My daughter and I are pretty close. She’s a braver, smarter, more stable and immeasurably more organized echo of me when I was 17. Oof to the Oracle I was a mess at 17.

There’s no mistaking our bond or our similarities.  We are both deeply curious and often anxious souls.  We look, to the untrained or ignorant eye, to be confident and unflappable.  But we both struggle with insecurity and social anxiety issues.  She craves validation so spends most of her academic and working life at the top of her class and the front of the queue for grabbing as many shifts as she cares to handle.  She’s always won awards and whenever I go to visit her at work they tell me what an amazing and mature human I have raised. I assure them I can’t take much credit as all I confidently gave her was enough trauma and adventure to ensure she’s funny and resilient, and enough safety and Love to ensure she can function.  She is her own success story now and will continue to be into the future.

We’ve forged a relationship of radical self-awareness and built a culture of care and comfort that means she’s pretty quick to put me in my place if my words, actions or behaviours upset her or are incongruent.  I’ve struggled with my weight and had almost all of the standard eating disorders you can think of.  At her age I puked to stay thin and in my late teens I withered away to around 40kg.  Then after my first baby I ballooned to over 90kg post-partum which placed me square in the camp of morbidly obese.  Steph refuses to entertain me complaining about my weight or my body.  She will scream at me to shut the actual fuck up if I say I am fat or I want to lose weight.  It’s pretty fierce and I appreciate it.  She’s got a solid self-image and is healthy and loves food and stays active without obsessing about calories or exercise.  It’s helped me to reframe my own body image.  

The most recent contribution that has prompted this blog is her assertion that my time as a queen of the narrative of no might be coming to an end and I might be better to bravely share my story of abuse and trauma and removing myself from people who were toxic an abusive and brought out similar qualities in me.  

There’s a lot of people, including my biological parents, who have been instructed to fuck ALL THE WAY off.  If you’re reading this, and think I am mad at you, chances are I am not.  I take the time and care to clarify my position with people who are toxic to my existence and they know exactly who they are.

I ain’t mad. I am just too comfortable with my boundaries and my own company to suffer through other people’s dipshittery. ANYONE’s dipshittery. My children and step children are exempt from that until they are fully fledged adults. I will always make space for them despite any dipshittery (real or perceived) they may be doling out. Love all of them and they will never be denied access to my dinner table.

One day, the ex-husband and I might be able to be friends again, but I’d actually rather not. He’s a pretty shitty friend by most of my measures. I have a surplus of people who are honest with themselves and me, so I will spend time and energy enjoying those far more rewarding relationships.

Every family has shit to shovel.  Every individual needs to decide how they feel about their heritage at some point.  Some (perhaps many or most) of us are born into a legacy of trauma and wounds that have been passed down for generations become burdens to be borne.  I really didn’t think you could opt out of that cycle until late in my 30’s and after years, no, decades of sustained sabotage, lies, abuse, exploitation, bullying and neglect culminated in a complete nervous breakdown.

Before I go on, I need you to hear this:

Before you diagnose yourself with a serious psychological disorder, first look around and make sure that you are not, infact, just surrounded by assholes.

I spent nearly the first 40 years of my life surrounded by actual assholes. They were the product of their own trauma and abuse and I choose to believe that each of them did the best they could with what they knew. That does not excuse the toxic and unacceptable hell they willingly and relentlessly engineered for me to wade through. If ever I was starting to find my feet or feel stable or safe, I quickly and severely had the rug I stood on thrust out from under me. The saddest part, was I was grateful to the perpetrators, as I was grateful to my abusers and bullies as a child. We can maybe explore that in another blog, this is all getting pretty heavy.

There were kind, decent, functioning human beings in my life throughout that journey. The fact that I existed in a sustained hostage situation where I was spoken to and treated like a freakish and useless abomination most of the time meant I simply did not have the capacity to recognize healthy boundaries or relationships. That resulted in me missing opportunities to forge healthy bonds with healthy people. In many cases, I actively napalmed potentially healthy situations and actively sought out being treated like shit, as this was standard operating procedure and something my nervous system and cognitive reality could understand.

For years I was a hot mess hurricane.

Generous to a fault , desperate for validation, and completely without a shred of self-preservation. The upside of that being I never gave too many fucks about what people might think as I was surrounded by cruel and critical abusers. Any success I had was ignored or down-played while any failing was amplified and shoved down my throat. There was no fear of failure nor did I even fear my own injury or death, as I was programmed to believe, and regularly and blatantly reminded that I was a worthless burden and an embarrassment.

I forged many an on and off-line community with the bravery and stupidity that resulted from my shitty life.  And now, I am very close to a calm state punctuated by financial, spiritual, sexual, social and general independence and stability.  Not too many people seem to see what I am up to these days, and that’s kind of perfect.

I feel safe these days. Safe enough to share my journey after a long sabbatical from sharing.

My children saw me broken and they now see me healing.

