Written 23 August 2026

Today I am six years sober.

Last night, I dreamed in colour. And texture. Wild hot pink. Peacock blue. Mustard yellow. Sparkling gold.

I was fossicking in a second-hand shop filled with quirky, beautiful things. Treasure hunting. The shop held the kind of things somebody had once chosen with care and loved too much. The quirky: orange sequinned sunnies. The unusual: a bedroom stool covered in emu feathers. The precious: a brooch of precious stones made to look like wildflowers. I found two pairs of earrings, pink and apricot, luminous like pearls. There was a blue dress I wasn’t sure would fit me but was the most gorgeous dress I had ever seen. And some enormous paper hearts in pink, purple, blue and black.

There were red clogs, too. I used to own a pair. They were favourites. But when I tried them on, one didn’t fit right. The top of the other fell straight off.

The man selling them offered them to me for three dollars. Then one.

I said no.

I didn’t want them. They were broken, and I knew I couldn’t fix shoes. Once, the fact that I had loved something before might have been enough. I might have overlooked what was broken because it was familiar. Might have taken it home because it was cheap and tried to convince myself I could make it work.

But in the dream, I put the shoes down.

I chose the earrings instead. The exquisite blue dress. The enormous, coloured hearts, hand-wrapped in brown paper and string with dried flowers tucked under the bow.

The dream shop was bursting with things - all of them available to me.

Addiction is not like that. It narrows the world.

For years I relied on wine each evening to relieve the stress of getting through the day. Over time, my world became tight. Tiny.

Stress. Relief. Repeat.

When I stopped drinking, I thought freedom would mean being released from the thing that had held me captive.

And it did.

But sobriety did not only remove alcohol from my life.

It returned me to life’s textures. Life on loudspeaker.

Just like the dream.

Colour. Beauty. Work made by hand. The pleasure of finding something unexpected. The touch of fabric against skin. The warmth of another person. The startling intimacy of being looked at and truly seen. Tears at the sheer beauty of it all.

Near the end of the dream, I was with a man I knew and loved many years ago. We had worked creatively together. He was artistic, grounded and gloriously himself.

He placed his fist against his heart and asked me to dream for him a future.

I hugged him and told him I would.

Then I looked deeply into his eyes. I felt his soul completely.

The dream brought me to longing — not the desperate hunger to be taken out of myself, but the desire to touch everything, feel it all, swallow up every moment, a glutton for life. To feel the heart of another, to dream on their behalf.

I imagined sobriety was the story of what I had escaped. How I had slipped from the jaws of misery. How I had made it out alive.

Today, on this sixth anniversary, I know it is so much more.

It is becoming available to life again.

There are still broken things. Some are irreparable. Collateral damage. But mine anyway. A sign that I am still alive.

I am here. And last night, I dreamed in colour. Just like I live.

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Beauty interrupts. Arrests. Disarms.

Stops us. Mid-stride. Makes us look. Makes a moment in the blur of our busyness. Causes us to see. To be transformed for a sweet second, lifted out of ordinariness. Into the bliss of feeling deeply.

Not always a sunrise, light on ocean, flowers opening. Sometimes it’s the woman outside the servo with a cigarette held between her lips, her whole life written on her bent back. Cracked heels. Steel-blue eyes.

Sometimes it’s the crack in the footpath where a weed pushed through concrete. Daring to flower.

Beauty doesn’t ask permission to be beautiful.

It doesn’t wait for the frame, the filter, the golden hour.

It shows up in the fluoro light of a hospital corridor where an orderly smiles reassurance as she wheels one more patient along in a metal bed. In the busker singing off-key like his life depends on someone hearing him. In the aging woman fossicking in her red vinyl coin purse for loose change to buy her milk.

We keep looking for beauty in the places we’ve been told to expect it. Sunsets. Symmetry. Things so lovely they take our breath away without effort.

But there is a whole other Beauty — unglamorous, unwashed, uninvited — waiting in places we were urged to look away from.

It lives in the old man talking to himself on the bench. In the tremor of a hand reaching for one more drink. In the tangled hair splayed across a fraying sleeping bag on a park lawn.

This is the Beauty that doesn’t expect to be seen. It is there, nevertheless. Ready to be witnessed. Felt. Tucked away in a brain file called precious things. Humanity.

At first glance, you might see hardship. Misfortune. A life washed up.

The second glance is where the gift is. Where the ordinary tilts toward the sacred.

A stranger becomes a person. The wreck becomes a story. And we become a witness to the beauty of being human.

This is where Life with God begins for me — not in the clean places, but in the places where life is raw, unfiltered. Fully there. So gorgeous I could almost die from the pleasure of it.

Alive. Aloft in presence.

When Beauty takes us captive, we see with less judgment. Listen without flinching. Let what’s raw stay raw instead of tidying it into something easier to swallow.

Our perception widens, hearts open — toward more of what is here.

Beauty is God’s first language, but it isn’t only spoken in light. Sometimes it’s spoken in scar tissue. In grief that hasn’t resolved. In a woman without home or lamp sitting in a shop doorway in Kings Cross catching the light from inside to read the detective novel she has scrounged from somewhere because she loves to read.

Beauty teaches me to stay.

A moment longer.

To look again.

To see. To feel.

All of it.

Memoir, essays, and true stories about mercy, beauty, and what it means to be human.
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I have never really understood why I am drawn to the margins, the edges of life.

But I am.

I come alive in doorways at dawn, in the presence of people the world ignores, in edgy, strange places where masks have been stripped by harsher realities, where the washed up feel at home and I feel like fire.

Here I am vibrantly alive. Present. My nerve endings rush, my senses glimmer, shimmer, sizzle. Touch feels like tingles on my skin. I become wide awake. Almost high.

Intoxicated by the moment. The nearness. The longing.

I have chased this feeling across different landscapes over different seasons of my life. Never being able to name it, but knowing when it arrives, settles on my skin. Sensory overload.

Me swimming in the human experience, immersed in the utter beauty of the people around me.

I think it’s proximity to what’s real. Raw. What’s left when the window dressing falls away. When the veil that divides us becomes thin.

Most of life feels like performance. Good manners. Small talk. The careful management of appearances.

But when someone has failed, is addicted, lost, left out in the cold, when they no longer care to curate themselves, everything changes. And in their presence, so do I.

