When I was two years old my mother each morning before starting  work, while juggling ironing a shirt, a toddler and another toddler  would set up a table with paints, and, crayons and various styles of brushes, and a single A4 piece of. One day, she recalls, I stopped writing and cried out ‘I can’t get out what’s in my head on the paper’.  This moment, to my mother, illustrated something profound to her, that I still cannot seem to understand, but cherish the fondness in which she recalls the memory. This moment, for myself as I grew up, illustrated the exact moment I knew that I would spend the rest of my life searching for the best way to get out what was in my mind and put it onto that A4 paper. This moment, for myself, as I grew even older, into an adult, illustrated to me the exact moment I knew that for the rest of my life I would become obsessed with those who had found out how to get out what was in their mind onto that A4 piece of paper.

When I was thirteen I gifted my best friend Tully by Paulina Simons. This was during the time in our lives which consisted of bi-weekly hangs to dye the ends of our hair bright colours in the dark in our bathrooms and when we believed going to sleep in mascara meant that our eyelashes would grow longer by the morning. When we were always stuck deciding between buying the $2 bags of red frogs off of the kind elderly woman who gave us compliments for free who worked in the dilapidated store opposite the playground with the melted plastic slide someone a few years before had set on fire or spending the money on a single cigarette from a stranger.

When being part of an all boys group who spent mornings on rolling spliffs and afternoons on skating was really cool but it was even cooler being part of the glory that we were given to bathe in that came from finishing the vodka flask hidden in the deep pocket of the windbreaker we stole from mum’s cupboard before it had hit midday.

It was when my dad introduced me to Radiohead and Pink Floyd and opened up his mind and mouth without me asking and let me know that life is like a play, except the intervals are too long, and that’s why he has to listen to music or play guitar or talk to me otherwise all of the silence and all of the waiting was too much. It was when my dad told me that he had tried to keep a journal of the absurdity of the situation that we were in, but when it came to writing it down, the pain of having to do so always stopped him. Ever since I was 19 I’ve written everything down that he’s said to me. His confessions consume four notebooks.

It was also the exact moment I felt the weight of several secrets and wondered when and where I would be allowed to put them down.

Growing up in my parents house they had a room that they nicknamed the “red room” because of the deep red shade they painted the room in while the rest of the house was a digestible baby blue. The room was filled with trinkets gifted from their friends, and items passed down through our family, displayed in a glass cabinet. The “red room” could have been taken straight from a Lynch film or a Stephen King novel. The room had this eery sense to it that my sister and I would play on and would tell our friends that the room was cursed.  The “red room” was the situated directly outside of my bedroom,  down the hall from my sisters, it connected the front door to the back door in a straight line and it sat in the exact middle of the house, forming the physical and symbolic intersection between my parents and I, and of course, the “red room” was home to all of the books my parents had ever read.  My parents and I grew up together in that room, they realised quickly that the language I communicated best in was through those books and the language they knew how to show me that they understood was through those books. Growing up, my parents and I, did not ever understand one another, it was not until I moved out at 21 that we all learnt how too.

I was fourteen when I read the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. I was fourteen when my dad told me to read Catch 22, and I was fourteen when I got caught reading The Cut and was told to never touch that book again.

I was fourteen when I discovered love poetry written by courageous and vulnerable teenage girls posted onto their public blogs, I was fourteen when I discovered Youtube videos of people confessing their greatest fears to an audience getting it out onto the page and then through their voice.

I was fourteen when my mother started drinking and I was fourteen when I realised that my father did not have the ability to stop what the following years would bring.

