It was 2016… I’d just “manifested” my dream wedding venue, except I would never have actually used those words to tell you thats what I’d done. I remember clear as day the first time I saw my (then) boyfriends Dad and step-mums new house. It backed right onto the river that curled through our town. The garden was particularly impressive, though at the time seriously overgrown, four tiers of yard, each lush and green. I remember walking down the hill looking around in awe thinking.. “what a location to get married”. At the time I wasn’t even engaged… in fact, even though we were in a committed long term relationship it wasn’t actually something we had actively discussed. So imagine my surprise when shortly after I got my beautiful diamond “will you marry me” engagement ring I got a phone call from said step-mum suggesting their yard as our ceremony venue!!!

This was well before I knew about limiting beliefs, subconscious blocks, nervous system regulation, embodiment, identity work, Human Design, quantum leaping, manifestation methods and the approximately 700 other things the internet has since convinced us we need to understand before we’re allowed to change our lives... In fact, this was before people even spoke about most of those things.

I just wanted things… I’d imagine them happening, almost see them in my minds eye…

And then, somehow, they happened.

There was absolutely no consideration into whether it was possible, whether I was energetically available or a match for those things to happen. Not once did I journal about it or look for limiting beliefs that could potentially block the things I wanted from coming true.

And yet on so many occasions, just like the one I described above, I would find myself thinking...

How fun would that be!

How fun would it

be to be in a management position at this store? How fun would it be to make more money? How fun would it be to go to that conference in Noumea?

(All things that came to fruition btw)

When most people talk about manifestation they usually refer to The Secret as being one the first books they consumed on the topic… I’ve literally never read it. If I’m really honest I can’t even remember when I first learnt about manifestation, I can’t remember a particular teacher or guru shaping my beliefs… but what I distinctly remember is when I fell into it… I was ALLLL THE WAY IN!!!

Books.

Podcasts.

YouTube videos.

Courses.

Certifications.

Coaches.

Mentors.

I guess you could say I was obsessed… maybe hyperfixated? Fort me it was like realising I was already so naturally good at something and then wanting to deepen it further… bend reality more, speed up the time collapse if you will.

And nothing has really changed… I genuinely think I could spend the rest of my life contemplating how much of our reality we consciously create, how much we don’t, what consciousness even is and whether reality is actually just a simulation that we can use cheat codes with to change the level we’re playing.

But here’s what I found wild…. the more I learnt… the WORSE I got!

The knowledge, principles, methods… they didn’t help me actually change my life. Instead it felt so complicated, I started putting things on my vision board that weren’t even things I wanted. And I became stuck in limiting beliefs and self-sabotage patterns because I’d surrounded myself in spaces that left me feeling inherantly not good enough.

I was deep in my wellness coach era… an opportunity that I’d “manifested” after suffering from serious burn out from my management position. It started as a side hustle that I had intended on bringing into the Pharmacy when the time was right… but before I knew it I’d joined what felt like the most perfectly aligned network marketing company. As with all of these companies there was a very heavy presence of “mindset work” - between book and podcast recommendations, big dream activities and a perfectly laid out plan. “Success leaves clues… follow these exact steps and you will reach these goals”.

I remember creating my first vision board shortly after and feeling this wierd pang in my stomach as I cut out the letters N-M-D from an old Vogue magazine and glued them to the card. “That’s strange” I thought to myself. Why wouldn’t I want to reach the top of the company? The pinnacle position is the whole point - thats where you know you’re making good money, have freedom… that’s the position where all the dreams come true?! So why the hell was I bawking at it.

I later journalled on this and sumised that I just didnt believe it was possible for me and therefore I needed to revisit the mindset modules to really cement in how worthy I was.

I attended every event, conference and group call possible. Got up an hour earlier every morning to send “hey girl” messages and journal about my dream life. And if I’m honest my grit kind of paid off for a bit… I actually made it to the first “leadership” position within the company… and thats where the wheels fully fell off.

I can’t even remember exactly what it was… but I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I’d watched so many of the other women do the things I was doing and progress fast… much faster than I was. They were making great money, working only part time or fully for themselves and I was still clocking 50+ hour weeks in the Pharmacy. It had to be me? (this was before Taylor gave us the it’s me high I’m the problem its me song to lean on)

I was done posting the same posts as everyone, trawling the facebook groups… messaging random women pretending to love their content… so I stopped with the intention of “I just need to find my own way of doing this because the people at the top didnt actually get there by copying everyone else”.

Naturally, in a bid to keep me active and involved I was invited onto a special call with an upline and guided through a series of questions designed to help me reconnect to the goal… it was on this call that I realised I couldn’t connect to the goal because I never actually wanted to be NMD.

I’d become “the average of the 5 people” I was surrounding myself with… and taken on their goals as my own. Suddenly, the wierd pang from cutting those three little letters out of my Vogue made sense.

It wasn’t fear, a limiting belief or a worthiness wound blocking me from manifesting the pinnacle position… it was my intuition telling me “No girl… this isn’t for you… there’s more and better instore”. (Not in the spiritual woo woo “what’s for you will always find you” kind of way but in the legit you actually don’t want this goal kind of way.

After I left the company I decided to double down on the mindset and manifestation work while I figured out my next step… unfortunately it left me running. incircles on the internet for another 6 or so years… creating content, selling things that never fully landed… coach hopping… searching… healing… lost.

I think the industry made manifestation and changing our lives far more complicated than it needs to be.

So much of personal development centres around you knowing who you are and understanding why you do the things you do… as if the awareness is a little cheat code. You’re told to find the limiting beliefs, heal the wounds and trauma, regulate the nervous system, shift your identity to become a match to the things you want, clear the blocks, raise your frequency and act as if you are the person who already has the things you want.

Once you’ve done these things… then you’ll finally be able to have the life you want. As if the universe is sitting their with a clipboard making sure you check off this list of things and be a good little girl and do what youre told.

I believed versions of this for years.

I did the work. Those who know me know I don’t do things in halves… I’m either in or I’m not. There is no one foot in and one foot out. I journalled, reprogrammed, healed, meditated, subliminal messaged, visualised, tapped, was coached….

And then went and learnt modalities myself to deepen it all further.

I’ve revisited my childhood and reprogrammed my patterns, my identity, my subconscious and probably several previous incarnations of myself at this point.

And to be clear: I don’t think any of that was pointless. It absolutely made me who I am today… it changed me, helped me understand things better… and some of what I’ve addressed legitimately needed my attention.

And also….

I don’t believe any of it was the prerequisite for having what I wanted.

That’s a very different thing.

So what do I actually think is the key to changing your life and Quantum Leaping?

I mean this is the premise to my entire book… not a seven step process or complicated ritual that can only be done when the moon is at the right phase in the house of some astrological sign I know nothing about…

Just three simple, repeatable things… here’s an actual exerpt from my book for you;

When I zoom out and look at the stories from a bird’s eye view, I don’t see hundreds of different manifestation methods. I see the same pattern repeating over and over again.

A person decides what they want.

They begin paying attention.

They follow the nudges.

They move and then life responds.

The details are different, the moves they make are wildly specific to them and their life and circumstances but the overarching pattern remains the same.

Decide what you want. Follow the nudges you get. Allow the sequence to unfold.

That’s as simple and as complicated as it is each time.

Underneath all of it, the same mechanism appeared again and again, the very mechanism I described earlier;

Desire.

Intuition.

Action.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that manifestation lives at the intersection of those three things.

Desire asks: What do I want?

Intuition asks: What feels true?

Action asks: What’s my next move?

And where those three things overlap, something powerful happens… alignment.

And I don’t mean alignment in the way we’ve come to throw that word around on the internet. Like there is only one perfectly aligned path you’re supposed to find and if something feels uncomfortable you’ve obviously wandered off it…

I mean something much simpler and far less glamorous…

You want something. It feels deeply true for you without needing to over explain or justify. And you’re actually moving in its direction.

That’s alignment.

Here’s what happens when we do this… Life responds. Things shift and rearrange, opportunities show up as if out of nowhere, ideas download as if they are being birthed through you… new people are put on your path.

