My first trip abroad on an Israeli passport nearly ended at Ben Gurion. Sydney gave me back family, confidence and parts of myself I had misplaced—until an Uber driver asked one ordinary question.

The first surprise of my enormous Australian journey was that it might end at Ben Gurion Airport.

I had a valid Australian visa, a current Israeli passport, a confirmed ticket and pneumonia. Only the pneumonia was accepted without further documentation.

Before I reached the counter, three members of my family had urged me to remove my Magen David necklace, earrings, and my chai rings. They were worried about my travelling through Dubai and Sydney visibly Jewish. I understood the fear. I also hated complying with it. My blue passport would state my Israeli identity plainly, while my neck and fingers had been instructed to keep quiet.

Then the check-in agent demanded my physical Australian visa.

There was one small difficulty: Australia had not issued me one. My visa was electronic and linked to the passport in his hand. He needed to enter my passport details into the system. This was not an obscure legal remedy requiring senior counsel and an urgent application. It was typing.

He declined to do it.

I searched my emails while coughing, found the visa grant, extracted the reference number and presented him with the evidence he could have found himself. He still did not check me in. He dismissed me to a colleague with the air of a man delegating an unreasonable woman rather than transferring a passenger whose documents he had refused to examine.

His colleague entered the details. My visa appeared. I was checked in.

The first agent had not denied my Israeli identity; the passport made that impossible. He had denied that I possessed a valid visa and therefore my right to make the journey to Australia. The distinction matters. It mattered especially while I stood there with pneumonia, watching weeks of planning depend upon whether a stranger could be persuaded to use a keyboard.

Eventually, I boarded. Diplomatic normalization had opened my route through Dubai; administrative normalization had apparently missed its connection.

I arrived in Sydney ill, furious and depleted. I expected relief. I did not expect to be looked after so thoroughly that I would remember how adventurous I could be when I was not permanently preparing for trouble.

The first discovery was not the harbor, the ferry or Australian vegetarian menus, although each deserves honorable mention. It was the luxury of knowing what would happen next.

Every morning, I knew the plan. Somebody had checked the weather, rain, arranged the lift or thought about the meal. In the evening, I knew where I would return. There was food, conversation, rest and a bed. Nobody presented this as an achievement. For me, it was revelatory.

I had become accustomed to spending a great deal of energy anticipating disruption: transport that might fail, plans that might alter, health that might collapse, money that might not stretch and arrangements that might suddenly require rescue. In Sydney, I stopped bracing. At first, I did not realize I had stopped. I merely noticed that I was saying yes more often.

Yes to lunch. Yes to the ferry. Yes to another coffee. Yes to meeting somebody from a history I had not known how to approach. With less energy being wasted on contingency plans, I began wanting things again.

Much of that security came from my three sisters, S., H. and P. I expected to love them. I had not expected to become quite so besotted.

With S., there were our three-hour expeditions to the gym. That statistic is accurate and will survive cross-examination, provided nobody........

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