Social media creators have become synonymous with superficiality. The pursuit of an influencer met with a scorned judgement. Everything that is wrong about our society and the way it operates on cheap dopamine, superficial messaging and the perpetuation of unrealistic and unattainable standards. Why on Earth would you want to do that?

While social media can and is certainly used for shallow and fruitless measures, I want to make an argument for the potential that social media holds— to confront and transcend social fears, inspire liberation and instigate spiritual awakening and expansion.

I write this piece as a love letter to the fearful past versions of me, as much as to you, the person who may stumble across this piece with a dormant or unexpressed desire for a dream: to share your art, words, perspective or life online – I write this as encouragement. I write this as a Dare. I want to do this by telling you my story.

In June of 2021, I posted my first YouTube video.

It was a June vlog, narrating my week of yoga, dinners with girlfriends and dance sessions at my high school boyfriend’s, where he and his brother are improvising a harmony of drums and trumpet, and I am seen dancing my heart out, cheering with an infectious youth.

It was 2021, COVID-era and the year after I’d graduated high school. I was wrestling with integrating my ability to have a spine, rising from the ashes of my teenage self and confronting the age old question – What did I want to do with my life?

This was a question I took seriously, as I have always taken seriously the questions I deem really matter.

The choice to post, as you frequently hear from those who have confronted the public arena, was a long-awaited decision, in that the desire had always existed.

At twelve I was doing Christmas hauls on photo-booth and making my friends create video star music videos with me every chance I got. At thirteen, after my first confrontation with high school social dynamics, I was passionately expressing my realisations in the privacy of my bedroom: people have no right to be so judgemental about who someone authentically is. My journal was filled with contemplations and analyses on why I myself fell into caring so much about what other people thought.

In essence, I’ve always been the same person and have held the same dharma, innate beliefs and desires to share and express myself and my ideas online.

But why didn’t I sooner?

The answer is unsurprising, but its lack of novelty does not take away its grip on us as humans. Fear. The largest for me was the fear of judgement, but it ran a long list: Fear of losing control, fear of being made fun of, fear of people thinking I was weird, fear of losing friends, fear of exclusion, and the list goes on and on and on….

High School, Wanting to Fit in & Constrictive Social Paradigms.

Growing up in an affluent and judgemental small-town, a little alternative hub called Mullumbimby just outside of Byron Bay, I was used to being in a social climate where the primary agency of communication was wit, sarcasm, exclusivity, and not caring. The cool girls smoked cigarettes, and didn’t seem to care much about anything, or so they presented. They weren’t very nice, let alone kind. Parties were ultra exclusive and I found myself frequently excluded, or let in by a tiny margin.

I have always had this tendency and desire to gain mastery over social realms. That is perhaps an anti-social way of describing it, but I am equal parts social synthesiser and nerd as butterfly and chameleon.

I am interested, curious and loving of human connection in all forms, so I’ve always been drawn to exploring and understanding social dynamics. And in high school that looked a little bit like athletic and animalistic warfare, survival of the fittest.

Back then, all I wanted was to fit in and be cool. Be like those older girls in the grade above who were skinny and wore vintage Levi jeans and always knew what to say; how to keep their cool. Unlike me, they were invited to all the parties.

I never bothered to ask myself what I liked, who made me feel safe, what contribution I uniquely had, even though all those parts of myself were present regardless, in little glimmers of passion I learnt to trace.

It made me much too fixated on the wrong things and sources – on clothes that expressed a trend, rather than myself, on connections I didn’t bother to ask were fulfilling or reciprocal, so as long as they were bringing me closer to fitting in. It is ugly, I know, but it was my reality for a while as a teen.

Menti-Breakdown, COVID-19 and Moral Awakening.

At seventeen, things started to profoundly shift. While the world navigated a Global Pandemic, I started dating my first boyfriend Sam.

There were a lot of events and realisations that made this time of my life so significant and life-altering, but largely I think that my relationship with Sam instigated a new way of seeing.

Through him, I was witnessing and perceiving access to a social way of being not dictated by hierarchies or the rules I’d become acquainted with so closely.

Sam opened me up to a world that could exist where human connection was about true charisma, which is by my definition the ability to connect and warm to pretty much anyone; the more genuine the better. He showed me humour, rebellious wit, and a profound ability to be open. Sam at his best has the biggest heart and capacity of a person I’ve ever met; holding this uncanny ability to talk to anyone, much to my dismay at times – from the homeless man to the drunken person he met at the pub, he would disarm them with his relaxed acceptance and humour, his love for humanity at the bottom. Without realising it, I was greatly influenced by how he existed so freely as himself without any rules, and people would welcome him. Maybe this was part of the contract of what drew me so totally to him at that time. I am grateful to him now.

