The Leeches Didn’t Ask

How a rainforest walk triggered my fire for consent.

Last Sunday, I was escaping the heat of late summer here in Australia, exploring the rainforest walk in the Orana East Forest near Coffs Harbour, when I first noticed them.

Tiny little leeches.

I felt a gentle movement and checked my legs to see if I had walked through a low-hanging cobweb (my face already showing the remnants of an earlier encounter). I spied some delicate threads on my shoes — thin, dark, moving. Rapidly inching their way upward with surprising determination.

If you’ve ever encountered rainforest leeches, you’ll know the feeling. You brush them off instinctively, slightly horrified at the idea of them attaching themselves to your skin. This is exactly what I did.

Flick. Flick. Flick.

And then, a strange thought crossed my mind: You didn’t ask.

Of course, leeches don’t ask for permission as they search for food. Their entire survival strategy depends on attaching themselves quietly and taking what they need. There was no request, no negotiation, just an assumption that they could take what they wanted by attaching themselves to me as a host.

This thought lingered in my subconscious for several days after I left the rainforest. I wondered about consent as I listened to some podcasts discussing consent and International Women’s Day. Then it came up again in conversations in a couple of Aboriginal cultural exhibition spaces. Because, unlike leeches, humans do have choices about how we take from one another.

And writers, in particular, live in a strange ethical landscape when it comes to this. We notice things:

We overhear conversations in cafés.
We observe people enjoying picnics in parks.
We remember fragments of stories someone shared with us.

These fragments can appear in our work. They might emerge as a line of dialogue, or as the setting to ground a scene in time and place. Writers are collectors, commentators and sharers of human experiences.

My rainforest encounter prompted a moment of reflection: where is the line between observing life and quietly taking from it? This is especially poignant for many of my clients who write memoirs or share case studies in their nonfiction books. Remember to ask for permission.

I’ve also found myself reflecting on another aspect of communication recently, and I have felt detached from writing. I wrote about this in my newsletter, A Little Birdie Told Me, just this week. For the past little while, I’ve felt like I’ve been living inside an egg. Not simply stuck. Or lost. Just… incubating?

It’s a curious, creative state where something is shifting internally, but the words haven’t fully arrived yet. The old explanations no longer quite fit, and the new ones are still forming somewhere below the surface. Instead of having a clear understanding, there are only fragments. I have questions. I am collecting clues as though upon a treasure hunt. There is a persistent pull of curiosity that refuses to leave.

Like the leeches who stubbornly clung to the insides of my socks (I won’t share the bloody imagery with you here). And my pondering about consent to share others’ experiences. It reminded me of a question commonly asked by new writers when they first consider working with a book coach or editor: “If I share my ideas with you… Will they still belong to me?”

This question is driven by a basic human need: Trust.

A piece of writing — especially a book — often contains years of lived experience, personal insights, and deeply held beliefs. Handing that material to another person can feel extremely vulnerable.

Will they respect it?
Will they understand it?
Will they help it bloom without taking something that isn’t theirs?

These are not just practical questions; they’re ethical ones. The role of a good writing coach (or editor) is not to attach themselves to the writer’s work like a leech, quietly absorbing the juiciest of ideas. It’s the opposite. A good coach helps the writer see their own ideas more clearly. This relationship works because of consent. The coach witnesses the thinking as it forms. They ask questions, notice patterns, and reflect on content for reconsideration. But the story, the voice, the insights — those always belong to the writer. What the coach offers is perspective. And the entire exchange works because it happens with permission. Something the leeches, of course, never asked for.