Call it synchronicity. Serendipity. Confirmation bias. The reticular activating system. God. The Universe. Quantum something-or-other. I genuinely don’t care because that part doesn’t matter…

Something happens because you are now participating differently in your life.

And slowly or sometimes really quickly…. you find yourself somewhere you couldn’t have reverse-engineered from where you started.

Like many women building an online presence or business, I spent years deep in it. “It” being personal development, identity work, business coaching, manifestation and healing content.

Coach after coach.

Program after program.

The marketing always promised the secret sauce… the thing you have been missing all this time that would finally change it all and help you grow your business to six or multiple six figures. And it was just on the other side of following the framework, implementing the method, or completing the six week container - yay.

Honestly, as a one line in human design (IYKYK and if you don’t drop a comment because human design is something I love to talk about) - I loved it at first. Like, genuinely loved it. I wasn’t just consuming the content and drinking the metaphorical coolade, I was watching… watching how the coach held themselves, the choices they made, the way they coached, the way they led themselves (the things they do, but don’t ever actually talk about). Somewhere along the way I realised that everything I was consuming was just more of the same, just packaged differently. Kind of like those clothing companies that drop new collections every month that are the exact same five pieces just made in a different fabric or print. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it… but each drop has you wanting the new, limited edition print until one day you realise your wardrobe is filled with the exact same five pieces just made in a different fabric or print.

By the time I realised I was more stuck then when I started and was just throwing spaghetti at the wall hoping something would stick. I had outsourced so much of my power to other people’s maps, and trying to follow the advice they assured me would be the thing that changed it all, that I couldn’t find my own anymore.

And I wasn’t alone. I could see women all over the internet in the same trap. Doing all the things and not seeing the results. Hoping, wishing, praying, manifesting that the next thing she tried would be the thing that helped her get out of her way, be more visible, attract more clients or land that deal.

I was so over it and I decided to rebel.

I declared I wanted to revolutionise the industry (hat was even my instagram bio at one stage) and I proceeded to pump out as much content as I could exposing everything I’d seen.

If you remember from your teenage yeara, the funny thing about being rebellious is it feels like power.

You're awake, uncharged, can see clearly AND you need to say it loudly and repeatedly to anyone who will listen.

What I didn’t realise was that, while my intentions were to help women who’d fallen into the trap I had, I was also still somewhat trapped. I’d traded consuming for reacting. And the reacting was just as loud, just as consuming, just as much of a way of not actually being in my own life. I was still orienting everything around the industry I was rebelling against. Still letting it take up all the space. Still not actually free.

So what I’ve been sitting with… What if this is actually a pattern? (Hint: it so is but I don’t want to sound like a coach telling you what’s wrong in your life lol)

First we consume. We follow someone else’s path, buy into someone else’s method, hand our power to something outside ourselves. Career ladders. Coaching programs. Other people’s definitions of what success looks like and what manifestation requires and what kind of woman we need to become before we’re allowed to have what we want.

Then we rebel. We see the trap. We call it out. We swing hard in the opposite direction.

And there’s something real in the seeing…the awakening is real.

But the swinging is still not freedom. Because you can’t find yourself by orienting yourself against something else.

Funnily enough though, for me It was actually someone else’s content that cracked it open.

For the last year I decided to join “Aussie Mumtok”. Freshly postpartum with the urge to create but absolutely zero desire to go back to my previous niche of business mindset, I started making videos about motherhood. A recipe here, a hot take there and then a video asking for everyone’s favourite mum creators was all it took for my FYP to shift into pure motherhood content.

Here’s the thing about (many) Mums… they’re either with you or they’re against you. And all it takes to be the latter is a slight difference in opinion. Feeding and sleep choices are all it takes for you to be on the outer of a group.

I started noticing women on my feed who seemed to always have beef with something. So fired up, so reactive, so consumed by what they were fighting against. And the content felt exhausting to consume. It was like being in a room where someone is always angry about something.

And then it hit me.

This is what it must feel like to consume my content.

I was shook. Not a vibe at all and no fucking wonder my brand never went anywhere big because… ewww.

Once you see something like that you can’t unsee it. And here’s the thing… some people genuinely love that energy. They eat it up, get fired up in the comments, go to war alongside the creator. But those women aren’t my people. That’s not who I’m here for.

So I got curious. Not in a “sit with my journal for weeks excavating every layer of my psyche” kind of way. Just genuinely curious. I started asking myself some honest questions.

And what I found underneath the rebellion was something I hadn’t expected.

Fear.

Not of the industry. Of my own work.

(Yep… even after all these years and all the work and everything I know about the mind and reprogramming… I still had a layer of fear about my own work).

Because reacting to someone else’s content is easy. Safe, even. You’re not the one exposed. But creating something that comes entirely from within you… your real thoughts, your actual stories, your genuine perspective - that’s vulnerable in a completely different way.

When you start to see your work as your art. When it feels like your purpose rather than your content strategy. That’s raw. That requires a completely different kind of courage.

So I made a decision. Not a dramatic declaration or instagram bio update. Not a rebrand or a pivot post. Just a quiet internal shift that I didn’t want to move from that energy anymore.

And now here we are.

Creating from this place feels free. The possibilities feel endless. But more than anything… it’s me. That’s what you’re getting here. My real, raw thoughts that don’t always make sense. Stories that are sometimes embarrassing to admit, like I’m exposing myself in the telling of them.

But it’s worth it if you feel seen. If you can find yourself somewhere in my story.

And here’s what I want to leave you with, because this isn’t really about the personal development industry or online business or any of that specifically.

It’s about the pattern.

The consuming. The rebellion. And the thing that comes after both.

Most of us spend time in all three. We follow something; a path, an industry, a version of ourselves we inherited from somewhere else. Then we react against it. And for a while the reaction feels like freedom.

But the real freedom? It’s actually much quieter than that.

It comes when you stop orienting yourself around the thing you’re fighting against and start moving toward something that’s actually yours.

That’s not a rebrand. It’s not a new era. It’s not becoming someone else.

It’s just you. More of you. The version that was always underneath.

No, I’m not kidding.

Before I share the full long-story-long as my friend Laura and I love to put it (because our stories are always filled with twists turns and a back and side story or two (lol) I want to share a huge lesson and theme you’re going to notice through out this book, and it’s in the stories I’m going to share. Real. Raw and everyday stories. Honestly, most them are not out of the ordinary, nothing major (although yes the Hilary Duff story is life altering but only because of what I made it).

Because the thing is, most awakenings don’t begin with a dramatic earth shattering event.

They don’t start at that Balinese wellness retreat you’ve been eyeing off, a perfectly timed breakthrough with coach or some beautiful packaged moment of clarity.

Nope, more often then not they start with something small and seemingly insignificant.

Some would go as far to say something so ridiculous.

A conversation that lingers longer than it should.

A comment that feels off.

A moment you can’t help but replay over and over because of siome weird second hand embarrassment feeling you’re experiencing.

A missed concert ticket.

I knew as soon as Hilary released Roomates that she’d announce a world tour - not a hunch I just knew. I was listening to the song one morning doing my skincare routine in our bathroom mirror, singing along and getting into the groove and out of nowhere I proclaimed to be unexpected husband “Just FYI, Hilary Duff is releasing new music, that means one thing - she is going to announce soon that she’s doing a world tour and I need to get tickets.”

He’s barely stunned by my random “stories” anymore but this one got a raised eyebrow.

“Okay….. Umm I’ve never even heard you listen to Hilary Duff.”

‘Dean, that’s because you weren’t in my 15 year old bedroom, where I used to sing into the mirror with my hairbrush ok. I need to go.”

I kid you not - two weeks later the announcement was made! She’s touring AND she’s coming to Australia.

Now the plan was that I’d go with my sister - we needed a do-over “sister trip” after our last concert experience with the Backstreet Boys (made bad not by the concert I might add just other life things that were happening at the time and even though I love me a side story that one really isn’t relevant to share).

We’d loosely spoken that if I was right (as if i’d be wrong) we would get tickets so of course I immediately test her.

“I was right! Hilary Duff just announced her world tour. We’re going.”

Turns out my sister has a far bigger social life than me and due to other commitments wasn’t going to be able to come. Not going to ie though - I was gutted. It felt like I was going to miss out because who was I going to go with if it wasn’t our do-over “sister trip”?

