We all belong here.

I grew up in Tasmania with an abusive parent. Finally able to leave home at 16 I was afraid to be judged and didn't know how to ask for help. I couch surfed, stayed in womans shelters even found a way to sleep at school all to avoid anyone knowing I didn't live at home. I lied on my resume and stole clothes to get work in retail. I felt pressure to work instead of attend school. By 18 I was a manager in a job that truly exhausted me, I had given up on music and art and pushed away friends, but at least my named was finally on a lease. By 20 I'd attached myself to an awful boyfriend in hopes his finances could help me move to Melbourne as moving across tassie didn't feel far enough away from my abuser.

Now I'm 23 and in an awful rental with black mold, 1 non working fire alarm, a leaking gas oven etc but I finally feel home. I live with my 2 best friends who have introduced me to their friends and I know I'll never have to truly be alone again. With their encouragement I was finally able to ask for help. I am on dsp payments while I work on rebuilding my health, confidence and skills. Not finishing highschool makes career options more limited but I'm working towards tattooing. Learning to let myself enjoy old hobbies and forgiving myself for taking time away from work that didn't make my life worth living. I finally feel like I can start my life.

We need more truly safe spaces where teenagers can ask for help without consequence. Centrelink intentionally makes process for applications drawn out and difficult when people need it most.
Housing assistance, I'm sure you're aware but all my friends live week to week. No one feels secure, non of us will ever afford their own home without outside help.

I was homeschooled until grade 8, when I joined my local public school ahead of my peers in science and English but behind them in social skills. I’m in my second year of university now, with a life full of friendships and love, but I look back at my younger self and I still cannot understand what I did wrong that left me so alone. Maybe I’m grateful. To some extent, my inability to make friends in high school left me with only academics to confide in. Without friends to spend time with at recess or lunch, I would sit outside my next classroom and get ahead with the work. Once, some nice girls walked past me and swore I was more hardworking than any of our classmates, but I didn’t believe them. I didn’t feel hardworking.

It was just all I had.

Me and my brother experienced a similar situation, but for some reason he took to socialising better than me. In senior high school, he shared with me his newest epiphany – “Even if you’ve never met them before, always talk like you’ve had one conversation before.” This stuck with me, a way to make first conversations less awkward. One time, I arrived late to my social studies class because I had been running errands for an extracurricular project and found my usual table unusually empty. Instead, there was a new student easily chatting away at a different table. I decided to be brave and joked about how lonely I was and asked if I could sit with them. From there, I used my brother’s advice and kept talking to this new student, who didn’t have any preconceptions about my shyness from previous weeks. Here was an opportunity to be someone else.
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I believe that was a catalyst for learning how to make friends and not be so lonely. I learned to seek out connect, invite people to spend time together, and talk with new people like we had already had a conversation.

Aisha, 20

Nothing is permanent, and sometimes that's good. The bad stuff isn't permanent either, no matter how awful or how much you hurt in however many ways. It's been a hard four months, and I feel I've retreated inwards and reacted outwards since November, really. Since I moved out. Around Queenscliff/Tasmania/Cremorne/Lorne, I thought I'd feel unencumbered by EVERYTHING - deadlines, physical stuff, even the very ground beneath my feet, and have the most free and wonderful summer ever - no fears or worries or anything other than having fun with my friends all the time, loving on my boyfriend, and cuddling my puppy when I saw him again.

My life seemed chock full of wonderful things - friend catchups, swimming pools, weekend trips, shows, barbecues, music festivals, hiking, ice skating, movie nights and late-night Cremorne Fortnite games. And those moments were wonderful of course, but there was some underlying Thing at the base of it all - and it was that I felt Unreachable. I capitalize Unreachable, and have done since I found the words to describe that feeling, because in a weird way it's a higher plane of feeling. It to me was really a state of BEING more than FEELING - this kind of slow, terrible sadness that ate away at me on the inside. And every time someone looked at me I was terrified they could see right through me, right to my core, infected and infested, sick with this sadness I CARRIED and felt I EMBODIED.

