25 questions with

What’s a song?

ac:

How do you think others see you?

ac: Australia’s next Eurovision contestant. (I am well aware I am not at the dancing or singing level required to be part of the greatest song contest of all time — but I would love to be involved in some way, even if I needed to be a tree.)

How do you think others see you?

ac: Easy-going. Open. Resilient.

How do you know yourself?

ac: I am respectful, thoughtful, loyal, passionate. I sometimes find it hard to personally see myself as resilient because I lean on loved ones to help me through difficult moments. I have never really felt like I fit in the professional world of football.1 Over the past few years, I have become a lot more confident and assured in who I am as a person. I trust my core values and use them as an anchor in my life. I am purposely open about my experiences and how I feel with those around me even if we haven’t known each other long. I love learning about other people’s lives and hearing their stories — it always makes me feel more connected to the world. And I believe Toy Story is real, because how could we possibly know what happens when we are not around?

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

ac: Freshly-cut grass.

What’s your favourite type of water?

ac: Pump bottled water (tastes better with that lid).

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

ac: My face has always been quite emotive (refer to my Year 1 report card), so people have a pretty good idea.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

ac: I was maybe six years old, having a sleepover at my grandma’s house, and I couldn’t sleep. It was around two a.m. and I remember being on the couch playing with my stuffed animals when my grandma woke up to find me. Without saying a word, she put the kettle on and proceeded to make me the most delicious warm beverage I had ever tasted — English Breakfast, with milk and honey (and, yes, it doesn’t make sense to give a caffeinated drink to someone who can’t sleep but it worked because she’s the best). We both drank the tea, ate shortbread biscuits, and she promised to teach me how to make it in the morning. The next day, she showed me her process and it became engraved in my brain. I have many of my favourite memories with a cup of perfectly brewed tea in my hand.

How does someone earn your trust?

ac: By being open, showing genuine interest in me as a person, and then how they speak about, and treat, their friends and family.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

ac: That I wouldn’t be able to function whilst grieving.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

ac: I remember waiting anxiously at home with my family about news on whether I had made a football representative team. I would’ve been thirteen and, up until this point, hadn’t been dropped from a team yet. I remember not feeling overly confident as it was for an under-nineteen team, but I was still hopeful.

My mum’s phone rang and she answered it on loud speaker. The conversation was positive right up until the coach said, ‘She’s too small.’ My heart sunk and a huge wave of insecurities I had never felt before washed over me. A few days later, I found out some of my good friends had made the team. I followed the tournament results on Facebook and saw all the photos which made me feel worse. It was hard to wrap my head around being dropped for being too small as it wasn’t something I could actively work on or fix. If I was tall enough to ride rollercoasters at Movie World then surely I could play football, ha. Months later, I went to a futsal tournament in Canberra and found a shirt that said: I’m not short, I’m fun-sized. It became my favourite shirt and I even went on my first date wearing it. I’ve not grown at all since I was thirteen, so when people call me short, I just correct them. I’m fun-sized.

What about you most comforts others?

ac: I show people my true self early on when we meet, so they can feel like they can be themselves around me.

What do you need to work on?

ac: Trusting my instincts. And speaking Italian.

What’s your most common question?

ac: Why is tax so confusing?

What scares you?

ac: Just the usual things: squid, getting stuck in an elevator, seeing people I love in pain, that I will never have enough time with the people who matter the most to me.

Who gave you a piece of advice you wish you could pass on to everyone?

ac: Ted Lasso said:

‘Be curious, not judgmental.’

In a world where we’re quick to assume based on where someone is from, the job they have, clothes they wear, who they love and what their social media looks like, I think it’s important to pause. We should ask ourselves why we hold those beliefs, and be curious enough to learn more before we judge.

I use this advice to check my own biases and keep learning. The more we understand each other, the more we can work alongside our differences.

What are you doing when you feel most connected to yourself?

ac: When alone: I’m kicking a ball against a wall and listening to music or a podcast. With others: I’m playing community football at the Big Issue Women’s Street Soccer Program in North Melbourne.

What do you think the purpose of life is?

ac: To spread as much love as you can to one another, lend a hand, listen to others, learn from our differences and build a strong community together.

What would you like remembered about you?

ac: That I was a good teammate. (And that I had a lot of swag2.)

What would you like remembered about you?

ac: That I cared for those around me.

COUNTDOWN

5 smells to describe your life:

ac: Popcorn from the Piccadilly Cinema in North Adelaide, Blue Gum Honey from Beerenberg Farm, Twinings English Breakfast tea, the rum essence my grandmother used in her baking, and fresh pastries from whichever new café I have found that week.

4 things on your bedside table:

ac: Lego people, Melbourne Victory pin, smiley face bracelet, potato night light.

3 words to explain your toothbrush to a stranger:

ac: Compelling, committed, graceful.

2 people you wish got more recognition:

ac: One would be Jeff Hopkins. Women’s football in Australia is lucky to have someone like Jeff Hopkins. He puts his whole heart into coaching and genuinely cares about his players as people first. It’s common in our game for coaches to use the women’s side as a stepping stone to the men’s game, but Jeff focuses on the teams and players he coaches. He creates an environment where everyone involved wants to succeed — not just for themselves, but for him, too.

My first season with Jeff came after an extended period sitting on the bench overseas. I was low on confidence and unsure if pro football was for me. Since I already had national team and overseas experience, I felt that there was an expectation for me to be one of the best on day one of training.

A week before the first team session, Jeff rang me wanting a one-on-one training session before preseason. I showed up nervous, wanting to impress. But he mainly wanted to get to know me. We spent the whole session talking, and a weight lifted. I realised I could have open, honest conversations with him.

When I told him how I’d been feeling, he made it clear he wanted this to be a place where I could play with freedom. I was still apprehensive because I’d heard it all before … but he really made it a safe place to find my feet again.

It’s no secret I’ve performed best under him, and I believe it’s because he shows he values his players. If I hadn’t met Jeff, I wouldn’t have made the 2023 World Cup squad or continued pursuing a career overseas — so I’ll forever be grateful. Ask anyone he’s coached: they’ll have stories like mine.

The other would be Aivi Luik. Aivi’s not only one of my closest friends but also the most underappreciated footballer in Australia. I think her story deserves more airtime, so I’m pitching it for a docuseries. I feel very lucky to know her.

I won’t list off all Aivi’s football accomplishments (please look her up if you don’t know them), I want to share the life lessons she’s taught me. I was sixteen when I met her, just starting my career. Aivi was thirty and showing no signs of stopping.3 I had left Adelaide for Melbourne, looking to learn from some of the best players in the league, and Aivi was my first friend in the team.

We quickly bonded over heated table tennis matches, extra training and completing stupid dares.4 When you make it as a young player, the game gets serious fast. One wrong pass can feel like it’s the difference between starting, being on the bench, or sitting in the stands. But Aivi makes anything you’re doing one hundred times more fun. Her infectious energy is my favourite part about her. She encourages you to be the kid who first fell in love with the game, whilst embodying all that joy herself.

Aivi is a textbook professional. She has faced plenty of heartbreak, but she moves on, keeps pursuing goals, leads with respect towards all staff members (no matter how big or small their role at the club is), looks out for her teammates and helps them through their own disappointments, and puts in a serious amount of extra work to be the best player she can be. I’ve drawn a lot from her mentality when I’ve faced setbacks of my own.

Our friendship has grown even more through using football to break down barriers and connect the world. Aivi taught me I could still have fun while being a pro. She also taught me to not be afraid to be an advocate.

1 cause you support:

ac: There are too many to choose from but one would be The Big Issue — a charity that supports people experiencing homelessness and marginalisation.

∞ an action you do every day that impacts the world in a positive way:

ac: Have meaningful interactions with people. Whether it’s a conversation where I make sure I’m really present, helping a friend or stranger without being asked, or just being kind to the barista serving me, I want others to walk away from any interaction with me feeling appreciated.

It matters. I know how much a small act of kindness impacts me when I’m going through a tough time — it can pull me out of a funk and reconnect me back to the world. As much as I can, I want to do the same.

Find Alex Chidiac here.

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previous drawings:

Saraid Taylor trains and writes on sacred Wurundjeri country. She acknowledges Elders, past and present, and extends that respect to all First Nations peoples around the world.

25 questions with

What’s a song?

am:

How do you think others see you?

am: As someone who’s spent too much time in the sun. A bit like an ancient piece of driftwood.

How do you think others see you?

am: As a handy-enough and highly-affordable jack of some trades.

How do you know yourself?

am: Given what I do for a living—make noise—I’m sure people think that I’m always up for a chat. There’s this perception that he-loves-the-sound-of-his-own-voice. It probably comes with the territory. But, and my wife will testify to this much to her occasional annoyance, I love shutting the whole thing down. Saying nothing. Hearing only ambient sounds. I love the stillness of silence.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

am: I’d like to think my laugh would feel like a Blundstone boot with about twelve months left before being reimagined as a potplant.

What’s your favourite type of water?

am: One that has dolphins in it, waves rolling off rocky points and stares up to huge skies.

What’s your most common question?

am: What’s their name again?

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

am: Usually by blaming the problem before me, then labelling it as stupid, occasionally raising my voice in exasperation and then waiting for someone to ask what’s up?

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

am: I think I’m five. Maybe six. I’m in the backyard at my family home with Barney, the cocker spaniel, and Reg, my granddad. He lived with us. I’m guessing it’s a Saturday. That was the day Reg did his raking and burning off. He was the hardest-working and most honest man I know. Instead of ploughing through his mounds of collected leaves as I chased my plastic footy pretending to be Jesaulenko, on this Saturday I gathered his home-made leaf scoopers and told him I’d take them to the incinerator. He smiled and winked. All these years later, I know that was his love language. Reg was a man of very few words, a child of the Depression who wasted nothing, especially his tightly-held emotions. That wink felt so warm.

How does someone earn your trust?

am: By turning up. By looking you in the eye. By being authentic. By agreeing that pineapple has no place on a pizza.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

Read more

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scene : tangible

I am sitting at my desk with a pink shower cap on my head. There is a treatment in my hair. I am not looking particularly cute: in an old basketball top I usually wear for pyjamas, worn tracksuit pants from a rival basketball club, and a jumper my friend offered me to keep because she had too many clothes and that I—although barely parting with anything since grade six and consequently also having too many clothes—happily accepted. I am sporting new slippers. They are not new, but they are new for me. Recently, my mother tried to gift me expensive ones, which I apologetically declined because they were made of sheep skin, only for her and my sister to simultaenously query what I called the material comprising the ones currently on my feet. I said: Surely not. They said: Indeed.