Now of course I have other friends I could have asked, but it was easy for me to find “excuses” or reasons they wouldn’t be able to join me (without really asking I might add). None-the-less I didn’t…

And then the ticket sale date was announced and I could feel the FOMO building already. I HAD to go. I HAD to be there.

I toyed with putting up a post on instagram, surely one of my 2.5K followers would want to go with me right? Turns out I didn’t need to, because an old friend, who I hadn’t spoken to for years had already done that for herself.

“Anyone want to get tickets to see Hilary Duff with me” the text on her story read.

Me immediately in her DMs - ME!!!!!

So it’s done right? I’ve got a friend to go with, we know the ticket sale date, we’re sorted right?

And the Universe said… no sis. No you’re not done.

The next day I received an excited message from my friend, “So a friend reached out to me after my story, she has a group of 6 wanting tickets and suggested we get them altogether, I already told her you’re coming too. We have a plan, we’re adding you to the group chat.”

At this point I was so beyond excited that I was ranting to my mentor at how proud I was of myself - from not going because I had noone to go with to all of a sudden a whole group women so excited to have the night of mum and lunch box duties - what a vibe.

Now if you too are in Australia and tried to get tickets to the “Luck… or Something” tour you know what’s coming in this story is nothing short of a “Duffies” (term coined by my mentor, India) war… a millennial blood bath if you will.

Six presales.

Ten’s of thousands of people in the online queue for shows all over the country.

Ticketek timing out and “booting” then blocking devices.

The original six ladies go tickets from the first presale, the rest of us laced up and “went to war” day in day out for the entire week. Each time we would get into the cart to be able to buy we wouldn’t be able to add enough tickets for everyone else.

Something really important to note here that I’ll circle back to later - I got into the ticketek sale portal multiple times. I had multiple opportunities to add a single ticket for myself and be done.

During the Westfield presale I almost added a single $400 premium seat to cart and checked out… but I didn’t. “This is a group thing” I kept telling myself.

I had a whole conversation with Dean, my husband, about it, he suggested to just get the ticket even as a backup. Of course I didn’t listen - as if I need a back up.

By Friday 20th February, morale was low, hope was fading… but we still had the final main sale to lock down our tickets.

We had a plan. We had a team. We even had husbands roped in on the cause.

I was booked to be in a Pharmacy that day so I’d prearranged with the manager that I’d be working but also on my mobile getting tickets (I kid you not).

Now imagine this…

It’s 12.30pm. The group chat is popping off. Everyone clicks the link to go to the waiting room and ends up in random positions between 15,000 and 50,000th in the queue. And here’s me being the Pharmacist for the day, watching my phone like a hawk with the deepest level of certainty that we were about to lock down those final tickets because “wow what a cool story that would be - a fight to the end and then a happy ending”.

Within 30minutes Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney had all sold out. It was over.

We conversed back and forth about flying to Perth - I was down for that I wanted to be in the room and bonus have never been to Perth. Then the logistics hit me. I have two small boys, a husband building a business… there is no way I can fly to Perth for a concert.

I pulled out. The other ladies got their tickets to Perth.

Not only was I not going… I was the only one in the group who would be missing out.

I was gutted. Exhausted from the adrenaline inducing week of ticketek queues and carts bouncing.

I couldn’t believe it… I was so certain!

And then it hit me… I’d made this choice. I had multiple opportunities to choose myself. Multiple opportunities to just get a single ticket but I put the group first.

A group of women I basically didn’t know.

And I was gutted.

To choose the group over and over again and then end up being the only one who wasn’t actually going to the thing… I actually couldn’t believe it.

And of course this was all unfolding AT WORK!!!!

I remember walking out the door of the store that day feeling drained, and on the verge of tears whilst simultaneously also being life “Girl what the hell, they’re concert tickets, why are you such a mess over this.”

I trudged to my car, pulled my phone out and immediately voxered my mentor who’d been excitedly asking for updates on the ticket situation all week. I laughed at myself as I choked back literal tears telling her I’d missed out on the tickets and would not be going to the concert.

‘I don’t even understand why I’m so upset about this - this is ridiculous.”

Read more

Urrggghhhh…. For years, I listened to this and tried to put myself in neat little boxes that made sense to the outside world. I needed people to understand what I did better and that's what niching is, right? You collapse everything you stand for into 150 characters for your Instagram bio. You pick a lane and you stay in it, because “a confused mind never buys”.

Look, I know people who have enormous success with this. They become the experts in their fields and make millions of dollars talking about that one thing until they die (lol not really but you get what I mean).

I've been building in the online space in one way or another for eight years and this advice created nothing but restriction for me.

I felt small, contracted… like I had to leave parts of me hidden because they didn't make sense to my niche.

But here's what Substack has taught me this year… I am a creative soul. I cannot feel restricted - it kills creativity for me and leaves me stuck in a procrastination cycle. (And no that's not self sabotage or limiting beliefs - it's my experience).

Like most thirty something women, I have the classic people pleasing, good girl tendencies. I like to pretend im a classic Type A rule follower who does everything right… but also I have a deeply rebellious soul. The more people wanted me to fit into the boxes, the more I felt this deep internal pushback, this Inner ick that I could never quite describe…

It was pure soul resistance.

That part of me that keeps saying: no. This is not the way. This is not right. This is not for you.

So I decided to test what happens when I just stop trying to fit myself into a niche and just share the things that are alive within me.

But this doesn’t translate to a 150 character bio and when you're in a room full of women asking what Thirty Something is about - they want an answer…. So I've landed on is this:

It's Spiritual Vogue… written by Carrie Bradshaw. Except Carrie traded her child-free life with Mr Big for a life more like Charlotte. And to top it off she's also in the middle of an existential thirty-something identity crisis (read: awakening). To some it looks like utter chaos… but to her people… it just lands, they get it. And regardless… she's so willing to be seen that she's sharing all of it with the world.

Head spin? Yep me too… but thats where I keep landing and I have to go with whats alive.

So… what will this actually look like??

The spiritual stuff (yes, including aliens)

For me, spirituality is my worldview. The entire lens through which I see everything. The way some people view the world through religion, spirituality is that for me. Except it can't be boxed into one specific type or a set of rules.

I believe we consciously create our lives. I believe we have access to information from the quantum field. I believe in energy healing, quantum leaping, manifestation, and yes extraterrestrials. I believe people can read energy. I believe in conspiracy theories (and even if I don't align with it, I froth on exploring them).

But I don't wear hippie pants or free bleed into the grass.

Because I don't think spirituality has to look a certain way or be all or nothing. I think it's just the lens you view the world through.

The inner work (but not the kind that keeps you stuck)

This is all of the inner work. The self-loyalty; which is what I'm really coming home to right now. Because to me, self-loyalty goes even deeper than self-trust. Sometimes, even when you can't fully trust that something is going to happen, if you are loyal to yourself you will follow through anyway.

This is the mindset work, the energetic healing, the reprogramming, the stories, the patterns. The deep internal architecture of becoming someone different. Not by abandoning who you are but by being more undeniably yourself than you've ever been.

The thirty something life (the real one, not the highlight reel)

I was so scared of turning thirty. I had all of these stories about it being this peak moment in life where you had to have made it. If you hadn't made it by thirty, anything you did beyond it was harder, less impressive, less worth talking about.

And I spent my twenties doing everything right. Bought a house. Built the career. Got married. Had my first baby. Did all of the quote unquote responsible things.

And then I turned thirty and woke up in the middle of it all going… hang on.

I've done all of this. I followed all the rules. I built an amazing life. And I want more. Not because something is wrong. Because I can feel there's more available. More freedom. More aliveness. More truth.

Nobody talks about people who build their success in their thirties and beyond. Forbes thirty under thirty makes headlines. Thirty something women coming into their own power? That's what I'm here for.

The big life (and what that actually means)

I've always had this feeling, and I know I'm not alone in it, that I am meant for more. That I was destined for big things. I was the first in my family to go to university. I've been the first in my family to do a lot of things. And I've always led with this energy of: I go first.

