• Loss, illness, and crisis do not define a person—but honest confrontation can transform them.
• Radical self-honesty can become the doorway to freedom.

I made it look easy

Not because it was. Not because I was strong in the way people like to imagine strength. But because I learned life is about facing pain, feeling it, and moving through it honestly, even when the world has taken everything.

At seventeen, my brother went to a party expecting to return home. Instead, he ended up lying in the cold bitumen gutter alone, in the dark, bleeding, with the rain spitting on him… a final insult.

He learned that the world isn’t always safe. We all did.
Three boys ended his life that night. Only six weeks from a new life, we never got to have together.

They took his future, his girlfriend, his career choice, his laughter, his talent… all because he said “yes, sir; no problem, sir” in his English accent.

The phone call that followed didn’t just bring grief. It moved into our house.
And never left.

My dad shut down. To protect himself. To protect us.
He believed it was safer that way, given God took his son as punishment for his failures as a father. He never mentioned my brother again.

So, I learned to reduce too.

I played small, invisible, easy.
I held my breath, afraid to exhale.

I’d learned from the best.

Beliefs began to accumulate around my life. People suck. The world is dangerous. Life can’t be trusted. Safety is imaginary. Everything hurts you eventually – love, loss, hope, staying – and it only takes one moment for your life to change.

So “life is hard, but I’m harder” became my mantra.

Then it was my father’s turn.

The cost of unhealed pain, unprocessed grief, hurt, rage, is unmistakable – the lingering smell of chemo that followed him home.

I understood why and how. Thanks to my life experiences, I understood what came next.

But of all the loved ones I’d lost, this one hit the hardest.

I knew the moment it happened. I felt his hand on mine, even though we were apart.

Time doesn’t heal wounds. You just grow around them like a tree bending itself around a rock. You adapt.

But strength is depleted with wear.

Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot, you don’t notice the heat creeping higher.

The torrent kept coming, but I was now a pro. I knew what it was, what to do with it, and what it meant.

But my tried-and-true strategy (numbing, protecting, fixing) stopped working. Or maybe it worked exactly as designed. It kept me safe. Or at least, it told me it did.

But numbing the pain meant numbing everything else too. The joy. The aliveness. The human parts of who I was or could be.

I wasn’t living. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t even fully here.

I had become an automaton – moving, coping, functioning.

At some point, my body joined the conversation.

I tried to warn my husband, but it came out as nonsense. Frustration of words on the tip of my tongue, unable to leave my mouth. In front of my kids. On a memorial trip to remember my dad after we lost him.

I was having a mini stroke.

The next morning, we boarded a cruise ship. As you do.

I couldn’t articulate. I couldn’t follow simple conversations. I couldn’t remember things.

My kids were worried there would come a day when I couldn’t remember them either.

I was a formidable entity before this moment, career brownie points stacked up by forty-two. After the stroke, I had headaches all the time, slept twenty-four seven, lost my job, and my family even considered getting me a carer.

I didn’t lose mobility. I lost capacity.

I couldn’t go to supermarkets. Couldn’t handle noise. Couldn’t track conversations. I needed lists, written instructions, people to explain conversations to me, scaffolding to get through not only a day, but a moment – an exchange.

I got better… at managing it. At scaffolding. At buffering it from daily life.

But to this day, I’m different because of it.

Life has a dark sense of humour.

I cracked my pelvis on impact in a motorbike accident.

When I finally got pregnant with my daughter, I got electrocuted by my apartment gate. They couldn’t find her heartbeat for seven minutes. I thought I’d killed her.

But she lived. Somehow.

Later, I was told I had Hashimoto’s, postnatal depression, and chronic fatigue. They said I probably wouldn’t have another child.

There was a day I got in the bath and couldn’t get out. Not because of pain or injury. Just exhaustion.

I started to forget who I was.

Even as adults, the world can be a dangerous place, but when it’s your children, the stakes are unimaginable.

My child was two and a half when it happened – too small to be seen, too young to understand. We trusted the adults. She trusted them. She learned that no one – not daycare, not DOCS, not even us – could keep her safe.

From then on in, constant bullying.

Shine, and they sharpen their claws.
Retaliation came as false accusations, threats with a butcher’s knife, abuse.

A young teen, already exhausted, carrying more than any child should. Survival became its own kind of education.

The other was mocked, misunderstood. They were unaware of the weight being carried from home. There was nowhere safe.

Black Sunday split me open. It split us all open.

It taught us what helplessness really feels like. What it means to pray with your hands trembling and your phone in the other hand, calling for help yet getting none.

We survived it. Just.

Like their grandfather and their mother, they learned the same trick – distract yourself from the hurt, don’t feel. Being strong didn’t stop the breaking. It just kept it hidden.

From then on, friendships were lost. Marriages strained. People left – they couldn’t carry the gravity. Every plan was a crisis plan. “We are great in an emergency” – but every week held a new one.

Eventually, I reached a point where I had nothing left to lose. Nothing left to protect myself from. I’d already lost everything I was afraid of losing.

Strangely, there was a quiet freedom in that.

Because now there was only one way forward – brutal honesty. With my feelings. With myself. No buffering. No managing. Just truth.

Might as well.

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