The honesty of a true moment shared. Kin.

Maybe I’m not drawn to suffering so much as the lack of performance around it.

Perhaps it’s about being needed for a moment. Wanted. Vital to someone’s story.

When I hand a hot drink to someone sleeping rough on a cold morning, when I press some cash into the hand of someone who has nothing, suddenly my presence matters.

I am not sure I have always served for the purest reasons. I cannot deny the comfort of feeling warm inside, important to someone, somewhere.

And sometimes I wonder if it’s recognition. Seeing myself inside of them. Maybe the pull to the margins isn’t separate from my own story. Maybe it’s my heart moving towards people who are not hiding what I’ve been covering up for years.

I know shame. I know growing up with the verdict that I was unreliable, unsteady, impulsive. I know about silence, the quiet years before I found my way to language. Maybe the margins helped me give voice to those places. Permission to exist as I am.

Mostly, I wonder if it’s where I feel God most closely.

Not in church buildings or passages of scripture. But in proximity. Close to the heartbeat of what is essential. Sitting at a fountain with Rosie — a woman who lived on the streets and called me Sis — heads touching, curly hair mingled, laughing until our stomachs hurt. Or the daily touches of a man who sits on the corner in a wheelchair. Each morning going close, following the beckoning of his hands to come near. His fingertips reaching up, finding the silk scarves at my neck. Him saying, beautiful. Then, bless you.

I have always considered it appetite, my insatiable hunger for experience, but perhaps it is vocation. A calling. The need to feel divine breath on my cheeks.

I don’t have a clean answer for why I keep going back to the edges. I only know that I do. That I probably always will.

That underneath all of it is my need to feel.

Human.

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For a long time I thought writing my story was the brave part.

Plastering my painful memories on the page felt masochistic. Hadn't I carefully packed them away, sat on the bulging baggage of my past and forced the lid closed.

Did I really want to write those terrible things, describe my pain and fear, the horror story of living with someone who was good until they drank and became terrifying? Did I want to look honestly at the life I had lived? Admit my retreat into the calming embrace of nightly drinking?

Finding the words to take my readers there was the easy part. It was remembering the details that seemed like an impassable mountain. Did I have enough courage for the climb? I have always been scared of heights.

But I wrote anyway. I finished my memoir. Started a second one. Words became my way through the life I had lived. Writing was an exorcism. The angry ghosts lost their power over me. Finally.

It was then I discovered that writing had been the easier task.

Publishing was something else entirely. Placing my intimate details in the public arena felt like exposing myself. Like a streaker at the cricket.

But there was another obstacle. A different mountain entirely.

Because my story has never belonged only to me. Every life is woven through other lives.

Parents. Children. Former husbands. Friends. Communities.

And somewhere in that weaving, a question arrives like a stone in the path:

Who owns a story?

Does the person who lived it own it? Or does everyone who appears within it own a piece?

If my experience is true, but it hurts someone I love, what then?

If I remain silent to protect another person, what happens to me?

These weren’t hypothetical questions. They became deeply personal.

I found myself changing names, deleting scenes, adding them back again. Delaying publishing because I wanted to protect people I cared about — or feared. Delaying because I was simply afraid.

I put my manuscript away. For months. Took it back out. Revised it. Put it away again. And now, once more, I find myself bringing it into the light.

I have spoken to many women over the years who carry unwritten stories.

They don’t usually say, “I don’t know how to write.”

They say things like:

“My children would be devastated.”

“My former husband would know it was him.”

“My parents are still alive.”

The problem isn’t craft.

The problem is love. And fear. The impossibility of separating one human life from another.

I don’t think there are easy answers.

I don’t believe every story should automatically be published.

Nor do I believe every difficult story should remain hidden.

Both positions are too simple for the complexity of being human.

One of the most freeing discoveries for me was realising that writing and publishing are not the same decision. For years I unconsciously bundled them together. If I wrote it, I would have to publish it. If I published, perhaps I would hurt someone. So perhaps I shouldn’t write it at all.

But writing can simply be an act of telling the truth to yourself.

It can exist in a notebook. On a password-protected computer. In a drawer.

Writing is where we discover what we actually think. Publishing is an entirely separate ethical decision.

Realising those were two different acts gave me enormous freedom.

To write was to be honest. At last. To take up space on the page. To own my life, my experiences, the things that formed me. To say, I existed. I hurt. I lived. I tried my best, and sometimes I failed terribly.

To own my failures, my frailty, my imperfections. To acknowledge that the “good girl” was often an act, an impossible standard. To stop curating a more acceptable version of myself.

Sometimes writing is for understanding. Sometimes for healing. Other times it is witness.

Sometimes it eventually becomes something we offer to the world.

I no longer think the first question is, “Should I publish this?”

The first question is much gentler. Can I bear to tell myself the truth?

Only after that comes every other question.

Who might this affect?

What do I owe the people I love?

What do I owe myself?

Can I tell the truth without hurting someone I love?

I don’t know that there is a formula for answering those questions. I suspect each story asks them differently.

But before any of that — the biggest gift is permission. Giving it to ourselves. Allowing ourselves to write what has remained unwritten, without yet demanding that we decide what will become of it.

Sometimes the page needs to become a safe place long before it becomes a public one.

I know many people who have waited for the death of family members before they publish. Many who write for themselves alone, an audience of one. Perhaps the answer is do whatever it takes, whatever you need, to allow yourself the gift of your own truth.

One of the best things I have ever done is write my story.

To let my whole self belong on the page.

If you're carrying an unwritten story — I understand.

I have seen what it means to own nothing.

Not in the way we say it in the West — I have nothing, I’m broke, I’m doing it tough. In the way that leaves you without any options, or hope.

A dirt floor. A roof that lets in the rain. Walls falling down.

Children who are beautiful and bright-eyed and barefoot in the mud, playing with whatever the earth provides because the earth is all there is.

No safety net. No fallback position. Absolutely no way out. It is hard for westerners to even perceive of this. Impossible probably.

I visited those places as part of my work with girls rescued from the sex trade in Thailand. I went to understand. To trace the thread from a bamboo hut on a hillside to a bar in Bangkok where a girl too young to be there was doing things no one should have to do — and sending the money home.