In light of this bad development, I slithered out of them, betrayed. How has nobody told me this? I wanted to know. My old slippers had never been exactly new either; they had been my mother’s gift to my grandmother, who had not liked the colour and I—who had liked the colour, who eagerly adopted them—had been using them for years. My mother and sister shrugged. They assumed I had known. I exclaimed: Have you seen my sense of fashion? I don’t exactly pay that much attention. My mother joked try not paying attention now and then apologised because I was quite dejected.

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I would prefer, I said to her, and I was still exclaiming, because of all the dejection, those cute cheap ones you’re wearing right now over fancy animal-skin ones! My mother said: Here, then. She slid her slippers, bought for her from some discount department store by a friend who wanted the two of them to match after a charity walk1, off her feet and passed them to me. She reassured me she already had plenty of her own fancy animal-skin ones so I could use these. I thanked her and tried to shake the dejection.

The new-old slippers are synthetic, and I am not entirely across the ethics of this, but they are keeping my feet warm and I like them. Anyway, I am in slippers and a shower cap and I am writing. Two days ago, I cried in a yoga class at the absurdity I was in a yoga class, stretching very peacefully, while other people in other places are being deliberately starved and tortured. That, unfortunately, is not morbid imagination. That is fact. I could cite many locations and many perpetrators. I scrolled past this video the same day and felt like technology has evolved to not just track what we’re saying (surely illegal) but hear how we’re feeling (goodness).

scene : virtual

I went to repost the video and then stopped because maybe my friends are sick of my solemnity and they just want to enjoy their happy scroll and it’s kind of jarring when I sometimes share a joke about tofu2 and then other times distribute reminders about the depth of grief in the world but then I reposted it anyway because I don’t exactly desire to ever be solemn, I would prefer to only be sharing tofu jokes, but sometimes solemnity is unavoidable and, also, ultimately, a very minuscule discomfort to experience in the scope of the world. I snorted at the absurdity I was even having this internal debate when, as mentioned, other people in other places are being deliberately starved and tortured, and the least we can do is talk about it. Then I castigated myself for acting as if interacting online—talking about it—counted as any tangible form of activism.

But, hours later, a friend sent me a message on a different channel, asking whether I could share a donation link that was raising urgent funds for Lebanon, which are being transferred directly, daily, to support people on the ground delivering various forms of aid. She sent: I would really appreciate if you can share it with a small call to action for people to donate. I feel like you have a lot of followers who care. And that last line made all the time I have spent since I was fourteen building a silly little virtual platform feel like it might be worth it. I feel like you have a lot of followers who care. What a beautiful, precious sentence.

I don’t believe social media should be where our support for others ends. It can’t be the only way we resist injustice. And yet, I do believe, it still has the potential to be a functional tool. It will never have complete solutions, but it can have beginnings. And it is in the conversations I have with people who follow me, who say, Oh, I hadn’t known that until I stumbled across it on your story; I was telling a friend about what you shared; I want to attend a protest; I donated, that I think: Maybe I will not! Shut down! All my social media accounts! Yet! Because knowing about the world, about the suffering of others, fills us with so much grief, but that grief is crucial if it can compel us to act. Ignorance might be more comfortable but it’s not worth its cost: the risk that we might not meet our unique capacity to make the world a safer and more loving place. I am sustained by the people who dedicate their lives to that aim. I am sustained by the people who take time out of their lives to help support them. This is the hope to which I cling.

scene : schedule

When cherished people ask me what I do all day, which loosely translates to why have you not replied to any of my text messages or called me back, I share this is what a training day in AFLW pre-preseason roughly looks like for me:

6:30am: leave for the club

7:00am: write for approximately two hours in a small room where the lights turn off every five minutes if I do not move

9:00am: gym

10:15am: on-field training

12:30pm: recovery

1:15pm: showers

1:45: get home and eat lunch and write3

7:30pm: stop writing and eat dinner and get ready to sleep

This is what a non-training day in pre-preseason looks like:

am—pm: writing

with a yoga class in there somewhere

and some compulsory eating because I am a disciplined, focused athlete who never ever forgets

All that is to say, publicly, please know a belated reply does not mean I am so popular. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I am not popular. I do love you. I appreciate you; I bare my soul to you. I tell you very embarrassing details that other people with more discernment would probably decide to keep private. I am merely either literally running around (an oval) or languishing inside the strange facility of my brain as it tries, routinely, to convert elusive thoughts into edible sentences.

It is slow work. It also doesn’t always seem logical. It regularly doesn’t seem fair (see: crying in yoga about being able to cry in yoga). My writing has faltered over the last couple of years, maybe not that visibly, in terms of production, but internally with conscience, because it feels trivial and indulgent. There is a live-streamed genocide on all our various screens. It is being committed by an ally to our government. It is not being reported on fairly by our media. It all presents as shattering and unreal. It doesn’t quite make sense for me to write. There is no fictional story I could produce with enough real value.

But then succumbing to the reasoning of indulgence seems like its own form of indulgence—doing nothing, ceasing to ‘exist’, is not a particularly helpful form of protest—so I am trying to renew vigour. I am trying to focus on doing my best. I have begun a new novel! The first4 was bad! The second will hopefully be better. We’ll find out together when I reply to your texts!

Concurrently with doing my best, I am, as always, an avid participant in failure. Here is a boring but non-comprehensive list of recent ones since the last scene I shared:

Failed to have a pitch about vulnerability and privacy accepted for the Emerging Writers’ Festival. Failed to have an essay about love accepted by Splinter. Failed to have a pitch for an athlete interview accepted by frankie magazine. Failed to have an essay about football and partners accepted by ABC Lifestyle. Failed to have a piece of fiction about weight and bodies accepted by Westerly. Failed to have the same piece accepted by Griffith Review. Failed to have a poem about basketball and injuries accepted by Griffith Review. Failed to have an essay about beauty and women athletes and sport accepted by Griffith Review. Have not given up on Griffith Review. We are going through a rough patch but I still love Griffith Review. Had my first piece of fiction accepted by Kill Your Darlings5! Had it retrospectively declined. Unsure how I managed that. A new, unexpected experience. Was thrilled and then was sad. Failed to win (or be shortlisted in) (or be longlisted in) the ABR Calibre Essay Prize. Failed to win (or be shortlisted in) (or be longlisted in) the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Failed to win (or be shortlisted in) (or be longlisted in) the KYD Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize. Failed, and this was truly the most fun failure, to have my application selected for The Next Chapter 2026.

scene : cyclical

I first applied for The Next Chapter scheme in its inaugural year, being 2018, and then again in 2019, 2020, 2021, along with, most recently, this year.

The application requires a 10,000-word writing sample, a 300-word statement, a 200-word sample summary, and a one-page letter of support. There is something excruciating about submitting all these elements to strangers and imploring them to choose you. It requires a type of abasement; a surrender, an exposure.

I suspect, across the years, my applications have becoming increasingly wretched. For example, this was my required statement for the latest submission:

I was really lucky to be offered a contract for my debut novel in 2022 when I was twenty-three. Within that month, I was awarded a Varuna Fellowship for the same work with a different publisher. I was advised if I wanted to accept the book deal I needed to decline the fellowship, which I did. My novel was loosely scheduled for release in late 2023. It’s now three quarters of the way through 20256, I am twenty-seven, and the novel is, honestly, not even in the process of being published. I signed the contract unagented but in the years since have attempted to attain representation—to the response that because my work is under contract I don’t currently need it.

There are so many ways the publishing industry is not inaccessible to me: I’m white, able-bodied, middle-class. I’m beyond fortunate to have studied at VCA, to have spent almost a decade playing professional sport, to have a book deal. But there’s a dissonance between my perceived success and the reality of my failures. I’m so desperately stuck.

As deeply grateful as I am to have signed with a wonderful publisher, it’s suspended me between worlds, between statuses: it regularly prevents me from being classified as an emerging writer—even though my lack of literary knowledge and experience clearly denotes me as one, exemplified by my struggling manuscript—and applying for appropriate programs. I haven’t been able to get a literary agent. I’m almost entirely surrounded by athletes and don’t have an artistic circle. In other words: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and no idea how to help myself. All I’ve ever wanted is to be a novelist. All I crave from the Next Chapter scheme, aside from the privilege of financial stability providing more space to write, is community and mentorship.

When I say not being accepted for The Next Chapter 2026 was the most fun failure, that is sarcasm. It was, instead, the most devastating because, as expressed, I genuinely felt very desperate—and also, somehow, still, strangely hopeful—entering. It felt like my career as a writer depended on the scheme. It felt like a solution.

I could’ve cried when I recieved the email to say my application had been unsuccessful again. There was a difference, though, between it and all the standard rejections I had received in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

It read:

The five judges … were deeply impressed by the calibre of the entries. Of the nearly 600 applications we received this year, your application was ranked among the top 5% of entries received. The judges specifically wish to convey their admiration for your work and to encourage you to keep writing.

I couldn’t decide whether this fact was a consolation. It seemed like the proximity to success, its almost-ness, was potentially more painful. It also seemed like a sign that I had no choice but to set aside the doleful little baby of a novel and try something else. We persist. Humility and ego and all that.

scene : diurnal

I’m currently reading the novel Griefdogg by Michael Winkler. I’m currently watching the television series Little America by Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani and Lee Eisenberg. I recently read an article which I found interesting and you might, too, called How to Write a ‘Positionality Statement’ (and Why Positioning Identity Matters).

Sarah Homan, Senior Research Associate at the Equality Institute, writes:

I have approximately seven works on submission—across essay, poetry, profile and fiction—and at least twenty interviews I am formatting for publication7. It has felt like a true honour to collaborate with various athletes and artists and humanitarians and other objectively cool people. It seems ridiculous that they have trusted me with such striking and sincere answers, but I appreciate it. If you have someone else you’d like to see respond to the silly set of questions, like how do you want to be remembered, or describe your toothbrush to a stranger in three words, let me know.

Here are two causes to support if you’re interested and able:

1. The Lebanon Mutual Aid fund, organised by Dani Moham, passed on by Rita Nehme, which distributes money directly to three organisations in Lebanon:

   1. Lebanese Red Cross: Providing frontline emergency care, including ambulance services, blood supply, and medical support to hospitals and communities under pressure.

   2. Nation Station: A grassroots kitchen delivering thousands of meals to displaced people across Beirut and Mount Lebanon.

   3. Egna Legna Besidet: A women-led group distributing emergency aid to vulnerable migrant domestic workers affected by displacement.

2. Aid for families in need in the north of Gaza, organised by Ahmad Atawneh, who has a trusted contact in Gaza. In the last round of donations, they were able to provide packages—of rice, flour, beans, oil, yeast, pasta, cheese, meat and many other essentials—to the 35 remaining families. He can be contacted directly for payment details.

thist

a journal by athlete or writer saraid taylor

By Saraid Taylor

3

My darling teammate and friend Eliza McNamara has provided a crucial correction to my daily itinerary, where I cancel out any benefit of my early morning by requiring more sleep by the afternoon:

She is, unfortunately, correct.

