I came so close to getting my PGA TOUR card last year and it took it out of me, mentally and emotionally.

I’m quite an emotional person but I was able to get over that disappointment quite quickly.

You get those feelings straight away when you just miss but I was lucky that I had my dad Mick and my sister Milly with me at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship in Indiana.

That was the time of Hurricane Dorian which closed the airport in Orlando for 48 hours so we weren’t able to go back to the house straight away. We made a trip out of it, going from where we were in Evansville up to Chicago, across to San Diego and then dipped home from there.

If I was on my own those feelings of disappointment would have been a little more raw but I had family with me so that made the transition a little easier.

I wasn’t in fantasy land about it, thinking about losing my card and how devastating and disappointing it was. I tried to find the positives from it and one of those was that I had earned myself a break.

I played 22 events last year which is the most I have ever played but if I’d got my PGA TOUR card, I could have pushed forward and kept playing. I’d have been ecstatic to get my card so I would have been able to draw some more energy from the excitement and adrenaline of getting onto the main tour and all that comes with that.

It was a big year with a lot of ups and downs. I was in no man’s land for a little bit, pulled myself up into the top 25 on the Order of Merit, hung around there until the thin end of the season and then just missed. Then there were finals. It just got real hectic towards the end.

Once I got back to Melbourne I went four weeks without touching a club. I was battling a strep throat problem as soon as I got home and with such a hectic schedule I couldn’t dedicate the time to recover from it. But I got over that and gave myself a few weeks just to unwind.

I did a lot of surfing. I’d go down Westernport way, Flinders, Gunnamatta. On selective days each has their perks.

I got back into the gym and back into practice but there was nothing pressing technique-wise. I was messing around with a few putters here and there but nothing alarming.

My year last year was golf to a tee. You play a couple of months of really poor golf – even longer sometimes – and then you come out one week and you’re in the hunt with nine holes to go on Sunday. All you can think is, ‘Where has this been for four months?’

When you’re playing bad it feels like you can’t get out of the rut but when you’re playing good you can’t imagine ever playing bad again.

I feel like on these secondary tours – even places like Canada, China, Latin America – it’s so top heavy that you can’t afford be finishing 30th every week. You need five top-10s and miss cuts the rest of the time because that’s ultimately more rewarding on the moneylist.

That’s one thing I had to really battle with. A top-20 or top-15 result as an amateur is a great week but you come out here and 20th gets you nothing. You need to come out here firing. Sometimes grinding it out to make the cut isn’t the best option, especially if you’re struggling physically.

It’s all subject to your hot streak. If you’re playing good you’ve just got to ride it, and that’s something that I didn’t do very well last year.

This year? Well, I’ve had a missed cut and had to withdraw after one round of my second event due to food poisoning so I’m off to a flyer.

I was hitting it fine at Exuma but the wind was 40 miles an hour every day. It was one of those courses where if you miss it by five metres you’re making nine. That element of rust wasn’t ideal for my first week back.

It’s been a funky start to the year but having a full card I can set my schedule and then adjust accordingly. Missing Panama last week might mean a busier schedule towards the end of the year but hopefully I can get it going this week.

And then hopefully make another run at that top 25.