Holding Both Worlds at Once

When I wrote 'Why Can't They Just Fix Themselves', I hadn’t yet moved to England. Now, I live in the heart of the colonising world, and everything feels different. 

It’s strange, unsettling, even, to be here at times. To see the machinery of tradition, power, and prestige not from a distance, but from within its well-oiled corridors. And sometimes, without even trying, I find myself pulled into spaces I would never willingly choose to be in. Spaces that feel absurd and deeply ironic, as if the universe were nudging me to confront my own discomfort more directly. To test my values. To ask myself what I truly stand for. 

One night captures this feeling better than any. I had just finished working with a young Eritrean boy, someone I supported through my role in the refugee sector. He had spent six months homeless on the streets of London, all because of his immigration status. He had already fled significant persecution only to arrive here and be placed in destitution once again. 

That evening, I clocked off and was invited to a formal dinner at an elite institution. I won’t name it, but it was a place not unlike Oxford's , where black-tie dinners occur twice a week not to fundraise or support any cause, but simply to preserve tradition. 

Every fiber of my being wanted to run. I didn’t belong there. I didn’t want to belong there. But I went, through association, through obligation. 

We were served canapés in an ornate drawing room, then ushered into a grand hall with a oversized fireplace and a long oak table absurdly decorated in candelabras and too many cutlery choices.

We stood silently behind our chairs, waiting for the head of the table to recite a line in Latin before we could sit. The servers wore tailcoats. The dinner stretched into five lavish courses. The men around me talked about money and the challenge of hiring the right soprano for their next concert, while I sat there haunted by the image of the young man I had just left; cold, displaced, and unseen. 

And then came the toast. I assumed it would be to a guest. But no, we all raised our glasses to the Church and the King. That was the moment, as dramatic as this may seem, I knew I was witnessing something I could never unsee. 

I left shaken. Later that night, I cried. Not just for the boy I was helping, not just for the surreal decadence of the dinner, but because I now felt the weight of the systems I had always known were unjust. It's one thing to study colonial legacy, to understand inequality intellectually. It's another to live in a place that proudly upholds those structures, under the guise of tradition, of civility, of national pride, and see how hollow and performative it truly is. 

In my work, whether in a homeless hostel tucked into the same postcode as million-pound flats, or alongside mothers and children seeking asylum, I see the consequences of this system every day.

Like the mother and daughter I met: stateless, surviving in an appointed budget hotel for over two years. They receive £17.80 a week. It doesn’t cover the bus to school. They are not allowed to work. Not allowed to contribute. Not allowed to participate. They exist in suspended time, existing in limbo, on the margins of a society that claims to be civilised while they await their claim for asylum with no deadline.

And yet, a few suburbs over, five-course dinners are served under oil paintings of men who built empires on suffering. These traditions continue, not because they’re meaningful, but because they comfort those in power. Because they reinforce a culture of entitlement that still sees wealth and whiteness as the default. 

I often ask myself: why aren’t more people enraged by this? Why aren’t we more uncomfortable? 

England is steeped in institutional tradition. But tradition, when unexamined, becomes a tool for erasure. It masks injustice in robes and regalia. It disguises cruelty as order. 

I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable here. I don’t want to be. 

Living in England has forced me to face the coloniser's world not just ideologically, but physically. I am here now, walking its polished floors, sitting under its portraits, eating at its long, oak tables while the fire rages and Latin toasts echo. It's one thing to know these spaces exist; it's another to find yourself inside them, not as an intruder, but as a tolerated guest. And the violence of that dissonance, to hold both worlds at once, is something I haven't yet found the words to fully hold. 

The contrast is often unbearable.

To spend the day working with a young man from Eritrea who has been homeless on the streets of London, criminalised and dehumanised for his immigration status, traumatized by his past, locked out of every system of support, and then to be escorted, by association, into a world of five-course meals, champagne, and tradition-for-tradition’s-sake. And I do mean by association. I love someone deeply whose life is intimately tied to these spaces. But I also know that my ability to enter them, even unwillingly, even uncomfortably, is a privilege in itself. Yes, I am there by invitation, by love, by obligation. But I am also there by choice. And I have to own that. 

It’s an almost dystopian experience: to listen to white men at dinner discuss their anxieties over booking the right tenor their next concert, while across town, the people I work wit, refugees, survivors of human trafficking, reoffenders trying to rebuild their lives, are scraping together bus fare or sleeping on a hostel floor without access to heating and food. And it’s not theoretical. It’s real. I hold both those realities in my body each day. 

The ability to shift between these worlds is a kind of violence, too. Even when I reject the values upheld in those privileged spaces, I still get to walk out of them. I get to choose not to read the news when it’s too heavy. I get to step back when the work becomes overwhelming. And that’s the cruel part of privilege: not just what you get, but what you get to ignore. 

What’s perhaps most disturbing is how normalised these traditions have become in England. In Australia, colonisation is a visible wound. But here, it’s a badge of pride. Classism is coded as culture. Royalism as identity. Opulence as heritage. It’s so deeply entrenched that to question it feels like heresy. But I must. Because the people I work wit, whose pain is dismissed, delayed, or displaced, are still suffering under the same systems upheld in those dining rooms. And if I remain silent in those spaces, even in discomfort, I become part of that system, too. 

I don’t pretend to have resolved the dissonance. I still cry when I leave spaces like that dinner. I still feel the emotional cost of proximity. But I refuse to be numb. I refuse to romanticise tradition when it feeds on exclusion. And I refuse to stop asking: why aren’t more of us enraged? 

Because I am. And I won’t apologise for it.