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.

Or of oranges plucked from a tree at 3am, spitting rain, tram tracks and electric lights, and another woman’s bed. (I never told him, but I found myself then.)

Or of those who didn’t want to talk about it but preferred instead to talk it out; who wanted to hear the words expelled from my mouth, staccato blasphemy: ‘Fuck, suck, cock, cunt. Does that make you feel good?’ (Face forward, kitten. I want you on your knees.)

And there again—bee-stings on my cheeks and things rough to touch, like skin on bark, a man’s chin inside my thigh—a dirty angel face, a beautiful beast. (When I draw, it’s trees: haunted, leaf-bare skeletons, curling branches. There’s more in my head, but that’s what comes out.)

And then there were those stories that made girls like me believe that love and sex made you feel the same way; that a declaration changed the world; that a couple of words were comparable to being pressed up against a wall with a tongue in your ear. Or limbs and fingers and hair, gasps and laughter, knotted together in damp sheets. Or binding someone’s arms because that’s what they asked for. Or coming home after a sleepless night with sore breasts and bruising between your legs, but still so desperately wanting, wanting, wanting, and not able to touch yourself for the pain.

Or was an orgasm the moment when the universe shifted? An escape from yourself; an embrace of yourself. A little bit of another person. A little death; a little life. Rebellion. (Touch me, and we’ll see.)

And every time I think I could make a choice to last a lifetime, I grow some more, learn some more, see the possibilities expand. And sometimes I think I might find enough comfort in a glass of red wine and a drunken stumble into a stranger’s arms—maybe a little taller, a little older, a little further away—because after all, it’s mostly chemistry, and everyone looks good in the dark. But even when it means nothing, it carries weight. Perhaps no more than the heat of your breath—just enough to maintain the push—but weight, nevertheless. Minute momentum.

So I won’t close myself off and I won’t hide, but one way or another I know what I’ll be left with, which is exactly the same as I’ve always had: the world in my head, an open window, and a cool breeze on swollen skin.

I thought about speeding cars and the hot summer sun, the wet leaves blowing in the back door, my empty stomach and the sand still in my shoes from four nights ago. And I wondered how far I could stretch myself – whether it might actually be possible to reach up and kiss the sky while still keeping my bare feet firmly on the ground, how much that might hurt, and how many layers of skin there are between what we say, what we hear, and the things we do with our bodies and our minds. And I thought about the subtle, pervasive nature of hibernation, of how to recognise the colour of my wings when they’re reflected back at me, and whether I ought to jump out while the water was still hot or stay in there until it cooled and risk the shivery, naked walk to my bedroom and nothing to wear when I got there.

And I thought: I will bury myself in this for the minute, for this moment, momentarily – because when things push at you from a hundred different directions, sometimes the only thing you can do is stop and let them crash in around you, wash over you, soak into you. So I stayed like that – in the steam and the foam and the million-miles-an-hour in my head – until the song faded and the echo of the heavy-dripping tap reminded me of all the things I have to do today.

One particular November, I broke up with a boy in the beach car park at Rickett’s Point. He’d already bought my birthday present but hadn’t had a chance to give it to me, so at the conclusion of my spiel he reached over to the back seat and handed me a small package. It was a notebook: royal purple, covered in hearts, and on the front of it there was a little gold-embossed quote about following your dreams.

It was obviously intended to be a bit special, and when I was eight years old I probably would have loved it, but at eighteen my writer’s quirks were rapidly becoming habits and absolutely everything about this notebook was wrong. It had coloured paper (more like card than paper), wide lines, a designated space at the top of every page for the date and the trite little quote repeated at the bottom. I can’t stand to waste paper – even if it’s horrible – and it took me ages to throw the thing out. I used it for shopping lists and scrap until moving out of home forced me to part with absolutely everything I didn’t need.

We were never a good match. I am a feminist agnostic with a major in Philosophy and English; I write stories about abused girls with illegitimate babies, gay men getting mugged in alleys, drug-taking, sex, loneliness, despair and euphoria – he is married at 24 and studying to be a minister. I heard on the grapevine he writes a Bible name, chapter and verse on the back of his hand before he plays basketball to stop himself getting angry. It always used to rain when I was out with him – every day except for the one we split – and that spring birthed some crazy storms. Sometimes I think the storms were the earth’s way of showing its displeasure. (He would probably say it was God telling him to drop the heathen. It was obviously never meant to be.)

The birthday present, however, stuck in my mind. Perhaps it comes with the territory – being picky about the words you use makes you picky about the surface upon which you place them, because as much as the words themselves are the most important part and don’t judge a book by its cover, quality stationery is all about respect. It was also my final year at school, and at Presentation Night not long afterwards, the principal presented me with a plaque, Stasiland by Anna Funder and a beautiful unruled A5 Moleskine notebook. I would probably have preferred 6mm ruled, but I decided then that my school really had understood what it was all about, just as the former boyfriend so obviously hadn’t.

One afternoon not very long ago, while shopping for books in Brunswick, I had the unexpected foresight to purchase a packet of three pocket-sized Moleskine cahiers. I dithered before buying them – I wondered when I’d get to writing in them. Back in high school, when I believed I was qualified to write what one might (loosely, very loosely) term ‘poetry’, I would swallow notebooks whole; numbering every page, filling them in as short a time as a couple of months, depending on how many free periods and unrequited loves I had. These days I choose my words more carefully. Notebooks are forever only half-full and I have more of them than I could possibly need. But for once my purchases weren’t mere indulgence: one has found a home in the pocket of my satchel and one sits permanently on the bedside table with my alarm clock and a fine blue pen. Too many nights I’ve been wrapped in the lazy haze of almost-sleep when something splutters in the corner of my mind – a spark, a little brighter than the rest – and too many times I’ve thought, “If I repeat this to myself, I’ll remember it in the morning and I won’t have to move right now.” But it doesn’t work like that. I need words on paper or the spark flickers out and the thought slides quietly away.

My crazy MA supervisor once said (although she was probably plagiarising) that if you can harness those moments between awake and asleep – the space between the conscious and the unconscious – that is where the real stories come from. I wonder what I could have found over the years if every time I’d seen that spark I’d climbed out of sleep far enough to blearily scribble half a sentence. For the last few months I’ve tried to get up early and write – to sit in the sun and find inspiration in the patterns of living ‘normally’. But there’s something about the quiet of post-midnight – a solitude you only get when everyone around you is asleep – that really unshackles my mind and gives it space to run.

When I am in love with someone, my writing takes second place. I spend my nights lying awake in a cocoon of tangled limbs instead of the cool blue light of my computer screen or an armchair with a blanket and a pen. It’s okay for a little while but not for the long term. I am not sure how to fix it. Why should writing and love be constantly in opposition? The boys with bad taste in notebooks are easy; not so those who actually matter.

Sometimes I wonder if underneath it all I already know the ending. In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton asks, “Without desire how is it possible to make a story?” On page 9 of my bedside notebook in the loopy scrawl of 3am some weeks ago, it says:

I’m going to be a bag lady one day
with a trolley full of junk.