After my most recent article about living in a bus came out on Stuff, I received a few messages, one of which was from Wallace Chapman. I was a bit distracted when I got the message, so when he invited me to go on The Panel Radio NZ, I just said yes without realising what the show was and who he was.

A while back a friend invited me to talk about the housing crisis on her podcast, but I am far more comfortable with writing than talking, so I declined. Maybe it’s an ADHD thing, but I often feel like I talk in tangents and blabber on about things when I’m talking. Writing means I have the time to get my thoughts in order to communicate what I’m trying to say.

Then I thought to myself, “what are the stakes here even if it did go badly?” and decided I should just say yes to things outside my comfort zone. The stakes are low: perhaps a bit of embarrassment or regret if I didn’t manage to say what I wanted to say exactly right – and so what?

So it was in the spirit of “just say yes” that I replied to Wallace without doing due diligence on what the show actually was, and agreed to go live on the radio.

Later that day I was talking to a friend and said, “I’m going to be interviewed on the radio tomorrow.” “What show?” She asked. I had to consult the Facebook message, that’s how clueless I was, and I read out, “umm it’s The Panel Radio NZ – wait. Radio NZ?! Oh shit.”

I’m so used to seeing it written as “RNZ” that I didn’t click until I said it out loud that I was invited to be on our national public broadcaster. Is it the biggest radio network in the country? I have no idea, but if you’d asked me “what’s the main radio station in NZ?” I would have said “RNZ”. I think we’ve established I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that’s what I would have said.

I was shaking with adrenaline before the call. I was sitting on my little bus couch waiting by the phone like when I was a teenager and the phone was plugged in to the wall and my friends and I would arrange at school that one of us was going to phone the other at a certain time later that evening. I can no longer understand why we needed to talk in the evenings when we’d been at school together all day, but I guess we needed to debrief on the minutiae of school life and our mostly-concocted dramas and who maybe meant a certain thing when they said something else entirely? Plus what else was there to do? Exercise? No. Family time? No. Reading? Well yes, but there were a lot of hours to fill. We only had dial up internet to access bad Yahoo Geocities websites and we were country kids. Anyway…

The interview went well. The host – Wallace – was lovely, as were the panellists. Someone wrote in while we were talking to say she was moving into a bus this very day with her 10 year old son and their dog, and another person wrote in to say they’d seen the photos of the bus and that I have “the greatest design flair”.

I just listened back to it and I don’t hate it, which feels miraculous! (Usually find it uncomfortable to listen to myself, as many people do if we’re not used to it.)

If you’d like to listen, it’s at this link here. A few minutes long, from about ~12.50 in: The Panel RNZ