My PMDD worsened over the November, December & January luteal phases. I struggled to enjoy the trips I took - Queenscliff, Lorne, Sydney. I was grateful for how busy and tiring Tasmania felt (and for how exhausting all the hikes were!) - since it didn't give me much time to think at all other than "I hope I get up and down the mountain alive". But anywhere I could relax and "settle", suddenly all these thoughts would crowd me and the incurable, Unreachable sadness would return. It was awful, and I was so terrified of ruining things for the people I loved that I couldn't even enjoy the trips I had been looking forward to for MONTHS. Why was that? I could never put a finger on exactly why, other than a dismissive "I never processed leaving UC and it's festering there as an unhealed wound", and I've since dubbed this time in my head as my "stateless stint" - where I was in and out of Airbnbs and places with so many people - just me, then my friends & I, then Dad & I, my whole family & I, then Aiden & I, and then I was back with my family yet I had never felt so alone, and I am someone who has lived on her own for two years now.

And all I had was that godforsaken black suitcase (which I'd really love to burn, truth be told) and my heavy ass navy backpack. My sparkly blue bag rested on so many different chairs, benches and kitchen counters it must have lost count. Some people love that idea - their whole life down to two bags. Easy. Simple. No fuss. No worries. No strings. I toyed with the idea for a while. There's a part of me that can handle it - the same part that is able to switch off her emotions on a dime when she's moving through an airport to make a flight, even if she's left someone she loves. There's even a part of me that strangely craves it all and fears the stillness - BECAUSE THIS IS ALL I'VE EVER KNOWN. Yes, it damages me and my sweet sensitive soul, but it's familiar, and in some sardonic way I can take comfort in that. "I CAN HANDLE IT."

I don't doubt I'll travel the world. I don't doubt I'll live in so many different wonderful, exciting places where my job takes me. I don't doubt this is my last stateless stint, but this right now is actually a really shitty time of life to experience that. One day, I'm gonna call the shots myself. The company - hopefully an ethical, sustainable, uber creative philanthropic organization with a lot of women in leadership roles - I wind up working for will offer me a place in Citycountrystatefargone, and that's MY DECISION as to whether I want to shift my role and my life and start a new adventure somewhere I've never been. And it'll be exciting rather than dread-inducing, since it's my choice for once. God I can't wait for that day.

That agency component in it all is really interesting. I like the element of choice in a situation like this, and I think it's why I crave adventure the unique way that I do. Why I'd be okay with living out of a suitcase to do something like remote work amidst van life, or live on a boat for six months away from it all. Being untethered doesn't bother me if it's my choice to go. I think the real home I crave IS that choice, and that freedom to choose and to call the shots in my own life. It'll be what I make it, but as long as I'm sort of living in "move out each year" res living, I still feel and embody the same fears as that twelve year old girl feeling the weight of shifting her whole life and feeling forced to start over when she never got the choice. I think that's why I reinvent myself as often and as vividly as I do - I dress in completely different styles, I act differently, I like different things all across many of those years I spent trying to find my place there. Sooner or later one of them would fit into the life I was living, a life that didn't even feel like my own.

There's no kid of mine I'll have know this stateless state. (Rereading that sentence gave me an absolute aneurysm, and I pity any editor here.) When my parents and my friends tell me about the way they grew up, there's a piece of me that aches deep inside, a yearning for something I've never ever known. And I was happy, I had a happy childhood, but it was a patchwork childhood, stitched hastily together with different fabric and by different hands. Still beautiful in its own way, but it often fell short of keeping me warm when I felt like this. When I do settle, I'll settle permanently - my children will know a Home, capital H, and if they ever feel Unreachable, it will not be by statelessness. I knew *home*, but I felt the concept of *a* Home remained just out of my reach, no matter how hard I tried to make all of those places (the PPT apartment, the Lantana house, and where my family still lives now) Home, I still felt strange going back and forth between Austin and Sydney over all those years.

