This chapter proposes a justice-oriented approach to valuing lived experience expertise and co-creative practice. It attunes to the broader politics of voice within the evidence of experience. We position listening, witnessing, and repair as central to this approach, and respond to arts and mental health festival The Big Anxiety’s aim to amplify voices of people with lived experience and create spaces for dialogue with those who have been silenced, or where silence is culturally encouraged. We reflect on the process of making and valuing lived experience and collaborative inquiry in evaluation, asking what happens when quiet forms of community connection are prioritised. Poppy discusses Holding Breath (2023–2025), a sound-based community project using voice-note exchanges co-created with other women and non-binary people who live with the debilitating impacts of Long COVID. Bec discusses her video installation Big Grief, Big Horror (2022), about what it is like to experience and live beyond a family murder-suicide, inviting multiple intimate publics to witness her story. While evaluation frameworks can be instrumentalised for institutional ends, we offer an approach that prioritises the value (and values) of slow attention, mutual witnessing, and creative reparation in the wake of structural harm, stigma and grief.