I'm always the first to sign up, the first to volunteer, the first to put my hand up and ask the question. And I want to encourage other women to become that person too. The one who chooses themselves and goes first.

But when I say creating a big life, I want to be really clear about what I mean. Because a lot of people hear that and jump straight to the Porsche and the ten bedroom mansion and the first class flights.

I genuinely don't care what it looks like.

My current life looks absolutely nothing like a vision board big life. Three bedroom house. Nice but not luxury car. Beautiful family and complete chaos.

And my life feels big. It feels expansive. It feels free.

That's what I'm talking about. Not the aesthetic version of a big life. The felt sense of one. Because a big life has nothing to do with what it looks like. It has everything to do with how it feels.

So that's the world I'm living and writing from. All of it. Nothing left out.

I'd love to know, which one are you most excited about? Which pillar made you think oh, that's exactly what I need right now?

Hit reply or leave a comment. I'm genuinely curious.

I'd ghosted for months trying to figure out what this was supposed to become.

I played with challenging myself to write every day for a month, my own kind of writing challenge if you will. I toyed with a weekly newsletter which honestly just felt blah and not at all like something I'd ever be excited to read myself. Then I convinced myself it needed to be a weekly editorial - like a magazine that I could play journalist with (think Andy Sacks from The Devil Wears Prada).

The more I tried to make it into "a thing", the more disconnected I felt from it.

It was wasn't for lack of ideas either, I have a whole list of those. And yet I’d sit down to write and nothing would come through. Which is honestly quite unusual for me because I always have something to say (just ask anyone who gets voice notes from me - there'sno such thing as long-story-short in my world).

The ideas were there, the desire to write was there, the words were there… but the execution was just all wrong.

I read a whole heap of substacks about how to grow on substack and no shade to the people who write them but I'm a bit over the whole “i grew teaching people how to frow” on a platform phenomenon… So I decided to just stop… not stop writing just stop trying to define it, to fit it into a box.

I stopped trying to make it make sense within the larger ecosystem of my business. And instead, I decided to let it become whatever it wanted to become, I know that sounds wierd but this space feels so alive within me (all of my work does in fact).

Within days of making this decision and shifting my inentions… five articles practically wrote themselves, and then what flowed after was what felt like an endless, stream of consciousness style, essays to share. I could almost publish an article a day some weeks.

I realised I didnt need more discipline or a different strategy. And i didnt need to figure out a better workflow… I just needed to stop trying so hard to force an outcome.

I posted this this on instagram a few weeks ago and then realised that this was soooo much more than just about substack… its an entire philosophy for life if im honest because I think we do this with so many things in every area of life.

Think about it; business, relationships, content, podcasts….the next chapter of our expansion… the list goes on and on.

We spend so much time trying to make things fit into the shape we think they should be... that we never give them the space to become what they're actually meant to be.

I think women are particularly good at this. We are the planners, the visionaries, the problem solvers… and even though feminine energy is wild and cannot be contained…. There is something in us that deeply craves certainty.

We like to know where we're going.

We want the roadmap.

And so when something doesn't immediately make sense, our instinct is often to grip tighter, go harder, strategise more, plan more… basically we double down and white knuckle our way through.

We decide to totally lock in.

And yet… I actually think some things need space to bloom before anything else.

What if the reason something isn't flowing isn't because you're not trying hard enough but because you're trying too hard?

What if the relationship is showing you exactly what it is?

What if the business wants to evolve in a different direction?

What if the thing you're trying so desperately to define is still in its unfolding?

I keep coming back to this idea that flourishing rarely happens under force.

Like last year when I bought 9 garden beds from Bunnings and turned our whole front yard into a garden… its was a whole process of soil, seeds and watering before we started to see the first tiny sprouts. I kept Imagining how beautiful it would be once everything was growing…

But that was all I could do… I couldnt force the sprouts to grow or the flowers to bloom, and even when I finally had a garden full of buds on fullt grown plants I couldn't pull on them to make them open or fruit faster.

And yet here we are in life doing exactly that!

Trying to pull the petals open and rush the unfolding.

Trying to force certainty where there is still discovery.

Trying to make things become what we've already decided they should be even when its not actually what they're meant to be.

And maybe that's why so many women feel stuck - they're spending all their energy trying to control the outcome instead of listening to what's trying to emerge.

This has become one of the biggest lessons of my own year.

Not just with substack… with relaunching my business, with the chapter of motherhood I'm in and with the life I'm building.

Even the book I've been writing behind the scenes.

I couldn't sit and strategically plan the chapters (trust me I tried and ended up with nothing but a blank page)… but when I listened to what was coming through the manuscript has literally written itself.

In general though, the moments that have felt most aligned haven't come from force but from paying attention to the tiny nudges coming through.

From noticing and listening to them deeply.

From being willing to release my grip on how something should look and becoming curious about what it wants to become.

So let this be a reminder for you that if something in your life isnt happening the way you thought or wanted it to… give it some room to breathe and tune into whats really coming alive within you.

I heard the lie come out of my mouth.. Well it wasn’t really a lie per say. The truth is that I didn’t ever run around saying I was going to be an author. Not like the stories I’ve read from other writers. They all seem to start as children who wrote stories and made their own books and then as teenagers who dreamed of being known as a writer whether it be writing a column in a magazine or novels that make the New York Times best seller list.

And I don’t have a story like that, because being an author, being paid to write... Was never something I ever considered to be an option.

It just wasn’t something people did where I grew up.

Not to mention, I was a classic straight A student who breezed through school with the highest of expectations when it came to career options - I was to be a Doctor of some sort, the first in the family to go to university.

But I have always written. And I have always been a book worm.

My parents were twenty-one year old apprentices when I was born. Neither of them could take very much time off work when they had me but fortunately we were surrounded by family, in the way the whole “it takes a village to raise a child” thing used to be. So I didn’t go to daycare or even kindy.

I went to my great grandma’s.

We lived across the road from her growing up, and lovingly nicknamed her “Grandma over the Road” which stuck even as young adults.

Her old dusty house that my great grandad built was filled with treasures, and toys, and dress ups and books. I used to dress up with gloves and a glow mesh bag, playing shops with the tiny toy cash register and a collection of old one and two cent coins that had long gone out of use. I’d climb behind her on her pink floral chair and play hairdressers while she watched her daytime “serials” (as she called them).

She was the very essence of a matriarch - strong, powerful and so deeply loved.

My favorite thing about days at her house was sitting at the table for lunch with her and my great grandad and requesting stories from the olden days. They’d tell us about life before cars, what it was like during the war and, my personal favourite, the stories of when they first met, their love stories.

She’d pull out photo albums to share pictures that helped make the stories come even more to life.

And I’d tell her my own stories in return.

As a thirty-something woman I have no recollection of these stories because to me they were just made up kids stories inspired by my books… but one day as a twenty-something university student she shared with me that she had written out some of the stories I’d shared with her and kept them safe with the intention of giving them to me.

I’ve had them ever since, tucked away safely in the back of a photo album right by a photo of her, my grandad and I at my eighteenth birthday party.

One is dated January 1996, I was five years old, and she had sat down and wrote out a story I dictated to her. Word for word in her beautiful cursive handwriting.

I found myself thinking about the stories after hearing the words come out of my mouth that I’d never really wanted to be an author and couldn’t help but wonder if that would have been different had I known it was an option.

After telling Cara Alwill about it in my Power Hour she declared that I HAD to dig them out.

The wave of emotions that came over me as I carefully unfolded the two lined pieces of paper filled with Grandma’s handwriting surprised me.

I didn’t even get to read them before an entire memory bank felt like it unlocked.

I remember drawing “picture books” at her table… pieces of paper with a story and carefully drawn pictures stapled together, cover page and all. “By Jaimee Lee Bright” written at the bottom.

I remember writing in a pink Barbie journal with a tiny gold lock about a holiday to Brisbane my Gran had taken my sister and I on.

I remember typing my version of a horror story on the first computer we had in our house.

As I got older the actual writing (outside of English assignments) became less and less and yet even then I remember always loving movies where the main character was a writer for a fashion magazine and imagining what it would look like to wear designer clothes and work in a New York City office, sipping a latte between writing my next article.

