Much of the country I’m travelling now, we travelled as a family in 1997. The trip so far—and it’s just over two weeks since I left Melbourne—has already been punctuated by flashes of recognition and re-evaluation, constant moments of this is where. This is where my brother, this is where the river, this is where the rain, this is where the butterflies. Doing it without them is like rewriting part of my childhood with no points of reference but those in my head. Did I come here? Do I remember this? The vague memories are overwritten, the vivid ones are detailed and deepened. Experiences now have price tags and responsibilities attached. Every 500km costs me $100. Every overnight stop is a negotiation between energy levels, fuel availability, community dynamics and the elements.

The Land Cruiser is a dogged but shuddery old thing, and I promised myself when I finally hit the highway that I wouldn’t get distracted by the romance of the road. But even monotony has its aesthetic, and pretty soon I was trying not to veer off the bitumen while typing text messages to myself so I wouldn’t forget the colour of the grass, the way the light fell, the sunset reflected on rainclouds. At one point, the car climbed a hill and the very road was glowing—luminous pink and orange, like when you peel the skin from a nectarine—the crest all but bursting with colour and light, and then the bonnet dipped and plunged in the cold, dark hollow of the valley behind it, sinking into mournful, wet blue-grey. ‘Watercolour’ doesn’t do it justice; it was richer than that, like saturated sound. And the muse squeezed my lungs and said, Capture this.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that it doesn’t even matter where I’m going. The movement is enough; away is enough. It was always the blur of the country rushing past, soothing and stirring, and the rhythmic lilting of the car that made travelling inspiring. Even the bus trip between my house and high school was scope for imagination. I was never an ‘are we there yet?’ child. Arrival ruptured my reverie.

But when I run away from myself fast enough I catch up to myself from the other direction. And I’m not only running to, I’m running from. The road between Brisbane and Melbourne was tracked with mud and rainwater, bloodsoaked carpet, alcohol and leaking engine coolant, and I stumbled along it clad in clothes that smelt like smoke and sweat. This was unsurprising, given the state I was in before I left. I know the danger signs because I’ve seen them in other people. When the catalyst for all your epiphanies is consumption of a substance. When someone pours their heart out to you, tells you exactly what you mean to them, and you have to ask them the next day to repeat what they said. When you are sabotaging opportunity after opportunity in favour of momentary, beguiling, artificial warmth. When people you love finally, angrily explain to you that while intoxicated, you have criticised, insulted and offended them well past the point of friendship, and you hear the words: ‘I am at the end of my tether.’

Last Monday, I was that person. And perhaps sometimes it’s good to know how far you can push it before it gives, but it would be better yet not to reach that point in the first place. I don’t understand people who can create under the influence. I drink so that my head will shut up, except that it doesn’t shut my mouth. I have sex so that I will feel better about myself, and then speak like I am putting myself on trial. It’s not about guilt or shame, it’s about control. Getting out of control to feel in control. But apathy has always been a problem for me, and the abuse that I put myself through, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, in order to somehow untangle these knots eventually takes its toll. It’s not that I don’t care; rather, I get to the point where there is so much to care about that in order to cope I have to sequester all cause for concern. An oxymoronic embrace of neglect.

As I post this I am 9 days celibate and sober. No sex, alcohol or drugs for 100 days. A self-imposed fast. I will have 100 days together with my own mind and my own body. I will remember what it’s like to be whole. It’s a good time to do it. I have a novel to finish writing and two thirds of a country to explore. And then, we’ll see.

In Year 7, a group of girls in my class passed around a petition with the instruction: ‘Sign this if you hate Stephanie.’ One of these girls I’d known since Prep. (She actually came up to me at a party in 2005, after years of my ignoring her, and said hello. I suffered through only three sentences of small talk before she said: ‘We were really mean to you at school. You were more intelligent and mature than us and we were intimidated by that. I’m sorry.’ I was so shocked and touched I forgave her on the spot.) This wasn’t an isolated incident, and it’s hard when you’re a kid, when all you want is for someone to like you, not to gravitate towards those stories that make you feel safe—that make you feel normal—and glossy magazines that purport to give you advice on what you can do to fix what’s wrong.

I credit the sheer volume of novels I read as a teenager featuring girls and women who had wit, talent, determination and resilience for getting me through high school, and my admiration and respect for those women in real life. Screw the insipid Bella Swan; Ellie Linton got shit done. Elizabeth Bennet spoke as she found. Anne Shirley may have got married and had ten children but she held up her chin, cut her hair short, stood up to bullies, came first in her classes and still found time for daydreaming and poetry. And I had a lot in common with them, despite my insecurities about the way I looked. I was the kind of girl who put her hand up in class. If I knew the answer, I had to say it. When I did the work, I had to be first to finish. I had to get everything right. In the absence of other triggers, I might have to put this down to genetics. Nobody told me to be a smartypants.

