Steph Amir, occasional poet

At the end of 2004, I had just turned 21, and had been recently dumped by my high-school girlfriend.  In between wallowing and distracting myself with endless commitments, I decided to try online dating. Back then, in the days before smartphones, access to the internet meant plugging one end of a blue cord into your computer and the other into the wall.  From my desk, I created an account, adding a photo of myself in a pink halterneck dress.  I added my search filters (inner-city Melbourne, aged 18 to 25, ticked "reading" as an interest) and dozens of profiles appeared. It seemed like magic: I told an algorithm what kind of partner I wanted, and the algorithm diligently introduced me to a range of people.  Having grown up in the 1990s, it really did feel like living in the future. Within weeks, I had a new girlfriend: a PhD student who went to the same university as me.  My friends said she looked like Missy Higgins, and I didn't see the resemblance but was pleased noneth

I live in Melbourne, which claimed to be "the world's most liveable city", until COVID hit us harder than anywhere else in the country. For me, 2020 was a bit of a weird time for my city and the world to be turned upside-down by a pandemic.  The reason was, I'd spent the last two years fighting hard against obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which hit me hard in 2018 following hospitalisation with a life-threatening illness and ongoing physical disability.  My OCD manifested in a few ways, but the main one was around the avoidance of germs.  So, it was somewhat surreal to suddenly have everyone else fretting along beside me, but with a slightly different emphasis. While the reality of OCD was very clear to me, it was often spoken about it a way that I found profoundly irritating.  The preoccupations and self-protection mechanisms of OCD suffers were described as being completely ridiculous, when in fact many (though not all) are grounded in truth, albeit taken to un