I knew exactly what to do when there was a knock at the front door late on a Saturday night and two boys were standing there with Lauren. One had her shoulders and the other had her feet, and she swung between them, eyes closed, drunk and limp and dangling like a dead body. Mum at work or asleep, Nanna in the granny flat out the back, it was up to me, and the chattering of my familiar internal monologue, I hope nothing has happened to her, I hope these boys are trustworthy, I hope she doesn’t need her stomach pumped, I hope she isn’t going to vomit all over everything, I hope she doesn’t wet the bed. I would get towels, a bucket, a plastic tumbler of water (plastic, not glass, never glass), help Lauren to the bathroom, find her clean pyjamas, put her to sleep on her side. Then I would sit in her room and listen to her breathe for hours, and make sure she didn’t vomit in her sleep and choke to death, anxiety shooting through my body like a rocket, zooming up and down my arms and legs, looping circles in my stomach.

I did this so many times. With Mum sometimes, but sometimes on my own.

‘You should be studying nursing,’ Mum said once, not understanding anything at all. I wasn’t doing this because I loved looking after people, I was doing it because I loved Lauren. I was doing it out of duty. I was doing it because I loved Mum and she needed someone to carry the stress of it with her. I was doing it because we didn’t want Nanna to know. I was doing it because there was no one else. I was doing it because it seemed to me to be women’s work, the intimate work of caring and worrying and touching and looking after someone else’s body. Mum didn’t understand that I actually hated this, I hated it so much it made me feel almost dizzy when Lauren went out to a party or a friend’s house or a concert or just a ‘quiet’ night with girls from uni, and I started anticipating what might happen when she came home. Part of the reason I needed to move away so badly was because I wanted to be free of this responsibility; I didn’t want to see it anymore. I didn’t want to just be the person who cleaned shit up, who saw the worst parts and never the good parts. I wanted to find the good parts for myself, whatever they might look like.

This is the year when I am going to reinvent myself and find the good parts.