Anthony C Baildon
Finding the courage to become visible!
There are experiences in life that shape us long before we have the words to understand them.
For me, that journey began as a young child growing up in Queensland in the 1970s.
Even then, I knew there was something about me that was different. I also knew, instinctively, that revealing too much of that difference could make me vulnerable.
So I learned to hide.
People may have described me as quiet, shy or a loner. In some ways, they were right.
But what they could not see was the reason behind it. I wasn’t withdrawing from people because I didn’t want friendships or connection.
I was protecting myself.
I learned to become invisible because invisibility felt safer than being discovered.
As I moved through primary school in Brisbane and later into high school in Bundaberg, in regional Queensland, with my dad, stepmother and brother, that sense of isolation became stronger.
The world around me was full of messages about what it meant to be “normal”, what was acceptable, and what happened to people who were perceived to be different.
The social climate of the 1980s made those messages particularly powerful.
Fear, prejudice and discrimination were visible everywhere.
The emergence of AIDS brought an extraordinary level of fear and stigma, while public attitudes towards people who were different could be openly hostile.
I witnessed and heard things that made it very clear to me that certain aspects of who I was were not safe to reveal.
So I adapted.
I became very good at playing the role that society seemed to expect of me.
I tried to fit in.
I tried to become the person I thought I was supposed to be.
Eventually, I followed the "traditional" path that was expected of me: education, career, marriage, children and family.
And I genuinely loved my children. I still do.
But underneath the life I had constructed was a part of myself that I had pushed so deeply away that, for a period of my life, I actually forgot it existed.
The cost of hiding:
The human mind is remarkably capable of protecting us from things we don’t yet know how to face.
For many years, I believed that I had simply made a series of choices about my life.
It took many years of reflection, professional support and difficult conversations to understand that those choices did not occur in isolation.
They were shaped by fear.
They were shaped by shame.
They were shaped by the expectations of society.
And they were shaped by a young boy’s very understandable desire to be safe.
Eventually, the walls I had built around myself became too difficult to maintain.
When I finally began confronting the truth about who I was, the consequences were enormous and devastating.
There was rejection, isolation and a period in which my life unravelled in ways that were extremely difficult to navigate.
There were times when I struggled deeply with my sense of worth and whether life was worth continuing.
Looking back now, however, I see something that I couldn’t see then.
What appeared from the outside to be someone “going off the rails” was, in reality, the consequence of years of hiding, rejection and accumulated pain.
The behaviour was a symptom of what had happened — not the beginning of the story!
My good friend and mentor, Shelley Argent, has taught me many things over the years too including about what a parent can be.
She encapsulates this best in her book "Just a Mum".
To me, though, Shelley is much more than just a defacto mum, she is a mentor to me so I can be just a parent!
That distinction has become incredibly important to me.
We often judge people by what we see at the point where they finally break, without ever asking what happened to them before they reached that point.
Choosing my children over myself:
Even during some of the most difficult periods of my life, one thing remained clear: I wanted my children to have opportunities that I had not had.
I grew up experiencing changes in schools, homes and friendships.
I knew what it was like to feel that the foundations beneath you could shift.
When my marriage ended, I therefore made decisions based on what I believed would provide stability for my two sons.
I worked to ensure they could remain in their home, continue at their school and maintain their friendships.
I made sacrifices, sometimes significant ones, because I wanted their childhood to have a stability that mine had lacked.
That experience taught me something else that has stayed with me: Sometimes love means putting someone else’s sense of belonging ahead of your own immediate needs.
Reclaiming the person I had lost:
One of the most unexpected chapters of my journey came many years later when I returned to the Bundaberg region in late 2023.
I went back partly to understand my younger self — to revisit the places, memories and experiences that had shaped me.
I thought I was going back to reclaim my teenage years.
What I eventually realised was that I wasn’t becoming a different person.
I was finally becoming the person I had been before I learned that I needed to hide.
I also reconnected with people from my school years in Bundaberg.
Some of them told me something that was both confronting and comforting: They had always known there was something different about me, and it wouldn’t have mattered to them.
For years I had built what I jokingly think of as the “Great Wall of Anthony” around myself.
I had spent so much energy making sure nobody could see through it that I didn’t realise how many people would have accepted me if I had simply allowed them to.
By the first half of 2024, something fundamentally changed.
I finally felt comfortable being visible.
I stopped trying to construct my life on foundations built from fear, expectation and the need to please others.
Instead, I began building it on something much stronger: Bedrock.
Why this matters to my teaching:
This is ultimately why inclusive education matters so deeply to me.
My experience has taught me that we rarely know what another person is carrying:
The quiet student may not be disengaged. They may be frightened;
The student who seems difficult may be dealing with circumstances nobody else can see;
The person who doesn’t participate may have spent years learning that being noticed is dangerous;
The learner who appears to lack confidence may simply never have experienced an environment where they felt genuinely safe enough to be themselves;
And sometimes, the person sitting quietly in the room may be carrying a story remarkably similar to mine.
That is why I believe inclusion is about far more than providing access or making reasonable adjustments.
True inclusion is about belonging.
It is about creating a learning environment where every person can look around the room and feel:
I am welcome here.
I am respected here.
I don’t have to hide who I am here.
I belong here.
This applies to every learner — regardless of their background, culture, identity, circumstances, ability, age, experiences or the barriers they may have encountered before arriving in our classroom.
We all know someone who has struggled.
A family member. A friend. A colleague.
Perhaps even ourselves!
Most people carry something that isn’t immediately visible.
My own experience has therefore made me particularly conscious of the power an educator has.
A teacher can unintentionally reinforce the barriers a learner has already experienced in life — or they can become one of the people who helps remove them.
I choose the latter.
I want my learners to know that their past does not define their potential, that difference is not something that needs to be hidden, and that the classroom can be a place where they are valued for who they are and what they can become.
No longer afraid of being seen:
I have spent a significant part of my life learning not to fear the things I once feared.
I have learned that vulnerability is not weakness.
It is often the beginning of strength.
I have learned that our most difficult experiences can become some of our greatest sources of empathy.
And I have learned that sometimes the person we spend years trying to find is the person who was there all along.
Today, I am proud of the person I have become.
Not because my journey was easy.
But because I survived it, learned from it, and ultimately found a way to turn those experiences into something positive.
That is the foundation upon which I now approach education.
Nobody should have to become invisible in order to belong.
And if my own story can help even one learner feel a little safer, a little more valued, or a little more confident that they have a place in the world, then the difficult parts of my journey have found a purpose.
Images below are of The Hummock in Bundaberg, Queensland.
