During the long, bitter winter nights on Melbourne’s outer fringe, Vanessa Heart would crawl beneath the front hedges of strangers’ homes. At 60, her bones ached and she had no blankets, only the need to hide from what she called the “monsters” — predators who would beat her and take whatever little she had. She had fled an abusive husband, convinced he would kill her if she stayed. Her story, now part of an exhibition titled Walk in Her Shoes, is not an outlier. Family and domestic violence drives more than 40 per cent of those who seek specialist homelessness services in Australia, and women and girls make up 60 per cent of the 289,000 people who ask for help each year.

The exhibition, presented by the Council to Homeless Persons at a community arts centre in Box Hill, Melbourne, asks visitors to sit with three such stories. Diana Connell, another voice in the show, lived in her car while undergoing treatment for lung cancer; her teenage son studied for his year 12 exams in the back seat. She parked at a McDonald’s to plug in her feeding machine. Advocates note that Victoria alone is short some 80,000 social housing properties compared with the national average, and the number of homeless women over 55 has surged by roughly 40 per cent in a decade. Yet the exhibition is not simply a catalogue of despair. It is also a quiet insistence that these lives hold a particular kind of resilience, a theme that surfaces in unexpected places.

Far from the hedgerows, psychologists in Latin America have been tracing a parallel thread: adults who reach their 40s or 50s without a stable partner do not become emotionally cold, but rather develop a deep self-sufficiency. Research highlighted in the Spanish-language press suggests that facing life’s setbacks alone — job losses, family crises, illness — forces the brain to build its own tools of emotional regulation. This autonomy, they argue, is not a rejection of connection but a form of maturity. In Indonesia, popular psychology features describe a similar dynamic among introverts, for whom long stretches of silence and solitude are not loneliness but a necessary restoration of mental energy. And in Australia, women like Susanne Gervay, 70, and Chiquita Searle, 45, have deliberately chosen to remain single for years, describing lives full of friendship, writing, gym sessions and, in Gervay’s case, Friday afternoons filled with the noise of grandchildren. “I am responsible for exactly one human being,” Searle says. “That is genuinely such an easy way to live.”

But for those without the means to choose, solitude is imposed by a housing crisis that is reshaping cities. In Quebec, a coalition of more than 120 community, union and feminist groups recently took to the streets to demand that the right to housing be inscribed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Protesters decried gentrification and rents that double overnight; one tenant described a lease transfer that saw a C$700 monthly payment leap to C$1,400 for the next occupant. On the central coast of New South Wales, the crisis has pushed people onto the water. James Bryan lost his job and his apartment, so he moved onto his boat, the Lindy Lou. Maritime authorities have fined him for staying at anchor beyond the 90-day annual limit and warn that unseaworthy vessels risk sinking, sewage leaks and fatalities. Bryan is unmoved: “They’ll have to get me off at gunpoint,” he says. Disability pensioner Tracey Swann, who has squatted in abandoned buildings, is now cleaning up a boat of her own, drawn by the simple fact that it has a kitchen, a toilet and a shower.

In the exhibition space, visitors are invited to walk a path lined with shoes — each pair a stand-in for a woman who has known the cold of a night without a door to lock. The shoes are silent, but they carry the weight of both forced and chosen solitude, a reminder that the line between a refuge and a cage is drawn not only by walls, but by the freedom to decide when to be alone.