I credit Kaz Cooke’s Real Gorgeous with giving me the courage (if that’s the right word) to have flesh on my thighs and not waste money on toner or Tommy Girl—and the facts to back it up. (I read it cover to cover on Christmas Eve in 1998. I never bought a copy of Dolly magazine again.) But it took me a long time to call myself a feminist. It wasn’t until a second-year uni drama class that the issue was made plain for me. A feminist believed in social, sexual, economic and political equality for men and women. A feminist saw that the world was imbalanced thus, and that power resided mainly with men. The past tense is for the sake of readability—I found (and still find) these things self-evident, but giving myself the feminist label got me into an unexpected amount of trouble. Friends harangued me. My brothers scoffed. A family argument erupted in a restaurant one night when my uncle looked at me skepically, and said ‘Surely feminism isn’t needed now?’

(The stigma is slightly ironic because my family is bursting at the seams with tough, independent women. I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have come up against resistance due to their sex. My grandmother ran a costuming business by herself after my grandfather had a stroke in the 60s. My mother wanted lots of children but refused to marry any man who would play push-and-pull mind games. My father’s sisters still command large salaries on their own terms. Every single one of them has a degree. Germaine Greer was taught German by my great-aunt, Sister Michael, who had ‘a face that looked like it was scrubbed hard with steel wool’. By the time I became a student at Star of the Sea, the nuns were no longer teaching and Sister Michael’s tenure as principal had been reduced to a plaque on a door in the old grey stone building, but their spirit had by no means left. Perhaps some people find it hard to see a feminist uprising in black habits—or, when I knew them, navy blue—but they obviously don’t know nuns. ‘Strong Star women,’ then-Principal Rosalie Jones used to say to us. No doubt.)

The problem is, while it might work in novels, real people expect strange things when sex is involved. Real people expect strange things when they want sex to be involved. And I’ve always had an appetite for fairy stories that compromised the good work of a lot of that literature. The law of romance says that logic and love are irreconcilable. On the contrary, I think love is extremely logical; it’s romance that muddies the water. And sometimes I feel like it’s the hardest thing in the world to reconcile staunch feminist politics with a desire to be loved. These stories of lust and death, betrayal and despair, obsession and infatuation, class and compromise—they’re compelling and ridiculous all at once. And I’ve never had such vitriol thrown at me as I have when I bring out the word ‘feminist’. Is a woman speaking her mind and standing up for herself so unpalatable even now? Is it some kind of challenge? Is the challenge to keep up or to shut her up?

What if she doesn’t shut up? What will change? Is that where the fear lies? Or is being close to a strong woman like the desire for attention—simultaneously craved and despised, fascinating and repellent? Sex is about power and power is about control, the desire for which stems from fear—at its most primal, fear of death. But we’ve also coupled sex with love, and I’m not the first of my feminist friends to wonder seriously if her politics will result in unintentional celibacy, especially alongside heterosexuality. I’m becoming increasingly aware of the strange social consensus that people like me end up alone. As though the only kind of love I could receive as a woman with these kinds of politics is from afar—someone to look up to or admire perhaps, but not someone to get close to. Or perhaps it’s more like staring at the circus freak, and there’s that odd bookish girl again with the ugly freckles and white legs. But there’s an assumption even in that term ‘ending up alone,’ that implies that a woman’s journey is necessarily about a reliance on others, as though one navigating the world under her own steam is wrong somehow. The aesthetic of the romance narrative makes women afraid to be feminists because it makes feminists look unloveable. It has rose petals on the surface and maggots at the core.

So here I am, split into three, each part curled around the other, tense, taut, tangled. The artist, craving magic, mystery and the beauty of drama; the philosopher, unravelling tapestries with painful and meticulous care, each thread weighed and measured and tested for strength; and between them both, the gawky little girl with her big imagination and pile of stories who just wants people to like her.

We had owned dogs before—blind, deaf and grumpy when I knew them, which wasn’t very well as they were already old and faded quickly—but it had been a couple of years since Jody had finally gone and the house had been pet-free. My mother wasn’t consulted about Mocha; Dad picked her up on impulse from one of our Tolmie neighbours. She was the runt of the litter—smaller than my school shoes at 6 weeks—but that didn’t matter in the city. My brothers complained for awhile that she was annoying, that we didn’t need her, or that she had chewed through their socks and was clearly uncontrollable. But I caught one of them saying a heartfelt goodnight to her late one Saturday. I considered paying him out at the time but thought better of it.