And standing there, in the intense green of Northen Thailand, in the heat that leaves your skin dripping, I understood. I watched children play and mothers cook and old men sit in the shade. I watched workers trudge home from long days in the rice fields. I watched subsistence living, hand to mouth survival. Just enough. Sometimes not even.

I was there to visit the family of a rescued girl. Her mother had died and her father had two small boys to look after. The hut they lived in was falling down. They owned one blanket, one plate and a single chipped cup. And the set of clothes they wore on their backs. The family had crossed the border from Myanmar at some point. Like most refugees they had no identity papers, which meant no possibility of paid work in the city. They had the ground on which they had built a hut. There was no money to fix it now that it had fallen down. And so *Pim travelled a thousand miles with a stranger. She was fourteen.

The agent had arrived with a promise. Work in the city. Good money. Your daughter will be safe. And the father — who has watched his children go hungry, who has nothing to offer them, no way out, — looks at this stranger and makes the only calculation available to him.

He says yes. A roll of baht crosses palms.

I am not excusing it. I am witnessing it. There is a difference.

I wrote about those girls. I wrote about what happened to them in Bangkok, what the rescue organisations did to give them somewhere else to be. I believed — I still believe — that their stories deserved to be told. That bearing witness to a life the world prefers not to see is one of the most important things a writer can do.

I felt sure that if everyone understood, we would collectively make it stop. I was compelled. Pushed by the horror. Disgusted to my core at the white male trash who flew to Thailand on the regular for a piece of underage flesh.

But something happened to me in the process of all that witnessing.

My needs became invisible. Everything about my life seemed trivial.

Beside that kind of suffering my own stories felt paltry. Embarrassing, even. What did I have to complain about? What did I have to reckon with that could possibly matter in comparison?

I had left a difficult marriage. Escaped a decade in a high-control church that took more than it gave. Sunk into a drinking life I wasn’t ready to look at directly.

Small things, I told myself. Private things. Things that implicated people I loved. Things that made me look less than I wanted to look.

So I kept writing for others. People with no platform, no power, no means of being heard. I lent my words to their lives and told myself it was selflessness.

Looking back, I think it was also fear and shame in a very convincing disguise.

Because here is what I know now, after years of writing and witnessing and slowly, painstakingly learning to turn the lens on myself:

Every human has a voice. Every story makes us richer. And the suffering of others does not cancel our own. It is not a competition. It never was.

The girl in Bangkok and the woman hiding her drinking life are not in competition for whose pain counts. They are both human. They both deserve to be witnessed. They both deserve language.

I spent years believing that only the most extreme suffering earned the right to attention. That ordinary shame — the kind that lives in a bad marriage, a lost decade, a bottle of wine each night — was too small, too self-indulgent, too much.

But shame doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t rank itself by severity. It just sits inside you, taking up space, costing you something every single day you refuse to look at it.

The stories we most need to tell are often the ones we’re most afraid of. The objections are loud and varied: too much, not enough, who cares anyway, where would I begin, who am I to tell this story?

I know those objections. I lived inside them for years.

What I know now is that the act of telling — even privately, even badly, even in fragments — changes something. It witnesses. It clarifies. It says: I was here, and this happened, and it shaped me, and I am finally ready to own it.

That is what writing gave me. And it is what I most want to give to others.

If you are carrying a story you have never told in full — I see you. Not the full story. Just the fact of it. Just the weight of the thing that has been waiting.

And if you want a place to begin, gently and privately — I have a free guide on my website called Returning to Voice. Scroll down the home page to find it. Or drop a comment below and I’ll send it to you directly.

No pressure. Just a way in.

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💛 Grace

*Not her real name.

I check the time. It's midnight already. Another recovery documentary has ended. I close the laptop, pull the doona up beneath my chin, and lie there wondering why I do this — night after night, year after year.

What is it in me that keeps returning to these stories?

Addiction. Recovery. Prison. Homelessness. Trauma. Spiritual crisis.

Human beings at the edge of themselves.

Am I obsessed with darkness? Or am I at home in this terrain?

I know shame intimately. I have lived with consequences I cannot fully undo. Watched parts of my life become unrecognisable.

I know what it is to sit among ruin.

Ruin. That word feels important to me of late. The place where we are broken open, fall apart, where the landscape of our inner lives is changed forever.

I have known ruin of different kinds: addiction, fractured relationships, self-betrayal, spiritual disillusionment, grief, being misunderstood, watching things end that I could not repair.

Some people spend their lives trying to avoid certain realities: failure, poverty, despair, death.

But some of us have lived close enough to fracture that we recognise it as kin. And refuse to reduce our fellow humans to the worst thing they have done.

"Addict." "Failure." "Lost soul."

We have learned that we are more than the most broken chapter of our lives.

Ruin does not destroy our humanity. If anything, it deepens it.

It teaches us to recognise sorrow in another's eyes. To sit inside contradiction.

It has taught me mercy. I understand how complicated it is to be alive. My survival has made me tender.

And perhaps that is why I keep watching these stories. Not because I am addicted to darkness. But because I know people can return from very difficult places.

That somewhere beneath the ruin is a human being. And perhaps God too.

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I was almost twenty-five when I married. Practically left on the shelf by 1980s standards.

He was two years older. Very good looking. Very damaged.

I knew, walking down the aisle, this was wrong.

I did it anyway.

Nothing else had materialised. Life had not exactly opened another door, so I walked through the one in front of me. Funny how the decisions that shape our lives are sometimes the ones we simply fall into.

My dress was white organza. A fitted bodice pulled tight at the waist. A chiffon ruffle framing my shoulders. A hoop petticoat underneath so the skirt billowed out around me. Accents of apricot and green embroidered at the hem. A blue garter hidden under layers of white.

I was a size eight.

I’m not sure what I thought marriage would mean. Security, perhaps. A shape for my life.

I had always been a little edgy. Creative. Restless. My own wildness scared me.

Marriage seemed safer.

Instead, alcohol became the third wheel in our marriage, turning my hardworking, dedicated husband into someone I braced myself for every weekend.

I left many times.

Then came back.

Then left again.

Eleven years passed like this.

There were two children — a boy and a girl — and too much chaos for small people to witness. Too many nights of fear. Too many promises. Too many weekends arranged around someone else’s drinking.

Living inside volatility changes you. You learn to monitor moods. To minimise yourself. Keeping the peace became more important than anything else.

