Gina Chick was about seven when her whole class was told to walk in a circle. She stepped out of it and walked the other way, on purpose, so she had to look at every single face coming towards her. She’s been walking the other way ever since.

I’ve wanted this conversation for a long time. Gina survived 67 days alone in the Tasmanian wilderness, but that isn’t the part that undoes me. It’s her book, We Are the Stars, which I read and wailed my way through, snot-crying, completely levelled. She writes about her daughter Blaise with a line that has never left me: “because I've said yes to the grief and whatever it asked of me, I've always been bigger than it.” So I asked her how a person learns to turn towards the thing that most of us spend a lifetime running from.

Our conversation gets into the voice of "should" that is never  ...