Imagine this: you are about to deliver a presentation to a classroom full of your fellow school students, watched over by your teacher. Perhaps your palms are sweating, your face slightly flushed. Perhaps your heart rate has increased. Perhaps there is a tremor in your hands as you shuffle the pages of your talk, anxiously checking that they’re in the right order. Imagine yourself imagining that everyone in the classroom is staring critically at you, waiting for you to stumble over the first paragraph. Imagine yourself standing in front of that critical audience, wishing that you were invisible. Now imagine feeling just like this every time you find yourself in a social situation with people you don’t know intimately, because you are shy.

What I wonder:

Hey Lofty is this how it was?

The mind returning and returning to the leaking body,

to the seeping ulcers where the bones are peeping through,

the bones aching from the fever,

the head aching from the blows you took

when you tried to stop the Japs burying a skeleton

who was not quite dead,

a skeleton whose hands still shook,

though his blank eyes stared star-wards?

I've fallen in love with a media star. And here's what I've learnt: front-page fame won't necessarily save you from extinction. My love-object first hit the headlines a couple of decades ago when former premier Jeff Kennett dismissed it as a "trumped up corella". The orange-bellied parrot (its real name) was getting in the way of Kennett's plan to move a chemical storage facility to Point Lillias, near Geelong. The "OBP" was endangered and Point Lillias was one of the places the remaining parrots came to feed.

Here’s a weird fact: a couple of years ago the most popular new emoji on the interwebs was that little face with the rolling eyes. You know the one – contempt embodied in a yellow circle. It should come with the sound effect of a sigh. I thought about this emoji recently when I heard an elderly man farewell a woman with the words ‘good girl!’ The three of us were in a lift together and as the silver-haired gent exited, the woman turned to me and rolled her eyes.

Recently a new version of the champagne meme was doing the rounds on Twitter, and this time the targets were memoirists: ‘I’m afraid it’s only autofiction if it comes from the autofiction region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling narcissism.’

As the author of two memoirs, I chortled and happily re-tweeted it. It’s not just witty, it’s also a useful reminder of what to avoid when writing about your life for imagined readers. Narcissism—or the perception of it—is one of the potholes you may encounter when shaping a confessional narrative from your lived experience.

I’ve never had the courage to move to a new town. I’ve thought about it often, perused property listings in warmer places, fantasised about fresh starts. Stayed put. So I admire and envy people who take the plunge. How do they make those new friendships that are so vital for our sociable species? This July I have been in Mildura on a four-week writing residency. I could have stayed behind closed doors, used my writing project as an excuse to be anti-social. But I was curious about this town and its folk. So I put the lead on the dog and began walking the streets.

I’m peeling again. Great strips of grey bark flaking off me. Feels good. I’m born again, a naked lemon-scented gum tree swaying in the Victoria St Glade in the Forest of Northcote in the Community of Darebin. And there’s a dead woman feeding me. She died in her eighties back in the year 2039. Luckily there was a flurry of aged care policy changes in the 2020s when all those dementing Baby Boomers started wandering the streets.

As a child, my unattainable object of desire was a giant Derwent pencil set. I knew that if I could just get my hands on one of those big boxes, my whole life would be more colourful. It took four decades but last Christmas I finally scratched that itch and bought myself a set of 36 Derwents. I pored over those creatively-named pencils, wondering who’d first come up with Blue Violet Lake and Golden Brown.

One of the things I miss most about life before You-Know-What is singing with choirs. Monday nights you would normally find me hanging out with a chamber choir. Wednesday nights it was a French choir, and on Sunday nights the neighbours had to put up with my noisy quartet. Tiring days morphed into inspiring nights when I was making music with other tired-then-inspired choristers.

Want to hear a good news story? Fifteen years ago I travelled from the north to the south coast of Timor Leste to visit some friends. We hadn’t met before, but we were officially friends, courtesy of an agreement between my local council and theirs. In 2005 there were a handful of ‘friendships’ between Australian local governments and East Timorese communities. The City of Port Phillip, where I was living, had befriended the town of Suai in the district of Covalima, and I was curious to see what that friendship looked like.

When it came to funeral planning, my mother had only two requests. She dictated them to me a year ago, when she could no longer write. Margot wanted ‘no church but lots of music’, and she wanted her body to be ‘left to science’. When she died seven weeks ago in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdown, we were able to fulfil her first request, but the second proved impossible. The bodies of those who’ve had Covid19 are not currently welcomed by the medical research establishment. Instead, Margot’s death is being co-opted by those preaching a brand of politics she loathed.

Month after month I felt increasingly at the mercy of external forces, including the male-dominated medical profession. No one could explain why I was unable to fulfil my desire to become a mother.

The girl gives up on her prodding and wanders towards the birds. Suddenly she’s running at them, waving her hands. I lean forward, leg muscles tensed. Just before the girl reaches the edge of the jetty the squabbling gulls rise as one, circling back towards the shore. The child stops and stands with her hands flung wide as if to catch any tardy gulls. ‘Gone,’ she says, to the air in front of her.

When you’re childless not by choice, Mother’s Day can be a painful reminder of profound loss. For some it’s miscarriage, for others it’s infertility, and then there’s something called ‘circumstances’, a term with a complex set of sub-categories. My story involves all three.

I’ve written a second memoir, everyone. Another sad one. Happy stories are boring. This is what I tell my writing students. Find the thing that troubles you the most. The knot you can’t untie. Write about that. But – again?

As NSW and QLD endure a grueling winter lockdown, I’ve been remembering the long months confined to home alone in Victoria last year. In no mood for self-improvement activities (learn to yodel! bonsai for beginners!) I spent the evenings watching popular television series. But my escapist screen binge turned out to be an immersion in the same ethical dilemmas being thrown up by the new virus.

In this era of ‘fake news’ and popular despotism, Tara Westover’s memoir reminds us that the best defence against repressive ideology is critical thinking – the kind that comes with an education.

What’s a polite, nearly middle-aged woman like me doing leaving a party without even saying goodbye to her fella, let alone to the birthday girl? Regressing, that’s what. Behaving like she used to before she became A Confident Career Woman. Like she did in the bad old days, when she was A Shy Young Thing.