"Many things can be true at once," Grace Tame says.
It's something the 2021 Australian of the Year knows all too well. You can be grateful the awareness your story brings to such an important cause. But on the flip side, it comes with relentless media scrutiny, a torrent of requests and invitations to events, seemingly endless interstate travel, and multi-directional pressures.
"When you're unexpectedly thrust ... onto a very sizable platform, you need to - I don't like to use the word navigate, but perhaps there's not a better word for that. You're learning to fly by the seat of your pants," she says over Zoom.
Three years on from being named Australian of the Year, the advocate is reflecting on surviving the public eye in her upcoming speaking tour, Lightening the Load with Grace Tame, which is at the Canberra Theatre Centre on September 29.
It's a chance for Canberrans to hear her views on being placed in the spotlight, as well as the triumphs and challenges of establishing the Grace Tame Foundation and the ongoing fight against child sexual abuse in Australia.
It's a heavy topic for a Wednesday night at the theatre. It's also a heavy topic that Tame finds herself surrounded by daily - both through the continual processing of her personal experience and her advocacy work.
Knowing this only makes Tame's sharp wit and ability to find humour - traits which she has become known for - all the more remarkable. Not to mention, they're the two things that will help the upcoming event be just as uplifting as it is scornful.
"It's obviously really difficult subject matter that I find myself stewing in, day in and day out," Tame says.
"And I think one of the things that people have been receptive to over the years is that I've stayed true to myself throughout it, which can be hard to do.
"Because there have been so many stereotypes of what a survivor of child sexual abuse should be like, should look like, should act like. I think that helping to just shatter all of that and to bring everyone along with that whole journey ... [is] so vital. It's just another step in that process."
Tame was 26 years old when she was named Australian of the Year - which is, as she points out, just one year after the human brain finishes developing.
It's one of the many curses of childhood trauma - you're experiencing something really complex at a young age, without the capacity to mentally start working through it.
"You're not just experiencing physical assaults that do permanent damage to the undeveloped body, you experience deep penetrating psychological abuse that you can store in your cells, but you don't have the neural architecture to actually unpack yet," she says.
"You have to wait until your brain has finished developing until you can actually understand it and process it.
"And once I got to that age, then I was put under this massive spotlight. I had all these eyes on me while my brain was going, 'Oh, hang on. Now we're going to ... unravel all this stuff at the same time.' So it was a really bizarre set of experiences that I was having. There's no guidebook for that cocktail of circumstances."
Tame has previously said in interviews and her 2022 memoir The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner that she felt like she was required to qualify herself through her trauma, rather than her advocacy.
"Everyone else had their paper credentials, everyone else had their degree ... and me, I was reduced to the thing that happened to me, the abuse that was perpetrated against me and I was told that wouldn't happen," she told The Canberra Times in 2022.
All the while she's only just starting to mentally process the sexual abuse inflicted on her as a 15-year-old by her teacher.
But because Tame's own abuse is at the forefront of her advocacy, it opened her up to something that she couldn't prepare for - the sheer volume of disclosures from other individuals about their own experiences with abuse. People aren't necessarily searching for answers, but rather the chance to be heard.
It's something Tame still gets - although not to the same degree she did in the months that followed January 25, 2021. Those months saw a flood of disclosures come through various channels, even through people she is close to.
"I understand that as somebody who has been deeply traumatised and who understands that experience of needing connection because that's what trauma is," she says.
"It's this broken, decimated attachment that is looking to reattach to heal and to form another bond, to fill a void and at different stages in the processing of that trauma it can be very myopic - it doesn't see beyond it's tunnel vision and that's not a selfish thing. It's a natural thing."
Tame says it's a privilege to be the point person for so many people's experiences. But that doesn't change the fact that she is just one person - not a service - which means there is also pressure there too.
She says her approach has always been to triage the situation and direct people to the right services, depending on their needs.
"If I could help every individual that is in need, I would."
Tame founded the Grace Tame Foundation in December 2021, in a bid to eradicate child sexual abuse in Australia through cultural and structural change. Up until recently, Tame was the chief executive, but the foundation made an announcement that she would be transitioning into an advocacy role within the foundation - something which Tame says was always the long-term plan.
And that advocacy work is more and more focused on the online world, and tackling incestual child abuse.
"There's still a lot of work to be done - we still especially have a lot of work to do in unpacking incest, in really facing it," Tame says.
"You know, 80 per cent of all child sexual abuse is incest. We've, rightly so, dragged institutions over hot coals and I think that's a good thing and again, there's still work to be done there.
"But when we think about keeping children safe, when we think about the victimisation to perpetration cycle and this lens of intergenerational trauma that we need to be looking at this issue through, we just don't want to look at incest. It's a really big problem."
When it comes to the online space, however, Tame is co-authoring a new book with Monash University's Campbell Wilson. The Unfair Fight is set to examine the evolving landscape of online child sexual abuse and how to fight back.
The online space might as well be the Wild West - there are no hardline jurisdictions and often the online space bleeds into the offline world. Child sex offenders will often use technology to offend offline as well.
"Child sex offenders, they were the early adopters of technologies," Tame says.
"When the internet boomed in the 1980s, they were among the first criminals to be using these encrypted messaging portals to transmit child sexual abuse material, to organise abuse, to create information and techniques with each other.
"So we're looking at the history of this particular type of crime and how it's evolving with new technologies, in particular generative AI and what that means for law enforcement but what it means for the community more broadly and especially children and what we can do to safeguard children."
A large portion of Tame's advocacy now focuses on this space. The ease of creating, distributing and proliferating child sexual abuse material online, means that it's a crucial element to tackling the issue as a whole.
According to a University of New South Wales anonymous survey of child sexual offending behaviours and attitudes among Australian men last year, it's more damning than first thought.
"One in 10 Australian men has offended against a child and they found that two thirds of this offending is occurring online," Tame says.
"And so we're seeing more and more offending take place online.
"But again, a lot of that has to do with just the speed at which you can send out material and trade material. It doesn't mean that offending is taking place less in person, it just means you can only abuse so many children at once in person. But you can send out lots of material online."
Just before our interview, Tame was on a roundtable led by Domestic Family and Sexual Violence Commissioner Micaela Cronin. It's work such as this - away from the cameras and the spotlight - that the public largely doesn't realise she does.
The number one thing exacerbating many of the issues is underfunding.
"If services were adequately funded [it would help] and also they were funded based on outcomes as opposed to these other bullshit KPIs about ... delivering this or delivering that," Tame says.
"How are we measuring what success is? What are the outcomes for the children that these services are supposed to be providing for?
"If they were staffed adequately, the families that were interacting with these services would have staff, not just for the adults, they'd have staff for these children and children would not just be ... falling through the cracks of all of these systems that are just sagging under the weight of too much need and not enough funding.
"But the government isn't incentivised to do anything. Because they've got the companies breathing down their necks and the tech companies want to make money. And there's not a lot of money to be made in child protection, unfortunately."
Grace Tame will be at the Canberra Theatre Centre on September 29. Tickets at canberratheatrecentre.com.au.
