Even though my brief time at the call centre ended because of my sleep issues, it was not the end of the road for me. I simply picked up where I left off with the plans I had before accepting the role.
The first thing I did was attend an interview at a criminal justice organisation. My interview was for a volunteer role which involves calling people on home detention, checking in on their wellbeing, and seeing whether they need any extra support.
My interest in this program came from the difficulties I’ve had having a criminal conviction for using my mobile phone while driving. I thought to myself: if I have so much trouble over something like using a mobile phone behind the wheel, where there was no accident or damage done, I can’t imagine how much trouble other offenders have with police checks. It must be incredibly difficult to gain employment where a check is required.
Just the other day I applied for a job on Seek for a part-time rostering role within a healthcare environment, and one of the first questions they asked was: “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” There was no room to explain or provide details — it was simply yes or no. I ticked yes, and I never heard back from them.
So, in relation to calling people on home detention, I know some of them may have done some really bad things, but I’m not there to judge. I just want to sit with them where they are at and follow the process and procedures in place for the role.
I applied for a job with the Census as a Field Officer. The role involves walking the streets and knocking on the doors of people who are having trouble doing the census, who haven’t completed it, or who have questions. As I understand it, the census is mostly done online this year, but there must still be a lot of work where a human is required.
On the day of my interview with the criminal justice organisation, I received a message from the Census advising me that my application had progressed to management, who will shortlist candidates for the Field Officer roles.
I am not religious in a traditional sense, but I am so excited about the possibility of working for the Census because a census is the reason Jesus was born in Bethlehem and not Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph were living.
Essentially, there was a decree from Caesar Augustus that “all the world should be taxed.” In older English translations of the Bible, the phrase “should be taxed” does not simply mean paying money. It refers to people being registered or enrolled by the Roman authorities as part of a census. Rome wanted records of people, for taxation, administration, and military purposes, and people had to register according to the rules of the census.
After the decree, Joseph travelled from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea because he was “of the house and line of David.” Bethlehem was the city associated with David’s lineage, and according to the Gospel account Joseph was required to register there for the census. Mary travelled with him while pregnant with Jesus and, as the story goes, gave birth to the king of the world in a manger, in an old stable surrounded by beasts of burden.
A census is an act of empire, and I find the idea of being part of such an ancient tradition thrilling. It is about counting people, registering them, taxing them, and understanding power. But more than that, it is about the idea that every single person should be counted, whatever the cost. It is about understanding both the power of power and the power of powerlessness.
I’m going back to art school in August, like I had initially planned, and I really have my fingers crossed that somehow, I am selected to serve in the Census so I can work for a while alongside my studies.
Something I find quite fitting is that there was a census in 2011 when I was living in Sydney. I felt so humiliated and defeated by my life and by the world I was living in that I still remember the census worker dropping the form off at my apartment.
I didn’t fill it in initially. Then they came back and asked whether I had completed it, and I said no. Later, they came back again and simply took the form away.
I didn’t count. I didn’t even count as a person.
At the time, I found that incredibly appropriate because I didn’t feel like a person either.
But that was a very long time ago. Now, I’m going back to uni, I’ve potentially got a short-term job with the Census, and I have an induction this coming week with the criminal justice organisation, which means I can start volunteering and making calls as soon as that’s done.
I also feel like it was probably for the best that I wasn’t able to make the call centre role work. If my sleep had been okay and I had managed to settle in properly, I could have stayed there for years and completely abandoned my dream of producing conceptual epistolary artwork.
In saying that, though, I need to be realistic. I will be 45 this year, and contemporary art is heavily driven by youth and young emerging artists. It is going to take extra work to get ahead, but I think I’ve said it before: I don’t trust my ability with anything in this world apart from my ability to create blueprints for conceptual artwork. And I owe it to myself to explore that.
I think what happened at the call centre really shocked me into some existential thinking, and I started reflecting on my life. I’m now in my second act, and in my first act I didn’t achieve one thing I had dreamed of doing. But the reality is, how could I? I wanted to be a journalist, theologian, visual artist, physicist, writer, social worker, lawyer, and God knows how many other professions. I wanted to get married, have children, or at least have a loving partner, a nice house, a decent car, and travel the world. All of those things slowly became null and void.
I have done some travelling, and I want to do more. Really, if it comes down to it, that’s all I truly want to do: travel the world, mostly Europe, I think. It is so rich in history, and those beautiful fairytale villages really appeal to me.
So, if someone asked me point blank what I really want to do with the remainder of my life, I would say this: I want to have enough money to live comfortably.
I want to travel, and the only other thing I have ever really wanted in this world — more than children, partners, travel, or even money itself — is to do something to help the Palestinians.
I remember vividly when I first started to understand the history and current circumstances of the Palestinians. I know there are horrific things happening all over the world — in Sudan, Yemen, and elsewhere — but there is something about the Palestinian situation that I find particularly cruel. Much of the world is willing to recognise the existence of a Palestinian state and acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people, yet when it matters most, we all seem to look the other way.
Once I had clarity about the violence, humiliation, harassment, apartheid, genocide and the treatment of Palestinians as second class citizens, I said to myself that I did not want to leave this world without helping them in some small way.
I go to rallies, and I have had two letters about Palestinian issues published in The Advertiser, but sometimes I think there is so much hatred and so much unhelpful rhetoric on both sides that certain forms of activism can become counterproductive.