I learned to stay small. If I laughed too loudly or shone too brightly, there was always a price to pay.

By the time I left, freedom felt like the force that would keep me upright. Alive. A precious thing. I craved it with everything in me. I reached for it. Stretched further than I thought I could. Freedom was the promise that helped me do the impossible: walk out.

Then my life began.

I laughed as loudly as I wanted.

I flirted with men. With life. With possibility.

I wandered.

I went to Maleny. Then Kings Cross. Later, Thailand. And other places I could never have reached from inside that marriage.

I seemed to gravitate towards the edges — artists, addicts, seekers, hilltribe villages, alternative communities and red-light districts.

Perhaps I was finally choosing the life I had been too afraid to choose the first time around.

Freedom suited me better than marriage ever had.

He remarried. Twice. Had another five children. He wanted that life.

I wanted mine.

Still do.

At sixty-three I am still a wanderer. I roam the worlds of words and mystery. Always seeking. But also found.

I live near the river now and my days are stamped with its moods and flows.

My family are my treasures. My children grew into beautiful humans with soft hearts and lives of their own. Grandchildren came, bringing their own brand of joy to my life.

Part of me still longs for new places, new people, new stories. I follow whatever makes me feel most alive. There has been a cost.

But my life is rich. Filled with the wonder of the everyday. Small moments. All my attention.

It is mine. And I choose it. I choose all of it.

This is my great freedom.

Sometimes I look back at that young woman in white organza and want to shake her. Mostly, I want to thank her.

She made a terrible decision.

And then she made a thousand brave ones.

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Lately I’ve been noticing a thread weaving itself through almost everything I write.

Not writing, exactly.

Voice.

The courage to tell the truth. The stories sitting beneath the surface waiting for language. The parts of ourselves we have hidden away, edited, made small.

For a long time, I wrote the stories of others — those who had little power and even less leverage. I lent my words to stories I believed the world needed to hear.

Homeless communities. Drug addiction. Refugees torn from home and safety. Children caught in the sex trade.

I felt their stories.

I wrote them down.

I slapped them across platforms because I believed if people only knew, surely they would care. Surely something would change.

Telling my own stories was harder.

It felt self-indulgent in a world carrying so much suffering. And my stories were full of shame.

There were no perfect endings. Or beginnings. Or middle parts.

There was just me.

Human. Frail. Sometimes triumphant. Mostly hiding.

So I began writing memoir. Three of them, actually.

Darling Humans: A Memoir of Mercy — my year in Kings Cross, finding light in what was then one of Australia's darkest places — is in its final stages of production, releasing October 18, 2026.

Songs of Deliverance is in draft five. With each draft comes more depth and understanding as I trace my spiritual pilgrimage through high-control church environments to a place I can stand.

And waiting in the dream box is In My Sisters’ Shoes — my years in Thailand working with girls rescued from the sex trade.

I thought I was simply writing memoir. And I am.

But I’m also interested in what happens when we begin listening more closely to our own lives. When we stop living in half-lines. When we realise we do not have to earn the right to speak.

That feels increasingly like the thread running beneath everything I create: grief, identity, family, belonging, memory, love, and the stories we carry about all of it.

Storytelling not just as craft, but as a way of understanding ourselves. A way of telling the truth. Of finding our voice. Of coming home to ourselves. For the strange, beautiful work of being human.

Because the more I write here, the more I realise something.

So many people are carrying stories they ache to tell but do not know how to begin.

Or they believe they need more time. More talent. More permission.

If you'd like to be part of the story as Darling Humans makes its way into the world — subscribing here means you won't miss it, including launch day, October 18.

This is where I share the writing life as it unfolds — essays, extracts, and the things that didn’t make the final draft. I’m glad you’re here.

💛 Grace

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Yesterday I was in an accident. My car was written off, and I ended up at the hospital. Before it happened, I was driving to meet a friend while trying to work out a major life decision.

But underneath the practical details was something deeper: the attempt to control every possible future. To reduce risk from every angle. Preserve escape routes. Make sure I never made another mistake.

I don’t think I realised how much fear was driving me. Not just fear of financial failure. Fear of myself. Of a long record of mistake-making.

For so long the internal voice has been:

“You are irresponsible.”

“You can’t be trusted.”

Some sentences become internal architecture. Especially when they are spoken repeatedly over years. After enough repetition, people stop evaluating themselves freshly. They begin living inside inherited verdicts.

And perhaps that has been the hidden engine beneath so much of my striving these past years: the attempt to finally become safe enough, careful enough, wise enough, controlled enough, that no one could accuse me anymore.

That I could stop self-accusing. And trust myself at last.

But life has never worked like that. I have made mistakes. Serious ones.

I spent twenty years drinking too much. I have hurt people and been hurt. I have lived through shame, fractured relationships, self-betrayal, spiritual disillusionment, grief. I have sat among consequences I could not undo.

But my life held other truths too.

Bravery.

Resilience.

The refusal to live on the surface of things. A longing for what is deeper, more alive, more real.

The part of me that kept searching for God. That kept reaching toward beauty. Wanting freedom, truth, mercy, aliveness.

The part of me that kept moving to the thrum of my strange soul, even when it cost me.

I have raised beautiful, compassionate human beings. I have loved deeply. I have written my heart out. I have stood with the marginalised. I have searched for God sincerely through all of it.

I am not shipwrecked.

Not perfect. Untarnished. Not triumphant in some shiny way.

But still here.

Weathered. Complicated. Creative. Spiritually hungry. Still becoming.

Ten years ago, when I lived at Bulcock Beach, a strong current ran beneath the still water where the passage opened to the ocean. You could hop in at one end, and the current would glide you all the way down the beach.

This was my practice: jumping in, allowing the current to take me, then hopping out and doing it again.

Daily.

Salt. Speed. Surrender.

The thrill of it.

I knew God was teaching me something. I thought the lesson was trust.

Now I think it was something even deeper: grace.

Grace was never only rescue. It was joy.

The current was joy.

I think I spent years swimming hard. Trying to hold everything together through vigilance and self-protection. Trying to become someone who could live above my own condemnation — and that of others.

But deliverance is not becoming flawless. It is understanding that something larger has always carried me.

Not always away from suffering. Or grief. Or consequence.

But through it.