And I was fourteen when my best friend and I finally spoke about Tully. When she only had to say ‘I understand Jennifer’ for me to understand that she needed to see a therapist. Quickly. When I only had to reply ‘I understand Tully’ for my best friend to understand that I needed to as well. This moment, marked the beginning of a long history of allowing the weight of secrets that had burdened us to be lifted, to be shared between us, to be spoken about in codes, in characters and through books and to be put be put down somewhere stable. When we both realised we were not alone, books became our connection and our capital.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing and English Literature with Distinction from the University of Wollongong. I worked several jobs during my undergraduate degree, sometimes two to three at a time. After graduating I was recruited into a corporate tech sales role as a Sales Development Representative where I worked with the aim of eventually transitioning over to an Account Manager position within a publishing house. This endeavour I knew I could achieve if I spent two to three years focusing solely on it, the company I worked for made sure they were continually giving me opportunities for growth and encouraged me to pursue this career path. Three months into the position I started a Graduate Certificate in Editing and Publishing at Macquarie University, graduating with a High Distinction, with the purpose of this further leveraging my future career track transition. I thought I had it somewhat figured out. While working full time and studying, I kept reading and I kept writing and I kept recommending books to my friends.  After a year in the role I left the job and decided to solo travel Canada trying to Keruoac my way out of a quarter life crisis while trying to find the reason why my mum decided to immigrate to Australia.

During travelling, I kept reading, and I kept writing, and I kept keeping records of strangers conversations, or someone’s turn of a phrase I enjoyed, the things people said in Canada that they didn’t in Australia, and of the people I had met fleetingly or for a longer period who shared their time and  thoughts and their own stories with me. I kept thinking about the Bukowski quote “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.”  I visited my sister in the States during this journey and she showed me her poetry and asked me to edit it, in hopes of it becoming published one day. As her younger sister, it was both an honour and utterly horrific to be allowed into her thoughts in this way.  She wrote about the fears she held as a child, and her fears now as a trans woman living in a country that convinces her daily that she would be safer dead than she is walking the streets in the middle of the day. She wrote about her recovery after facial feminisation surgery, the relief of leaving Australia for the states five years prior,  the pull between loving her job but it also causing her harm because of the work load and stress, about the five pairs of shoes, pants, and shirts she owned from the ages of thirteen to twenty, how the wind feels different here but how sometimes it pulls her right back to being fifteen and sitting in a men’s change room for an hour when she was meant to be trying on a shirt for her year ten formal but sat staring at the walls wondering how she had gotten there at all, how she didn’t know who to tell when she first realised. All of this, we had never spoken about in as much detail as her writing did. But, she had learnt, that eventually the secrets had to be put down somewhere, the secrets had to be shared, the weight had to be lifted.

When I came back to Australia I asked my best friends if they continued to write. They both said they did, sharing secrets and triumphs that are too hard to tackle over text. My best friend wrote about how her job as an abuse lawyer was destroying her, how company revenue attached to human’s lives was keeping her awake at night, how she no longer enjoyed eating or reading or doing much else.  My other best friend wrote about her husband and how he had performed in the marriage long enough now to finally feel entirely comfortable revealing his true destructive self. Secrets shared, calls made, actions in place. All on the A4 page.

Throughout my undergraduate degree there were several moments that looking back upon were key moments that changed the trajectory of where I was heading in life and what I hoped for my future. Those moments were always, at the time, so deeply embarrassing for no other reason than caring intensely about something. I remember my first year creative writing lecturer tearing to shreds one of my tragically written pieces of writing and then taking a subject by him in my final year in which he told me he ‘hoped to read what I write in a book one day’. This moment made me believe that I had somehow gotten better at getting what was out of my head onto that page. Another moment was when I wrote an essay in my final year on The Turn of the Screw, and was introduced to different critical theorists from various schools of thought and I understood how theory can change the way I viewed not only literature but the world. I was introduced to Butler and Foucault and Derrida and Freud and Lacan and Socrates and Camus. I found these very deep beautiful trenches that I would remain in for several years of my life, trenches that were home to Despentes and Solanos and  Long Chu, and Hooks, and Plath, and Woolf and brand new glorious inspiring secrets.

I do not think I will ever figure out how to ‘get out’ what is in my mind onto the page properly. But I know that I am utterly enthralled by those who know how to do it. I know I am captivated by the ways in which people approach and embrace writing and I know that I will always continue to ensure that anyone I interact with believes that what they have to say is worth saying, is worth writing, is worth confessing.  I am grateful for the many people who have spoken with me, taught me and showed me the world beyond my own. I, in no way, was responsible for that, I owe that to strangers, and friends, and teachers, and lecturers, and advisors and authors.

I owe all of my survival to A4 and A5 pieces of paper.