Christiaan McCann | Risks and Solutions for the Vulnerable | Socialwork Projects in Hobart

Coping in the In-Between: A Day with Eamonn

Christiaan
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There’s something about the way Eamonn moves through the city that tells you he’s learned the rules the hard way.

Not the official rules—the ones written on forms or spoken in offices—but the quieter ones. The survival rules. The ones you only pick up when life narrows.

Eamonn lives in short-term accommodation in the city. “Short-term” has that polite, temporary ring to it, but the reality feels more like suspension. Not quite landing, not quite leaving. Life, for him, seems to orbit around coping—getting through the day, stretching what little there is, staying afloat without ever quite reaching shore.

Money is tight. A few spare dollars here and there, but never enough to relax into. And yet, what stands out isn’t scarcity so much as the resourcefulness it breeds. Necessity sharpens instinct. You see it in small moments—like the way he approached the free supplies in my van. No hesitation, no second-guessing. Just a kind of practiced awareness: this is available, this is part of how I survive.

There’s no shame in it. In fact, there’s almost a quiet confidence. A sense that this is not only normal, but necessary. That being alert, even a little competitive for resources, is healthy in this world. It’s not greed—it’s adaptation.

Life, as he describes it, splits into two domains: inside and outside.

Inside is the unit. Contained, functional, impersonal. A place to exist.

Outside is everything else—the movement, the people, the culture. When Eamonn talks about the outside, his voice shifts. Suddenly there’s an itinerary: art shows, underground scenes, people you might know if you were in that world. A kind of social map of the city that feels alive, connected, almost glamorous in contrast.

Sitting with him, you get drawn into that rhythm. Conversations about who’s going where, who’s meeting who, the buzz of new encounters. There’s excitement in it—real excitement. But there’s also something else, just beneath the surface.

It feels like a constant reaching.

Like the importance isn’t just the event or the person, but the fact of having someone—anyone—to meet. Someone to talk to. Someone to share a moment with, even if that moment quickly turns into talking about something else. Often anything else.

And it makes you wonder: what happens to intimacy when private space disappears?

When your “inside” is shared, temporary, or thin-walled, maybe intimacy doesn’t live there anymore. Maybe it gets pushed outward, into conversations with strangers. Into these fleeting, socially agreed-upon pockets of connection—brief moments where two people create a sense of privacy in public, just long enough to feel human together.

But those moments don’t last.

And so you keep moving.

When I sat down with Eamonn more formally—what you might call an interview, though it didn’t feel like one—I noticed another layer. There was a kind of performance happening. Not in a false way, but in a structured one.

The conversation leaned upward. Positive. Light. Almost rehearsed.

It felt like there were unspoken rules about how to present life. That you keep it social, keep it upbeat, keep it moving. And the more I looked around—the small space, the shared kitchen, the unused social nook—the more that performance made sense.

Because the environment itself didn’t offer much to be positive about.

Except, perhaps, in the most existential sense: I am here. I exist. I made it through today.

And maybe, in some quiet calculation, that’s enough to keep going. Enough to say, “I’m not likely to disappear tomorrow.”

There was mention of monthly meetings with a psychiatric board. A check-in. A moment of oversight. Then back out again.

It raises questions.

Is this what support looks like now? A brief intervention, then release? A system that stabilises just enough, then steps back? There’s a sense of being managed at a distance—kept within bounds, but not truly held.

Not accompanied.

And sitting there, listening, observing, you can’t help but ask where you fit into all of this.

Because you’re not part of the system.

But you’re not outside it either.

You’re in the in-between space—offering a ride, sharing resources, having conversations that stretch a little deeper than the usual script. Not a professional intervention, not a passerby. Something more human, less defined.

Maybe that’s the point.

In a life shaped by coping, where systems are intermittent and spaces are temporary, what stands out are these unscripted connections. Moments where someone isn’t performing, or competing, or moving on—but simply being seen.

Even briefly.

Even imperfectly.

And maybe for Eamonn—and for you—that’s not everything.

But it’s not nothing either.

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