6 years ago this day my life changed. I sat at the doilyed dining table of an old Greek woman's home I didn't know in Hurstville, Sydney. Floor-to-ceiling white. I was housesitting, looking after two yappy dogs while she travelled to Greece. 1/8
I'd landed here through a housesitting website after years of insecure share-housing & crisis accommodation. It was a 1mo stay & I thought I'd hit the jackpot! No stable home in an unforgiving dog-eat-dog-cultured city like Sydney was rough. 2/8
I'd just got the call. I landed a permanent full-time job in the public service in Canberra. I called my family teary & ecstatic. Secure permanent work was about the ceiling of our expectations in this broken economy. 3/8
I immediately felt guilty and privileged to be in work, & I flogged my guts based on that guilt. I kind of still do. (That's how weak the working class is right now. A privilege to work!). 4/8
I spent at least the first few years on the full-time work train just so, damn, angry. At everything. But especially every happy, middle-class person around me who never knew the torture of poverty. Not always a helpful emotion. 5/8
After a life of relentless, frenetic risk & price calculations everywhere I went, suddenly I had time to THINK! Depriving humans of secure basics wires the brain for permanent survival mode: defensive, anxious, sick. That was all I knew. 6/8
With a stable income for the 1st time in my life I could feel my brain being reconstituted. It's this reconstitution that's enabled me to read, focus, analyse & strategise. A stable income & job is why so much has happened in 6 years since I sat at the old woman's table. 7/8
I think often about the 1.2 million children & young people in Australia living in needless poverty. Their capacity to think diminished. It's criminal. 8/8
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