25 questions with

What’s a song?

tc:

How do you think others see you?

tc: What do you mean? I look like me. I don’t know anyone else who looks like me. Once, someone said they saw someone else who looked like me and showed him to me. He didn’t look like me.

How do you think others see you?

tc: I think it depends on the context, but those who have seen me for my public-facing advocacy work probably perceive me as serious and intimidating. Those who know me in my personal life probably see me as being less serious, sometimes funny, and hopefully as someone with integrity.

How do you know yourself?

tc: A work-in-progress.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

tc: Oooh. Soothing like ocean waves or something? Preferably not an irritating one.

What’s your favourite type of water?

tc: Cold Melbourne tap water. Whenever I get back from overseas, sometimes even interstate, I stick my head under the tap in the kitchen sink and take big gulps of water. I’m also one of those people who orders sparkling water at restaurants. I also like the ocean. I like bodies of water.

What’s your most common question?

tc: ‘Can I give you a hug?’

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

tc: Get really worked up about something until someone offers help, turn down the offer and then begrudgingly accept — I’m working on getting better at that.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

tc: I remember when I turned five and my parents made a cake for me. I distinctly remember my dad in the kitchen with my mum the morning before school that day and he was helping to ice it. It was a boat-shaped cake and it had blue and pink icing and I took it to school for everyone to share.

How does someone earn your trust?

tc: I generally trust most people, I think? But for me, being a person of integrity is a big one.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

tc: The earth being flat. It’s not. When I was about three or four I thought the earth was flat. But I was wrong.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

Read more

25 questions with

What’s a song?

bl:

How do you think others see you?

bl: Six foot, blonde, blue eyes.

How do you think others see you?

bl: Short, brown hair, green eyes.

How do you know yourself?

bl: I’m really clean. I clean everything constantly: I vacuum the house once a day, make sure all the dishes are put away. There’s always fucking dust everywhere, so I try to wipe everything down to get rid of it all. I think a glass of water left on the bedside table tastes gross the next morning. I get really anxious with time trials, even after eight years, because I don’t want to perform badly. I’d do anything for my friends, or my partner, Rhiannon Banner.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

bl: Blue slime.

What’s your favourite type of water?

bl: Half cold, half tap water.

What’s your most common question?

bl: ‘Sorry, can I ask another question?’ because I’ve already asked ten.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

bl: Compliment someone on something they do well and then let them teach me.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

bl: Not the earliest but most distinctive: my seventh birthday. My parents were both at work so my sister woke up really early and baked me a cake. Then my brother and I took turns riding my new bike through the house. We all had cake for breakfast before going to school.

How does someone earn your trust?

bl: Following through on their word, being genuine to themselves, not saying what someone wants to hear.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

bl: Too many to count. There’s been countless times where I rely on the people around me to give me new perspectives and explain to me why I’m wrong. Recently: I thought my wedding would only cost $20,000 and that was very wrong. (The wedding I wanted ended up being priced at around $70,000.)

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

Read more

Disclaimer: While all efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the following instructions do not constitute, and cannot replace, professional advice.

part one

The first step is to be silly. Be silly enough that, despite considering yourself a relatively balanced and logical person, you dread New Years. Dread it so much you reject the reality of its impending arrival. Believe fully in your powers of rejection. Think: It will be different this year. Think this, resolutely, every day of the last month of the year—especially on the 29th and the 30th, historically the two days you begin a frantic initiation of arrangements—and when you do not succumb, feel proud of yourself. Think: It really will be different this year! Think this until you wake up on the 31st and begin making breakfast. Waver for half a second whilst preparing banana oats, and then pause the oat-preparing to venture a text to one friend. When she replies to say she has no plans, think forlornly: It will not, apparently, be different this year. Ask whether your friend would want to spend the afternoon into night at your house, and when she says yay, yes, begin a rapid distribution of individualised messages to your other friends consisting of roughly the same two principal components:

1. So sorry for not replying to your above message;

2. Do you have plans tonight?

Try not to forget anybody. Worry you’ve forgotten somebody. Send more invitations to combat the worry. Even reply to your interstate friend from primary school, R — who has informed you he is not currently interstate but instead inquiring whether you want to catch up the following night — and impulsively invite him into these shared plans. Understand R won’t come, and likely won’t even reply, but feel glad that he will feel included. Continue to send messages. Shudder at each one you send. Think: Apologies! If this is! Presumptous! Feel immensely grateful when you receive any response, even when it is to politely decline your invitation. How mannerly! Feel slightly more grateful when you receive responses that accept. Mannerly and fun!

Fret, frequently, like every year, as you frenziedly begin to clean the house, that nobody will attend. Assume, arrogantly, like every year, that despite your disturbing aptitude for belated planning, there will still inexplicably be attendance. Agonise, somewhere in between the fretting and the arrogance, that there will be too much attendance and it will be overwhelming. Return to fretting. Return to arrogance. Return sporadically to more agonising! Have a crack at the simultaneous experience. Repeat indefinitely as you go to the supermarket to buy many packets of chips.

Exhale when the first guest arrives. You will have at least one person to force into a game of cards. M is a football teammate who you invited last year but was too shy to come. Now she is here. You are honoured! Hug her gently. She is shy. M has brought lots of items for a platter and a plastic contraption presumably used to shoot alcoholic fluid into mouths. Open a can of alcoholic lemonade for both of you and force M into the game of cards. Feel gleeful when she learns the rules. Feel less gleeful when she begins to win. Ask the dog to stop barking at M. Think to yourself: Hey, this is fun, as the two of you steadily intoxicate yourselves on the alcoholic lemonade. Begin to relax. Check your phone and instantly un-relax.

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25 questions with

What’s a song?

ms:

How do you think others see you?

ms: I’d say average height; a smaller build, shaped by my love of running and by my body issues; blue eyes, hair dyed blonder on the ends than it naturally is. I was called ‘borrid’ in school, as in big forehead (also: five-head, etc), and my beautician recently noted one of my eyebrows sits slightly higher than the other — haven’t stopped thinking about that. There’s some argument over whether I look like my dad or my mum more. His family say him, hers say hers. But I’ve thought blurry film photos of my mum in her twenties were actually of me once or twice.

How do you think others see you?

ms: It’s incredible how difficult I found these questions … to the point it delayed me in starting them all together, ha. Working in television has forced me to think a lot about what I look like and how others perceive me more than any other role I’ve had in my career and more than any other stage of life.

Being a Gamilaroi and Dunghutti woman with a white mum and black dad, I naturally want to tell you the depth of cultural pride and passion I feel pumping through my veins emerges externally too — but it doesn’t. Blackfullas pick up on the round shape of my nose, my eyes, the tone of my skin colour after summer; non-blackfullas see the outline of my flag tattooed on the back of my right arm and start putting the pieces together that way.

I think people would assume I’m ambitious and competitive and cutthroat — a by-product of the media industry. I have certainly made mistakes with how I communicate things, I’ve been criticized for being too blunt or too honest, but I’m never personal, just always trying to do my best work. I’ve tried to be better with this, but I also think that kind of criticism is gendered. I hope people think I’m kind, hope they can feel my authenticity, my empathy and care.

How do you know yourself?

ms: As someone not trying to be anything other than what they are. I’m often pleasantly surprised to find myself in the professional situations I do — as I’m driven by hard work for hard work’s sake, more than any kind of fixed destination. I’m deeply interested in people, deeply motivated by stories and, at the risk of being perceived as naïve, deeply dedicated to my belief in a story’s ability to make true change. I think people would be surprised by how unnatural I feel in social situations and how my struggle with making friends is a never-ending one.

I’m sure television has warped what I used to think and feel about my appearance. However, one thing that has been a great constant is how I, like so many women, have never seen my body for what it truly is; the impact of external expectations and mixed messages of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘fat’ and ‘skinny’, have deeply affected my self-worth since adolescence. I’m a chronic body checker1 and not hesitant to admit it or make jokes about my own body dysmorphia, as a means of trying to keep myself accountable and those thoughts at bay.

There’s a big contradiction within me too: I am periodically between states of high stress and anxiety, and then total relaxation, ‘go with the flow’ mentalites. On any given day, my brain and heart surprise me with their reactions to situations. Sometimes, the notion of missing the train I planned to take could send me into a spiral and result in a truly horrible day. The next day, the same situation won’t even garner a shrug of concern. I’m not sure what that says — maybe as this becomes public someone can psychoanalyse me.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

ms: I have two types of laugh. One that comes from a shocked amusement: it’s a cackle. Loud, distinct. One that rises and bursts. Let’s say it’s a brew heating over an open fire, as the bubbles rise from the depths of the cauldron and explode in thick, rolling waves. The other is when I’m truly hysterical — honestly, the most common time it happens is when my sister and I are retelling a childhood story nobody else finds funny. It’s almost like a howling cry. It drawls and wheezes, like an accordion stretching and contracting.

What’s your favourite type of water?

ms: Salt. I’m a beach baby through and through. She is healing, she is life.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

ms: Eat in silence at my mum’s kitchen bench with my head down and wait until she asks me what’s wrong.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

ms: When I was in kindergarten, I started having this weird series of fainting spells and it was a scary time for my family. Everything turned out to be okay, but I remember how much I became aware of the love from everyone around me when I was going through it. There were lots of ‘how are you feeling?’ check-ins, and cuddles and worry from my dad who has always been more of the stoic, you’ll be right type. I remember getting visits from aunties and uncles and specifically getting a packet of Twisties when I was sad I had to miss out on swimming lessons because I was wearing a heart monitor. It’s like I could feel all their softness in a different way.

How does someone earn your trust?

ms: Slow and steady does trust build. People always show you who they are in how they treat others and that becomes apparent the more you spend time with someone. It’s in those moments my trust is built.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

ms: What the best way to deal with people who disagree with you is. I used to be combative and defensive and the type to try and scream them into their place. I have learnt the hard way that this doesn’t work. I’ve tried to listen to understand those who I disagree with and have had far more progress in shifting their perspectives. (Although it requires a practiced level of patience.)

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

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25 questions with

What’s a song?

sp:

How do you think others see you?

sp: No matter what the time is, I always look like I just woke up. I probably did. I love a nap. I’m 5’2 with dark brown skin, black hair, black eyes — they say you can’t have black eyes but mine always look black to me.

How do you think others see you?

sp: As a funny, confident and extremely impatient person who is terrible at responding to texts.

How do you know yourself?

sp: As a strange, anxious person, ill-equipped to function in a tech-savvy world. There are too many mediums to communicate on and I get lost in between them. I think given my socials, everyone may be surprised that I’m a Luddite. I’d love it if we all threw our phones into the sea.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

sp: Like the ground shaking below the wildebeests’ hooves as Mufasa fell to his death. When I find something really funny, I laugh in a low deep voice with my whole body.

