Stella Donnelly didn’t want to write songs about a friend who broke her heart. But any time the Welsh Australian singer-songwriter tried to channel anything else into her lyrics, the hurt was always there on the surface.

We have a language for coping with romantic heartbreak, learned from movies and songs – but there are fewer mirrors in art for coping with the end of platonic bonds. On her third album, Love and Fortune, Donnelly has captured the dull ache of being rejected by a friend who once knew her best of all. It might become the record ghosted friends turn to when they find a person they knew intimately for years no longer wants to hear from them.

When it happened to her, Donnelly felt powerless, realising “no amount of questioning or reaching out is going to work. I’d never come up against that in my life.” Any tensions in other friendships she’d had previously could be talked through; this time, she was having a conversation with herself.

“It’s so heavy and, for me, never resolved,” she says. “Ever.”

As much as the 33-year-old tried not to write about it, it sprang up each time she touched an instrument. She writes of letters left unsent on the track Friends, hiding herself away and not showing up to gigs she thinks her friend might also go to on Ghosts. “It’s as much an offering as it is a journal, in a way,” Donnelly says of the album.

We’re chatting over kombucha in the garden of Ceres, a farm and nursery in Melbourne’s East Brunswick. Around us flit magpies and other species that Donnelly, a keen ornithologist, notes by name. Birds are a symbol for evolution on the record: over plaintive, soft keys on Please Everyone, she recalls birdwatching with her former friend as sweet recorded chirps arrive on the track. “Wherever you may be, I hope it’s kind to you,” she sings. By the time we get to the album closer, Laying Low, she’s calmer, singing of the feathers left behind when someone flies away. By then, she’s learned, trying to grab them would be a fool’s errand.

Donnelly is quick, eager and delightful in conversation, but she has been struggling in interviews, she says, “because I’m so busy trying to protect the other person in all of this. But then I have gone and written this record.” When a freak sun shower prompts us to scurry away for cover, it also gives her respite from having to tiptoe around her words. When we settle again out of the rain, she apologises for “giving politician answers”, explaining the last thing she wants to do is twist a knife in someone else’s side with a more uncensored version of events.

Donnelly has taken a deliberate break from the music industry in recent years. From the moment her debut EP, Thrush Metal, was released in 2017, she never allowed herself a pause. That record featured her searing breakout single, Boys Will Be Boys, which arrived at a prescient moment and became a symbol of the Australian #MeToo movement. “The first song I put out was the heaviest song I have ever written. That came with pressure.”

Donnelly toured internationally, was awarded the inaugural $25,000 Levi’s Music prize at Australian industry conference Bigsound, earned multiple best album nominations at the Air awards for her debut, Beware of the Dogs, and an Aria nomination to boot. “I was just like, ‘I don’t care. I’ll just say yes’,” she says of the workload. “It was a little bit crazy.”

After years of saying yes, a crash was inevitable. People around her could tell Donnelly was “at [her] wit’s end for a while but was pushing through”. She was overwhelmed, “a little bit scared, and getting sick”. Shows were cancelled. Her label, Secretly, would later drop her.

Hunting for the spark of creativity proved harder than ever when she was deep in burnout. That was perhaps the true warning bell. “I’ve always championed honesty. So it was hard to have a bit of a tough time and not be able to give very much.”

In an effort to establish normalcy and a daily rhythm outside making, selling and promoting her art, Donnelly got a job at a local bakery. She began riding her bike to work before dawn, where she and her fellow musicians-slash-hospo-workers spent the day listening to community radio stations as they served the local musicians who came in for coffee and sourdough. “I could not escape music if I tried.” And she really did try.

She began playing in friends’ bands, rounding out rhythm sections alongside her husband, Marcel Tussie, of the band Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: “That’s where Marcel and I really, really connect. I play bass and he plays drums, and it’s my favourite context to be in with him because we are just there together, supporting someone else’s music, and it’s not about either of us in that moment.”

They swapped headline shows for a fundraiser gig in their back yard last year, when 75 people showed up to help chef Aheda Amro, a Palestinian refugee, gather funds to buy her own food truck. She watched her friends perform intimate shows to a couple of dozen people. In trying to escape the music industry, she found what a music community looked like. “That’s when I started writing more songs again, because it was just like, ‘Oh, I love this’.”

Even learning Secretly wouldn’t pick up her next record eventually felt like a blessing in disguise. “I cried for a day, and then the next day felt really, really free. I felt like that little kid in overalls again, who wanted to write an EP. It was that feeling of ‘No one actually cares about what I’m doing – so what am I going to do?’”

After writing her past two records on tour and on deadline, Donnelly wrote Love and Fortune in her head and on her bike around Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Six months ago, after being diagnosed as neurodivergent, she learned what self-care looks like for a person with a sensitive mind. “It’s just understanding that I need a little extra help here and there with things, and that a motorcycle riding past really loudly on the street can be a day-ruiner for me. I’m just a lot kinder to myself now, about everything.”

“Take back my little life … I set myself on fire for someone else’s game,” she sings on W.A.L.K, a song about caring for herself like she would a beloved pet. Tending to her most basic needs became a new daily devotion.

“I think, up until this year, I’d been really hard on myself because I was just like, ‘Why can everyone else do this and I can’t? Why can everyone else cope with life?’” she says.

She now has “hindsight kindness” for the past versions of her. The ones that couldn’t cope as well, who pushed through the discomfort of touring and sat in bed waiting for a text back – then chastised herself for doing it. “Finally allowing myself to just write a whole fucking album about this big thing that had happened to me made me accept that that’s kind of who I am: I’m this annoying person that writes songs about their personal life. I had to reconcile with the fact that that’s who I am, and grow to love that person.”

• Love and Fortune is out on 7 November (Remote Control/Dot Dash Recordings). Stella Donnelly is touring Love and Fortune around Australia 19 February-6 March, then UK and Europe 19 March-2 April; see here for all dates