And I guess that’s where it all just stopped… a dream… imagination. Something that I thought would be so cool… but not for me because my future was already mapped out and writing like Andy Anderson about “How to lose a guy in 10 days” was never going to fit that plan.

Yet here we are… thirty years later, circled back to the very thing I used to do with my Grandma.

When I reread my stories I was actually shocked… there’s a clear theme…

Someone loses something. They go looking for it. And along the way they find other things they weren’t even searching for.

Thirty years later, it seems like I’m still writing that exact story.

It’s just women now, instead of Bo-Peep and Cinderella.

Women who lose themselves; to a career they built for someone else, to a version of life that looked right on paper, to the relentless pursuit of becoming someone impressive, and go looking for their way back. And along the way find things they never expected. A garden. A book. A publication. A version of themselves that was always there, waiting underneath everything they’d piled on top.

When the inspiration for Thirty Something first dropped in for me, I couldn’t have told you where the thread started. Turns out it started in my great grandmother’s lounge room, at a table with old two cent coins and a toy cash register, in the handwriting of a woman who loved me enough to write my stories down and keep them safe.

She saw the writer before the writer knew she existed.

And as I sit writing this for you, the gentle hum of my airfryer cooking dinner in the background, my one-year-old at my feet trying to put on his brother’s blue swimming goggles… I wonder if you also have a version of this. Something you did as a child that you loved, and yet you filed it away under “not for me” because it just wasn’t a thing where you’re from?

I do this often. I'll feel a nudge, a pull toward something - a brand name, platform, idea… then I'll immediately buy the domain, take the instagram handle, create the account… essentially do the thing with no real plan beyond that first step. Some of those things become nothing (well nothing yet anyway), and others bloom into something I never could have imagined if I'd sat down and tried to plan it.

Thirty Something is the second kind.

That Substack I created…. It sat dormant for almost a year.

I journalled about it on a beach around my birthday in September 2025. I was setting intentions for the year ahead, pondering writing and the concept of being paid to be me.

“I can feel the evolution, the depth, the magic. I felt it when we arrived. I know that one day I will tell a story about how the magic unfolded where the forest meets the sea.”

On the pages that followed I wrote things like 200K followers on Instagram, book(s), substack and the way I wanted my life to FEEL. Light… free… alive…

It's interesting reading it back because I'd never really considered myself a writer, aside from the brief period where I told everyone I was going to be a blogger. That was short lived once I actually launched the blog. And yet there it is in my journal and my handwriting… books and substack.

It wasn't until December that I had a total, F*CK IT we're doing it, moment. I needed an escape from a very turbulent time in our life…my husband had lost his job. A career he'd invested close to 10years building, alongside his multiple six figure salary… weeks before Christmas. I needed an escape and decided the substack would be a wellness publication called Bloomè-ing.

Even as I typed the name I knew it didn't fully feel right. I published a few pieces anyway. But here's the thing about me… I need the thing I'm doing to feel alive. It needs a name and a vibe and to feel like its own living entity. And Bloomè-ing wasn't that… it was another placeholder.

If I'm being honest I can't remember the specific day Thirty Something was born.

I do know I wasn't sitting at a laptop having a revelation. I was following my children around the yard, watching the wild and whacky “Mum watch this trick I can do” (which is, honestly, where most of my best ideas arrive. My creativity tends to come from within the chaos)

I'd had another creative surge the week before after booking in for a Power Hour with Cara Alwill to talk about Substack as a platform to launch the book I'd started writing…

I do, however, distinctly remember the feeling of aliveness when the name came through. Like something clicked into place. I'd been thinking about why so many women were pivoting and shifting and changing direction in their thirties. I'd been wanting to write about the mindset shifts, the glow ups, the things that nobody was quite naming in the way I wanted to. And then suddenly… Thirty Something.

Out of nowhere.

I didn't even need to sit with it… that was the name. Like reading Cosmopolitan or Vogue but for the things that actually happen in a woman's life in her thirties. Elegant, personal, real… and a little bit chaotic. A magazine that felt like it had always existed and somehow hadn't. Like if Carrie Bradshaw was married, with kids and pondering life as a Thirty Something.

I honestly toyed with the idea of becoming a bit of a journalist.

I could imagine myself researching things, sitting down with intention, writing structured pieces once a week with a plan and an editorial calendar and all the things a proper publication is supposed to have.

Instead, I became a woman who couldn't stop talking into her phone at red lights, or the park, or the bathtub.

The essays don't come from sitting at a laptop trying to write.

They come from voice notes at 6am, from following threads in conversation, from observations that arrive mid-school run and refuse to leave until I've written them down. I have more to say than I have hours in the day to say it. I thought I'd publish once a week, very intentionally. I now have a bank of essays I haven't even published yet and new ideas arriving daily.

This is what it feels like when something is actually yours.

Thirty Something isn't just a Substack. It's the living proof of everything I write about and everything I'm writing about in my first book, Magnetise, which is coming very soon.

Magnetise is about manifestation. But not the aesthetic, vision board, instagram version. It's about what actually happens when you stop forcing and start following. When you let the nudges lead instead of the plan. When you trust the thing that arrives without an explanation.

This is how the best things in my life have come to fruition.

So since you've just found your way here… welcome. I'm so glad you're here and I know we're crossing paths for a reason.

This is a personal essay publication about mindset, manifestation and the chronicles of modern womanhood.

It's about the shifts that happen in your thirties, the things that fall away, the things that come alive, the version of yourself that emerges when you finally stop performing the life you thought you were supposed to want.

It's my “couldn't help but wonder” thoughts said out loud and won't always wrap up neatly with lessons…

But it will always be honest. And serve to deepen your own musings.

So with that… I'd love to know, what brought you here? And what are you most excited to read about or talk about?

Hit reply or leave a comment.

And if you're not subscribed yet, consider this the invitation to a seat at my table x

Somewhere between the nodes shifting, the full moon and the start of the Lions Gate Portal everything that felt like momentum building all of a sudden felt heavy and hard to handle? I know, I know, this is so ironic of me to be writing this so soon after my big declaration of “My entire life is about to blow TF up (in the best way possible)” lol

And also it’s a beautiful reminder that often this is how the start of the leap feels.. Heavy, too much to handle, like you just can’t actually do it.

There was once a time where this period would be enough to fully take me out. I’d notice the stories popping up, the doubt, the feelings of there never being enough time and then immediately clock that “ooohh there’s more to uncover here” and then proceed to metaphorically pan for gold in my mind - except there was no gold and all I ever found was stories, beliefs and patterns that I’d convinced myself needed rewriting. So that’s what I’d do… excavate to the depths of my psyche until I finally felt “ready to go again”. (and then I’d be upset that I was always inconsistent, feeling late to the party and couldn’t hold any results I did manage to see).

I’m pretty proud to say that I’m not that person anymore… maybe it’s growth, maybe it’s the years upon years of inner work… maybe it’s the whole awakening after the awakening thing… regardless now I start to notice these things and I actually get excited.

I get excited because I know what comes after, and it’s always better than I could have imagined.

Ok so I really didn’t want to be vague in this.. When I sat to write I had the intention of sharing the exact feelings, thoughts, beliefs, behaviours that have been popping up. But of course when I reflect it feels like reaching - like making mountains out of molehills just to write an article, and maybe that’s the growth part? And maybe it’s actually not important to share at all… maybe you just need to know that at the moment there’s a whole collective of us going through it. Old stories of comparison resurfacing, that familiar feeling of being behind or somehow having missed the boat that you never got the schedule for. Feeling unseen, undervalued, unappreciated. It’s like we went to bed one night feeling complete and utter clarity with what we’re building, where we are going, how we’re choosing to live our life… and then woke up to utter chaos - the clarity from the night before nowhere to be found.

And of course I have a few theories on what’s happening and why.

Firstly, I believe as a collective, (and by that I mean you, since you’re here, reading this it’s for you and it is my intention to call in more of us). Our little collective are the silent strivers… we’ve been working, building, growing, uncovering our magic for the better part of the past decade. Some things worked, somethings didn’t. We are the ones who despite it all never gave up… we took time off, rediscovered parts of ourselves that got lost along the journey… but never gave up ion the pull that there’s so much more available to us. Even in the moments where it seemed impossible to actually imagine any of our dreams or goals coming to fruition.. We knew. We knew there was more.

