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I write about the things
modern culture struggles
to say out loud.

Who I Am

I’m Claire Von Cleveland — a writer, speaker, and consultant based in Palm Springs, California. My work sits at the intersection of power, shame, media, and the gap between what institutions say and what they actually do.

I don’t write from a research desk or an ideological position. I write from proximity. Married to a formerly incarcerated man who has spoken publicly for years about childhood abuse, prison, and redemption, I have lived inside the blast radius of systemic exclusion, viral shame, and institutional contradiction. That proximity is my credential.

My essays are long-form and precise. They are written for people who already sense that something is wrong with the way we talk about redemption, about shame, about certainty, about pain — and who want someone to name it clearly.

What I Write About

These are the questions I keep returning to:

  • How shame operates as social control — not a personal failing, but a mechanism that determines who is allowed to speak and who isn’t.
  • How trauma becomes content — and what is lost when a person’s most painful experience is stripped of name, context, and authorship and circulated for attention.
  • How institutions quietly contradict themselves — celebrating redemption in public while enforcing exclusion in practice.
  • How certainty travels — and why the most confident takes on other people’s realities are often more about the speaker’s identity than the subject.
  • What reinvention actually requires — not the vision-board version, but the honest account of what it costs to walk away from a life that no longer fits.
Where to Begin

Five essays, in the order I’d recommend reading them.

01
Redemption in Theory, Discrimination in Practice
The essay that started everything. On why organisations that publicly champion second chances quietly enforce exclusion — and what it costs the families absorbing the damage.
Read the essay →
02
Shame, and Those Who Guard the Silence
On why the most common male response to a man disclosing abuse is mockery — and who is watching from the edges, deciding whether it is safe to speak.
Read the essay →
03
The Art of Clickbait
On what happens when a thirty-second clip travels millions of times without a name attached — and what the algorithm is actually rewarding.
Read the essay →
04
Who We Listen To — and Why
On authority, certainty, and the mechanics of how confident voices shape what we believe — and the real cost of the distance between opinion and expertise.
Read the essay →
05
I Can’t Find the Runway
On political homelessness, ideological certainty, and the growing difficulty of thinking honestly in public without being immediately categorised.
Read the essay →
If You Want to Go Deeper

When you subscribe, you get new essays delivered directly — usually one every few weeks, sometimes more. They are long-form, carefully written, and not optimised for sharing. They are written for people who want to think, not react.

You also get occasional notes on what I am reading, watching, or working through — the things that don’t make it into essays but feel worth saying to the people paying attention.

No noise. No content calendar. Just the work.

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“Redemption is widely celebrated as an idea. It is narrowly tolerated as a reality.”

— Claire Von Cleveland