I loved them and missed them sorely when I was away, and I hated to leave. So when Facebook later asked me "Home town🏠💕❓", I couldn't even put one down. I don't even have one now. "From...❓" DON'T AS‼️ I couldn't tell you for the life of me where I'm from. When people do ask, my favorite phrase is "Here, there, everywhere." Possibly because it rhymes. It's not a one minute answer, that question, and I don't always like it. But I DO always like how people look at me when I tell them - like I'm stylish and worldly and wise beyond my years. All things I don't feel - well, it's rare if I do. It's like yeah, it is pretty amazing. Yeah, it totally didn't fuck me up for life and give me crippling anxiety, abandonment issues, detachment-level sarcasm, self-deprecating humor and the biggest No-Home complex since FUCKIN E.T😀👍🏻

I digress. There are some days I like it and some days I don't. But I don't know any different. I can WANT different. I think on some level, everybody does. But I sometimes think of my friends here, born and raised and lived all their lives here, and I wonder if they look at me and my life (lives, rather), and they think how lucky I am to know adventure like that. How lucky I am to have seen so much of the world in my 21 years, to have experienced so many different walks of life that I feel I have lived a thousand lives in just my little old years. It alienates (hiiiiiiii E.T again) me sometimes in that way, and I don't get the culture here sometimes, and my friends don't always get my idiosyncrasies or phrases that are a byproduct of the way I grew up. Most times I can laugh it off. Like 99 out of 100 times, I can laugh it off. That one time? It hurts. I feel like a freak, like I have one foot in both worlds and somehow also no feet in either world.

I don't live or belong There anymore, but I don't seem to fit Here either. And that hurts. And I feel I can talk to no one in that moment because no one would truly understand what it is like. And no one seems to GET IT - that trademark third culture snark earned from literal YEARS of packing up and shacking up Here, There, Everywhere. I said I'm everygirl. I want to be. In many ways, I am. In this way, I'm not. I can't be. Because everygirl is not a third culture kid.

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Starting university was a really strange time for me. I come from a low socioeconomic background and experienced a lot of stuff in my childhood that convinced me I was never going to have a nice future of my own. University definitely wasn't in my plans - no one in my family had been before, so when I started uni I was already feeling like an outsider. I felt like I didn't belong (major imposter syndrome!). I was excelling academically, but struggling in every other way. I was at mental rock bottom because I couldn't keep up with university. I was missing deadlines, missing most of my classes, and put zero effort into making friends. I craved the connection though, and often felt sad looking around me at uni and seeing my fellow peers talking and laughing together. It was worse in second year because by then, everyone had their established friend groups. It made me not want to go to classes anymore because I'd often be one of the only ones who was sitting there without someone to talk to.

I desired connection and new friends (as my current friends do not go to university), but my energy and time was focused on being in survival mode - grappling with severe anxiety and severe depression. My struggles with university started to make a lot of sense last year when I found out it was undiagnosed ADHD and I'd just flown under the radar my whole life due to exceptional grades and being very quiet/reserved - teachers wouldn't have had a reason to suspect anything. This was a big wake up call for me.

This year has been a lot better - I was medicated for both depression and anxiety (after two years of therapy) and it was the best choice I could've made, my mental health improved significantly. It's amazing the energy you can put towards things when your energy is no longer being used up trying to battle your own mind. I put myself out there in various opportunities both within and outside of university, I gained a few casual jobs, began volunteering in the community, and started making connections/networks. It's given me some confidence in myself, to the point where I'm actually looking forward to being back at university next semester (surprisingly!).

There are moments where I’m met with the shock of others expectations for me to be fully independent and self-sufficient, or even my own. In these moments, it can feel like I have no other option but to step off an unknown ledge – without certainty that I will be able to support or catch myself if there are no footholds. This feels daunting and lonely, and it feels unfair because it feels like I am being forced into a life of serving something else (capitalism, perhaps), without the security that it will support me back. I don’t want to be reliant on my family forever, but in becoming less so, at this time in my life, there feels like much uncertainty about whether I can actually achieve this whilst still living the life I want – for my health and my sanity.