God was not only present in survival. God was in joy too.

In play. Freedom.

In the body.

God was in laughter. Saltwater and sunlight. Delight. Sand-coated toes. Salty lips. Sundried curls crunchy from the surf.

There are people who will misunderstand me. Relationships that will likely never reconcile. Stories told about me that are not true to who I essentially am.

But as I age, I cease to hand other people authority over my soul.

Self-knowing replaces self-abandonment.

I have harmed and been harmed. I have wandered. Loved badly and beautifully. And have searched for God through all of it.

I will not abandon myself anymore.

Perhaps this is what trust actually is. Not: I trust myself because I will never fail. But: I trust that I can survive being human. That I am always carried.

There has been a river running through my life. Always.

God.

I continue to swim.

Sometimes float.
Or dive deep.

Alive with the current.

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It took me more than twenty years of writing to realise I had never really spoken for myself.

I could gather my gifts for the work of others. I spoke strongly in defence of those who had no voice — children rescued from the sex trade, families in deep poverty in the slums of Asia, refugees who had lived through unimaginable horror and now needed understanding, compassion.

What I didn’t realise was that I was one of the voiceless.

While I was tearing it up across platforms on every issue of human justice, my stories, my truths, my suffering went unsaid.

I held stories of shame. Of living through domestic violence — how could I have married him? Of being caught up in a high-control group posing as church — how could I have been so naive? Of numbing myself through alcohol-sodden evenings for years — how had I let myself disappear like that?

I didn’t want to own these stories. To tell them out loud. What would people think?

But the call to stand for my own truth became stronger than the need to hide.

The need to articulate my experience — what happened to me, and what I allowed — grew louder. I didn’t have to justify it. But I needed to own it.

The pull toward wholeness, toward integration, the call of the writer in me, won out. Words became the way back to myself.

I didn’t sit down to write a book.

Manna Days came out of the wilderness years — the words were not clear, not certain. But they were honest.

I wrote them in journals and notebooks, trying to make sense of what had happened, of the truths emerging in me. I wrote in the middle of unravelling, when the structures I had trusted had fallen away and I was left to find what was real for myself.

There was no plan. Only the need to speak.

It was the beginning of telling the truth in my own voice.

One day I decided to gather those words — those moments, those parts of me that had lived inside closed covers — and make a book. To show the world, or anyone who needed to know.

I offered up my pain and my triumph, my truth as it was. I brought my manna to the table, set places for those who wished to come, and exposed my words, my heart, to the world.

All along knowing that if no one read it, that was okay. What mattered was that I had spoken — aloud.

And if one person found solace, all was well in my world.

There is something I didn’t expect when I wrote Manna Days.

I didn’t sit down with a plan.
I didn’t map out a strategy.
I didn’t think about reach.

I wrote it because something in me needed it to be written. I needed to offer mercy words to those who had been heartbroken in the pursuit of God.

And, if I’m honest, I held a very small hope: that it might help one person.

Just one.

A few days ago, a friend reached out to me from the United States.

She had tried to find the book but couldn’t access it.

So I told her I would send her a copy. She is a generous and good woman. I wanted to give something back to her.

She wrote back with her address. And then she wrote something else.

She said she needed it as “nutrition for my soul.”

And then, at the end of her message, she said this:

That she would donate a solar light and light post
in a village in Cambodia —
in honour of me
for giving light to dark paths.

I felt almost head over heels in love with that.

Because I didn’t set out to write about light.

These were words from my wilderness journey. They were born in uncertainty, when faith had unravelled. When everything had gone dark.

And somehow, they have travelled.

To a woman I’ve never met in real life.
To a village I’ve never seen.

It made me realise: you don’t always know where your words will go.

They move in ways you can’t see, reaching places you never imagined.

I didn’t write this book to reach many.

I wrote it because I couldn’t not write it.

If it reaches one person,
that is enough.

And sometimes,
one person carries it further than you ever could.

—

If this book finds you,
you’re welcome to it.

If you’d like to read it

My face looks puffy. Wrinkled. My left eye is red again — the recurring allergic conjunctivitis plaguing me once more.

I don’t linger long.

To be honest, the reflection before me is a bit depressing. I look knocked around. I suppose I am. Sixty-three years knocked around. And not all of them lived well.

For a moment I consider the usual remedies. I should drink more water. It’s probably time to be consistent with that face cream.

Aging is a strange process. No one really warns you about it. As if they could.

Like childbirth, it arrives as an experience that must be lived through rather than explained. Like grief, it opens up a new landscape of feeling that you can’t fully imagine beforehand.

It sneaks up quietly.

One day you realise you are standing in the passageway that leads toward the final challenge — our exit.

Some of my peers have already begun passing through that door.

The ones a few years older.
The ones who lived harder and faster.
The ones unlucky enough to receive some terrible diagnosis.

Just two weeks ago I heard from an old friend. One of our teenage crowd is gone. Bone cancer.

And yet most of us still behave as if this ending does not really apply to us.

But the images are beginning to feel closer now — the bedside scenes of the frail and aged, family gathered quietly around as someone slips away.

Those pictures once felt distant.

Now they feel… possible.

And sometimes, if we are honest, we find ourselves wondering which path will be ours.

Will we go quickly?

Or will we slowly deteriorate before we leave?

But I have other things to ponder.

Like the book I have written that no one is reading.

Like the lateness of the hour when I began assembling my writing and my soul’s work — a crazed gunman robbing a bank, knowing time is short and the valuables must be seized.

I stare into the face of irrelevance, plant my feet against the wind of indifference.
No one cares what I think.

And yet I think it.
I feel it.

I am human. I am here.

To me, this experience is everything, and making sense of it matters more to me now than it ever has.

I have years of navigation behind me. Decades spent discovering what matters. Time has stripped away the fluff. I am left with what remains. The vital stuff.

The irony is that now no one listens.

I don’t have the face to launch a brand. Unless it’s the “before” shot for Ponds Night Cream.

But I have the heart of a woman who has lived. And cared. And still lives and cares.

I still write.
Words are my way through.

And so I open my laptop and begin the new day with words.

Again.

They are my succour.
My light.
My life.
My way.

I flip through my Facebook feed on the way to my writing. Past all the fresh faces. They are so beautiful. Surely we were never so perfect.

