Sophie Hardcastle is an inspiring young author who has written a memoir called Running Like China about her struggles with mental health. Lip’s Bridget Conway had a chat with Sophie and found out about how she chose to push through the stigma to write the book in the hopes that it would inspire others to…
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*Trigger Warning: This post contains writing which may upset those with mental health issues* Imagine waking up in a cold, grey room all by yourself. You have a few of your clothes shoved into a shelf next to your bed and a plastic cup of water sits on the floor. There is no…
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The colour of the tomatoes is changing each day. There are two on the vine; plump sisters, green-golden in the dapple beneath the frangipani tree. They were green yesterday, and now they have changed. I plucked a large tomato from the vine a few days ago. It was almost bursting, skin taut, still somnolent with…
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‘Polyamory is a claim that the heart is capable of loving more than one person deeply and intimately at the same time,’ wrote Anne Hunter in Archer Magazine. ‘Poly relationships are often sexual but may not be, and they may shift in and out of being romantic and sexual.’ In her article, she discusses the…
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The woman behind the counter jiggles the baby on her hip. The child is red-faced and crying. Customers smile sympathetically as the woman tries to serve them and placate him. She had no choice in the matter. The daycare is closed today. There is no one at home who can care for her son. Thus…
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**TW: rape, violence** It’s been one year, one month and ten days. One year, one month and ten days later and I am not afraid of going to sleep anymore. Like a child, I was afraid of the dark. It’s fair to say that I haven’t really known myself in this time. I have been…
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For the longest time, I’d believed it to be a mere fatigue masked as sorrow, bouts of mourning meant to induce involuntary sympathy. The insanity plea. My mother is an exceptionally engaged person. It’s impossible to slot her into a schedule because she’s constantly days ahead of herself. Compulsion to productivity, she calls it. Cases…
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The colour of this fantasy seems to me to reflect something closer to cream than anything else – cream, yes, because that is the colour of the walls I remember even if it was not correct. That was not important. It was the essence: cream, because even the air was delicious and sweet and perfect,…
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They are on a train to her house. She and her boyfriend. The second to last train home. They are alone in the vestibule and she is pressed up against the glass partition between the seats and the doors, and her boyfriend has opened her shirt and has his hand in her bra. Don’t, she says,…
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The first thing you can remember is the cicadas. Their sound rings through the air, picking at your toenails and at the corners of your eyes. You can’t sleep. They herald the rising and setting sun and sometimes when you step on the nature-strip just right they stop. But then the cicadas chirp again. Your…
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Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother really existed or if I made her up in my head. All I have are constructed and reconstructed memories of a mythical woman and her illness and the inter-generational impact of her life. My grandmother’s photographs hang in my mother’s bedroom. Ten photographs of different sizes; some in colour,…
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It feels like forever since I last wrote a column and I guess, in some ways, it has been forever since we left Broome. From there we took the Great Northern Highway down the coast and made our way slowly but surely towards Perth. At our greatest, the West Coast road train weighed in at…
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I lie awake, eyes wide beneath the lacing of moonlight filtering through unfamiliar curtains, listening to the distant wail of trams. The pub up the street is pumping out a bassy whump-whump and bursts of raucous laughter. A coil in the mattress feels like a knuckle in my spine. The thoughts in my mind feel…
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When my friends warned me about the overt sexist comments many young women experience while walking on the streets in some European countries, I wasn’t sure what to think of it. Naively, I laughed, dismissing the issue by claiming I would have some devious feminist comeback if any man was to pester me. This attitude,…
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