I’m adrift.  Three months since the megaquake level nervous breakdown, and feeling happier, healthier, and more optimisitic than I have done in years. I am happy, but clueless and quite lost. I’ve got no idea what I want, where I am going, what I want to be doing, or how I want to be doing it.

There are three unyielding veracities that keep filling my chest and gnawing and snarling at me if I veer too far from any of them.  

1. I adore my family– and need more time with my tribe. We are our relationships and they are the magic that make the good times better and the bad times bearable. The kids are incredible and open and honest and FUNNY!  They are of course damaged and difficult and it feels like I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t most days.  But far fucking out these kids have a self-awareness, integrity, kindness and depth that blows my mind and both breaks and buoys my fragile and frantic heart.  They Love me. I do not feel like I have earned that, as I am painfully aware that I am a hot fucking mess and let them and anyone else foolish enough to care for me down sometimes.  It is exhausting being my friend and even more exhausting being my family.  And honestly, it is impossibly exhausting being me.  I guess if we stop to think about it, many people would acknowledge feeling a bit overwhelmed by the baggage they carry and the package that has been added to over the years that makes them who they are.  But seriously.  I am full fucking on.  Full throttle or slamming on the breaks.  Hot or cold. Meek or bold.  I am just a lot, and I scare strangers and put small children and animals at ease.  People can only handle me in small doses (those lucky fucking assholes) but I am stuck with me 24/7 and my family, even the husband who has recently agreed to a serious separation, well, they know all of this and Love, forgive and crave me in their lives anyway.  Steph cried so much today when I left.  She doesn’t generally.  And now I am crying as I write this.  I spend ¼ of the year (at least) away from them flitting around the planet to find meaning or scream from some mountaintop.  The kids and I cherish our time together, and I just think it is time we spent a bit more. This year, I will travel with them not away from them, a lot more often.  

• This is the year of the Goddess.  Championing and supporting the amazing women I know and seeing that ripple on and on feels like it could be the single most impactful thing I could possibly do while on this earth.  We’ve been fighting ourselves, each-other, misogyny, glass ceilings, harsh dealings, and so much judgement (internally, externally, and always detrimentally) that most women find it difficult to fucking breath anymore. The sweet spot at the centre of a Venn diagram of my passions (mental health, social justice, tolerance, sustainability, carbon divestment, tipping the balance of power, shaking up the status quo, kindness, learning, humour, creativity, and just basically NOT being a fucking cunt) well smack in the middle of that huge number of passions and problems, well women being kinder to themselves and others and feeling more empowered falls quite squarely as a potential game changer for any/all of these things.  We’re more than half of the population of the planet. We need to be heard and we need to be strong if this broken clusterfuck of a planet and society in general have any chance of surviving, let alone thriving.  

• I’m really fucking tired. Before I was adrift I was riddled with guilt and chock full of frenetic energy and guilt that kept me reaching out and striving for… hmmm.  Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw, I genuinely don’t even know what I was striving for.  I do know I had something to prove and a chip on my shoulder and felt I needed to yell to be heard.  I guess it was validation.  I was so desperate for validation and so riddled with guilt I stretched myself so thin I broke. And rather than validation, I was given the gift of a hefty and healthy reality check and an opportunity to stand up and demand to be given the time, space and resources I needed to fucking reboot and find myself.  I was juggling so many balls, flying to so many places, waving around my jazz hands, sobbing, laughing, screaming, crying, and perhaps, almost dying, because every waking moment had to be filled with purpose.  If I wasn’t charging ahead with guns blazing and raising some serious hell, I was bed ridden and sobbing.  That’s bullshit gets to be well fucking tiresome.  I am not interested in repeating the cycle that has led me to that place again.  So yes. I know a lot of you will be able to relate.  I’m forty, and I am fucking seriously bone tired.  The loving my family realization kinda touched on this point. But seriously.  Tired.  

So here I am in the Koru lounge at the Auckland airport. If you pass through I always wear moth leggings and a red tunic when I travel.  You’ll maybe see me showing someone how to use the water spout (tap on one side then the other to get hot, still below, bubbles up top) or chatting with some strangers over the trials of traveling with children, or just getting to know them for the sake of learning something from strangers.  Most of the time though, I am hiding in the corner either by myself or flanked by one or more kids and occasionally my Phoulmate Phteven (we are still undeniably best friends and I hope that never changes).

I am heading to LA to see my friends Cat and Dan and hopefully Tony and Leesa and the girls as well.  Then I am off to a very special women’s retreat in the Dominican Republic. The strength and connection I have enjoyed from attending Women Who Get Shit Done conferences here in NZ impacts my life daily.  If you are one of the WWGSD tribe, I fucking Love and respect you.  Thank you.  Seriously.

Looking for answers, and looking forward to yoga and horses on a beach and being squished back into some sort of metaphorical amalgamated and functioning alloy, instead of feeling like fractious and impossible to combine or control hard chunks of chaos (seriously, I feel like a bag full of ball bearings bumping up against each-other as they get shaken around lately).

I am going to calm the fuck down and figure shit out.

Eva told me before I left, we are all empty.  We are all trying to fill it up.  Being goal oriented and keeping going through adversity is her strategy (and it seems to work, she’s AMAZING!) and she’s made me promise to commit to a goal and give it a completion date.  So this is what I will do.  I want to choose 12 amazing women among the dozens, perhaps hundreds of beautiful women I know.  I want to intensely, sincerely, and genuinely interview them and share their stories with the world.  I want everyone to know that our heroes and the goddesses who shape our lives are ALL shoveling some serious shit, and we all fall down, we all get hurt, and we all feel lost and ready to quit.  I want to find out what they have in common, what keeps them going, what they dream about and how happy they are and why.  None of us are always completely happy.  And that’s something that I think many of my most admired goddess have in common, they know that and embrace and honour the good along with the bad.

So.  I will let you know how it goes.  And DM me if you’re keen on a no holds barred interview and being in my 2019 Year of the Goddess book that I promised Eva I would write, and send into a publisher by December 31^st2019.  Even though it will likely never travel beyond my blogs, I will do what I say and I will definitely learn so much along the way.

Thanks for reading.

XXOO