A counsellor once told me I am overly concerned with having control. ‘Control is a nebulous concept,’ she said. There is no such thing as being in control. Have faith and go with the flow. The universe will provide.

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Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

My parents chastised my brothers and me because we grew too quickly. The lifespan of a shoe was a fixed length that they could not reduce to suit the size of our feet. Our clothes, always second hand, fitted us poorly and we often went hungry, so it makes sense that memories of food are the strongest of my childhood. We ate damper smothered with butter and Vegemite.

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Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

A still life is both a life that has been arbitrarily arrested, and a life that is settled, at home. For a stateless person, life is stasis and frustrated potential. At the same time, the lack of citizenship can push people to ceaseless migration in search of a home—a place in which to settle and belong. In this series, five people now in Australia and New Zealand tell about their lives. You will meet two men who have spent more than seven years in immigration detention—Abbas, a Faili Kurd who remains in detention, and Khan Safdari, a Hazara man from Afghanistan, […]

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I am developing a callus on my left thumb. Although I’ve been a writer with terrible penmanship, an amateur artist (with terrible penmanship), a string player, an avid baker and an amateur seamstress in my life, I’ve never hardened the skin on my fingers so that the nerves have dulled, the skin has thickened and a callus has formed.

‘Tits. Out. For the boys. Tits out for the boys. Tits. Out. For the boys. Tits out for the boys.’ I started out softly but by the end I am screaming at the top of my lungs because I am 19 and everyone around me is doing the same…