We might learn that our individual fates are inherently bound up in the collective and perhaps, like Daniel Defoe, we too might come to regret ‘the return of all manner of wickedness among us’ as this crisis eventually abates.

This World Hearing Day, as well as thinking about the ten thousand people whose first language is Auslan, or the half a million people who will be buying hearing aids this year, I’ll also be thinking of those thousands of Australians around my age who are unable to afford to get help. The Hearing Awareness Week slogan in 2020 is ‘Don’t let hearing loss limit you’. I only wonder if the Government is listening at all.

Where self-care began as the radical notion of self-love, it has since been reappropriated to function as a marketing tool, advertising individualistic acts of respite from the pressures of late capitalism.

On another World AIDS Day, I wish I could believe a cure was in sight but unfortunately I cannot. My experience living with HIV and working in the HIV/AIDS sector has shown me what we’re up against – a monolithic pharmaceutical industry that thrives on us swallowing pills for the rest of our lives.

My first response to anti-vaxxers and others telling Sia that the real source of her disease were toxic ticks and ‘chemicals’ was rage. But reflecting on this state of mainstream medical knowledge has allowed me to have empathy for how people get into these alternative explanations.

Those asking the general public to ‘trust the science’ are often uncomfortable or hostile when asked to acknowledge how biased medicine can be, and how it has even very recently committed crimes against marginalised groups in the name of health. We can only start having the right conversations about vaccine hesitancy when we start being more honest: about medical science being a product of the people who create it, about the disparities that still exist (and why), and about the need for committing to real changes in how our health systems work.

Heatwave disasters are not as publicly dramatic and noisy as bushfires, storms or floods and the human catastrophe tends to unfold in isolation and in private homes, behind closed doors. Heatwaves are infamously labelled ‘silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people’. Deaths are heavily concentrated among the elderly, with chronic illness, gender, poverty and social isolation other key contributing factors.

To have endometriosis is to lose your job, friends, partners, independence. To have endometriosis is debilitating – and can be just as severe as some of the illnesses already in the public consciousness (multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy). To have endometriosis is to lose hope in a future for yourself.

Antidepressants work. For me, they have helped lift me out of a deep slump, but had I been prescribed them alone, I would not have sought – with the help of a fantastic psychologist – a deeper understanding of myself; one that acknowledged that my depression was partly existential anguish at the direction my life had taken. An unpromising job market had made me desperate for work, which compounded my own personal anxieties about pleasing people, making it harder to leave a job I hated.

Messages on sexual health almost invariably focus on sex rather than health. Increases in diagnoses are explained as driven by changes in sexual behaviour, and calls are made for individuals to make better choices around sex. But this obscures the reality that STI rates are predominantly driven by testing frequency and access to convenient, non-judgmental sexual healthcare.