But I know a secret they don’t.
I know what awaits.
What arrives out of nowhere. Almost overnight.

If they are lucky, they will discover it too.

That the next generation of bold young faces will rise behind them.

And that the skin you are in matters less than the simple fact that you are finally comfortable here.

Able to face each day authentically. Honestly. Without the bells and whistles.

Finally free enough to speak their truths — even if only to themselves.

Manna Days was written during a season when many people are wrestling with faith and disillusionment. The ache of things falling apart.

Watching these stories unfold stirred something in me. Old memories surfaced. Old wounds too.

Mostly, I remembered the wilderness.

And so I wrote the book I wish I had when my own world collapsed.

The reflections inside it are small portions — mercy words for those healing from spiritual harm and rediscovering God beyond the systems that wounded them.

This piece sits close to the heart of that journey.

I wandered for years.

From belief to loss — and back again.

Discarding what insulted my soul.
Trying on new language.
Learning to live with doubt.
One step and then the next.

There were seasons when I had little belief at all.

And yet — looking back — I see that I was never without the Divine.

Even when I felt alone and abandoned, something holy kept drawing me back. Not to doctrine. Not to church. But to beauty.

I have come — and keep coming — to a deep knowing that there is a Great Presence animating all things. A Divine Hand. A Still, Small Voice. A Love breathing through all things.

My thoughts shift. My beliefs evolve.
Yet I never stop seeking.

Light through the leaves can undo me.

A single act of compassion.
A phrase in a poem.
The way the ocean inhales before a wave breaks.

In an instant I am taken beyond the ordinary and into something vast.

Ah.

There You are.

God has little to do with buildings for me. I have experienced Presence in churches, yes — sometimes profoundly. But I have also felt God on riverbanks, in hospital rooms, in airport terminals, in the quiet between breaths.

God is not scarce.

Sometimes I struggle to access that Presence inside church spaces, because old wounds rise when certain things are said. The body remembers. The heart recoils.

The impact has softened with time.

But there is still tenderness there.

And yet nothing satisfies the deepest parts of me like moments of awareness. Those minutes of immersion when time expands and the world feels saturated with meaning.

It is not spectacle.

It is stillness.

It is the Lover of my soul.
The kiss of God that steadies me.

For me, God has many names.

And also none.

Sometimes I lean into the old names — Provider, Healer, Peace — not because I believe God is limited to those functions, but because language helps me reach.

Other times I let go of language entirely.

The Divine does not seem confined by gender or image.
God is larger than that — and more intimate.

Seeking God does not feel like subscribing to a system anymore.

It feels like stepping into wonder.

There is a feast available — not guarded by gatekeepers, not policed by doctrine — but open. Lavish. Alive.

The veil between heaven and earth has been rent. Opened.

I do not need permission to enter.

Healing from church pain now feels far behind me, though the scars remain faintly mapped beneath the skin.

What overwhelms me instead is gratitude.

That the journey continued.

That my hunger for God was not extinguished by disappointment.

That beauty kept calling.

When I think of the woman I was in those first fragile days outside the church — frightened, untethered — I want to wrap her in tenderness.

She did not know yet that seeking would become singing.

Deep calls unto deep.

It always has.

Can you hear it?

Manna Days is now available for those walking through their own wilderness seasons.

If this reflection resonates with you, you can learn more about the book here:

https://graceheers.com/manna-days/

As a child, I was often scared to speak.

I would rehearse difficult conversations for days. Weeks.

I remember wanting to ask my mother if I could shave my legs. It was the Christmas holidays, and I would be starting high school the following year. I was twelve. All the girls were doing it.

I tried many times, but every time the request lodged in my throat. Shame would flood me with heat, and I would slink away, furious at my own gutlessness, and practise asking some more.

I never asked.

Instead, I used my father’s razor under the covers of my bed and sliced a slab of skin from my shin, inches long. I watched as blood seeped through the pores — tiny red dots becoming a river that ran down my ankle and over my foot. I grabbed a tissue and held it tight, terrified I would bleed on the sheets and reveal my shocking act.

Silence was something I learned. Over time. Over and over. At great cost.

Why was it so hard to speak up? There are many reasons.

My mother suffered migraines — blinding headaches that kept her in bed for days. The curtains drawn. A plastic bucket by the bed in case she vomited. We knew to be quiet. Sometimes my father would carry her to the car for an injection. After it, she would sleep for hours and wake up better, as if by magic.

“Stop fighting.
Stop being naughty.
Stop upsetting your mother,” Dad would say.

We learned quickly.
Having needs gave her a migraine.

Her pain was exacerbated by stress, and my sister and I were often blamed for causing it. The guilt was unbearable. Watching her suffer was reason enough to be good forever.

I don’t remember resenting her illness. But I do remember tearing my room apart one day while she lay bedridden — ripping sheets from the bed, throwing things against the walls. Once I cracked open the door to anger, I couldn’t stop. I was seven or eight.

My father was not a violent man, but that day he took off his belt and hurt me with it. I remember the shock. The humiliation. My legs stinging.

Perhaps I didn’t speak up because I was raised in a time when children were seen and not heard.

Or because my sister, full of her own rage, punished me when I dared lift my head too high.

Or because with Dad, mistakes were never finished. He would revisit the error of our ways for months afterwards, recounting them in heated tones as if we were freshly guilty. We never knew when the stain of our sins would re-emerge.

And “giving cheek” — speaking back — was one of the gravest offences.

Whatever the reason, I spent much of my life unable to say what I needed. All smoke and mirrors. And I got bloody sick of it.

But I could write.

On the page, my voice found a shape that didn’t invite punishment. Writing became a place where I could tell the truth and nothing bad happened.

The next step came slowly. Letting my writing be seen. Bringing my authentic self into the world required more courage than I knew I had.

I worried: What would people think? What would the fallout be?

I am still learning that my freedom lies in becoming a foot soldier for my own truth — in being honest, even when my voice shakes.

Like many of my generation, I was raised to hide the dirty linen. To keep quiet. To keep up appearances.

That conditioning runs deep.

This work — all of it — is my refusal to keep up appearances.

If any of this resonates — if your voice falters when it matters — you can begin somewhere safe.

For me, that place was the page. It might be for you too.

I’ve written a small journaling guide to give you a place to start — for truths that need somewhere to land before they are spoken aloud. It isn’t a course. It isn’t a performance. Just a place to begin.

