Love Across Borders Publishing
Knowledge earned by living something firsthand, and why it sits at the centre of the books, the imprint, and the platform.
Lived experience is the understanding a person gains by living through something themselves: an illness, a country, a loss, a recovery, a way of working. It is distinct from expertise gathered at a distance, and it cannot be transferred by reading about it.
I have spent twenty-five years accumulating it on purpose and by accident, across close to one hundred countries, two large online communities, years in harm reduction, and a body that keeps revising the terms. The books are what came out of that.
Lived experience is what you know because it happened to you. Not a study you read, not a case you managed. The difference shows up in the detail: the hour of the day, the smell of the room, the thing nobody warns you about.
Harm reduction taught me this fast. The person who has used drugs knows things about staying alive that no protocol contains. That knowledge is evidence, and treating it as anecdote is how systems keep failing the people inside them.
One border crossing is a story. A hundred countries is a way of seeing. Illness, sight loss, PTSD, Crohn's: none of it was chosen, and all of it became a lens I now write through rather than around.
Most lives are documented as a job history, which is the least interesting record a person leaves. Writing the rest down, honestly and while you still remember it, is the whole argument behind everything on this site.
A Life Experience: The Shaun Apple Story is the long version: the memoir that turned decades of borders, friends, mistakes and recoveries into a single record.
Life of Experience is the platform built on the same idea: a way to record a life by what you have actually lived rather than where you have been employed. The wider catalog sits with Love Across Borders Publishing.