Meanwhile, I was having a menti-breakdown / spiritual awakening, reckoning with the stagnancy and toxicity of many of the friendships, patterns and lies I was living out. It was the Great Purge. Goodbye high school, goodbye old friends, goodbye living out a lie. It was not a time of gentle becomings but rather aggressive and urgent realisations; perhaps influenced by the backdrop and collective trauma of living out the unprecedented anxieties of COVID-19.

Most strongly, I’d woken up to the fact that Truth had to be my light to guide my life. A Moral Awakening if you will. I’d heard this Biblical quote translated —

“The Reality you Manifest out of Truth is Good”

The fabric of reality, which is created through the decisions we make guided by Truth, are innately Good – even if they carry us initially through chaos or conflict.

This wisdom changed my life. It allowed me to expose lies I’d been telling, set boundaries like I never had and end friendships that no longer served me. It has shaped my decision-making and the way I lead my life ever since.

Also, high school was over and I started to feel such a massive capital L Lameness to caring so much about looking cool or determining your social value by who you hung out with. The world was so much broader… I started to not just see but desire to embody that kindness was the real cool, and your ability to speak and connect with anyone as the true key to the doors and lands that would actually be meaningful to access.

I didn’t know it then, but I was starting to create a new Social Paradigm – this was the beginning of my passion and world I’d create online, much later.

So now to the juice. All of this led me to the inevitable conclusion that actually the coolest and bravest and most inspiring and True thing I could to, was to get out of my own way and start doing what I wanted to always do. Labels aside, cringe aside, I wanted to create and share. I bought my first vlog camera second-hand, the Canon G7X Mark II, and I started to film… Little did I know that Cringe Mountain awaited, and it would be a long and hard climb.

CLIMBING CRINGE MOUNTAIN

= Ego Death.

For the first year of creating on YouTube, I think I just got past 100 subscribers.

Every video felt equally humiliating, and in posting every video a little part of my old self died. My inner critic was LOUD. Who do you think you were? You are only embarrassing yourself. Everyone is probably making fun of you.

In reality, besides a few inevitably snarky encounters, it was actually the opposite: people were surprisingly supportive and encouraging, even though internally I felt like I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out (sometimes I still feel like that, if I’m honest).

I had not yet built the stamina that the terrain requires: vulnerability, courage and the capacity to be seen in who you authentically are. These are the very ingredients I am most grateful for today.

I believe reality matches not what we say we desire, but what we actually believe deep down in our subconscious. My journey to taking centre-stage online has been the latter, a deeply spiritual process of transcending the hidden fears that held me back so strongly from living up to my potential.

And so the next four years continued on this way, with little and large, often unexpected rewards: helping hands from other creatives further along the climb, peers that I met on a similar trajectory, the emergence of synchronicity, creative discovery and most poignantly, a stronger sense of self being built, brick by brick.

And, of course, my True Love for creating always guided my way. I am a communicator and a storyteller, Archetypically. The difficulty was never in creating; it was always in the fears I had to confront to allow myself to create.

The Great Weep & the Ancient City.

In August of 2025, I hit a massive wall.

One month into my three-month backpacking trip, I lay defeated on a hotel bed in Rome (trust me, I am self-aware about how ridiculous I sound). I’d told my friend Luca I was travelling with that I needed a resting day, and she had gone to explore the ancient city on her own.

Weeping on a hotel bed in Rome, I found myself asking God why.

How can I pour four years of my life into something with so much soul, consistency and labour, and still see such little fruits?

I don’t know what it was about that precise moment that made it hit me. Maybe it was the list of other perceived failures in my life: going through a brutal breakup with someone who I believed was my soulmate, only to be left feeling so naive, confronted with his total indifference. Or the fact that I’d just posted a vlog that I’d put so much care into, and really liked, and it had only reached barely a couple hundred people, and it had felt like four years of being teased in moments and holding so much faith, only for nothing to ever build momentum.

I was bubbling with the feeling that I just tried so hard in life, all the time: to be good, to be courageous, to be earnest, to be mature, and I couldn’t understand why two essential parts of my life kept failing. A part of my brain is and was judging myself then, because I know comparatively these are small struggles to wrestle with, and that there were obviously other great things happening in my life (like travelling Europe hello?) but it doesn’t really take away the fact that this all felt brutally true to me in that moment.

