Berty Nghiem – Automotive Digital Content Strategist

Category: Hope

  • Cars For Hope teams up with Motorsport Australia for Suicide Prevention

    Cars For Hope teams up with Motorsport Australia for Suicide Prevention

    This Saturday is World Suicide Prevention Day and there’s no secret that this is something very close to my heart. For the past month as part of Cars For Hope’s #IAMDRIVEN campaign we’ve been asking people to answer our question ‘What drives you?’. And you know it wasn’t until last night that I realised that I’ve never really answered that question.

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    The last 5 years with Cars For Hope has been an amazing ride and I feel like it’s just such a privilege to bring my heart to work every day. I get to wake up every day and write things that I really believe and say things that I really believe. I get to be creative trying to encourage people and move people to know that it’s okay to be honest and that it’s okay to ask for help. And the other part of it is I get to hear the best stories and compliments, sometimes even people saying they’re still alive and getting help because of the work that we do. It’s so incredibly humbling and encouraging.

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    Today, I’m also very proud to announce a collaboration between Cars For Hope and Motorsport Australia (Formerly the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport – CAMS) and Shannons Nationals this weekend at Phillip Island which sees over 120 competing cars wearing Cars For Hope stickers throughout the event in support of mental health awareness and World Suicide Prevention Day.

    Press Release: https://portal.cams.com.au/media/news/latest-news/cams-joins-cars-for-hope

     

  • The Story of Cars For Hope

    The Story of Cars For Hope

    Cars For Hope began as a way to tell the story of our friend, Annabel. It was our way to remind her that she matters and we love her. She was growing up and starting to figure out how our world works, how our world thinks, and what our world thinks is important. For a long time she struggled with self-injury and she believed the lie that the world had forgotten about her. The cuts on her wrist and thighs are images I’ll never be able to keep from my memory, but the most heart-wrenching feeling is seeing a loved one in a state where they have no urge to be picked up. It has to be one of the worst feelings one could ever experience.

    I remember sitting in the Doctor’s waiting room and not knowing what to expect. I was just 18 and failing to comprehend what was going on. I simply did not understand it. But it was a turning point for me because I realised that while there was still air pumping through her lungs, something more had to be done.

    We started out small. We placed a sticker on our car and we went racing. People came up to us wondering what the sticker meant and we would tell them the story behind it. These days there are thousands of stickers and tens of thousands of people helping to spread the message across Australia and the world.

    I think the reason the whole Cars For Hope campaign started to grow is because so many were pleased to embrace the message behind it.  They would be like, “Oh, that’s me. Annabel is me.” There are so many ways you can connect with her character and they always connect with her, no matter what place or what country they’re in. They feel the shit that she’s going through, and they’re living it. So they started giving that feedback and saying “I’m an Annabel because I’m depressed and I hate my family, or I’m creative and I love building cars but people don’t understand it.” I’ve been connected to the issue of self-injury for about four or five years, and I know that what people need to hear more than anything is that they’re not alone.

    There’s a mini message built into the story behind Cars For Hope. It reads something like: “Yeah, I’m scared, I’m depressed, I’m obsessed, I’m whatever, but I’m also an Annabel because there’s a million Annabels and they’re all going through crazy shit.” But it is our absolute pleasure and honour to say that hope is real and that recovery is possible.

    We have heard stories from all over the world.
    From all ages, genders and races.
    We have heard from people helping people.
    We have heard from those who were once confused with what depression actually is.
    We have heard from people taking the brave steps towards help and healing.
    We have heard from people sitting across from their doctor or counsellor for the first time,
    And we will continue to hear from people pursuing stability and full recovery.

    That’s what we’re all about.

  • What I did on Monday mornings.

    What I did on Monday mornings.

    As a 90’s kid most of us would have grown up spending our mornings watching Cheez TV before we left for school. From Tuesdays to Fridays I was no different; my mornings were dedicated to the Ninja Turtles, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and the list goes on. But come Monday mornings I’d probably be out of the loop with my classmates as they speak about how Goku just dropped a spirit bomb on Frieza. I’d be a little bit confused as from an age of 5 I grew up watching the Indycar series on Monday mornings. Usually I’d never get the chance to watch the races live since the series is predominantly based in the USA and I would have been tucked into bed by my mother well before these races had begun. So instead my older brother had each race taped on video (Yes we still used VCR’s back then) ready for me to watch them the next morning. I stumbled across our collection of tapes today and we just about have every race from the early 90’s to about 2006. Watching these races was my childhood and has had huge effect on my interest in motor racing and cars. You could say without these tapes I would not be the person I am today.

  • What That Cars For Hope Sticker Means

    It’s New Year’s Eve, well New Year’s day now as I’m writing this post.
    We’re driving back to Sydney from Gosford.
    We spot this Nissan on the freeway.
    There is a Cars For Hope sticker on the side window.
    We don’t know whose car it is or how the sticker got there.
    But we know what that sticker means.

    It means that millions of people struggle with depression.
    It means that there are even more supporters, friends and family of those suffering from depression are also struggling.
    It means that what we do with our pain – how we respond to it – matters. Perhaps it is one of the biggest questions we get to answer in this life.
    It is still a misunderstood mental illness.

    Love and depression are very similar. They can both be turned into awful clichés and so we reject them for their commonness, their fallacy. They are paraded like teenage girl ideals and nothing more. Yet when it truly happens to you, it feels so personal, like it has never happened to anyone else before. Like no one, even someone experiencing the same thing, will ever understand the way you feel at this very moment.

    And we know this because we are, in fact, real life, people, human beings.
    Deep down we know that you can snap out of being unhappy or a bit down, but you, cannot, snap out of an illness.
    We know that nobody wants to be sick and unable to function or enjoy life.

    But it is our absolute pleasure and honour to say that hope is real and that recovery is possible.
    We have heard stories from all over the world.
    From all ages, genders and races.
    We have heard from people helping people.
    We have heard from those who were once confused with what depression actually is.
    We have heard from people taking the brave steps towards help and healing.
    We have heard from people sitting across from their doctor or counsellor for the first time,
    And we will continue to hear from people pursuing stability and full recovery.

    This is what that sticker means.

    Happy new year everybody.

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