At this year’s One Door Mental Health Symposium in Sydney, Mind Board Director, lived experience advocate and award-winning poet Tim Heffernan shared Gaps – a powerful poem exploring the spaces that can exist throughout a person’s mental health journey.
Drawing on his lived experience, Tim reflects on the moments of connection, uncertainty and hope that can shape recovery. Through his poem, Tim gives voice to experiences that can be difficult to put into words, encouraging us to look beyond systems and diagnoses to see the whole person.
Tim says the ‘gaps’ in his poem reflect the ways psychosocial disability can be shaped not only by a person’s experiences, but also by the barriers, expectations and structures within society.
Mind and One Door thank Tim for generously allowing us to share Gaps with our community.
Gaps by Tim Heffernan
The space between us, between friends,
between having friends and not having friends.
The space between going to school to not going to school,
between having a job and not having a job.
To having a house or not having a house.
A family or the breeding out – sooth my dribbling pillow?
The space between getting up or staying in bed.
The lack of balance in our bank accounts.
The gap from getting up and going out the door.
The movement from incomprehension to comprehension,
from adolescence to adulthood.
From citizenship to incarceration.
That space from the hospital to our homes.
The things we were thinking and the things we could not say.
From being a service user, a consumer –
to being a human being,
from one service to another sentence.
There is a space about not having a voice to having a voice
and the gap between budgets allocated and budgets received.
The distance between two people.
The way you retain that distance.
The glass that separates me from you.
Are we the structural elements of this thing
or are we the gap filler holding together incompatible building material?
Are we the architects
or the public housing tenants existing in buildings unfit for purpose?
Do we deserve an opera house?
Tim’s poem was one of many highlights from the 2026 One Door Mental Health Symposium. You can watch the full recording of this year’s event on our YouTube channel.