What’s your favourite type of water?

sp: Warm, deep enough to float in, with no big waves. I struggle with the cold ocean water in Victoria; genetically I’m supposed to be near the equator. My husband bought me a wetsuit and it’s been a game changer for me. I’m not cool enough to be a surfer but I’ve now tripled my floating time in the water.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

sp: If I call a friend and ask if they’d like to do something together, that’s me asking for help. I’m not good at chatting through what’s going on but I’d really like to sit in their company, talking about something else.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

sp: Falling asleep next to my grandmother. Isn’t memory a strange thing? She passed away many years ago but I can still feel the paper-thin texture of the crook of her arm. We went back to Colombo from Dubai every year when I was a kid and I’d make a fuss to sleep next to her. There was a forcefield of safety around her that I couldn’t bear being outside of.

How does someone earn your trust?

sp: With time, tea and oversharing trauma.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

sp: I spent my twenties thinking I was right about everything then my thirties being humbled for being wrong about so many things — love, work, home, family, MySpace. Now I start with assuming that I’m wrong, I think I’ve overcorrected.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

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Maeve Chaplin is 167cm. She was born on the twenty-second day of August in 2002, and currently lives on Wurunderji Woi-wurrung Country. Maeve uses she/her pronouns. Named in the AFLW All-Australian team for 2025, she is a professional footballer. She has never eaten beef tartare.

How do you think others see you?

mc: Medium height, natural brown hair with some blonde highlights, hazel sometimes green eyes, pale complexion with lots and lots of freckles!

How do you think others see you?

mc: Extroverted, kind, funny, caring, probably hot.

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Rhydian Cowley is 181cm. He was born on the fourth day of January in 1991 and lives on Wurundjeri Country. Rhydian uses he/him pronouns. A professional race walker, he has been to three Olympics. He has never eaten haggis.

How do you think others see you?

rc: A slightly goofy-looking white guy with brown hair and a lazy eye. Seen wearing some form of sports uniform, usually national team kit that I’d rather use until it’s worn out than leave hiding in a spare room.

How do you think others see you?

rc: As someone who likes walking, and birds, cares about the environment and people, and who can be a bit silly and make jokes that only he understands. And seems very busy.

How do you know yourself?

rc: As a bit of an awkward nerd who tries not to take himself too seriously but sometimes does, both likes and hates being in the spotlight, tries to be involved in too many things at once, and still has a fair bit of imposter syndrome when it comes to community involvement and sporting performances.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

rc: Probably something hard and metallic that would be loud and reverberate a lot if you hit it. Maybe like a bell so it could have some fancy shapes like birds on it from the casting that you could feel out if you prefer over hitting it.

What’s your favourite type of water?

rc: The water in gentle nighttime rain that provides a soothing background sound to fall asleep to.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

rc: Probably by whinging about whatever it is that’s bothering me, regularly, to anyone who will listen. Though sometimes when I do that I don’t need help as such, just need to get stuff off my chest.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

rc: I was lucky to have a pretty loving home growing up. I never felt unloved, or like I had to do something to earn affection, which is something that seemed normal to me but now I’m older I realise not everyone gets that experience. I like to give and receive lots of hugs, and both my parents were happy to indulge that … I grew up always having my offer or request for a hug accepted.

How does someone earn your trust?

rc: By being honest, straightforward, and showing through their actions that they listen to and care about others.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

rc: Thinking that Essendon men would win a finals game anytime in the last twenty years.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

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Marissa Williamson Pohlman is 173cm. Born on the nineteenth day of February in 2002, she is a Ngarrindjeri woman raised on Wadawurrung Country currently living on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people. Marissa uses she/they pronouns1. They were the first Aboriginal woman to qualify and compete with the Australian Olympic boxing team. She has never eaten a witchetty grub.

Content Warning: This piece contains references to suicide and child abuse.

How do you think others see you?

mwp: I have bright green eyes framed by dark, bushy brows that always seem to be either frowning or raised with excitement. My cheekbones are high, my face carries soft smile lines, and my blonde hair naturally falls around my face.

How do you think others see you?

mwp: I think I’m the kind of person people either really vibe with or can’t stand — there’s rarely a middle ground. I’d love to say I genuinely don’t care about what the people who dislike me think, but if I’m being honest, sometimes it hits a weak link in the chain and shakes my sense of worth. Most of the time, I choose to pour my energy into the people who show me real love and loyalty. Still, I’ve noticed that both the love and the hate I receive can bleed into each other — they both shape me, whether I want them to or not.

How do you know yourself?

mwp: My sense of self is dynamic — it shifts depending on where I’m at in life and the external things that impact my self-esteem. Right now, I feel a bit lost in everything I’m doing. But in typical me fashion, I still show up every day, even when I don’t fully know why or what for. The difference between how I see myself and how others see me feels like looking into a mirror with a crack in it. The qualities people love in me are the same ones I’m proud of: I stand up for what’s right, I fight for people who deserve advocacy, I work hard, I care deeply about community, I carry humility. But those same traits are also why some people dislike me. My confidence, my refusal to tolerate bullshit, my courage to speak up — those things inspire some and threaten others. It’s a constant push and pull. Those forces — admiration and resistance — either build me up or break me down. And this year in particular, I’ve felt both intensely.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

mwp: Some might say my laugh could be heard across all seven continents. It’s a vibration, like standing in a mosh pit at your DJ’s favourite set. It’s either annoying or it’s contagious.

What’s your favourite type of water?

mwp: Definitely salt water. I am a water woman. Nothing gives me more joy than body surfing at a beach in summer.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

mwp: It depends on who I need help from and what kind of help it is. If it’s something deeply personal, it often shows up as me withdrawing — going quiet, disappearing from the people who love me until the silence becomes sharp enough that they know I’m not okay.

Sometimes it’s more direct, like walking straight to my dad on the couch just to melt into one of his teddy bear hugs. Other times, it’s me turning up at the boxing gym to hit something because that’s the only language my body knows for release. It might look like booking a therapy session, or sitting across from my best friend at a bar, drinking Aperol spritz and pretending we’re just catching up when, really, I’m trying to keep myself together. Most of the time, asking for help without asking is me fully knowing I need it, holding all that weight, and trying to carry it anyway — until someone notices that I’m not just being strong, I’m hanging on.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

mwp: This one is hard for me to revisit. My childhood is fractured — split between out-of-home care and, before that, an abusive household. But when I reach for moments of love, I think of being alone in the house with my three brothers, doing all kinds of wild things to survive boredom and chaos. Riding bikes and scooters — usually ones one of us had stolen. Walking to the neighbour’s place just to play WWE on the trampoline. Stealing lollies because treats were rare but hunger for joy was constant. Making pancakes for dinner with one of those shake-a-bottle mixes and thinking it was the best meal ever.

But the most profound love came later — from my mum, the one who took me in when I was seventeen. The person whose name I chose to carry: Pohlman. She brought books, laughter, safe fights, honest conversations. She gave me a home without fear. The first time I truly understood unconditional love, free from the shadows of violence, was when I asked her if she would adopt me. And she just said, ‘I can, but we don’t need a piece of paper for you to know you’re mine forever.’

How does someone earn your trust?

mwp: People don’t need to earn my trust, they have it from the start. It’s only through their actions that they might lose it.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

mwp: I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life. The beautiful part about the person I’m becoming is that I’m okay with that. I’m human — we all are — and being wrong is part of the deal. What matters is whether you own it. It’s only not okay when you do the wrong thing, whether by choice or by mistake, and refuse to take accountability. A recent example: I was overwhelmed and ended up hurting my best friend — the person I love most, the one closest to me. She forgave me because I took responsibility. I knew I’d fucked up and promised myself I’d never treat her that way again. That apology felt like swallowing a dry pill, but it was mine to swallow. It was up to me to make things right after being a c**t — and honestly, I’m proud to be the kind of person who does that work.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

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Geraldine Hakewill is 179cm. She was born in Paris, France, on the thirteenth day of July in 1987, grew up on Darramurragal / Guringai Country and now lives on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Geraldine uses she/her pronouns. She has never eaten a Dagwood dog. She is an actor.

How do you think others see you?

gh: I have my mum’s colouring, my dad’s height, my grandmother’s facial features and a combination of my other grandparents’ hands and feet. I think I look more like my uncle than either of my parents. If I was an animal I might be a … deer?

How do you think others see you?

gh: As capable and nice.

How do you know yourself?

gh: I’m diabolically hard on myself, and sometimes my thoughts are mean about myself and others — but I’m working on it. I’m messy and I’m silly and I love overhearing gossip.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

gh: Wizz Fizz lollies.

What’s your favourite type of water?

gh: Anything 37 degrees and above.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

gh: By passive-aggressively doing the thing I need help with just a bit too loudly.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

gh: I can’t remember not feeling loved so I’m not sure. What a lovely, privileged thing to be able to say. I remember being sick in bed at my grandmother’s house. She would make me lamb chops and mashed potato, give me flat lemonade for my tummy, and I’d get to watch Foxtel. She’d leave a little bell beside the bed so I could ring if I needed anything. Her hands on my forehead were soft and her smell was comforting and her house was cozy and she let me play with anything I wanted to, including her makeup.

How does someone earn your trust?

gh: They pass the intuition test. I choose to trust most people and I like to think the vast majority of people I meet mean well, but I have a pretty good internal radar for liars and fuckheads.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

gh: That ‘Happily Ever After’ is attainable, or even desirable.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

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Joe Williams is 171cm. He was born on the fourth day of September in 19831. He is a Wiradjuri/Wolgalu man who lives on Wiradjuri Country. Joe uses he/him pronouns. He was a professional NRL player who became a professional boxer and, now a PhD candidate, is an adjunct associate professor at the School of Psychology. He has never eaten a frog2.

Content Warning: This piece contains references to suicide.

How do you think others see you?

jw: A broken-down former athlete.

How do you think others see you?

jw: They probably see someone who’s super busy, who is frantic, always all over the place. Or they see someone completely calm: a duck on the pond. I spoke in a session one day in a small, small town — was actually where I live — and the person who introduced me goes, ‘Well, everyone here knows Joe Williams. I don’t really need to give him an introduction,’ and I sort of interrupted him and said, ‘No, everyone might know of me, but not many people know me.’ Sometimes we can feel we know people through social media because we see them constantly — and I’m very visible with that, but there is this side of me that is quite protected.