Our time is now.

The recent astrological events, the node’s shifting… the entire energy 2026 for us is that that direction we’ve been being pulled… it’s not just an idea or theory or wish… it’s the very thing our soul is asking to be our reality.

We’re shedding the cultural norms; creating for algorithms, trying to fit ourselves into boxes, performing everything, overcomplicating things and letting external circumstances determine our next steps, especially when it comes to creation.

We’re being called into bigger desires, bigger truths, bigger levels of self-expression. Not the be more delulu or if you’re dreams don’t scare you they’re too small cliche kind of bigger either. This bigness is deep… it’s a calling that you don’t need to force yourself to come up with, it’s the quiet knowing thats been sitting beneath everything you’ve been through.

Here’s the part that really has me excited for us… our inner identity, the woman (or man - Hi if you’re here too) we truly are on the inside… has finally caught up to our outer vision. Now this does not mean that we weren’t enough until now - that’s not a philosophy I stand by. But I think you will agree that there’s always been this feeling of a mismatch? One that’s very hard to describe? Like there was always this part of you that wanted to be more expressed and you just couldn’t quite get there? This feeling of either being too late to the party, or so early that it’s hours before the party even starts.

I don’t believe that we needed to get to this point in time and only now are we enough and that’s why our time is now. For me that feels ick, disempowering… laced in “heal more” culture. Instead I believe we’ve been in the training grounds. In fact, as I sit here typing I have this image of a Rebecca Campbell Oracle card “You’ve been training for this for lifetimes”. That’s us. We’ve been in the training ground, not waiting… preparing for this exact moment.

Just for fun I created a little release ritual to shed the final layers. Now while I fully channelled this ritual, it’s important to know, this isn't a new thing. Women have been burning their stories for centuries, across cultures, across traditions, across continents. There's a reason it keeps circling around. It works.

Funny story before share it though - I’ve literally never shared this side of myself on the internet. Not because I’m scared of what people will think, but because I’ve never wanted to contribute to the misplacement of power I’ve seen in personal development and the spiritual community - where the power is put in the ritual, the method, the vision board, the oracle cards. They’re amazing tools but I need you to know that they are no more powerful than the person using them… thats right Queen - the power is in you!! (I go deep on this in my book by the way).

Here’s the thing about me though… I love me a little ritual, I love a spell, a little symbolism. I loved to play witches as a little girl and now I get to really play with magic. For me, the ritual is the anchor, it gives the conscious mind something to anchor into because it often has a hard time interpreting mystic shit.

Which means this next part, the ritual, is both deeply intentional, symbolic… and also… totally for fun (because we all need more of that).

Here’s my releasing ritual i.e. what I’m doing to close the chapter.

What you’ll need

• A loose piece of paper and a pen

• A candle and some matches

• A moment to yourself…

1. Light your candle setting your intention for the ritual. Just something simple like “I’m shedding the final layers and stepping into my highest timeline of truth, abundance and infinite potential.”

2. On your paper write down anything and everything you’re choosing to release. Think; thoughts, beliefs, stories, habits, dreams, goals or desires that were never truly yours, relationships that aren’t fitting anymore… literally everything. Write in as much detail and specificity as you can. Nothing is too big or too small, it all counts.

3. When you’re done (you’ll know) fold the paper in half, away from you. Then fold in half again, away from you.

4. Write on the outside of the folded paper the numbers 999 and “Closing this chapter, ending these cycles”. (999 marks the end of cycles. It’s the closing of one chapter so that a new one can open and encourages the release of what no longer serves you.)

5. Take a breath, take a moment to send love to all the past versions of you, to the parts of you that have been holding onto the things you’ve written as a way of protecting yourself. Because thats what it all is. Every thought, belief, story, habit - it’s all your subconscious mind trying to keep you safe, it’s served it’s purpose and is ready to be released.

6. When you are ready burn the paper or tear it up and throw it in the bin. Blow out the candle and notice the lightness you feel, knowing that girrrlll we are just getting started!!!!

Ok, if you do this, I need to know! There’s something extra powerful about a whole collective of women doing this. So make sure you comment below. If you’re feeling extra brave or declarative snap and story to share on your instagram or even substack notes and make sure you tag me because I love seeing this stuff!!!

A particular area I’ve been diving into is understanding what’s happening in the sky and how it’s affecting me personally… not just on an energetic, “how I feel,” level but down to the nitty gritty… my creativity, my business, my goals, how I make decisions and the general feeling of my life.

And what I’ve landed in the middle of my own research is pretty wild if I do say so myself. So for those of you who have absolutely no idea… let me catch up to speed with what has been going on and why the energy has been feeling pretty crazy lately. .

I mean aside from the fact that we are in a one year in numerology and we’ve entered the year of the fire horse - two things that would be impossible for you not to know if you’ve been anywhere on the internet this year because I’d call it the most trending topic of the year. Aside from this we have just come through the Barbault’s Basket (a rare outer-planet configuration which many were deeming a powerful manifestation portal). What’s more interesting about this is that the astrologer who coined the configuration, Andrè Barbault, was known for having eerily accurate predictions, the 2020 pandemic included. He believed this specific configuration would mark a significant turning point.

Then we had the nodal axis shift, marking a new 18month cycle and recalibration period. Nodes are two opposite points on the moon’s orbital path and in astrology are linked to the collective focus. The shift saw the north node moving into Aquarius, and the south node moving into Leo. Which felt extra significant for me because these just so happen to be my exact nodes. My literal north and south node in my own chart. (Mindblown)

And now we’re in Lions Gate Portal (another supposed powerful manifestation portal), which also coincides with a Full Moon in Aquarius. Full moons are a time for releasing - beliefs, habits, stories, patterns - anything in life that’s taking up space and weight that shouldn’t be.

So all of that to say… the sky is sky-ing. And many of us are really in the feels of it.

A slightly unhinged side note: CERN also shut down shortly before all of this started unfolding and I have since fallen so deep down that rabbit hole and its blowing my mind! Let me know if you want an article on my findings.

I want to be really clear about something though… I use things like human design, astrology, angel cards etc as tools to support me NOT to take away my power. I am not the person who believes that if you don’t use Lions Gate energy you’ll miss your window and never manifest the things you want. (In fact this is a huge through line of the book I’m writing - we are very fast to outsource our power to methods, tools and the moon and I fiercely believe that it is that outsource of power that “blocks” us not missing the tool). It’s because of this belief that I generally don’t even speak publicly about this stuff… it’s still in my spiritual closet.

But with the energy that I’m feeling at the moment.. I couldn’t not make this public.

Right now I feel fully activated.

You know that feeling of build up in a really good movie? Where the plot is thickening, and anticipation growing, building right up to the peak, to the moment…

That’s how my life feels right now… at the tipping point, about to cross the threshold. In the exact moment where balance ends and rapid change begins.

Here’s something you should know about me… I’m obsessed spiritual quantum physics, quantum leaping, collapsing time, manifesting at rapid speed… so when I feel energy building like this rather then surrender it to the universe I like to lean right in and really play. I call it playing in the quantum.

So I decided with all these wild cosmic events unfolding in succession that now would be the perfect time to really test the theories of my book and bring back my “Collapse Time and Quantum Leap”series.

This became a signature series of mine in a few different iterations a few years ago. It gained serious momentum, energy and attraction…

But, since I’m in my “air my dirty laundry era” (see my Museum of Failures article for the details) I need to be really honest… even though each time I’ve done this I’ve gotten really cool results and outcomes, the series itself and what I’ve subsequently built from it has always fallen apart. Of course with the whole twenty-twenty hindsight I know exactly why. (Plus I’e birthed a baby and been through a hell of alot of growth since the last series).

So, let’s go back to the very first iteration “How I’m Quantum Leaping And Changing My Life”. It popped off. This was my first taste of “viral” content and fast growth… i’ll never forget the rush of excitement (and dopamine) every time I opened the app to what felt like truckloads of new followers. I really did change my life - we renovated our house, I upgraded my office which creatively uplevelled so much, I looked good, felt good… but the one flaw in the plan… I’d declared I’d document it daily. And honestly… the pressure to film daily content in the midst of a very full and busy life was just far too much. So the actual series itself fizzled out and with it so did everything else.

