ABOUT ME
I DIDN'T FIND MY WAY. I HAD TO BURN THE MAP.
I was the middle child of seven daughters raised in Wellington, New Zealand, inside a world with its own rules, its own language, and its own version of love… one that had to be earned. Approval wasn’t given freely. It was competed for, performed for, prayed for. So, I learned early that being seen required being exceptional. And so I became exactly that. Exceptional at becoming whoever the room needed me to be.
I left that world and walked straight into another one. Built a career. Became a wife. Gave it all up to raise my children and I poured myself into that role with everything I had. And I was extraordinary at it. But somewhere inside the giving, inside the managing and the nurturing and the holding-it-all-together, I lost myself. When my children no longer needed me in the same way, the silence was deafening. Because I had never learned to fill my own cup. I had only ever learned to empty it for others.
What followed wasn’t a breakdown. It was a reckoning.
I began to see the programming and the invisible scripts installed by religion, by birth order, by a lifetime of looking outside myself for validation. I saw the stories I had been telling myself as facts. I saw the victim I had unconsciously chosen to be. And I made a decision that changed everything: I chose myself.
Not once, but over and over. Again and again, in the messy, unglamorous, deeply humbling work of unbecoming everything I had been taught to be, so I could finally discover who I actually was. I have reinvented myself more times than I can count. I know what it is to grieve an identity. To step into the unknown without a roadmap. To rebuild from the inside out when the outside world has no idea anything has changed. I know the tools that work, not because I read about them, but because they saved me.