How do you know yourself?

jw: Like all of us: we’re all yearning for things. We’re all yearning for different needs for different reasons, for things to help, to keep us whole. I have been lucky enough to live a couple of different lives, through sport and now through the work I do in the wellbeing space. I was at Uluru for the 40th anniversary of the Handback on the weekend, and I was hanging out with the Prime Minister [Anthony Albanese], who literally knew who I was because he’s a Rabbitohs fan and I played at the Rabbitohs. That’s wild to think: the Prime Minister knows the name of me, a little Aboriginal boy from the bush with dirt on his knees and his face. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, particularly in the last five or six years, and I’ve come to the realisation that I’m just that little boy wandering through life on this big, great adventure. I forget who I am sometimes, if that makes sense, because I have to walk between two worlds: as an Aboriginal man, as someone who’s deeply ingrained in values, which are in my behaviours now, who is constantly walking in spaces he feels uncomfortable in — and as that little boy who sometimes still feels like asking, ‘Why are people so mean? How can people be so unkind?’ I literally see myself through the lens of that child. I’ve never actually said that out loud to anyone. But that little boy would be proud. My shell, the outside of me, is getting older, and I’m hanging out in some pretty cool spaces now, but I don’t see it as a big deal because I’m still him.

More people than I can count have said to me over the years, ‘You’re so different to what I thought you were like.’ They view me as … I’m not sure if intimidating is the right word … but they can’t believe how different I am to what they expected. I’m a soft person: reflective, a deep thinker. I’m welcoming. I get emotional. But there are multiple versions of me. That’s probably the most honest and vulnerable and interesting answer. There’re multiple versions of me and there are very, very, very few people who see the real version, the whole version. Now, I’m always truthful. I don’t ever pretend to be someone I’m not: everyone sees an authentic part of me, but not everyone gets all of me.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

jw: Smooth, a little malleable, like my baby’s bouncy ball on one side, and a cricket ball that’s been bowled and bashed around for a hundred overs on the other.

What’s your favourite type of water?

jw: Rain water: because you can drink it and you can dance in it. You can be cleansed with it. When we die, we go back to the water. Not everyone understands that concept. We go back into the ground, where our body disintegrates, returns to those deep waters throughout the layers of the earth, then gets evaporated back up to the sky, to the clouds, before falling down again as rain. Then, as Professor [Uncle] Paul Gordon says, when that rain hits the ground, it becomes the grass. And then when the kangaroo eats the grass, we become the kangaroo. You know? And then when we eat the kangaroo, the kangaroo becomes us, and it constantly goes around. So when we die, we go back into that big water, right? The big water in the middle of the earth. When I die, I want to be cremated and thrown in a river because then every time my kids go to the water, they can connect with me through it – no matter where that water is, it’s still the same water.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

jw: I was part of a podcast with Lifeline and one of the questions was: how does your partner ask you for help. When I asked Courtney, she said, ‘You don’t ask me for help.’ As someone who goes around the world telling people they need to ask for help, I’m the first one to lock myself away in my bedroom and not talk to anyone, ha. So I do relate to people — for me, over the years, I’ve also struggled to ask. But Courtney and I have been together for a long time so we understand each other. Me, sitting in my room, not coming out, is a trigger for her to come to me and ask if everything is okay. I always tell groups to pay attention to behaviour, not what is said. Our behaviour can show others when we’re doing it tough, more than we’ll sometimes actually say.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

jw: There was a time my mum went in to bat for me hard: these neighbours at the end of our street were picking on us, swearing at my little sisters, and we took a BB gun — you know the ones that pop out tiny little pellets — down to shoot them with it. I would have been in, like, Grade Two. The neighbours rang the cops and said I had a gun. And my mum went and found this little toy gun in my room and said, Don’t be stupid. This is what he had. Times like that, when my parents just really supported me, made me feel like I was loved. I was always surrounded by it. And this is the wild thing, right, I can’t remember yesterday, but I remember those feelings of love as a kid. I remember dressing up as a Ninja Turtle at my birthday party — maybe I was turning seven — and running across the front yard doing these karate spins. We never had a lot growing up, so times like parties where I got to be the centre of it was special. It wasn’t particularly about how I was told or what happened to me, it was what I felt, what I feel, when everyone is happy. Times at family gatherings where it wasn’t on the back of any sort of personal success or achievement, it was on the back of big groups feeling that happiness. It was experiences of family, as a kid, with mob and lots of laughter. Laughter and playing. Our family is very competitive. There were times with sport when I was thrown into playing touch footy with the adults, and I’m seven or eight or nine, and there’s heat with how everyone’s competing, but there’s so much laughter too. There’s love. That’s what shapes us, right?

How does someone earn your trust?

jw: They don’t. Authenticity is not an earnt thing. Authenticity is just a natural thing. If you show me your real you, then I’ll make judgment on whether I’ll let you in or not.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

jw: Life: experiences, people, my career. You’re an athlete, right? Post-career, you realise that the game we love doesn’t love us back. It’s an uncomfortable relationship that we want and we yearn for, but one that doesn’t give a single care about who we are. So I’ve been wrong about lots of stuff. But I don’t ever say I’ve been wrong — I just say I’m learning. We are only wrong because of our perceived idea about things: about love, about people, about life. And we only have that perception through what we’ve already learned or been taught. We’re all just perceiving everything through our experiences. So nothing is wrong. It’s all growth.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

jw: A boy called me a — sorry for saying it — black cunt, then said, ‘I didn’t mean it like that, man,’ when I fought back. But thinking about it now, how else could he have meant it? I would’ve been fourteen. It was the first time I ever sort of stood up for myself when I was clearly in the minority. Cowra, where I was born and went to primary school, was a small community, so whilst there was divide, it was a lot more visual. We moved to Wagga when I was ten. At high school, there were only two kids in the whole school who were Aboriginal. I punched on there a bit for, like, really overt racism. It was the first time that, as a person, I was seen as different. That I felt I was different.

What about you most comforts others?

jw: I think who I am now. I think I’m safe now. I have knowledge around the work that I do: I understand what triggers are, understand why they are, understand the behaviours when they happen. I read body language. I’m constantly analysing things and people. So I’d like to think that other people feel safe around me. That I help to make them feel safe. But also there are others, because they get a very different version of me, who might not feel that way.

What do you need to work on?

jw: I self-sabotage a bit. I’ve put loads of work in but there’s still plenty to do — to help me be a better Dad, to be a better partner, to be the best version of me.

What scares you?

jw: I fly around the country a lot, and I have a panic attack every time I’m on the plane: thinking that I’m not going to get to the other end. But it’s the loss of any of my kids, or my wife, Courtney, that scares me the most. Culturally, though, we believe all of us are on a journey: that everything’s going to happen on the day that it’s supposed to happen. So I know if anything was to happen, then it was supposed to.

What’s your most common question?

jw: ‘What’s crackin’?’ I guess that’s my most common question. I always dive into people: I’m like, ‘How are you doing,’ and we talk and then I’m like, ‘How are you really?’ Because not very often do we show how we’re actually feeling.

Who gave you a piece of advice you wish you could pass on to everyone?

jw: There’re millions of great pieces of advice I’ve been given. Every little thing goes into the backpack that we carry around and ultimately become. Some of the best advice I’ve ever heard was from my dad. He was the one who gave me the story of the little boy. After he found out about my suicide attempt, he sat with me on my step, and we were crying, and he goes, ‘I want to tell you about the little boy that lives inside you.’ I said yeah, okay. This is 2012. He said, ‘There’s a little boy who’s scared. There’s a little boy who comes to a dark hallway and there’s a door at the end and he needs to get on the other side, but he’s too scared to open it.’ He said, ‘Adult you, right now, standing next to him, what do you do, knowing that this little boy’s scared?’ And I thought I had to show bravado to my dad, that’s what I always thought: I have to impress my dad, as many of us do, right? And I said, ‘I’d just kick the door down.’ And my dad said, ‘No, Joe, that’s not what you do. What you need to do is to put your hand out and hold that little boy’s hand and just say, Come on, we can walk through this together.’ My dad goes, ‘That little boy, you get to walk with him every day, mate.’ Again, this is back in 2012, and my dad is talking about the psychology of the internal child. My dad didn’t go a day past Year Eight at school, but he’s the smartest man I’ve ever met. He just had profound wisdom.

Something else he said to me once: ‘How many removal trucks do you see following a hearse?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You can’t take anything into the ground when you go, mate. Alright? So the only obligation and responsibility is just to be good to people.’

What are you doing when you feel most connected to yourself?

jw: When I’m at cultural events. We’ve got a Corroboree coming up soon — there’ll be hundreds of people dancing. In that moment, I’m in me, so I can feel me, but I also have most of my kids there dancing as well. That’s when I think I feel most me.

What do you think the purpose of life is?

jw: If we’re born into unfortunate circumstances, it’s our obligation to learn about it — learn why — and then not bleed on those we love the most. Don’t carry our bad behaviours. Don’t project them onto our kids. That’s the meaning of life: to leave the place better than we found it.

What would you like remembered about you?

jw: It’ll say on my headstone day: ‘Here’s a bloke who tried to do his best, and loved hard.’

5 smells to describe your life:

jw: The smell of food, of cooking garlic. The smell of water. The smell of sitting around a campfire out in the bush. The smell of sweat. The smell of, like, a love and softness.

4 things on your bedside table:

jw: Phone charger. Books — currently Jilya by Dr Tracy Westerman, and Own Your Story by Lael Stone. My daughter’s iPad, because she goes to bed in my big bed every night. It’s only recently I’ve started sleeping back in it and she’s, what, eight. She’s been sleeping with her mum forever. And folded clothes because I’m useless at putting my clothes away.

3 words to explain your toothbrush to a stranger:

jw: Battered. Soft. And — don’t make judgement — underused.3

2 people you wish got more recognition:

jw: Women. In general. They hold the joint together, man. They hold the joint together. The reason why our world’s messed up is because it’s run by mediocre-thinking men who have no empathy. When I was at Uluru, the Governor General [Sam Mostyn] gave a speech at one of the events — it was a presentation night for the National Indigenous Training Academy — and I thought to myself: wow, she speaks so well. And then I was reflecting on it, so when my mate who was running it said, ‘How good was the Governor General’s speech?’ I said, ‘Do you know why? Because she’s a woman.’ And he goes, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And I told him these male politicians just speak with no heart, no emotion, no empathy. And women, I think for the most part — the mothers, matriarchs — have empathy for everything. They hurt when our kids cry. Do you know what I mean? Like, men do, too. Don’t get me wrong. But not compared to women, man. This is my lens, so I understand everyone else’s lenses are vastly different, but I just feel that, generally speaking, there’s a lot more understanding in the world because mothers wipe the tears away from their babies. Because women turn up. And that’s especially true for women of colour. The most oppressed people in the world are women of colour. Black women. Blak women. Indigenous women. First Nations women. They have been nurturing our communities, holding down our families, since the beginning of time. They’re the original women of this earth. They’re continuously pushing back against both the patriarchy and racism but you look and, even in feminist movements, they do double the lifting but their voices don’t always get heard. They don’t get the credit. I think all women — but especially women of colour — need more recognition for who they are, what they do, and how they hold it all down.