If you’re not ready to speak yet, you can begin here.

It’s morning. My quiet time — the gentle hour when the world renews itself and gives me the courage to go again. I’ve lived my life on these fresh chances, day after day. My Dad always used to say, the sun will still come up tomorrow. Whatever family disaster we were facing, this was the mantra that put it in perspective.

But that panacea no longer goes down easily.

In my morning cloister, I turn to my constant companion: my laptop. I am a woman possessed. Like most of the world, I doom-scroll far too often.

In a few flicks of my thumb, I see that Iran is burning — thousands and thousands of dissidents slain. An innocent man has been murdered by ICE in the US. The people of Minneapolis (and the world) are heartbroken. Fears of totalitarianism grow by the day as governments kill innocent people on the streets. It is becoming more dangerous to resist.

It isn’t yet seven and I am despairing.

I despair for us humans, and for how fragile language feels in the face of a society hell-bent on destroying itself.

I do not remember such a savage time. To me it feels like power-hungry men are having their last rites — going for broke, like leviathan beasts determined to hunt down all those who believe in a better world.

And yet, I have to refuse silence. It is too costly. It doesn’t matter whether my words have any potency against the horror of our days. I have to open my mouth, open my hands, open my heart.

I have to continue to believe there is hope. That we can love our way out of this. That the dinosaurs are doing a death roll. That all will be well — and we will remember that life is sacred and humanity our greatest gift.

Please God.

I have been quiet lately. Refusing the pull of commentary — the relief of being sure enough of anything to have something to say.

I have been uncertain, off-centre. Waiting. Allowing impulse to rise when it does. Resisting the pull of my own opinion. Aiming for truth — or at least my version of it.

Something has been forming in the quiet. Listening has been doing its work.

It feels like time to raise my voice.

I’m drawn to human experiences that are often overlooked or spoken about from a distance: isolation, addiction, invisibility, life on the margins. I don’t write to tidy these realities up or turn them into lessons. I write to stay close to them — and to the people who live there. I write to feel my humanity and the humanity of others. To sup at the shared table of our vulnerability. And beauty.

Words are still my medium.

Liturgy lives in my veins; it formed in me before I ever chose it. Rhythm, invocation, call-and-response, blessing, witness, lament — this is the language I learned first, my native tongue.

I know how language can hold what is hard to look at, and how it can help people feel less alone inside their own lives.

This is a place for that kind of writing.

I’ve spent many years learning how to speak honestly, with heart. This space arises from that practice.

Much of my work here has grown out of my memoir, Darling Humans. Here, I continue writing from the same place — sometimes through story, sometimes through fragments, sometimes through thoughts that are still forming.

If you’re drawn to writing that feels lived-in — language that stays with experience instead of resolving it — you’re welcome to partake.

I aim to publish a couple of times a week.

I thought becoming was something that happened earlier… when the world still believed you were allowed to dream without apology.

But here I am at sixty-three, standing in the doorway of a life I almost didn’t think I’d ever get to live – edits nearly done, a book coming in March, and something inside me finally unclenching.

I am learning how to receive without collapsing into guilt.

I am learning how to take up my full size without apologising for the space I inhabit.

I am discovering that becoming doesn’t end just because the world stops expecting it of you.

Sometimes the threshold opens later – slower – wilder – truer.

And sometimes, the bloom waits until now.

And lately, my dreams have been teaching me what my body forgot. That receiving is not the same as taking. That abundance does not require a wound to justify it.

In sleep, I am practicing what I was never allowed to practice awake: letting generosity land without fear that it will cost someone.

I am watching myself return to my original wildness. This is where the becoming begins: in the tiny refusals to shrink. In the quiet reclaiming of the parts of myself I once tried to tame.

When I say abundance does not require a wound to justify it, I mean: I no longer have to hurt first before I’m allowed to have good things. I don’t have to bleed to earn ease. I don’t have to prove I’ve suffered enough before I’m permitted joy, rest, beauty, support or resource.

For so long, the only abundance that ever felt morally safe to receive was the kind that arrived after struggle – as though hardship was the price of admission. But I am learning that abundance can arrive without a wound attached. That goodness does not have to be paid for through pain. That receiving is not a crime that needs a sacrifice to balance it.

And maybe you are here too – somewhere in the middle of your own second-half becoming. Maybe you have been afraid to take up space, or speak the truth you actually hold, or receive good things without immediately calculating the cost to others.

If so, come with me. Let’s step into this gentler way together. I am finishing this book now – preparing for a March launch – not as the woman who had to earn everything through suffering, but as the woman who is finally learning to let goodness in without apology.

There is still time for bloom. There is still time for return. There is still time for the wild self to come home.

And maybe the first steps are small. Tiny, even. The kinds of shifts no one notices except your own nervous system. Maybe it looks like breathing slower when the old shame circuitry calls to you – compelling you to shrink again.

Maybe it looks like praying in a way that doesn’t beg – but receives from an open-handed, open-hearted God of Love.

Maybe it looks like pausing before you apologise for existing or before you rush to fix what isn’t yours to carry.

Maybe it is letting others live their lives without turning yourself inside-out to keep peace that doesn’t actually need keeping anymore.

This age can be liberating because you finally realise you don’t have to mother the whole world to be good.

You can unlearn the patterning. You can unplug from the compulsion to manage everyone else’s welfare. You can walk – slowly, gently – back into your original shape.

I invite you to stay with me for this next chapter – this second-half bloom. I’m not writing from arrival, but from the becoming itself. From the unlearning, the returning, the gentle widening of my own capacity to live true.

I’ll keep sharing what unfolds as I walk this path toward March, toward publication, toward a self that no longer shrinks to stay safe. If you’re also opening, loosening, returning to your wild – I’d love to walk beside you too.

Last night I dreamed I was invited to a party at the top of a very high mountain.
The sky looked stormy, and I felt nervous about taking the road up there. I wondered if my vehicle would have enough traction for such a steep incline. Someone beside me asked, “Why go now?” Yet deep down, I knew this invitation mattered. It wasn’t just another event; it felt sacred.

Before I began the ascent, something ordinary and human happened: I needed to release what was inside me – literally. In the dream I tried to hide it, to cover it with perfume, as if acceptance depended on me being neat, tidy, and unembarrassing.