The next few iterations were similar but the one that really shifted things was my “Million Dollar Me” movement. This one had people reaching out to me asking which new coach I was working with because apparently my energy was on fiiirrreeee. No-one, I’m just in my own little bubble. I’d type back, quietly very impressed with myself.

The whole idea of Million Dollar Me was that if I designed and performed the version of myself who had everything I wanted, she would eventually integrate - thats how it works right? You decide who the future version of you is that has everything you want and you show up as her everyday.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about that… you cannot energetically uphold an “act” for that long. And, act as if is flawed, because if you don’t truly believe that you are that person… your subconscious mind will essentially deem everything a red flag and chuck a total hissy fit.

I’ve always found the idea of curtain who you are as a person to be a little weird. Don’t get me wrong… I love the idea of reinvention. It’s empowering to know that at any moment we can choose different and experience different. But there is something weird to me about essentially making up an alter-ego that represents a future version of yourself when you currently exist in a timeline that couldnt be further from the one you’re trying to get to. You can feel the dissonance. You’ll start to see it in people too when they can’t hold it.

By now you’re probably wondering why I would even think to attempt this again and why this time would be any different. And look I’m not mad about that, it’s fair.

Here’s the truth… I have a half written manuscript for a book that was not on my vision board for this year. It came to me seemingly out of nowhere and I’ve been writing like mad to get it out into the public. The wildest part of the book is that the way it has come to be proves the exact theories I write about in it!!!!

Now I want to put it to the test in a totally different lens. Really test my own theories. And I couldn’t think of a better time to do it.

Here’s what’s actually happening right now, behind the scenes of my life.

Aside from my half written book, these essays are pouring out of me. At this point I could nearly become a daily columnist if I had the time to sit down every day and do it. Ideas arrive constantly. I found work I love within my very traditional career. My husband’s business is doing well. Really well. My boys are growing in leaps and bounds. Our life, even though it is more chaotic than it has ever been between two busy entrepreneurs, two very busy boys, not a quiet Tuesday in sight and yet has never felt more calm or aligned.

I’ve reached a point where I genuinely love my life… and now I’m excited to create more.

So this time there won’t be a performance, no “how to act as if and become her” essays or videos, no daily tasks that I have to film to prove its real. Just me writing to you and going really deep with it… what I’m calling in, what aligned actions are flowing through to me, what’s arising in real time.

And this time I’m inviting you in with me, right here. Follow along, play along, ask me questions, leave comments.. Let’s harness this wild energy and see how much we can manipulate the matrix (lol)

After my article on being seen trying in your thirties (Read it here) I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the “cost” of it… see I know people love a good rags to riches, phenix rising from the ashes story. As humans we froth over it. It’s relatable. Inspirational. It serves as evidence that our time could actually still be coming… But what’s much more confronting to examine is that particular feeling of exposure that only comes when the “failures” haven’t yet amounted to the great success story.

And truthfully… there’s something far more interesting in those stories. A different kind of inspiration…. permission.

I’m thirty-five, I’m not interested in building a life where I’m only willing to be seen doing things I’m guaranteed to succeed at...

Ladies and Gentleman step right up to my museum of failures. Admission is free… my dignity is, at this point, totally shot.

(especially after birthing two children)

To get us started… Let’s go back, back to the beginning… (puhleaseeee tell me you sung that?!)

I could go back to the first time I failed… ok it was actually just a C in Biology which at the time felt like it totally ruined my life because how the fuck was I going to get into my university degree with that?! I questioned the teacher who’d I’d promptly submitted a draft to weeks prior for feedback and she’d left feedback saying something didn’t feel finished but she didn’t know what (clearly it was her fault for such atrocious feedback?)… and then I cried and bitched about her to anyone who would listen. I was definitely not scared to be seen trying in high school. I was a small town girl with big goals and dreams and nobody was getting in my way… Looking back now this whole situation feels like a total joke… I still graduated a straight A student, got a top overall position which secured me an offer at my university of choice into my degree and a $20K scholarship. Thus why this isn’t the kind of story I’m going to share here… because that’s a happy ending.

So let’s just skip straight to the tea…

The truth I’ve never really admitted until now…

I’ve been trying to build something online since 2018.

2018.

Eight years!!!! (well minus the year I deleted it all on an intuitive nudge).

And the more exposing, awkward and vulnerable truth… I don’t have alot to show for those eight years, not in the sense of tangible or physical outcomes.

I’ve lost count of how much I’ve invested into my personal growth, mentorship, coaching, marketing support, admin support… tens of thousands of dollars. And all in those years of trying… I’ve barely made an annual minimum wage spread over those eight years!!!!

So… Exhibit No 1: Circa 2018 - my Wellness Girl era

I was a burnt out Pharmacist with a passion for holistic health and helping people in a way I could never in a regular Pharmacy. I’d found myself down the nutrition and integrative medicine rabithole and decided that it was time to stop telling everyone I was going to be a blogger and just be a blogger… so I launched my first ever brand online “Whitehouse Wellness Co”. I told all of three people and started sharing random tips to Instagram, I even launched a blog that those three people read. It felt hard writing to no-one.. embarrassing even… why hadn’t blown up with the first blog I put out there? That’s how this was supposed to work right? I stopped after five posts and told myself blogging was just not right for me.

This was during a time when the network marketing girls could sniff out someone trying to build their own thing from a mile away… they’d see your posts, flood your comments and then pop up in your DMs with the classic “Hey girl I love what you’re up to…” message. At first my ego frothed on these messages… after the tenth I was onto them.

One time I got super curious… I’d noticed a few influencer looking ladies with platforms far larger than mine, busy, travelling, talking about the things they do with their clients and sharing their health tips. They had same health coaching certification as I did so I reached out to see what they were up to… I got the ick immediately when I realised it was network marketing as I’d already had a previous awkward experience in one of those and I was skeptical af. Until one day curiosity got the better of me… I’d been seeing a young Mum sharing about her online business and how it was supporting her and her little family. She hadn’t bombarded me so I reached out. “Can I send you a video that might explain what I’m up-to better” she asked. “Absolutely” I reoplied.

I watched that video and I was ALL IN! I bought the products, progressed through the first couple of ranks, pocketed a few bonuses and became a “hey girl” message sender… there were sooooo many good points to this experience. The community, meeting new people, getting out of my comfort zone. But if I’m honest I felt like a totally fraud most of the time because I despised the way they actually did business. I dragged my husband to a conference once and I swear he left convinced we’d somehow gotten wrapped up in a cult and needed to get out asap. I kept my “virtual franchise” open far longer than I should have because of FOMO.

Exhibit No 2: The Queen Life Co (which eventually dissolved into just Jaimee Lee White)

The real reason I left network marketing was because I’d joined a coaching program where they were teaching how to get clients - perfect exactly what I need I thought, dieing inside over the investment of the program. I convinced myself I’d make the money back and it would be so worth it.

I had some one on one support as part of the program and it was during those very honest conversations that I finally realised that I was never going to be able to make good money the way I wanted to in the network marketing business. “With your skills and expertise you’re going to see a much faster ROI from building soemthing of your own.”

I remember feeling like a total fish out of water, little old me sitting in a room with people making serious money in business. I had no idea what the actual fuck I was doing. And then all of a sudden, with the support of my coach, I had a program plan built, a webinar to pitch it and a whole ad set ready to turn on?!?!? The game plan was simple… the ads led to a funnel which was to convert to a webinar which would be where I’d sell my program. The catch? $50/day ad spend and I had to call every single “lead”… I actually want to vomit thinking about this.

I used to call and pray they wouldn’t answer… and most of them didn’t. I tried texting instead and was always left on read. I posted everyday, ran the free webinar which only my mother in law showed up live to and made exactly zero dollars after spending thousands on ads.

