out to me as her local Salvo officer for support.

Over the course of a couple of years, I accompanied her to doctor’s appointments, wrote letters to different government services, visited her flat and went with her as she called in at her mother’s place from time to time. Eventually, we found her a new place to live where she didn’t have to walk past people exchanging drugs and where she wasn’t afraid of being assaulted.

This woman was so courageous.

Just showing up in the world when you have a mental illness, let alone dealing with government departments and living arrangements that left her exposed to abuse and trauma, takes immense courage. But she not only showed up, she reached out to me for help. And she stayed the course as together we worked our way through meeting after meeting and sent letter after letter until she achieved the outcome she needed. Of all the work I did in Canberra with the Salvos, this was the most satisfying and the achievement of which I am most proud.



Courage is, at its core, all about the heart - from Old French corage, from Latin cor meaning ‘heart’.

This woman had heart. She followed what she knew her heart needed – safety. And, when she couldn’t do it on her own, she reached out for help.

That takes courage.