Most of my story ideas start with the end of the world. Or the end of a world. The end of a friendship, the end of certainty, the end of the version of reality you once relied on.

Mostly I write contemporary YA fiction, although I’ve been toying with an idea that leans a little more sci-fi. In researching that idea, and in living through multiple crises, I’ve realised just how much of my thinking surrounds crisis and how we deal with it.

It may not surprise you – and definitely shouldn’t surprise people who know me – that I am a catastrophiser. I’m not as bad as I used to be (partly because my mental health in general is better), but I still feel drawn to the worst-case scenario. In many ways, I find it comforting. Like many naturally anxious people feel we are, I like to feel I am always prepared for the worst.

It sounds smug, but the public health orders and general end-of-the-world feeling that came with the first lockdown here in Melbourne did not come as a surprise to me. That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult – it absolutely was – but I knew the beats of the story. I knew not to let myself think, like some people around me did in March 2020, that this might be over in a couple of weeks. I have long been interested in disease pandemics and I had been following COVID since December 2019, when it seemed to be a weird blip in China. I only heard about it because I had a Google alert set up for bubonic plague and was pinged about articles that linked this new disease in China to the Black Death.

Months before, I had stood in the pressed-together crowd of a school strike for climate with 100,000 other young bodies. In that crowd, among all the noise and inspiration, the anxious part of my brain asked, ‘How long would it take for the plague to spread if one person here was infected?’

The strangest thing about COVID for me has been having those worries and anxious thoughts confirmed and affirmed as rational risk assessment. It’s something I’m finding difficult, as we move from a ubiquitous crisis of COVID to many others, just as urgent and scary (and with COVID still in the mix, of course). It is difficult to rein in my anxieties when they’re confirmed like this. It’s difficult to tell yourself you’re overreacting or that your worries are the stuff of sci-fi when they keep unfolding right before your eyes.

One of my friends, when I told them about the plague worry I’d had at that school strike, went wide-eyed and said that I had predicted the pandemic. I told them I hadn’t done that; there are just some disasters that are historical inevitabilities. There are some challenges we’ve been warned about but choose to ignore. Half my state was underwater last week and no one was overly surprised, but there was still so little discussion of how these floods linked to our climate crisis. It was scary and frustrating, watching it all play out.

Maybe this is what I’m trying to say, when I write and talk about ends of worlds: we all need to think about crises more. We need to prepare for them and we need to treat them as real and present threats. Because, dear reader, they are coming.

Or maybe I need to read fewer dystopias…