How can we look to the future as we watch our present burn?

I clearly remember waking up at 2.00am to throw up as my stomach finally gave into the butterflies.

I was quaking with nerves. Although the middle of the night, the sky was lit by the orange, red and white glow of the surrounding farmlands as I watched my community's livelihoods swallowed by the same fiery beast that would later consume my dreams.

My experience was not abnormal. For too many young Australians, encounters with catastrophic climate-fuelled disasters have become an unnaturally common occurrence.

Just this summer, the country spent months preparing for what was expected to be the most extreme fire season on record, only to be met with storms, cyclones, and floods.

I realised the extent to which these experiences have become normal in my teens, as groups of friends casually swapped anecdotes of where they were that summer, - whether they got evacuated, how cold their toes got sitting in the ocean as they waited for help, or simply arguing over which one was Black Friday. Or was that Ash Saturday?

In the end we all agreed: why does it matter, when every summer seems to be black and covered with ash?

A lingering fear remained, quickly rearing its ugly head as one of us caught a whiff of smoke or another watched a fresh torrential downpour with frightened apprehension.

It wasn't until I turned 20 that I finally had a label for these feeling: climate anxiety. It's the feeling of fear and dread when considering the state of the environmental world in both the present and the future.

The future. That's what gets me every time.

The experience of being asked to pack only your most treasured belongings in anticipation of the worst shares dark symmetry with our generation's views of the future.

Which hopes and dreams are most important to save? And what, regardless of how much we desire to take it with us, must we be forced to leave behind?

For many, we feel the weight of a century's worth of environmental neglect on our shoulders, and on the shoulders of the generations we bring into the future. We feel a desperate need to act through self-sacrifice to cling to the bright future we were always promised.

In a country boastful of freedom, choice and chasing dreams, we feel the neglectful boundaries set by those before us, squeezing at the necks of what we thought was possible. Jobs. Travel. Homes. Children. All of which are in arm's reach, yet we question whether pursuing these is "right", and whether desiring a family is not just the best decision for us, but the responsible decision for the planet.

This is what terrifies me the most.

At 10, I watched my world turn to ash, and now in my twenties, at an age where my focus should be the joy of the present, I continue to watch the world burn into the future.

Bringing children into a life where we spend more time creating bushfire evacuation plans and listening to heatwave warnings than enjoying the summer's breeze is not normal, yet we continue to treat it as such.

Children deserve to look at the world with hope in their eyes and opportunities at their fingertips, not wondering whether their houses will survive the summer or if their mere existence is more of a burden to the natural world than a blessing.

I don't just feel anxiety. I feel anger, disbelief, loss, and fear as I mourn for my future and the future of the children I was promised I could have.

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But my climate anxiety isn't a solo venture, nor should it be a burden to bear alone. Today, a Senate committee is due to hand down their recommendation on the Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill, a bill supported by nearly 400 submissions many of them written by young people, including myself.

Co-authored by another young person, Dante Casanova, and Save the Children Australia, our submission pleads with our government to consider their actions beyond their elected term, to view their privileged time in Parliament as an opportunity to build the future that their generation deserves.

That we, their children, deserve. That our children deserve too.

It's 2am and I can still smell the smoke. I'm still waiting for the day when it finally smells like hope.