My Story (Part 1) Rock Bottom

I never intended on telling my story but as I slowly grew and changed through the pain and unlocked nature’s magic, my very purpose has become sharing the things I held deep in my darkest depths..

It is my hope that through reading this and connecting with me, someone out there never has to feel as alone as I once did. We are all pregnant with a new possibility each and every day.

As I write this looking back, it feels as though it took an eternity to get here. To the other side of me, yet in a quantum field of pure potential it all changed in an instant. A magic moment. My story is one of magic. Of surrender. It is a spiritual pilgrimage. A lesson in letting go and while it is one that was also intensely physical in nature, what surprised me is how immensely spiritual it really was too. How dark, how deep and how uplifting and transformative. Pain pushes us. I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. Thank you for being here.

Up to this point I had never considered myself a woo woo person. I found ‘hippies’ and spirituality triggering and would eye roll at the very thought of what it meant to seek enlightenment.

It was 2019, I was 36 and I had just left my sought after job working in fashion. A moment of clarity that it was time to go, left me only weeks later wandering the streets of St Georges Terrace in my hometown of Perth, feeling very lost and searching for a new path.

I had also had a fashion blog I started in 2008 but after a decade of working on it consistently and being a little too early to market or not pivoting it into a viable business like I should or could have, it all ended around the same time. The ego death was brutal. After many rejections (which I have now come to learn are valuable redirections), eventually I found a new job, a role that I was grateful for at the time, but one that couldn’t have been further away from where I was headed.

I was left having to deal with the person behind this career I had built up to, who was I on the other side of it all? A nobody. I had completely lost my confidence and my adrenals were shot. It wasn’t long before rock bottom after rock bottom cracked me open.

Sometimes it takes being brought to your knees to need to lean on a spiritual practice and for me, that was the case. I’ve since come to learn (or believe) that a rock bottom will often take place if you are out of alignment with what you are trying to manifest. The universe is trying to shake you into alignment through a series of unfortunate events so eventually you level up. And boy did I get shaken.

The 2013 team covering Perth Fashion Festival for The Sunday Times, STM Magazine (L-R: Myself (Blogger), Teagan Sewell (Stylist), Gemma Bidstrup (Model), Gemma Woolf (Writer), Matthew Knight (Videographer)).

Thanks to this newfound daily disorientation, feeling misplaced on my commute to and from work, I discovered podcasts. First it was Gwenyth Paltrow’s ‘Goop’ and then ‘The Expanded Podcast’ by Lacy Phillips of ‘To Be Magnetic’. Before now Lacy’s voice and the way she spoke would have triggered me to no end but this time I wanted to listen. Learning about manifestation made me feel lit up inside. Before long I had drunk the kool-aid and delved into the courses ‘How To Manifest’ and ‘Inner Child’ and found myself doing ‘shadow work’.

I never intended on ‘doing the work’ but this is where it all began for me. I learnt about my authentic code and upon closer inspection realised that everything I had valued up to this point or where I sought my value in life and even my career was rooted in ego and inner child wounds. To seek approval, to be loved and be seen.

I listened to the beta waves religiously through their DI’s (deep imaginings) which are a series of guided meditations that apparently rewire the neuroplasticity pathways in the brain to take on new beliefs of self worth and the wild thing is, I actually went on to manifest everything on my list in a few short months. Commbank paid off my entire 10K credit card debt (no joke), I opened up a new freelance career path working in TV commercials and styling again after waiting 9 months to leave that job but before I knew it, the pandemic hit and I had nothing but time on my hands.

By now it was 2020 and the Covid pandemic had taken over the world. My partner and I had booked flights to LA and we were considering moving somewhere else when the whole world shut down. Instead, we stayed put, drank ALL the wine, searched high and low for formula for a friend’s baby, we signed up to Masterclass, I still worked on TV commercials out of our one bedroom apartment until they got shut down too. I started learning French remotely with a tutor based in France on Skype.

All I knew up to this point was hard work. Studying my uni degree whilst working, running a blog I posted on 4 - 5 times a week for 10 years whilst working, styling private clients on late night trading and weekends on top of my full time job, costume designing a TV series on annual leave days…Is this where I mention the damaging effects the ‘girl boss’ movement had on us millennial women?

The hustle was real..