When I started high school, my mother would come upstairs every morning at 6:45am to wake me up. Mocha would bound in after her and lick me on the hand or the face or whichever part of me was closest to the edge of the bed—if she could make it through the mess on my bedroom floor. When I was living in Poland she’d still come upstairs while Mum woke up my brothers, and would run down to the end of the corridor where my bedroom was just to see (Mum used to say) if I had come back in the night and she hadn’t noticed. On her birthday and Christmas day we’d give her toast with Vegemite for breakfast. She loved it so much that on the few occasions when she escaped into the street and refused to come back, all we needed to do was flick the spring on the toaster and she’d be back at our feet within seconds.

She had been getting old for awhile but had only started to show it in the last few years. When I took her for a walk on Christmas Eve (two blocks, that’s all she could manage) I wondered how I would feel when she died. She was 14. We all knew it was inevitable, but it’s hard to know how you’ll react to something until it actually happens. I had been preparing myself for awhile—making sure I said goodbye to her properly every time I left the house in case it was the last time I saw her. I’ve been living out of home for years, but still the thought choked me up, and I realised then how much weight our pets carry in our lives, and how much just knowing she was still around was a source of comfort and support even from the other side of the country.

Mocha always knew damn well when we were going travelling, no matter how much we tried to pretend otherwise, and would race out the front door and jump into the front seat of the car at the first opportunity. She would sit in the car, sometimes for hours, while we packed. ‘You’re not going anywhere without me.’ On Tuesday morning, it was no different. I was headed to Moulamein, my father out bush with our cousins, and Mocha was already sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser with her tongue hanging out and a giant grin on her face. I didn’t get a chance to give her a goodbye pat—I was running late and too busy wondering if I’d forgotten to pack something myself. That was the last time I saw her, because six hours later, in a beautiful piece of bush called Limestone, my stupid, careless second-cousin drove off without looking and caught her under the front wheel. She was so badly hurt, they shot her. I didn’t find out until Friday afternoon when I turned my phone back on and found voicemail messages from my 23-year-old brother, drunk and distraught and mostly incomprehensible at half past midnight, pleading with me to call him, please, just call him.

You know your childhood is over when your childhood pets die. 2009 ended with a tempest. My childhood ended last Tuesday with a gunshot and a whimper. Part of me feels like we ought to qualify our sadness and anger with ‘It’s just a dog, but…’ but the truth is, it’s never ‘just a dog’. And if the lumps on her chest had turned to cancer and we’d been forced to take her to the vet to have her put down, I probably wouldn’t have felt so angry. We were prepared for something like that and it would have given the whole family some kind of closure, not to mention saving that beautiful, trusting animal such acute stress and trauma. But instead she was killed by someone else’s hard black skidding tyre and a bullet to the brain. It wasn’t the way it should have been—it never is. But she damn well didn’t deserve to have it end like that.

I miss her.

Somewhere along the road, we came to an almost vertical rock-face. One side of it was smooth, the other jagged, and the men stood around trying to decide how they were going to get the convoy of Landcruisers up it. Dad’s car—with me and Kathleen in it—was the guinea pig. They tried the smooth slope first but the tyres couldn’t get a decent grip, so they backed us down ever-so-carefully and tried the jagged side instead. The engine strained and Kathleen and I—almost horizontal—held on tightly to the seats. Halfway up the rock-face, the car paused for a minute or so as Dad got a firmer grip on the gears and the wheel, and Kathleen and I thought, “Oh, we’ve stopped.” Never mind that were almost lying down in a car whose wheels were clinging precariously to a few chunks of stone, we proceeded to open our colouring books.

I started with a story because it’s late and I’m trying to keep the motor running. I’m in a bad mood and people insist on walking into the firing line, claiming “I can handle it, I can handle it.” No, you can’t. You say you can because maybe you want to, but you can’t. So I’m going to shut you out because I’m tired of small talk and I’m tired of anxiety and I’m tired of feeling like I need to explain myself. I’m not doing it to be nice, I’m not doing it for some bullshit attempt to sound like I’m tough—I’m saving myself the guilt-trip later. You may as well get a glimpse of what you’re missing all at once because it saves me having to go through it again.

All week, friends and family (bless them) have been talking about me, to me, saying things like, “Look at what you can do! Look at what you are doing!” And I look and what I see is that I’m running on borrowed time. I know I should be grateful—I am more than grateful—but I don’t know how to fight for things when the odds aren’t severely against me: when people aren’t saying, “Yeah right, as if you could.” And the more people tell me I can, realise I can, the more third chances they give me, the more contrary I feel. No, don’t let me hand this in at the last minute. No, don’t tell me my excuse is “fair enough”. I don’t want special consideration; I want a challenge that electrifies me. It’s the arrogant discontent of the excessively privileged. If it’s too easy, I switch myself off again and float out into space, ignoring the stars colliding on the far side of something, wondering where the anchor is or what it anchors me to. And I wonder even now if I will spew this out and care what you think, or if I will spew this out and leave it idling, half-finished, going nowhere, and bury myself in the waste of my day and the excess food, and the way that lately my eyelids get heavy the minute I feel like I need to write, and the fact that I write to avoid work, that I work to avoid writing, that I try to write when I should be sleeping and that when I fall asleep the words start coming. Sometimes I feel like I’m made of conflict and the tension is all that keeps me upright. But I can’t move either forward or back. Perhaps every artist’s life is a constant struggle with the impulse to create—medicating the world away with one anaesthetic excuse after another, as the pressure builds up on the inside until finally the smooth veneer is ruptured—and the voices outside murmur, she’s successful, she’s smart, she’s got it all together—and then the dam wall cracks and gives way, words pouring forth, thundering through the valleys, washing away fences, uprooting trees. And perhaps that’s what this is, the inevitable build-up. But I don’t want to validate inertia, and I don’t understand why I manage to get away with it all the time.

