Privilege, power, patriarchy: are these the reasons for the mess we're in?

Changes can arise out of this uneasy pause in the world right now, but whether it is bent towards greater authority or greater equality is up for grabs

• This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

I can't put my finger on exactly when I first learned I'm not in control. My certainty broke gradually: the first crack when my body went rigid with a seizure and I convulsed violently into nothingness on a red-eye flight to Beirut; another splintering when the doctors found a mass" in my brain that afternoon; the edifice barely holding as my partner and I clung to each other all night in a skinny hospital bed, waiting for a prognosis of life or death.

Even then, as the sun rose the following morning and tears streamed down my face, the terror was strangely numinous, almost thrilling. This would be an aberration, a story to spice up a dinner party. My lifelong sense of certainty - a deeply habituated need for order and control - was fractured, but still intact.