And to be honest, it was the first time I had really let myself cry about it to that degree, where defeat became even a possibility and question. I was letting myself ask something I had never considered an option: Maybe it wasn’t right for me. Maybe it was time to accept that. I felt like Mia in La La Land, except this was real life and in real life, dreams didn’t always come true. And maybe you do find what is meant for you through being honest about your failures.

I knew I was being a little dramatic, but I also knew my feeling was true. At twenty-three, I thought I’d be further in life than where I was, where truthfully I felt I deserved to be.

Admitting What I Wanted

I had been at a landing spot for a while now that had kept me in stagnation, where I proclaimed that ‘creating was worth it regardless of the outcome’. ☆

While I still believe this, it shielded me from the deeper truth that would hurt me much more: despite all my time, tears, heart, bravery and labour, I hadn’t gotten the results I was hoping for. Two things of course, can be true at once. As a creative, I have learned it is necessary to admit honestly to yourself what you want, that creating is worth it regardless of the result AND results can matter. You are allowed to want people to connect with your work, to be externally successful even; it isn’t shallow to desire that.

I knew a new beginning was approaching, but I didn’t know what. I kept getting this feeling that I wish I could just start over. I had learned so much over the four years – but my YouTube channel had been more of a rehearsal playground than a clearly fleshed-out world and concept. Too much staleness. Too much blur.

I knew I needed to start from scratch. Try just one last time. But this time, with all the right ingredients and from the purest place I could. I told myself if it didn’t work, I would genuinely and peacefully accept that it wasn’t meant to be that. Accept my fate of creating as a hobby, and as joy. I would still love it the same.

Still sniffling and snotty, I started to feel excited, as if something knew in me that this time I was in for the kill. It was time to head back to the drawing room.

GRACE IN BEING

This is where Grace in Being was born, the Substack you’re reading on, the TikTok, the Instagram – but most importantly, the central idea.

The central inspiration for Grace in Being was to create a world so effortlessly Grace (me) that it would flow from an endless stream of easeful creation, it was about being over performance, being in where my deepest interest was already carrying me, being in my deepest authenticity, being in and creating the culture that I craved most as a child; as a teen and that I still look for in the world around me.

A New Social Paradigm.

On Creating the Culture I Craved

I spent the next few months of my travels, in every pocket I could, secretly working on my new project. Luca asked me, perplexed, what in the hell are you working on?

I went down creative rabbit hole after rabbit hole; this time I was Alice, and entering into the Wonderland of my deeper self. I mapped my ideas on journal pages and on Obsidian, where I paid for the subscription; I created Pinterest boards and Google Docs documents where I listed inspirations, values, core themes, resonant works, my favourite creators and why I liked them; I asked three of my closest friends to answer some questions on where they thought my gifts and values lay.

Here were some of their answers:

The two main questions that drove my Creative Inquiry that I’d recommend any creative or person ask were surrounding:

a) who am I in essence and what are my natural interests and gifts?

b) what kind of world did I want to see more of, which reflected my values?

My natural gifts and talents, I concluded from my own reflections and from my kind friends:

1. My ability to communicate and articulate myself

2. My depth of reflection

3. My ability to warm to others and to invite them in.

Defining my values was easy:

In Grace-world, kindness is the coolest, earnestness gets you brownie points, and the goal is always to express ourselves truthfully and connect meaningfully, but not just seriously. Be playful. Be true. Be childlike. Be deep. Be kind. Be who you are.

It is a play on words. To hold Grace in your Being, to hold Grace in the way you exist and are being throughout this world, but to also allow me, Grace as a unique individual to be in who I really am, to the fullest extent. By my own permission to be, maybe I could allow other people to feel safe and brave enough to do the same.

What would I talk about?

• Core themes of my deepest interests and value, at least in this chapter, included women-hood, human connection, and creativity

• Sub-themes under this included love, limerence, channelling crush energy into artistic hobbies, de-centring men, setting boundaries, creating your dream friendships, spiritual expansion, overcoming social fear, stepping into your authentic self, being well-spoken and on and on and on…

• you should see my mind maps omg.. ✮

Within two weeks of posting, my TikTok was blowing up.

It came with the perfect balance of all the premeditation I’d conducted, but none in the moment. I hadn’t planned to post on TikTok at all, I was always set on YouTube. But without too much thought I started to post a few videos, just having fun with the process and experimenting with my ideas. Pretty soon, I was sent on a new trajectory.