Then there’s the fact that art doesn’t come from quiet comfort; it comes from quiet comfort being torn away. It comes from tension and conflict and uncertainty and discordancy. It comes from euphoric joy and unheralded despair. Its creators are selfish and biting and incredibly messy, and the process of construction is contrary and draining and physically debilitating.

Or maybe I’m just talking about myself.

How’s the writing going? I hate that fucking question. How do you measure a good day? Quality? Quantity? A spark of inspiration? All three? In that case, most days are bad days. I could write 3,000 words and not use any of them. I could write 40 and it could be the best sentence of my novel.

How’s the writing going? Here’s the truth: it’s stagnating, because I’m stalled at the bottom of the rock wall. I’m too proud to turn around and go home, too stubborn not to eventually succeed, and it’s not like I can’t do it, or think it’s worth devoting my life to—because I can and I do—but I’m the one that’s driving, I’m the one that has to decide which slope to take, I’m the one with the keys and the means and my foot on the clutch, and instead I’m colouring in my fucking colouring book.

Pathetic.

My grandmother’s house smelled like books, vegetables and gum trees. It was right on the edge of town, with a park across the road and a rose garden out the front. Behind the park was a yellow hill with a house perched on the crest. As far as I was concerned, the town ended there. We never went over that hill and I never found out what was behind it. We stayed in the street and played 40-40 in the park and got calluses on our hands from the rusted monkey bars.

When we were up there I’d sleep on a camp bed in Grandma’s room and she would put out a children’s rocking chair for me to sit in and read. There was a tree right outside the window in that room and the birds would sit in it and screech at each other all morning. I would spend the days playing Happy Families and Old Maid with my younger brothers, building houses from hand-me-down Lego-esque bricks and dressing up Mum’s and my auntie’s old Midge and Skipper. As I got older and less interested in dolls and toys (and more interested in daydreaming and boys) I would curl up on the camp bed and read endlessly.

There were thousands of books and magazines in the cupboard of the spare bedroom. Mum and my auntie used to collect girly magazines of the sixties – Princess was one and I can’t remember the name of the other – but instead of being filled with ads for clothes and make-up and articles on ‘How to get a Boyfriend’, they were full of graphic serials about independent boarding-school girls who solved mysteries and kicked arse at hockey. Grandma also had The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle – the books in the Narnia series we didn’t have. It took Mum ages to buy copies for us at home. The first time I ever read them was at Grandma’s, and then repeatedly almost every time we visited. It was at Grandma’s when they changed from being really good fantasy stories to being really good fantasy stories with a religious subtext. (I think I was about 14 at the time. I distinctly remember feeling both cheated, defensive and slightly disappointed.) After awhile I stopped fitting properly into the kid’s rocking chair. Mum used to wonder why I wanted it in there at all.

Grandma used to burn her toast until it looked like charcoal and then scrape the black from the outside. She had the sweetest-tasting carrots growing in her backyard. She took up the skirt of my winter uniform for me when I was in Year 7 because I didn’t want to be uncool when I wore it for the first time and Mum was no good at hemming pleats. Grandma died peacefully in her sleep in 2000 and I inherited her bedroom furniture, including the bed she died in (minus the mattress and bedding, of course.) People freak out a bit when I tell them this, but I don’t feel strange about it. If anything it’s comforting, in the same way my random memories of her are comforting.

The house that I’m living in now reminds me of her house. The venetian blinds are covered by white lace curtains. The living room is full of books and shelves and comfortable couches. The kitchen has an electric stove, a laminex table and not-quite-enough bench space. The street is lined with gum trees and when I wake up early in the morning, a flock of birds are screeching indignantly at each other from the branches. The more I think about it, the more I believe that this is why I’ve found it so easy to settle in here, and the more I think about my Grandma, the more settled-in I feel. I used to be afraid of being so far away from my friends and family – afraid of being alone and lonely. But here, even though I’m by myself in a suburb I didn’t even know until 6 months ago, I’m not lonely. I’m content here. I feel like I brought my Grandma with me.