1 cause you support:

jw: Our Way Academy — a not-for-profit that connects with First Nations young people through the core values of The Dreaming: care, respect, humility, compassion and sharing.

∞ an action you do every day that impacts the world in a positive way:

jw: Brush my teeth. Nah. In 2012, after that suicide attempt, I had a lot of reflection in the psych ward. It felt like a question: you’ve got a second chance at this, Joe, what are you going to do with it now? So I made a promise to myself that every day I opened my eyes, I was going to make a positive impact on someone’s life. When people praise me for the work I do, that’s my reply: I’m just keeping a promise I made to myself. I’ve got a chance, I can’t let it go this time.

Find Joe Williams here and here.

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thist

a newsletter by athlete or writer saraid taylor

By Saraid Taylor

Saraid Taylor trains and writes on sacred Wurundjeri country. She acknowledges Elders, past and present, and extends that respect to all First Nations peoples around the world.

Megan Fitzsimon is 169cm. She was born on the tenth day of August in 2002, grew up on Gunaikurnai Country and currently lives on Wurundjeri Country. Megan uses she/her pronouns. She has never eaten blue cheese. She is a professional footballer.

How do you think others see you?

mf: Caucasian female with longish blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles, often seen wearing Birkenstocks, shorts and a t-shirt.

How do you think others see you?

mf: Cool, calm and collected, I hope. A hater of hugs.

How do you know yourself?

mf: I try not to come to any conclusions before I feel I know all the information. I am quite routine-driven. When completing tasks, I’ll try to finish one before starting another and I like to keep my spaces tidy to feel productive and calm. I don’t really like to appear too opinionated and am content in my own company most of the time. I don’t completely hate hugs.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

mf: Maybe like a cotton pillow or bubbles or something?

What’s your favourite type of water?

mf: The East Gippsland coastline at Lakes and Conran. I spent a lot of my holidays and weekends there as a kid, so it’s somewhere I have a lot of fun memories. As an adult, the ocean is still a place I like to head to when I feel I need a reset.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

mf: I think I tend to isolate myself.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

mf: When I was in primary school, Dad and I would race down to the local oval at halftime of the footy so we could have a quick kick … which usually turned into one or two hours. I’d be at school during the week and Dad would be working, so this was a way we would reconnect. I remember really looking forward to the weekend: the chance to kick the footy with Dad. He’d give me a lot of advice, and always made sure I practised on both sides of my body, but he was also very patient with me and I felt like he got a lot of joy out of those hours too.

How does someone earn your trust?

mf: They’re kind to everyone.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

mf: Tofu tasting like shit.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

Read more

Shelley Heath is 160cm. She was born on the sixth day of June in 2000 and currently lives on Bunurong land. Shelley uses she/her pronouns. She is a professional footballer. She has never eaten a durian.

How do you think others see you?

sh: As a smaller version of you.

How do you think others see you?

sh: Quiet, sarcastic, caring. It can take a while for me to open up and be my truest self when I first meet someone. I am quite shy.

And how do you know yourself?

sh: I love to dance and sing aloud and speak in different voices when I’m playing around. I can be grumpy. I have a very short fuse. I don’t think many people would know that about me. Or maybe they’d guess by the way I play footy? I’m also a massive empath. Like, I cry a fair bit for the people around me but I would never show my sadness in front of others.

If your laugh had a texture, what would it feel like?

sh: I think it would feel like tinsel.

What’s your favourite type of water?

sh: Tap water — such a boring answer.

How do you ask for help without asking for help?

sh: I go quiet.

What’s your earliest memory of feeling loved?

sh: I remember being seven and playing tiggy as a family. It was everyone in: my sister and brother and both my parents chasing each other. You best believe how competitive it was. We probably played all together up until I was fifteen or sixteen. If someone couldn’t tag someone, the rest of us would be laughing so hard watching it unfold. It was that much fun! It was really special. It literally makes me want to go back in time so I can be there in those moments again. My family are such a pure form of love for me.

How does someone earn your trust?

sh: They show up for me, no matter how big or small. They show I can count on them when I need them, that they’ve always got my back.

What’s something you’ve been wrong about?

sh: Math.

What’s your first experience of being excluded?

Read more

It started out as an idea for more w.

w: as in, AFLW. Or WNBL. Or NRLW. Or WBBL. Or any of the other professional women’s sporting leagues that are underrepresented on the televisions of bars and pubs around the country.

Drawing on pioneers like Jenny Nguyen’s The Sports Bra in Oregon and Rose Valente’s The Ladies League in Sydney, co-founders Tessa Lavey and Liz Quinn planned for The W Club to be Melbourne’s first women’s-focused bar showing only women’s sport.

But in designing a space that ‘catered for women’ — meaning, women could feel safe to walk in off the street and watch a game of sport — they realised they were creating an environment where anybody could.

In August, I sat down with Tessa and Liz for Missing Perspectives. Below are some of my favourite answers from that interview.

thist

a journal by athlete or writer saraid taylor

By Saraid Taylor

You both return to the idea of inclusion. What is your earliest memory of being excluded?

Liz Quinn: I was in Year 5, so about ten, I think, and my primary school was starting up a footy team. They asked anyone who was interested to meet in the classroom at lunch time. I was worried everyone would laugh at me but I also knew I was good enough to mix it with the boys — I’d play kick to kick with them all the time — so I went. I was the only girl who rocked up and the teacher running the program said, “Sorry, you can’t do it. We’re not having girls.” Deflated, I went to leave but one of the boys said to him, “Oh, she’s better than Paul Hodges!” The teacher took one look at poor Paul, who was in the room too, (and whose name was not actually Paul), and let me stay.

Tessa Lavey: I’m the youngest in my family, with four older brothers. When we were growing up, they’d all have friends over and I wasn’t allowed to play because I was the girl and they were doing boys stuff, which just meant having campfires down at the cubby house, or kicking the footy. I can still remember the feeling. I just wanted to tag along.

How have these experiences shaped you?

LQ: I’m not sure if they shaped me, but maybe subconsciously I realised that if I wanted to play sports, or participate in any area of sports really, I had to be just as good as, if not better than, the boys in order to be allowed. In some ways, I still feel as though I need to prove myself — either that I understand sport, or can play it, or can coach it, just as well as a man. I want The W Club to be the opposite of that: it doesn’t matter how much you know or how experienced you are or how many games you’ve watched or how well you can play or anything like that. It’s just a place where you can watch sport surrounded by other awesome people watching sport because they love it.

TL: Yeah, I love the idea that nobody has to prove anything. You like sport, you’re welcome. You’re not sure if you like sport but you’d like to find out, you’re welcome. You don’t have to be ‘legitimate’. You don’t have to pass some kind of test. I want everyone to feel like they’re invited inside.

Where does your sense of community come from?

LQ: There wasn’t much money around between ours and all my friends’ families when I was growing up, and we really relied on each other. I learned just how much a community can rally to provide childcare, food, emotional support, friendship and help when needed. It’s given me a strong sense of service.

TL: My home. I come from a small town where everyone knows each other. There’s a deep sense of community in our sport; the netball and football clubs are orientated around families. Everyone helps each other with their kids: getting them ready, getting them fed, giving them lifts to games, giving them lifts home. Everyone’s a coach or a fan or helping out at the canteen.

When that paperwork for The W Club was signed recently, who’s someone you wish you could have told?

Read more

Running On Timelines is a series mapping the life of a creative project before its release: from conception through submission cycles and rejections.

2020

3 october, 2020 | 11:18am

I wrote down: to be turned, to be preyed upon, to alter, to conquer verse a change in direction, an evolution, new growth or understanding, shaping or becoming, expansion.

16 october, 2020

I spent an entire day finishing a narrative non-fiction book proposal named The Turning for the Spark Prize. I submitted it at 11:47pm.

‘It seeps through us in fractures: as a phenomenon, a myth, a joke, an enduring stereotype, a revolution. A question that has lost its form, is no longer a question but an implication: Do women turn gay in sport?’

I thought: I think this might win.

3 december, 2020

It did not win.

2021

21 february, 2021 | 10:04am

Following an interesting conversation with a teammate, I wrote down: literary magazine article? called ‘the turning’?

In the same note, I wrote a few thousand words. The world is so much more complicated than binary.

19 march, 2021

I decided to submit a non-fiction pitch called The Turning: is sexuality actually contagious in female sport? to Kill Your Darlings, a literary magazine about arts and culture. I first had to learn how to write a non-fiction pitch.1

Why this piece? prompted the KYD pitch template. Why you? Why are you the best person to write this piece? Why do you care about the topic? Why should the editor care about it? Why should readers care about it? What questions or insights are you wanting to convey? Why is it a good fit for the magazine? Why is now the best time to publish it?

‘This topic is both encompassing and nuanced,’ I wrote, ‘and has a vocal, hungry audience now. More than ever, women and young girls are participating in physical activity; infiltrating what was once staunchly male-only spaces. Historically when there are pushes for equality and inclusion, resistance manifests in a myriad of ways. That is why this piece fits neatly into what Kill Your Darlings publishes: the magazine does not shy away from contentious societal critique, nor uncomfortable conversations. It consistently, unflinchingly challenges.’

I thought: wow. I am excited to write the essay when this pitch is obviously accepted.

21 april, 2021

The pitch was not accepted.

I spent the rest of the year busy.

2022

13 march, 2022

I edited the pitch and submitted to KYD again.

‘This topic is an urgent one: not only are we finally celebrating #womeninsport, we are being forced to interrogate how far our tolerance for difference stretches — and where the lines of our inclusion is drawn. Kill Your Darlings is an unflinching magazine that is prepared to facilitate these kind of conversations, and it is a big goal of mine to be included in its writer alumni.’

25 march, 2022

KYD said: maybe we do not want you in our writer alumni.

I said: I really want you to be sure.

29 may, 2022

I re-edited the pitch, lost the two capital letters when paring the title back to ‘the turning’ and submitted once more to KYD.

‘I continue to submit a variation of this pitch to Kill Your Darlings (sorry) because not only am I passionate about this topic, but I have not seen it engaged with deeply, nor offered creatively from the perspective of a woman who is both a writer and an athlete.’

15 july, 2022

KYD said: apologies for the delay getting back to you.

KYD said: please do keep us in mind for other pitches in future, it would be wonderful to hear from you.

25 november, 2022

KYD announced their Creative Non-Fiction Essay Prize. For the first time, I expanded the pitch and wrote out an actual essay — 3,500 words of it.

turn _[turn]

verb

1. to be altered, corrupted; to be conquered.

noun

1. a change in direction, a movement; a natural evolution or expansion, a becoming.

— and submitted it. I thought it was the best thing I had ever written: mature, biting. I also really thought it might win.

6 december, 2022

It really did not win.

2023

15 january, 2023

I then thought: okay, goodbye, KYD! and submitted an updated version of The Turning to the ABR Calibre Essay Prize.