I remember staring down at my phone in disbelief, as my favourite tarot reader had liked my video. It was on whimsy. Within a month I’d hit 10,000. And the next month, 20,000 and so forth. I was making videos on journalling, friendship, articulating your ideas, overcoming the fear of cringe, heartbreak, my favourite Substacks, all topics I’d mapped out prior but which emerged as inspiration naturally. I’d never felt such creative momentum in my life. I felt like the Creative Gods were blessing me, all at once. Here you go, they said, you’ve earned it.

It was then and is still quite miraculous to me that people would value or resonate with what I had to say. I never take it for granted.

Most of all, I felt so grateful people were resonating with a Self I’d learnt to understand, nurture and express across my almost five years of putting myself out there. I could confidently stand behind all I was saying.

Spiritual Lessons from Posting Online.

I am far from perfect, nor do I know exactly where this path is leading, but I can say confidently that posting online has been one of the most pivotal and transformative decisions I’ve ever made.

Dear Reader,

So I turn the mirror back to you now. If you’ve made it here, maybe there is a reason for that. Maybe there’s something in my story that speaks to yours. Maybe this is the first nudge, or the final, beckoning you to just start.

If you are thinking or have been ruminating on starting that Substack, that YouTube channel, that TikTok account, on sharing your words, your poetry, your art, your ideas, your passions, your activism, your purpose, your wisdom, whatever it is, this deeper essence, this sense that you have something to say: trust me, from someone who knows – follow it.

Posting online has been the best decision I’ve ever made. Not only in what it has gifted me but who it is that it has allowed me to become. I have never stopped caring completely about what other people think. It has always been and will always be about existing in service of my deeper values, of placing these higher callings above my fears, of knowing there is something Higher that I’m guided by.

We genuinely only have one life. While there are realities of privilege and accessibility, it is still true that we have agency and power to make decisions that are aligned to who we are and what we believe in to our core.

As a final exercise, imagine this:

You are on your Death-Bed and you’ve just been brought back to this moment Now: What would you do? How would you live differently? What would you Admit?

If anything, I hope this can be a nudge towards your own private investigation of Truth.

Yours sincerely,

Grace x

In October of 2024, my auntie died. It was slow and sudden. She’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia one year beforehand and was in palliative care when she died. Much of what struck me about it was her courage.

Two weeks before she died, she sent out an email. It was short and to the point and emailed to her dearest friends and family:

Subject: Farewell Party

You’re all important to me and I’d be glad if you could come and share some tea, cakes, bubbly & memories,

Love, Ro

PS I’ve attached Angelica’s poster explaining AML. [Angelica is my older sister].

The day of the party I arrived with my sister at my auntie’s place, half nervous, half confronted, with this feeling in my heart. It wasn’t just sadness, I knew, but something else.

When we arrived, Ro greeted us warmly with open arms, laughed and I’ll never forget it, said: thank you girls for coming to see me on my way. I almost felt like laughing, just in disbelief, at how ridiculously direct she could be and how admirable I found it. This trait was so characteristically her brilliance in Spirit and under the circumstances, was particularly impressive to me. Maybe impressive isn’t the right word, but I was just that. Impressed in the truest and deepest sense, the kind that strikes you to the very bottom, and happens only in the presence of an act truly inspirational. I was so touched by her bravery that day, in her ability to confront Death head on and in what she’d offered by example to everyone close to her in the process.

What a gift, what a gift, what a gift, it was a harmony I couldn’t get out of my head that day, and it came with a feeling that wouldn’t stop reverberating in my heart and consciousness and mind. It’s an anthem that echoes in my heart every time I remember her, still.

Rosemary Anne Chance was an environmentalist, believed in organic food and moved to the alternative area Mullumbimby in the Northern Rivers with her son Perry, my cousin, back in 2003. Years later, her sister Lizzy and her brother, my dad Jeremy and our families followed suit, all attending the local Rudolph Steiner school, an alternative education system that Ro believed in deeply. After she died, I wrote a small speech for her funeral. Upon doing so, I realised that because of these very actions, she’d actually had this profound and direct impact on my life. Rosemary Chance was a pioneer to her core, I realise that now, so clearly as a grown up. She was a large person, and I mean that spiritually. A writer like me. A leader in the truest sense, this embodied morality she carried that naturally made people follow her.

