Winter ruptures my insides.

I am dragging this weight around with me, a lump of living flesh that won’t work the way it’s supposed to. Warm, soft, heavy and painful. Created in a moment of madness, like the complications of a kiss. A gasp, the quick paralysis of shock, hot tears and the crunch of bone against bitumen. Don’t watch where you’re going, girl. Tumble off head first.

I remember this girl. I’ve seen her before, half-blind and reeling, a cannonade inside her head. Is this pain or the memory of it? She’ll be back again the next night, back to the spot where she fell. She won’t be on her bike this time but still won’t look where she puts her feet. She knew before she started that it could be dangerous, but people only learn to take care after they fall, and recklessness makes her teeter.

I remember once, driving through an intersection alone late at night. A camera started flashing in the corner of my eye, through the window, bright slaps of white on my forearm gripping the wheel. My heart jumped, blood rushing to my head, and suddenly I couldn’t remember if the traffic light had been green or red, if I’d taken any notice at the time or been so caught up in the song playing, the momentum of the traffic and the smell of summer through the open windows. I kept driving, shaky, breathing quickly, left arm tingling with the memory of that flashing light, like it had stamped itself into my skin, an invisible scar.

Sometimes I think she knows she’s losing, as I watch her block me out with wine and noise, the light of a computer screen, or the hard, fleeting warmth of pills and potions. And all she wants me to do is put her in the car and drive, grip the wheel with both hands, and burn a straight line down the freeway, a straight line to wherever and ever. And I want to be able to do that too, but I have one arm bound across my chest now and it feels like paralysis, artificial inertia. Because I remember that girl; I remember how she felt back then. I remember her pleading with me, trying to convince me that it would be okay, that head first was the only way to fall. But she mistook arrogance for strength, ego for confidence, intelligence for understanding and intensity for passion. And in her moments of shock she listens when I speak. That voice that knows best—that voice in her head—pick yourself up, pick yourself up, you’re tougher than this, pick yourself up. And so we get back on the bike and ride home in the dark, whether from stubbornness or fear, it doesn’t matter. I know what to do, because I remember her curled up in the cold, I remember the smear of tears in the fine hairs of her arm—this arm, the dead weight, a limb and the light fantastic—so while she’s still numb I put a bullet in it, because I don’t want her to cry again.

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.

Before that: I found precisely eleven post-it notes in my copy of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Eight of them were blank. The ninth, tenth and eleventh read, in this order:

1. The picture being seen,
2. the feather falling—
3. hiding oneself.

Before that: the silence of snow was unexpected. Surely something that so changes the shape of the world should come crashing in, clamouring, announcing its arrival triumphantly, flamboyantly? Thunderstorms break out the symphony. Thunderstorms are the narcissists, the attention-seekers, the drama students hoping to shock and slander and find notoriety in a quickened heartbeat. Snow is the solitary artist in the basement, meticulous and meditative, painting perfect miniatures. The silence of snow was unexpected and eerie. My skin craved salt in the water and sunlight that would burn and blister.

Before that: my hands smelt like soap and the soap-on-skin smelt like being in the bush when I was twelve, in hand-me-down cargo pants and a black singlet top. It rained most of the night. We walked without torches, hoping the adults wouldn’t catch us. I wore a blue jumper under my coat. We sat on the wobbling wooden bench in the mess tent, listening to the rain on the canvas, and I ended up with a mouthful of your warm tongue.

Before that: I was skinny-legged and daydreamy, too tall for my age, too smart to sit on my hands in class, too shy to know what to say to their faces, holding both hands full of dewy bluebells from under the plum tree in my grandmother’s garden. My Dad nailed planks of wood to the arching branches of the fig tree and I sat among the mosquitoes and turned myself inside out. I wanted fairytales, and never weddings.

Before that: my mother.

Before that: dust.

There is a fast-flowing river, heading for the ocean, and the tributaries are growing. Other people’s faith is both buoyant and a burden. My own faith is caged but still flutters wildly. I’ll do one quick revolution—a somersault, a pause—and smile perhaps, then catch the current again.

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.