‘The stereotype shimmers translucent, slippery: widely acknowledged and yet taboo, available as fodder for jokes but not as a topic for legitimate dissection on a cultural level. It is not intended to free us. It has always been about dominance.’

I, again, suspected it might win.

6 april, 2023

It, again, did not.

23 april, 2023

I thought perhaps the title was an issue and, humbly returning to KYD, revised the piece then submitted with a different name: The Politics of Women’s Sport.

The first line remained the same:

‘I was warned about the pandemic: of dangerous, contagious lesbianism. I rolled my eyes and dismissed it. I was heterosexual but cool.’

12 may, 2023

There was success.

Instead of the standard rejection message the piece had received from KYD three times: ‘This sounds like a unique angle on an interesting topic, but unfortunately it’s not the right fit for KYD at this time.’

KYD declined it with a different line: ‘This was a strong and interesting piece, but unfortunately in the end it wasn’t something we were able to fit into our schedule.’

Which felt downright personable. It could easily have been a new template for rejections, but I still thought: improvement! I thought: hope! I thought: this basically invites a follow-up query!

Leave a comment

19 june, 2023

On the submission portal, there is a messages tab, which is where I sent back:

Shockingly, it did not receive a reply.

29 june, 2023

At a similar time, I had a relatively public online interaction with a famous ex-athlete. On the day I realised the editor of KYD now followed me on social media, I sent them a message:

I readily admit I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. Are there rules, conventions, some secret but fundamental etiquette when it comes to pitching and submitting and persisting? Likely. Has anyone told me them? They have not.

The magazine’s editor courteously replied with:

To which I said:

And then emailed:

There was no reply.

I thought: fair enough. I thought: very sorry, please forgive me. I thought: it’s quite seriously now time to leave KYD alone.2

23 november, 2023 | 2:32pm

I left the essay alone too, for months, unsettled and saddened by its consistent failure, then I abruptly investigated Missing Perspectives, a media platform founded by that challenges the underrepresentation of young women in news, and Archer, a print magazine about sexuality, gender and identity — edited the essay again, reinstalled its name, and sent it off to both.

‘Please find below a summary pitch of The Turning: Sexuality and Shame in Women’s Sport, including a one hundred word bio, with the full draft also attached. It is longer than what you generally publish but I am hoping you might find an excerpt you like within it.’

5:09pm that day

An editor at Missing Perspectives replied:

I emailed back as if I was nonchalant, and not giddy with surprise and joy.

24 november, 2023

They sent me the edited document.

As discussed, [the editors] reviewed and pulled an extract from the piece. They moved around a few paragraphs just to tighten it up, and can jump on the phone if you have any questions.

The essay had been chopped from 3,656 words to 1,929. Its tone — ruminative but irreverent — felt deadened. Its new opening line was: I accepted a contract with the Richmond Tigers in the AFLW last year.

It was my own fault for offering a strange little literary work to a news outlet. I closed my laptop in panic, feeling like I might cry.

27 november, 2023 | 10:07am

The Missing Perspectives editor emailed me again:

Hope you had a lovely weekend! We have our sports newsletter going out on Thursday so let me know what you think re: having an excerpt in the upcoming edition?

2:52pm

Damp with guilt, I sent back:

The editor was very gracious: No problem at all, they said, totally understand! Would love an op-ed — but no pressure either way.

3:48pm

I tweaked the essay, paid $2.50 USD and submitted it to an American literary magazine called The Sun.

4 december, 2023

One of Archer’s online editors emailed me.

Thanks so much for your draft! I’ll be working on this piece with you. Very excited about it!

Before I start on my edits, would you please be able to see if you can cut the existing draft to approximately 2000 words? I may then suggest more cuts from there, but I find that this process works best if the author makes their cuts first. Once you’ve had a go, it’d be great if you could send me the updated version … and we can go from there.

I reflected: I did essentially propose cutting it in half. I reflected: I’m not, however, sure I fancy cutting it in half. I reflected: I am unnerved.

Subscribe now

2024

2 february, 2024

The Archer editor followed up:

Hope you’re well! No rush on my end (I’ll actually be on leave for the next few weeks), but I just thought I’d check in and see if you’d still like to continue with this piece?

To which I said:

To which the editor responded:

No problem at all! Thanks so much for getting back to me.

I’ll have a chat with the rest of our team about considering this piece for print, but I can’t make any promises. And even with print, you may still need to make cuts to fit within our page layout.

But I’ll raise it with my team, and we’ll go from there.

13 march, 2024

The editor emailed back to say they’d discussed the piece with their team.

Although we all love it, we have limited space remaining for our next print issue, and a specific theme we’re prioritising.

I’d still love to work on it with you for online publication if you’re keen, but you’re also welcome to pitch it elsewhere if you’ve got your heart set on print. Totally fine and understandable either way!

Let me know what you think.

I replied:

They replied:

That’s not an annoying question at all! Thank you for asking. I’m not sure what our timeframe looks like for the issue after the next issue, so my main concern would be making you wait a long time on something that I can’t promise at this stage. How comfortable would you feel waiting (potentially until the end of the year) for a decision on whether we could pick it up for print?

I thought: the end of 2024! That does sound like a long time away.

25 march, 2024

I encountered a print magazine called RUSSH, which publishes both written and visual art, and submitted a piece of fiction to their Literary Showcase, and then emailed them an updated version of The Turning as a nonfiction submission.

As for supplied imagery, I wrote, if you’re interested in this piece, I could organise a portraiture shoot with a combination of other athletes, exploring physicality verse gender verse sexuality.

28 march, 2024

The essay received a rejection from The Sun.

3 april, 2024

Island, a literary magazine based in Lutruwita/Tasmania, opened for their online submissions and I edited The Turning and sent it in.

14 april, 2024

I apologised to the Archer editor for my late reply, then said:

I completely understand [there being no promises], and appreciate your concern / communication. I am happy to wait and see how we go, especially as I would love to pitch a portraiture series … to accompany the piece if that is something the magazine might also be interested in.

15 april, 2024

The Archer editor said:

No worries about the late reply! I’ve popped your name and idea down for consideration in a future print issue of Archer. No promises on the outcome, but I’ll definitely discuss it with the team when the time comes. :)

22 april, 2024

I edited the essay and then submitted it, for $16.50, into the Island Nonfiction Prize 2024.

6 may, 2024

I received an invitation for the inaugural RUSSH Literary Showcase — self-described as a space for unrecognised writers - aspiring, emerging and established - to be supported in their dreams to write and be read — and replied to the email to say:

This sounds incredible — thank you for the invite. Any plans for a Melbourne-based event?

Which received a reply back:

Hi Saraid, so lovely to hear from you!

This is the first year we are holding the Literary Showcase … Hopefully in years to come we can continue this exciting initiative and hold the event in other states.

I naturally replied to the replier, who was also a photographer:

Yes, it really is such an exciting initiative bringing so many different art forms together — I unfortunately won’t be in Sydney on the day so hopefully the event does spread in coming years.

Also! I had a look through your photos; you are such a talent. They are absolutely stunning. Let me know if you’re ever in Melbourne! I’d love to work with you.

They replied:

Aw, thank you, that is so kind. I would love to head down to Melbourne more often and work with all the talented creatives down there; if I do I will hit you up.

I replied:

That would be so fun! Please do.

One last thing while I have you (very sorry!) — do you know whether RUSSH accepts unsolicited essays? The website says to email for more information about written submissions, so I queried in late March. Should I have received a response, or is it best to assume the piece has been passed on?

They replied:

.

(Nothing; they stopped replying.)

(I intuited the piece had been passed on.)

21 may, 2024

The shortlist of the Island Nonfiction Prize was announced. The Turning was not on it.

29 may, 2024

It was also not selected for Island Online.

2 september, 2024

It was then edited again and submitted to Island for its print round.

I thought: this is it.

Refer a friend

8 september, 2024

I edited the original pitch and submitted it with two other ideas to GR Online — the virtual extension of Griffith Review, a literary quarterly journal.

I thought: this is also it.

19 september, 2024

It was not it.

(The essay was not commissioned by GR Online.3)

31 october, 2024

It was not it either.

(The essay was rejected by Island for its print round.)

I thought: oh! my! goodness!

I thought: is this essay not relatively bold? Is it not rather poignant? Is it not strangely funny in a sardonic kind of way? Why doesn’t anyone like it? Why doesn’t anyone see its remarkable, wondrous potential?

Then I thought: maybe I don’t even like it.

Then I thought: maybe it doesn’t have any potential.

Then I thought: hide it away forever.

27 november, 2024

Then I thought: okay, try again.

I followed up with the Archer editor.

Just wondering whether there was any potential update on the essay fitting into / being selected for an Archer issue? Absolutely no worries if not. Appreciate your time, and hope you’re having a nice Wednesday.

29 november, 2024

The editor replied:

I don’t yet have any updates about upcoming print commissions.

Our next print issue will likely be [redacted], and we’re not sure about the timeframe or theme for the next one at this stage. This will likely be decided next year, after February … If the wait and uncertainty is too much, that’s totally understandable — feel free to let me know at any point if you’d like to pivot this piece for online publication.

I fear that I, now officially imbedded inside the bracket of self-[delusion] despite all opposing evidence, was not keen to pivot.

4 december, 2024

I stumbled across the social media account of a beautiful print magazine, The Everywoman. On a recent piece, one of the editors was tagged. I did not have any dignity left anyway, so I messaged them.

The editor replied:

5 december, 2024

I emailed them:

16 december, 2024

The editor emailed me back:

18 december, 2024

I replied:

Ah, that is exciting! Can I ask what kind of tonal and structural changes you’d be looking to make? If they’re vastly different, would it be easier for me to write something new on a similar topic? And yes, I’d love to know rate of pay please.

2025

13 january, 2025

The editor said: Apologies for my delay here, we’re just getting back on board with The Everywoman this week!

I said: That makes a lot of sense (and thank you for your thoughtfulness) — I’d be interested in either of those options.

25 january, 2025

I submitted The Turning to Splinter, a literary journal from Tarndanya/Adelaide.

5 february, 2025

REWIND → In October of 2024, I worked with Island’s wonderful editorial manager, Jane Rawson. on a piece of fiction called the storing. That same month, I played my first professional game of AFLW and she tagged me in a story:

Four months later, after almost five years carrying the silly essay around in my body — being alternatively elated and poisoned by its prospects and failures — I had exhausted my supply of self-[belief/delusion] in it. Feeling genuinely a little manic, I snipped up the last surviving speck of my ego and, after poring over Island’s website, used the email it provided to contact the editorial manager personally:

3:29pm

5:12pm

Jane replied:

I sent back:

5:18pm

Island’s nonfiction editor, Keely Jobe, then emailed:

21 june, 2025

The Turning, after rounds of edits, was published as a 3,563-word essay in the print edition of Island 174.