So fittingly that day, she’d gotten a Cardboard biodegradable Coffin, which was placed outside on the balcony for people to come decorate. Families, friends, children, we all painted symbols of memory and meaning; flowers, horses, her passed dog Buddy, Chincogan mountain from back in Mullumbimby, everyone occupying a different corner and colour. My cousin Tim compiled a leather bound journal to write a final memory and message to her. We sang songs from printed sheets of paper from her earlier days at a girls school in Sydney and she sang and laughed vibrantly with her school friends, in between coughs. In the journal, I reflected on the sweetness of the tomatoes in her garden at her home in Mullumbimby, how I always remembered her warmth as a child, the organic apple juice she’d fed me and my sister from the local health food store Santos every time we visited. The sweetness of such small acts in the wake of death shape a new meaning to a moment, to a day, to a gesture, to a person.

When I said goodbye to her that day, she was open and didn’t avoid the intensity of the moment, not even a bit. Her eyes reflected her heart. Bye Grace, she said softly. I still remember the expression on her face so clearly, it was so sincere and somehow light. We didn’t have much to say, but a lot to feel. We embraced, and I think I thanked her and wished her well, stumbling to form a single sentence to say beyond that, but knowing then, it was a moment surpassing the need for words, even for writers like us.

Ultimately, I felt we understood each other perfectly. Those rare moments in life where words fall flat and the heart speaks instead. I felt absolute clarity in all I could never describe to her, and her to me. More than anything, it felt like a thank you. We lingered for what felt like a long time, but probably was just a few seconds, said bye one more time. And then my sister and I walked away. I don’t know if I was in denial, but I was sure that wouldn’t be the last time I’d see her, that somehow she’d outlive what the doctors said. But she didn’t and she was gone two weeks later.

…

In the wake of Death, the real kind, you gaze at all the important questions in life. Every petty feeling or clouded impulse melts away into total clarity. Am I happy doing what I’m doing? Happiness, not as fleeting feeling here, but happiness as fulfillment, happiness as connection, happiness as leading a life with the kind of morality that Auntie Roey innately held. I think death predates this temptation to overly pedastalise or martyr a flawed individual once they’ve died, which isn’t what I mean to do at all. What I mean to capture is that despite being a flawed person like anyone else, Ro had this absolute conviction and clarity in her morals, and she embraced who she knew herself to be right to the very end, without shrinking. I think that’s pretty close to the best a human being can do, and I believe it’s the example she intended to leave behind.

I don’t really know what this piece is about except for capturing and honouring this feeling of her memory and legacy that I felt compelled to write down. We weren’t so close, but I think of her often. She was such an awake human being that it doesn’t feel real, even a year later now, that she’s gone. I wanted to write this to honour her courageous spirit, but also capture the ripples of impact that this kind of courage can have on those closest to you.

…

Even at twenty three, I’m frequently struck with the inevitability of my death, of the death of everyone I’ve ever touched, loved, been moved by, spoken to. I fear non-existence deeply. It haunts me at times. But I feel that it’s the only clear reality in which, against it, we are moved to live our lives more vibrantly and fully. To ask ourselves if our attempts at change are really sincere. To ask ourselves: deep in my bones, am I doing all I know I can to live in the way I desire, in a way that honours what I uniquely value and believe in?

My heart as I write this is feeling with the same sensation I had before I walked into Ro’s Farewell party. And just like I knew then, it’s a sad but also deeply beautiful, Divine feeling: a feeling that reminds me of the final conclusion we all meet one day; that none of us know when that day is coming. It’s a feeling of awareness, one that reminds me of my pulsing heart, of the chance to live another day that many people, including my auntie, will not get.

I hope I can confront life the same way Ro did in her death. I hope I can live courageously. I hope I can keep her in mind when I’m cowering away into non action and non speech. In irony, at the face of her death, I was struck by something close to the meaning of life. And with it, came an energy and inspiration to live.

We don’t know how many days we have left. Nothing else matters besides making the most of those days, with whatever capacity we have.

Post Script: Upon writing this article, I kid you not, I suddenly have this feeling that I need to check the date and I realise that today is the exact day that Ro died one year ago, October 13th, which was a complete and total coincidence. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, maybe she’s somewhere in the other room, laughing knowingly, urging me to write. Maybe I’m the messenger for something she wanted to get down. I don’t know, but whatever it may be…

I love you Auntie Ro.

I hope I captured what you meant to say

With the Dignity you deserve, In Death and Life,

Your Sincerely,

Grace.

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