The last few years have been some of the hardest of my life.

I never imagined that midlife could become quite this precarious. After the pandemic, Melbourne was hit by a brutal rental crisis. Rents climbed dramatically, in some cases by 40 percent or more, and like many Australians, I was caught in it.

I lost my apartment and eventually found myself back in a family home. It was a period that took an enormous toll on my sense of independence and dignity, and on my mental health. I live with borderline personality disorder, and the instability of those years hit me harder than I knew how to explain at the time.

Eventually, I left Australia.

For much of the following year I moved through Southeast Asia, never staying anywhere for very long. There were wonderful moments, and places I will always be grateful to have experienced, but underneath it all was an exhaustion I had never known before. Constant movement sounds romantic until you realise that what you are really craving is somewhere to put your books, close the door, and know you will still be there next month.

After many years away, I am now living in Berlin.

I’m still figuring out what stability looks like. And I’m tired.

But somewhere in the middle of all of this, something unexpected happened.

I started writing seriously again.

I resurrected a speculative fiction project I had first begun many years ago and realised that the story was still alive. More than that, I finally knew how to write it.

What began as an old abandoned novel has grown into the beginning of a trilogy. I am now very close to finishing the first book, and it is probably the piece of fiction I am proudest of having written.

When it is finished, I’ll begin the frightening and occasionally absurd process of looking for an agent. If the stars, publishing gods and various bureaucratic demons align, I hope people may eventually be able to read it.

In the meantime, I have also begun returning to short fiction, including stories I abandoned years ago and new pieces that seem to have emerged directly from the strange period I have just lived through.

And I’m beginning to notice something about them.

Again and again, I find myself writing about systems. About exploitation. About housing, institutions, technology, class and power. About what happens when ordinary people discover that the structures surrounding them are far more powerful than they are. About people trying to retain some part of themselves when circumstances begin stripping their choices away.

I don’t think that is accidental.

For a long time I tried not to write publicly about what was happening in my own life. Partly because it was painful, partly because I was embarrassed, and partly because we are very good at pretending that people disappear politely when society stops working for them.

But housing instability changes you.

Without a home, almost everything else becomes harder. Work becomes harder. Relationships become harder. Creativity becomes harder. Mental health becomes harder. Your sense of who you are begins to loosen.

And I was far from the only person caught in this.

Australia’s housing crisis has displaced and damaged enormous numbers of people, including people who did everything they were supposedly meant to do. I want to write properly about that experience soon, because I no longer want to pretend that this period of my life was fine.

It wasn’t. It was frightening, humiliating, exhausting and, at times, devastating.

But I kept writing.

Some days that meant a few paragraphs. Sometimes it meant disappearing into a fictional world for hours because the real one had become unbearable. Slowly, page by page, something accumulated. A book. Then stories. Then the feeling that perhaps I still had something to say.

Writing did not solve the problems around me. It did not give me a home or fix a broken rental market or magically remove uncertainty from my life. But it gave me somewhere to go. And during one of the most tumultuous periods of my life, that mattered more than I can properly explain.

So this is partly an update, but it is also a small change in direction.

Right now my focus is the novel, which I’m close to finishing, and finding my way back into short stories I hope to share here before too long. I’m also going to talk more openly about what the last few years have actually been like: housing, displacement, ageing, instability, resilience, and the systems we increasingly find ourselves trapped inside.

But I want to use this space differently too. Less focused on wherever I happen to be, and more on the actual work of writing itself: the techniques, the habits, and the strange little disciplines that can hold a project together when everything else is falling apart. I also want to share some of what years of teaching writing and literature have taught me, because I’m realising I have more to say about that than I expected.

Because, strangely enough, after everything that happened, the stories survived.

So did I.