The last time I was on Newstart, it was when the probationary period of a big, posh new job wasn’t extended.

This news, delivered just after my colleagues had exchanged Kris Kringle and departed for Christmas break was as unexpected and disorienting as the mid-December rain.

I stood out the front of the suburban office park with all my things thrown in a now sodden cardboard box and thought about the line that’s always there, but only visible to some. Less than 20 minutes after losing my job, it was becoming visible to me now – like a lemon juice ink drawing emerging with the application of heat and a flame.

The line is the thing that separates those with good financial padding, who might not think much about the $30 taxi or the unexpected bill, or $70 meal in a restaurant or putting a round of drinks on their cards – and those who are fearful when the bill comes, when the groceries are rung up, when opening the mail. On the other side of that line there are no shock absorbers. And of course, the journey is more jarring and perilous.

That to me is the story of Newstart.

***

Over the next six months on Newstart, I got bits of teaching work at a university and did freelance assignments, but I was caught in the currents of underpaid, intermittent and casual work. Money came in dribs and drabs and Newstart was adjusted accordingly. But the gap between earning money and declaring it, and actually getting the money in my account, could be dangerously wide. This gap would leave me exposed, sometimes with $70 a week to live on, while I chased rich and powerful companies for small, unpaid invoices.

It was humiliating to see, after repeated requests to be paid from one big media company, that I was accidentally copied into an email about the payment and how I was “pestering” them.

The email said “desperate vendor” in the subject line. I was the desperate vendor.

A month or so of this and I started waking every single morning between the hours of 2am and 4am and thinking obsessively about money.

This wakefulness was pure anxiety and what I was doing in my head were tiny sums with tiny pieces of money. I’d check my bank account and if nothing had come in overnight, I’d start the process of doing the maths. Could I afford that day’s tram fare, and what about the friend’s birthday party in the nice restaurant, and could I say yes to a lunch but eat something first and just have a water?

Many of my friends’ careers were booming, and they were moving into jobs that paid serious money. The wine at dinner parties became more expensive, the restaurants pricier. Sometimes friends paid for me, sometimes I borrowed money, but there was no way around it, a night with my friends could wipe me out financially for a week or more.

One of the most isolating things about being on Newstart was being priced out of my social group. Before I lost my job I was earning $100,000. After on Newstart and bits and pieces, it was around $27,000. I wore rich person’s clothes while walking everywhere because I couldn’t afford the tram.

Other times I’d be offered travel assignments in luxury resorts. I didn’t have enough money to get to the airport, but once I landed I’d find myself in, say, the Philippines, in resorts where I’d have my own villa, personal butler and private pool, dining on mineral water flown in from a glacier in Finland and eating little miniature bits of delicate raw foods that contained the precise amount of micronutrients the human body needs, sampling spa treatments worth thousands of dollars, while lying in the warm dark under the stars having a Four Hand Under The Stars massage, all the while my mind whirring in a ceaseless panic, doing the sums about how I was going to pay this month’s rent back home.

Being a poor person in a rich person’s world reframed everything. If you are poor you only usually enter these gilded worlds as a servant of the rich. And the servants were everywhere, hidden, almost, in plain sight – from the Filipino groundsman who would stop sweeping when a guest walked past and avert his eyes, and incline his head slightly in a bow – to the casual tutor at the wealthy university who earns $12,600 a year and marks papers late at night in the cafe because she cannot afford the winter heating bill.

If you are rich you do not even see the servants, but you get to experience the frictionless existence that these people help create for you.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had a supportive network of friends and family and was able to get back on my feet within six months and return to the full-time workforce. But the forms and the queues and the mutual obligation and the job network provider appointments and the mountains of mail received each week advising of mandatory meetings – and the overlay of anxiety about money – is not something quickly forgotten.

As for the poor – one of the worst things about being poor, and by extension being on Newstart – is the lack of freedom. Not just the lack of freedom to travel, or enjoy socialising with your friends, but the mental freedom. As soon as you get on Newstart, your mind isn’t free. It’s anxious and busy working out how to survive. It’s doing tiny sums with tiny bits of money. It’s going right down to the decimal point.

To have money is to be free, to have that space in your head freed up for other things: thinking, dreaming, enjoying your life, planning for your future, surrendering under the canopy of palms to the four-hand massage and thinking of nothing, because you don’t have a care in the world.

We take it for granted and do not appreciate that others have their headspace shrunk by poverty and the necessities of survival.

In this respect the failure to increase Newstart is not merely a policy failure – nor is it just a moral failure – but an epic failure of imagination.