Part of my healing has been huge and rigorous boundaries being put into place. I learned during the darkest days of my existence (ironically when I had the highest engagement and a huge online and IRL following) that I quite like my own company. I discovered in my late 30’s I would much rather be completely alone than share space or energy with anyone or anything that made me feel unsafe or unwelcome.

Interestingly, the whole world was undergoing a hibernation and healing at the same time as I was.  The pandemic gave me pause to be completely off-line and off-grid for weeks on end.  

Fortuitously, my solitude was shared by the kindest, bravest, most adoring man I have every met.  Without the pandemic, Damon would have succumbed to the same fate as anyone who attempted to get close to me and I would have sabotaged our relationship to prove to myself my unworthiness.  

The Oracle had different plans though.  

We spent weeks that turned into months and have now become years basically tattooed to each other and rarely do we argue or hurt one-another.  Over four years in we are each other’s safe space and definitely most adoring fans.  

Rarely a day goes by when I don’t think to myself “He’s just too-fucking good for me.” And apparently, he spends most of his time equally in awe of me, as he observes from a front row seat my authenticity and tenacity.  We are solid.  We are safe.  We have a lot of fun together.  Drama does not get a seat at our table and I fucking LOVE how easy it is most of the time.

As a gift to myself and anyone who cares to participate in one of the sessions I help facilitate, I now encourage women to find and use their most powerful and authentic NO!

This heals me as I never ever used my no when I was broken.  Being able to say no is an integral part of the human condition.  It makes space for the times we truly want to say yes to things.  Prioritising and protecting ourselves and our needs and interests makes us stronger, healthier, better humans.

My daughter suggested that I may have run the course of being the goddess of NO.  She pointed out that I have found my safe and trusted coven of friends and we all feel pretty great using and accepting each other’s no.  I just had to tell one of my very oldest friends and most favourite people I couldn’t make it to her graduation party because of my social anxiety piquing.  I definitely feel like I missed out, but she accepted my need to decline social contact with grace and tact.  

So the next and much scarier gift I want to unleash on the world is my deep personal conviction that people need to look closely and authentically at their relationships, and be brave enough to actively remove themselves from any that are toxic. ANY.  

That was Stephanie-Jane’s gift to me this week.  She got me thinking.  She’s definitely proud and often exasperated by her larger-than-life, but magical-mess-of-a-mother.  

She’s opted to be here with me or on her own at our city house for most of the summer because she can and does recognize people and situations that are out of her control or that aren’t safe or rewarding to her.  Thank the Oracle I’ve healed enough and found a safe and stable partner and together we have created a culture that all of our kids actively want to enjoy.  It isn’t perfect by any means, but our foundations are that of honesty, vulnerability, nourishment, kindness, authenticity and joy. 

I could not have imagined a life as safe or beautiful as the one I am living today.

Five years ago I was a product, not a person. I was a brand being built and trying desperately to earn my right to exist.  Oh I was always aching for the acceptance of people who often only wanted to see me broken.  The emotional pain I felt was palpable in every waking breath I took.  Many people benefited from that broken, and I launched and supported many an advantageous conversation and even career for people who likely would not cross a street to pour a glass of water on my if I were on fire.  

That’s cool though.

Truth is I do not have beef with the vast majority of people on this planet.  I like and respect lots of people I don’t see or hear from, but that’s not a problem as the universe ebbs and flows and brings people into and out of my life in waves. 

I am an excellent and loyal friend, and am actually incapable of feigning affection or respect, so if you haven’t explicitly heard me tell you to fuck all the way off, chances are I think you are wonderful and wish you the very best.  I’m just nigh on impossible to pin down these days.  Busy healing and farming and feeling my way through the second act of my life.

Today I don’t force anything, I don’t feel I owe anyone anything and don’t expect anything form anyone either.  There are people who protect and Love me just as I am, and don’t ask for anything but cherish our vibe.  There are people who benefited from my broken in the past and are sometimes salty or passive aggressive shitheads who spin lies and throw shade at me now that I am healing.  I fucking actually LOVE that.  I genuinely Love that I irritate some people’s un-managed demons and I relish the fact I have engineered a life where I will not tolerate the presence of anyone who does not earn and deserve my time and energy.  We all have to deal with dickheads we don’t like sometimes, I tend to mostly be able to avoid it, but when I do I certainly keep a cool distance and if I sense even a whiff of BS will promptly establish my boundaries by saying something like:  “We are not friends, and I do not like you, please just do the thing I require and we can both get on with our lives”. Or I simply remove myself from them completely. 

I think 2024 will be the year that I will be sharing more of this story.

The world is pretty scary right now.  I am still in awe of so many wonderful, fascinating, beautifully broken people.  But I also know that I am very good at being an enigmatic mystery to most humans.  I like being left alone, and I cherish the moments of connections that happen organically too.

Wherever you are in your journey, I hope that something in here made you feel empowered to look at yourself and your circle and know that you can call time on any toxic relationship.

This is your life.

Make it great.

Thanks for reading.