july 2023 - journal entry **(content warning - trauma and mention of family violence)

i want to start a book about houses and homes. this core concept is part of what grounds us as humans and connects us to place and other people. im 38 years old and ive lived in so many houses, maybe more than 40.

ive had a mixed bag of experiences, some amazing share-houses with absolute gems of my life and memories that will stay with me forever - a very unique and special kind of intimacy is possible when the formula is right with people that you live with. as a contrast ive had some fucked up dumpster fire living situations! at various times i’ve chosen to live on the road, in my car, couch surf, work trade, live on farms and in caravans, travel overseas etc.

and its true there is something about movement that helps me to process my shit, helps me deal with my trauma and create spontaneity that satisfied my (until v recently) undiagnosed adhd and kept things interesting. also, ive learnt a lot of lessons on the road and on top of mountains, or looking at the ocean for hours, cooking at a fire and staying with the fire until its just tiny shining gems that sound like glass when you drag a stick through them. ive met some real sweethearts on the road too.

i actually rode a bike around for 3 months and camped and barely saw other people and felt so at home - maybe more at home than i had in most houses. so these things are real.

andddd…. ive been thinking a lot lately about home and houses and place- i love to move around but i also desperately crave belonging and community. being with people (some of the time and with good boundaries) is something that is really important to me. but after having years now of unstable housing and living situations that either had fucked up power dynamics, or the people were transphobic, or lacked the life experience or education to know how to live with a trans person, or i was going through a burn out and couldn’t do much at all and people stuck in productivity mindset didn’t understand, or the lease ended, or i couldn’t afford it etc.

anyway after years of this baloney & moving around from place to place, at the start of 2023 i decided to live in my car! …because

A) i got my licence and was so happy with myself, and I decided to go on a big old road trip and be in the bush as much as possible, and B) my living situation was shite and had weird power dynamics with the owner of the house who also lived there, and after all the other myriad of temporary houses i had tried to make home, living in my car was a kind of precarity that I at least could have some agency over!

its winter now, and ive been stopped for a month and am thinking about settling just outside of naarm. but i cant help but feel some kind of calling to get in my car and start driving, or even get on a plane and start flying, its almost like the want or need to move has been programmed into me. but actually it kinda has-

ever since i was a baby we were moving around. we were pretty hard up and rented cheap rundown weatherboard houses (much like the ones i feel drawn to occupy as an adult) and moved around from place to place every time my parents split up, or got back together, or we were evicted, or my favourite- my mum had not been sending my older sister to school enough and so the police kept coming around. my parents solution-- move interstate to canberra.

every time my parents had a fight my mum would tell us - “we’re leaving, we’re moving back to melboune!” i remember once i went to school and told all my friends and my teacher that i was leaving. “i’m moving back to melbourne so i wont see any of you anymore.” i made my teacher take down all my artworks off the walls of the classroom- and there were so many because I loved to draw and make art. I said goodbye to everyone and walked home with my big stack of oversized pastel drawings (and collages from womens weekly magazines and the ones where you drop the ink and then blow it with a straw to make patterns) and when i walked in and found out we weren’t actually moving i was so confused. why did my mum say something so dramatic and then not clarify with me that it wasn’t happening? i think this was a key moment in my childhood when i realised i couldn’t necessarily trust what my parents told me.

but sometimes we would actually leave. my parents would fight and one of them would call family violence numbers or the police and we would end up going to stay in a refuge for days or weeks. or when I was older my siblings and me would have massive fights with my mum, and we would go and live with my dad who lived two hours from my high school on public transport. or we would move house, or move to another city.

i have literally always been moving, from when i was a baby up until now. its been both a resource and a place of strength for me - feeling at home while moving is something ive felt and thought about a lot. but its also been a hindrance when it comes to forming community and achieving life goals. its hard to get stuff done when you’re constantly on the move. i almost always have people around because im good with people. i have folx i love deeply scattered across continents. i feel like i have little parts of me in every place ive been. im such a deeply nostalgic person too so it works too well- im always missing someone.

but community!! even though yes i have had and been part of several communities over the years, i feel like building community can take time. and im not saying ill ever stop having adventures but stopping and making a base to come back to and rest and connect, and slowly build on connections with community, is not the worst idea anyone ever had. hot take i know - staying in one place is conducive to building community lolol.

anyway i may have digressed ever so slightly! and i dont think people read blogs anymore so the secret that i write like i talk and think is safe. so yeh, i want to settle down a bit, but i also want to investigate these concepts that have been so formative in my life …i want to start a book about houses and homes. i want to go and visit all the houses ive ever lived in. and take photos, and meet the people that live in them, and plant sunflowers in their front yards.!!

and try and heal some of this dang trauma that follows my around from place to place,

and gets in my way,

makes it hard for me to connect without running away.

maybe ill follow it around, retrace.

i want to start a book about houses and homes