26 june, 2025

I received this email abruptly from a stranger4:

thist

a journal by athlete or writer saraid taylor

By Saraid Taylor

Saraid Taylor trains and writes on sacred Wurundjeri country. She acknowledges Elders, past and present, and extends that respect to all First Nations peoples around the world.

Three organisations to support:

1. APAN — a national coalition harnessing the passion of Australians for Palestinian human rights, justice, and equality.

2. The Jewish Council of Australia — a diverse coalition of Jewish academics, lawyers, writers and experts on antisemitism and racism.

3. The Dhadjowa Foundation — a grassroots organisation established to provide strategic, coordinated and culturally appropriate support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families whose loved ones have died in custody.

A more important timeline to read:

1. Justice for Kumanjayi Walker Timeline

When I was trying to become a professional basketballer, I asked a psychologist: when exactly does self-belief become self-delusion? He laughed like I had made a funny joke and I was pleased by his amusement but I was also serious.

The definitions feel absurdly and dangerously close to each other:

self-belief

noun

/ˌself.bəˈliːf/

1. confidence in one’s judgment;

2. belief in one’s capacity to complete a task or achieve a goal;

3. trust in one’s own abilities.

self-delusion

noun

/ˌself.dɪˈluː.ʒən/

1. a process of denying or rationalising away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument;

2. the act of allowing oneself to believe something that is not true;

3. the state of deceiving oneself about one’s abilities.

I consistently allow myself to believe in my capacity to achieve [a goal] — a reality that does not currently exist and can therefore be categorised as something that is not true. I have confidence in my judgment of this capacity, even when there is an abundant amount of opposing evidence. It seems probable that, to allow for the continued pursuit of the goal, I might be incidentally denying or rationalising away the relevance, significance, or importance of this evidence. I could be ignoring all logical arguments. I could be deceiving myself.

uh-oh

exclamation

/ˈʌˌəʊ/

1. an expression of alarm, dismay, or realisation of a difficulty.

I must, although it doesn’t always feel like it, have trust in my own abilities … but what is the difference between that and being utterly duped by my desires? It seems like the only difference is outcome, so am I just within the nebulous bracket of self-[belief/delusion] until the outcome comes out? Or do I assume self-belief until the goal is un/attained and my ability is dis/proven, at which time I can then either confirm my mental fortitude or sheepishly acknowledge that my aspirations were misguided and unrealistic?

What if the outcome takes a while? What if the outcome takes more than a while? When is the logical expiration date of belief that prompts the transition from self-[undefined] into pure, rigorous, inescapable delusion?

The biography on my website states,

‘Each of [my] careers have hauled themselves forward in parallel: demarcated consistently, enduringly, by failure.’

Nobody, even the luckiest, whisks through their life without encountering failure. But the quantity of that failure, depending on circumstance and character, varies drastically. As someone who has, if there was a scale, been nursed by experiences closer to the threshold of you suck than wow, you’re great, I fear I have naturally also been treated to larger doses of delusion. Am I resilient or obtuse? Humble or narcissistic? Gallantly ambitious or farcical?

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When exactly, I said to the psychologist, does self-belief become self-delusion? and it was posed in the context of me pursuing a basketball career, but it could be as easily applied to any realm of my life, including as a writer.

I concluded the only reason I have been able to persist in art and sport is because I am a contradiction:

1. I have such a big ego it allows me to keep going (I believe I can be good enough);

2. I have such a small ego it allows me to keep going (I can tolerate constant rejections because I assume I am not good enough).

In a lot of ways, I am accustomed to not succeeding. It is familiar to me; it secretly makes sense. There might be some who snort at that, because I am signed to a professional sporting team, or I’ve worked with photographers, or it’s reported I have a book contract, but the tiniest scrape across the coruscation exposes the fragility of it all: any of my ‘achievements’ are so complex they are sullied — each ‘success’ might be more accurately defined as a composite of failures.

The art I have created, that has sought and eventually been granted permission to enter the world, are composites: even after their acceptance, the pieces remain tinged with the rejections they have accumulated.

I find myself returning to the notions of resilience and shame, of belief and delusion, of success and failure. I am drawn to the journey of art being art itself. It feels like not preserving, or at least drawing on, these journeys in some way causes cavities within the fuller dialogue. It carves out an absence, blunts nuance.

This is a protracted way to introduce a new little series called Running On Timelines that maps the life of a creative project before its release: from conception through submission cycles. An early incarnation of the series was published in December 2021, although the story was not a physical work but an entire year.

I opened the essay with a recalcitrant apology:

I repeat, and intensify, the apology for ROT #2 which explores the journey of the turning, an essay about women and sport. Its timeline is gruelling and boring and truly, hilariously, mortifying. That is your warning.

Saraid Taylor trains and writes on sacred Wurundjeri country. She acknowledges Elders, past and present, and extends that respect to all First Nations peoples around the world.

I played elite sport throughout my childhood.

At twenty-six, I have spent eight years in professional sporting environments across two codes. Sport has consequently existed alongside me through various physical and emotional puberties. It has given me a lot of things: diverse skills, support structures, a wider understanding of myself. It still did not rid me of the self-consciousness attached to existing as a girl, then a woman. It perhaps worsened it.

There is a disparity between women – and non-binary – athletes, and men athletes. It is not just financial. Sportsmen are praised for becoming a physical expression of their activity. Their bodies, with hours of intent and focus, change and tighten and develop and expand and grow. Boys and men do not escape the strain of idealised body image but, ultimately, when they reflect their own labour, it is an achievement. When women work hard with similar results, it is widely accepted as a curse. We are taught to fear the changes our bodies make to adapt. We are taught to fear visible improvement. We are taught, passively and explicitly, to be ashamed.

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Emilee Whittle-Harmon first told me her story in December of 2023. It was over the course of a morning. I listened, absorbed with the horror; alternatively crying quietly and then wondering whether it was not too late, each time there was another twist in the narrative, to pull out my phone to record. When Emilee finished, all I could do, beside from hug her, was lament the fact I had ultimately not turned on the tape. Her storytelling — grim, cogent, poetic — had not been preserved.

Ten months would pass before we managed to schedule a time for her to conjure all that emotion again. On that day, we collected, over four separate recordings, a total of almost two and a half hours worth of interview. It would be another five months before we would have the transcript edited and approved. One more before it was ready to be published.

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a journal by athlete or writer saraid taylor

By Saraid Taylor

Emilee’s experiences form a complex, harrowing story: one that navigates betrayal more than injury, belief more than recognition. It intersects brutally with ageism, gender and status. All athletes work hard. All athletes are resilient. Some, naturally, work harder and are more resilient than others but to compete in sport at an elite level ultimately requires at least a base level of both. Not all athletes are accountable. Not all athletes look first to assess themselves — their own actions and thoughts — before seeking an external source to blame. Along with being one of the hardest working and most resilient athletes I have ever met, Emilee Whittle-Harmon is also one of the most accountable. Her mentality is one of humility, pragmatism and strength. She has a perspective that not only any athlete, regardless of age, should hear, but any person.

Because despite all the layers of trauma, the breaches in her trust, her physical suffering, the mental anguish, her deep, lingering grief, Emilee’s resentment is still retrained. It is balanced. She remains compassionate. Her integrity endures.

It is why I changed initial plans to create a narrativised account of her story and instead am publishing the initial interview in full. All should read Emilee’s voice, verbatim.

EH: Where do you want to start?

Um. Anywhere you’d like.

EH: My first memories have me with a basketball in my hand. I started playing when I was like four or five. I had two older brothers, whom I looked up to, and the only way they’d let me hang out with them is if I could hold my own. So that’s what I learned to do. And I loved it. I loved who I got to be while playing. I was a shy kid: reserved, didn’t step out of line, wanted to please. But when I played I was allowed to be someone else. I got to be fierce. I got to be dominant. I got to be a leader. I could put the internal fire I held into something. It became my identity. And I know they say not to do that ... Not to let something fleeting become you. Not to be obsessed. Find balance. But I wouldn’t change a thing. The obsession was who I truly was. The obsession was authentic. I was my truest self when I was on a basketball court. It was peaceful and chaotic at the same time. Home. Free.

Let’s flick forward — past school, college, your first professional season spent in Ireland — to when you arrived here.

EH: My first year in Australia was 2014. I was signed in the SEABL, which is NBL1 now, and I was playing against athletes who played in the WNBL. I had heard about the national league, but I didn’t really know anything about it. When I recognised it was the highest level, it became the basis of everything I worked for. I was still an import, being American, so for about four years I would be in Australia for six months and then I’d go home to Ohio for the other six, where I would train and coach. When I met Amy in 2016, who later became my wife, I stayed.

Where did you play in Australia?

EH: All over in the SEABL. But the WNBL was my only goal. I offered to be a training player, to give my time for free. At one point, I was flying all over the country just to do tryouts. I tried out for the SEQ Stars when they were still a franchise, the Melbourne Boomers, Bendigo.

Was it a financial strain?

EH: Yes [laughs]. I paid for all those flights. Chasing dreams in basketball is not very financially rewarding. It’s a huge sacrifice on partners. Amy really helped support me. I wouldn’t have been able to pursue the goal without her. I think eventually I would have just given up. I was an import. I was fighting for two spots, not ten.

How was it mentally?

EH: It was a lot. Physically, too. I remember in 2015, when I was playing state league out in WA, we had a doubleheader but I had managed to organise a tryout, so after the second game I got on a red-eye from Perth to Melbourne then drove from Melbourne to Bendigo and tried out with their WNBL team, then flew back to Perth the next day because we had training.

Then?

EH: Nothing came of that. Nothing directly came of any of it. But then it was 2020 and everything shut down. Cheryl Chambers, the coach of Southside Flyers, needed players to train. I essentially became a training player with them before the hub. There were other players also having to drive across the Westgate to get to the stadium, but they were getting paid for it. For me, I was investing a lot of time and money just to come to practice. But I think I always knew, because of how hard I worked, I just needed to be seen and once I was seen I was going to get an opportunity. So when I was asked to be a training player at Southside, it was worth it. It was everything I was working towards. I decided I was going to go every day, to every session, even though I knew that because I was not a resident it probably wasn’t going to end up in a contract. I initially hoped that, maybe, because the league couldn’t bring in imports due to lockdown, if I did a really good job I might get an opportunity. But then the league came in with the no-import rule for the season which took that hope away.

What happened next?

EH: The team left for the hub. I stayed behind, training on my own. It was the first COVID year which was sort of a blessing in a way, because I had time I wouldn’t otherwise had. I could focus on basketball. I trialled at Wyndham for the state league season, but decided to leave because I was still ambitious to play WNBL. I was pulled, alone, into a room and told I would be the laughing stock of not only the club but the entire league if I didn’t make it.

Wait, who told you that?

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