But still, I went.

When I reached the top, the doors of a beautifully lit room opened to me. It was a banquet – a celebration for people with wounds. Mobility aids were strewn around, while those who needed them stood tall in beautiful garments. No one here was hiding or ashamed; they were radiant with belonging and the honour of being an invited guest. It was a party for those who knew what it meant to struggle and still rise. We were excited and also filled with the esteem that this privileged event bestowed on us.

And then I was singing and dancing performing with a troupe of entertainers.
When the show ended, I took off the costume but the music didn’t stop. It poured from me effortlessly, as if it had always lived there.

When I woke, the dream lingered – vivid as a parable.
It reminded me of my favourite verses of Scripture, from Song of Songs:

“Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away,
for the winter is past, the rain is over and gone...
The flowers are springing up; the time of singing has come.”

The imagery intertwined perfectly – the mountain, the banquet, the call to rise.
It was as though the dream had unfolded like words written across my soul: an invitation to ascend, to release, to sing again.

In life, as in the dream, we often hesitate at the foot of something holy. We look at the steep road ahead – the risk, the exposure – and wonder if we have enough traction to make it. But love keeps calling: Come away, my beloved.

Before the ascent comes release – of what no longer serves, of the small ways we hide our humanity. We try to perfume our imperfections, to make our offering tidy, but grace has never required perfection. Only honesty.

And when we rise – afraid, yet full of yes – we find what was promised:

“He brings me to the banquet hall, and everyone can see how much He loves me.”

In that upper room of the dream, I saw it:
a celebration of the wounded and the whole, all adorned in love. The ones who had struggled most were standing tallest.

The performance wasn’t performance at all; it was worship.

When the costume came off, the song kept flowing. Because that’s what love does – it moves through us until it becomes part of who we are.

What mountain are you standing at the base of?
What might you need to release before you climb?
And what if, when you reach the top, the song that’s been waiting inside you finally begins to sing itself free?

I am a dreamer. Most nights I get to imbibe the wildest, most intricate journeys — trip the light fantastic. My dreams take me to places I’d never dare go awake, and they tell me the truth more tenderly than waking life ever could. Big truths. Life-altering revelations. Grand plans — plans that feel like prophecy.

Last night I dreamed I was in a vast room — it was where I lived. Sunlight poured through tall windows that opened to the Brisbane River, a shimmering brown serpent curled across the landscape below. From here I could see everything: homes and castles scattered across the city, purple mountains in the distance — a view so beautiful I couldn’t quite believe it was mine.

I showed people around — some from my past — and they marvelled at the space, the light, the sweep of the view. It must be worth a fortune, they said. I knew it was. Not in dollars, but in distance travelled. This was what it meant to have carved a life big enough to breathe in.

At the far edge of the room, the land dropped away into a rock face. Two narrow roads traced it — barely wide enough for a car. To drive them would be madness. As I looked out, the woman beside me began to talk about her marriage — how she’d started saying no and her husband didn’t like it. I was surprised; I’d thought they were perfect. She laughed and said, Nothing ever is.

Before I could answer, his head appeared over the cliff. He’d climbed the whole way up, bare-handed, like a man proving something. I stepped too close to the edge and the world tilted. Dizzy, weightless, I felt myself start to fall. Push me back, I said, and they did. Relief flooded through me — not because I’d been brave, but because I’d let someone help.

Later he said he’d felt afraid too. He talked about survivors — how we have to do everything ourselves, always scheming, always starting behind, while everyone else seems to know what they’re doing. I recognised that voice. It was the language of an old life, one that built its safety on self-effort.

Now, standing in this room that is mine, I see how the view holds both abundance and edge — the kind of beauty that takes your breath away, the kind that reminds you how easily you could fall. Maybe this is what it means to come home to yourself: to look out over all that you’ve survived, to see the beauty and the drop, and trust that you’re held.

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I know what it is to live in survival mode. To make the money last till next payday because there is no back-up, no buffer. I was a single mother of two; there was only me to pay the bills — all of them. I lived on my wits and prayers. When I left my husband, we walked out with the clothes on our backs. Someone gave us a safe place. Maybe this is why my heart aches for refugees to know belonging and safety.

We drove up the hill to Maleny and my son said I needed to have faith — that God would provide. In Maleny, a friend bought ice-blocks for her kids and included mine. The shop assistant slipped them a free cheerio — a custom back then. Little provisions that girded our faith.

Survival mode is exhausting. It can be exhilarating — life on the edge often is — but also lonely and endless. Me, pitted against the world. Survival sees us fighting circumstances with no tools in our hands while the rest of the world is kitted up for success. This is how the rich get richer and the poor burn out.

I don’t live in survival mode anymore — though my circumstances haven’t yet changed. Now I live in surrender: a place where I can lean in, place my hand in God’s, and trust that the Divine has me. I’ve got you, Grace. I’ve got you.

This is the same power that helped me walk away from nightly drinking for more than a decade. It relies not on my strength or ability — quite the opposite. It is made manifest in my weakness, in my utter inability to change anything despite my best efforts. It is a breath. A rest. Taking my hands off the wheel. Placing my head on the shoulder of God.

I know survival. I know what it is to stand with empty hands in a world that doesn’t seem to care. But now I know letting go — the miracle of being held.

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For years, this story has lived in my blood — scribbled in notebooks, hidden in drafts, pulsing beneath the surface. Now it’s almost ready to step into the light.

Darling Humans is my debut memoir — a fierce reckoning with addiction, silence, and the tender beauty that lights the darkest places. Set against the wild streets of Sydney’s Kings Cross, it’s also a love letter to everyone who has ever lived on the edges.

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Bringing this book to the world has been both terrifying and liberating. My fears have been loud: What will people think? What will the fallout be? But I came to know that my freedom lay in showing my face to the world. Addiction thrives in secrecy; healing abounds in honesty. This book is my rejection of silence — and my hope is that readers will find inspiration in my uncovering.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll share:

• Behind-the-scenes glimpses of book-birth (editing, cover reveal, printing)

• Pre-order news and launch invitations

• Reflections and stories that never made it into the final draft

This Substack will be our gathering place as Darling Humans comes into the world.

Thank you for being here. Your presence makes the story larger than me; it becomes ours.

💛 Grace

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