I’ve decided that I am going to establish myself as a neutral conceptual epistolary artist and then, if I ever gain a platform — even if it’s tiny — I will use it to speak out for the Palestinians in a reasonable, rational, and informative way.
Something I think about a lot is how Israel often defends its actions by describing itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. First of all, it is generally classified as a flawed democracy rather than a full liberal democracy. But then, more recently, when members of the Knesset supported legislation proposing the death penalty specifically for Palestinian terrorists and not Jewish ones, some supporters justified it by pointing out that the death penalty exists across much of the Middle East. So which is it? Is Israel fundamentally different from its Middle Eastern neighbours, or is it not?
I am not an educated woman, despite my many attempts to obtain a degree, but I have done a bit of reading about democracies — in particular the Economist Democracy Index, which is published by The Economist Group. The index measures the quality of democracy across the world and separates countries into one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
Up to 2024, there were only 25 full democracies in the world, with Australia being one of them, and 46 flawed democracies — meaning there are only 71 democracies in total in the world. I find that mind blowing.
This is something I have become very interested in, independent of Israel being classified as a flawed democracy. Over the past few days, I have considered the possibility that I have the potential to undertake an enormous conceptual epistolary artwork project, and I came to the idea that I am going to write to each politician in the parliaments of all 71 democracies in the world. I want to ask them what being an elected member within a democracy means to them.
I am going to learn how to make my own picture frames, bind my own books, and create something which is informative, useful, and potentially of interest to anyone interested in democracies.
I understand that this is going to cost a huge amount of money. Potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I have decided to start with two countries: first, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, which has 650 members, and the National Diet of Japan, which has 465 members in the House of Representatives and 248 members in the House of Councillors.
I am going to exhibit the work as I go and hopefully obtain grants along the way to help complete it.
I love the idea of creating a collection of all the democracies in the world. I do not want the project to be controversial or focused on pointing out what is undemocratic about particular countries. I want it to be as simple as it is complicated.
It’s 3:39am on Sunday, 24 May. I’ve got the heater on and it’s almost too hot, but if I turn it off then it will be too cold.
After staying up all night, my favourite time of the morning is when it hits 5:00am. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s when I feel safe. I hate being awake alone overnight in this house. I literally jump every time I hear something, and that’s another reason I like having the heater on because it makes a bit of noise. It distracts me from the things that go bump in the night. I also find that silence can be terrifying.
When I’m awake like this, I sometimes try to remember my life before I became what is probably the world’s worst insomniac. I remember the feeling of going to bed at around 10:00 or 11:00pm and, even if I couldn’t get to sleep straight away, there was pretty much a guarantee that at some point I would drift off.
Now, if I went to bed at 10:00 or 11:00pm, I could literally lie there for ten or twelve hours, and that is painful because it’s just me and my thoughts.
I remember when I was seeing this sleep psychologist who was honestly the nicest woman, but not particularly helpful to me. One day, when my sleep corrected itself for a little while, I wrote her an email saying how people take for granted things like being awake for breakfast or lunch. I told her how happy I was to be able to enjoy those things without that heavy feeling of not having slept.
The best time for me to do anything in the real world is first thing in the morning. I’m still awake from the night before and I’ve got that last bit of energy left in me to push through. The afternoon can be hard, and sometimes I just can’t make it through at all, like when I tried to manage that job at the call centre. I honestly think if I had my days back, I could do anything.
As things have been emotionally volatile lately with the criminal conviction and then the job situation, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make sure I don’t let it get to me too much. So, I decided to join the gym.
I’ve been a member of gyms before, and the one I joined is a big one that is open 24 hours a day. I want to go there at times like this in the morning, but to be honest I’m scared of anyone who might be lurking around the house at this hour, and you never really know what could happen at the gym when it’s unstaffed. They pride themselves on their CCTV, which is good after the fact, but I don’t think it is always much of a deterrent.
So, what do I do at night when everybody else is sleeping and I feel like I am the only person awake?
I watch a lot of YouTube. I watch Al Jazeera, a lot of Piers Morgan, who I have actually learnt a lot from, and I also watch Mehdi Hasan and his news channel Zeteo.
Another thing I do at night is read articles and blogs on the internet. There is a left leaning Israeli newspaper called Haaretz which I read a lot, and I think it is genuinely good quality journalism.
I’ve got my volunteer calls this morning. I’ve written before about my volunteering before but just to repeat myself, I essentially call older vulnerable Australians in the morning as part of a welfare check service. If they don’t answer my call three times, there is a process that takes place and then family members or the police follow up to make sure they are okay.
I’ve been doing this for just over a year now, and I have really come to know my regulars. I speak to some longer than others, but I’ve worked out a rhythm with my calls.
It’s funny — the clients always say how grateful they are for the calls and how much of a help the calls are to them, and I am so grateful for them too. It’s a real honour to ring them first thing in the morning and say hi. I love it.
I know it sounds like there is no urgency in me to fix my insomnia, and in many ways that’s true. I am stuck in this cycle, and I know the limits of it, so I’ve sort of learnt to work within them.
A lot of it comes down to how much sleep deprivation a person can actually tolerate.
I’m not going to put my head on a pillow one night and magically return to a conventional sleep cycle. But I do wonder whether that will ever be an option for me again.