Until it wasn’t.

There is no question that I had burnout and it wasn’t until I gave myself some space (or more to the point, that space was forced on me), that I realised how badly this pace of life had affected me and how long it took to recover. Spoiler, it was years.

Burnout is serious and very under-rated, how quickly it can floor you. I used to almost talk about it as a badge of honour, until I felt its full effects. The pandemic seemed to make everyone I know (mostly creatives working in similar fields to me) realise how hard we had all worked for 15 odd years non-stop to this point. Juggling uni degrees on top of full time work, on top of freelance work, on top of the event work expected of us after hours, not to mention any paid regular work we could fit in for some regularity amongst it all. Any 9am - 5pm, 40 hour work week would have been a walk in the park compared to our lives. It wasn’t long before I learnt the damage it all had on my nervous system and potentially, no doubt, was a contributing factor to my declining health as I knew it…

Behind The Runway’ was a prime time TV special featured on Channel 9 about the making of Perth Fashion Festival, produced by Matthew Knight and I was one of the ‘characters’ as a blogger of my popular fashion blog, Style Voyeur.

I had never been to hospital before 2020 and by the end of 2021, I’d endured 4 traumatic surgeries on my uterus and seen numerous specialists and surgeons, all of whom I’d happily have never met.

My health concerns started in a relatively harmless way. I was on a walk during my bleed one day, navigating mild traffic when I walked in front of a car and almost got hit. My mind felt cloudy and as luck would have it, a friend who usually lives in Bali was in town and standing right in front of me. I didn’t know where I was. I asked her to drive me home and did the due diligence to get it looked into. I had started to have irregular cycles and was referred to have a scan of my uterus. Being 36, I thought, why not ask about my fertility while we’re at it, was this something they could also see?

I had never wanted to know about my fertility until now. I had a friend who froze her eggs but I’d always assumed everything would be fine when the time came. I always knew I wanted to have a baby and be a mum, it felt like destiny and I didn’t question it for a second.

They said yes, they would check out my egg count while there. Before long the lady scanning me told me she had found a polyp. I had no idea what that meant or the implications but then this sombre mood came over the room, she said my ovaries ‘looked quiet’ and seemed very ominous about it. My partner was waiting outside the room and I remember going out to him and shaking my head with teeth clenched. Not the prognosis we were hoping for.

First I was referred to see an IVF doctor by the GP as the fertility prognosis was looking rather dire but as GP’s don’t actually speak to specifics on this topic, I would have to wait to hear from the specialist herself as to what was going on.

I asked around and heard about another IVF doctor, the best in the business I was told and we got an appointment to see her also. When I called a friend of a friend who had been through IVF and had seen this doctor, she told me that if it didn’t work out for me, even though it had worked out for her, that it wouldn’t be the end of the world as having kids was hard. I remember thinking in that moment, I would never ask anyone who’d been through IVF their opinion again. It’s funny how quickly people forget what it’s like to feel infertile when everything works out for them. I swore in that moment, I would never be like this to anyone, no matter what happens to me.

Seeing this star IVF doctor would be months away so we kept the appointment my GP referred us to and saw her first to get the ball rolling. I was also referred to a specialist surgeon who would remove the polyp ASAP.

It was 17th December, 2020, I was 36 years old and we attended our very first fertility appointment with an IVF specialist doctor. We had not yet even had the chance to try to conceive naturally, due to my impending surgery and we were only 3 years into a relationship where my partner was 6 years younger than me and up to this point, like most women, I had been trying my whole life NOT to get pregnant, until I was ‘ready’. Naive but hopeful.

This woman, an IVF specialist who I assume trained for years to ‘help’ people like us, enters the room. I forget her name, luckily for her. We are sitting down in front of her desk and she walks in carrying a folder which I assume is my scan results/ blood tests, AMH etc. as I was required to do these with my GP ahead of time. She’s now standing in front of us and before she even sits down, she plonks the folder to a thud on the desk in front of us and says: “Talk to me about egg donors.”

My heart broke.

Her words haunted me.

I don’t remember a single word that was said from then on that day but we were talked into doing a tracking cycle to see what my hormones were doing throughout the month. My partner, who at this point was not even sure if he was ready for parenthood, was by my side supporting me every step of the way.