Exhibit No 3: Circa 2020 - Jaimee Lee White 2.0

I was postpartum with my first baby, had recently turned Thirty and was no where near ready to thow in the towel… so I did what all others would do in my shoes…

I launched a podcast! “The Everyday Queen”

I started interviewing friends, putting out heavily scripted solo episodes and creating cute graphics for my insta. This also coincided with my heavily filtered, dancing on reels era (all a total flop), and I flip flopped between business mindset and mindset and manifestation.

I’d learnt the coolest new modality and once again I was all in and committed to getting this thing off the ground. I found a new coach who had built her business more in alignment with the way I wanted to do things and I set out on my way pumping out reels, content, offers, programs, a membership at some stage.

The podcast morphed into the “On Air with Jaimee” show and I had some seriously incredible guests!

From the outside I know people were watching thinking everything was working out…. but behind the scenes I had completely abandoned myself and my intuition. I’d outsourced all of my power to other people telling me the best steps forward.

My podcast had all of 13 listeners each week no matter how high profile the guest.

Email list dieing even more after every carefully curated email.

Instagram… 2000ish people never getting above 2.5K.

YouTube channel… under 100 subscribers and videos with five views.

The most people I had in a program was around 9… it was a called Money Mastery and I almost made $1000 from it.

I once ran a mastermind with one client. One amazing client who showed up and gave her all and made it a whole moment.

The most virality I’ve seen was because of my garden and a random Justin Bieber reel I made in under thirty seconds whilst on the phone to my husband. (Ofc) And nothing came of either of those.

Ive done it all. Ive seen it all.

The social media experts could break down my story and tell you it was my strategy... I didnt hook people well enough, didnt market to pain points, wasnt clear enough on my niche, ideal client or why someone should work with me.

The mindset girlies will tell you its unresolved trauma... blocks... a visibility wound or a problem receiving. Clearly I need to do a hell of alot more work on myself before I can finally see the fruits of my labour lol

And the manifestation babe’s?? Well clearly I didnt BECOME HER so ofc nothing “worked”.

I’m not going to end this article debating over who was right and who wasn’t - there’s pieces of truth in each depending on who’s telling the story. 

But here is one thing they wont suggest...

I was just out here trying. Figuring things out... trying things on... changing my mind...

ALL whilst living a VERY full life offline.

I used to have this quote as my instagram bio;

I want to inspire people. One day, I want someone to look at me and say “because of you I didn’t give up”

And I dunno… I can’t help but feel like theres something inspirational about simply being the woman who goes through all of the above and is still here pottering along trying something else.

It also kind of felt nice to air my dirty laundry… kind of freeing? Like I know longer have to pretend like everything is working and instead I can just be in the unfolding. Which, by the way, I’ve come to realise is life.

I can’t help but feel a deep sense of knowing that my time has arrived… that i’m about to get my phenix rising from the ashes moment….

But right now I’m happy to just be a thirty something woman who no longer wants to build a life where I’m only willing to be seen doing things I’m guaranteed to succeed at.

According to “the rules” - in your twenties you’re supposed to do the building and the exploring. It’s the decade for following your dreams and discovering yourself and making mistakes and starting over. There’s essentially a social permission slip that comes with being in your twenties, a collective understanding that you’re supposed to be figuring it out and therefore it’s all good to get it all out of your system (as long as it promptly ends by thirty of course and then you really have to start taking life seriously).

Anything cringe or embarrassing you do is totally forgiveable and forgettable and there’s this energy of people rooting for you. You got a new job? Yay! Booked an overseas holiday? Amazing - you go girl! Met a new man? Had a girls weekend? Launched a business? Threw away something ultra successful and became a barista? Get it girl nothing is worth your mental health!

And then one day you turn thirty… the dreaded 3-0. The day you’re supposed to wake up and magically have your shit together.

I was so scared to turn thirty, I spoke about it to anyone who would listen. “I don’t want to be old”. “I feel like there’s still so much I want to do”. (This was even after I watched Gary V speak on stage and declare all thirty year olds fucking foetuses who needed to stop making excuses and see that they were just getting started). Even my Gran assured me that she believed her thirties were her best decade yet…

I entered mine four weeks post-partum after a traumatic c-section… not a champagne in sight. Just me, my husband, my baby, and the endless eat, sleep, poop routine of a newborn. It was such a nothing day that I remember absolutely zero details - turns out we went for breakfast at our local cafe which was 100m from home, a sneaky sushi train lunch and then somewhere along the way a creme brulee instead of a birthday cake. (Thanks photo archives)

Here’s what didn’t happen though…

I did not wake up with my ambition completely gone feeling like that was it my life was over, i’d peaked and now it was downhill!!

No maam. I woke up with the same fire in my belly (no not reflux) that I had each birthday prior. The drive to keep building. The drive to keep exploring what was truly meant for me.

I was a few years into building an online wellness business by this point. In fact, before I got pregnant I’d even thrown in my very successful Pharmacy Manager position to work as a part time contractor so that I could focus on my little business, a move I was certain I only got away with because I was twenty-something. Everyone was so supportive of that. I had frequent conversations with friends about my business and what I was building, what I was up to, many of them also working on their own side hustles. It was a whole vibe.

By my Thirtieth TikTok had blown up and reels were taking instagram by a storm… using instagram’s filters was encouraged, we choreographed dances and skits and mimed our way through video after video.

It was a strange kind of cringe but fun? I’d already sat on the sideline for months before I posted my first reel. I remember watching peoples accounts blowing up as they mimed “Don’t stop believing” with inspirational text over their screen and a caption to match. I’d wished that I could do it too and then made up a whole bunch of excuses why I couldn’t or shouldn’t.

But when I turned thirty something switched. I decided I’d come this far online, I’d always had supportive people around me, what did I have to lose?

Here’s what I noticed… In your thirties, people start counting, they watch with a different lens.

The judgment gets quieter but somehow heavier. Most people don’t say it to your face… they snicker behind your back, question you to mutual friends, pretend they want to understand while being completely committed to misunderstanding. Family members raise their eyebrows. What on earth is she doing now?

And then there’s the “Oh I could never do what your doing, but honestly good on you” comments. That kind of back handed compliment that you overthink for months later. Is it because she think’s I’m more confident or just totally cringe?

Then eventually friends stop asking questions at all.

Except that one friend who confides that she’d had a conversation with her sister about what you were doing wondering how well it was doing and then discusses sunk cost fallacy with you. She wasn’t being cruel, I believe she genuinely cared. But the conversation was essentially: at what point do you cut your losses and accept that it’s not going to happen?

That’s what trying in your thirties feels like from the outside to the people watching. A calculation. A ticking clock. An investment that’s starting to look like it might not pay off.

I recently heard Stephen Bartlett (Diary of a CEO) say that cringe is the cost of entry into success. And I think he’s right, but what nobody prepares you for is how much more expensive that entry fee feels in your thirties.

It’s a strange kind of irony… you want to be able to talk to people about what your doing and creating… but dread the questions and trying to help them understand. You want to be seen, have to video that pops off or new opportunity land in your lap… but also you don’t really want anyone in your real life watching your videos.

Someone will share they’ve seen your video and you’ll immediately down play what you’re building so as to not look that serious… if you downplay it you can both make fun of you right?

And I couldn’t help but wonder… why is it so cringe to be seen trying?

Here’s my thoughts… It’s not actually about confidence. Nor is it about caring what others think of you. And it actually has nothing to do with being thirty-something.

It’s far more boring than all of that… it’s your primitive brain. The part of you that still thinks you live in the Stone Age and could be taken out by a sabor tooth tier at any minute.

As humans, we are literally wired to want to be accepted. We’re wired to want to fit in, not to stand out. We are wired to want to be seen as a regular part of the crowd and therefore avoid doing anything that might be seen as socially weird or awkward.

While the biggest fear we have now-a-days particularly when it comes to feeling cringe online is being cancelled or worse - a family member seeing and wanting to share in the group chat and ask what you’re doing… shame…. but back in the “cave man days” being seen as an outcast wasn’t embarrassing - it was a death sentence. You couldn’t survive without community. Fitting in was survival.

The cringe you feel is your nervous system in survival mode.

None of this is conscious by the way. It’s not something you’re actively thinking. It’s not a “limiting belief” you need to rewrite. It’s a story so deeply engrained in your subconscious that it quite literally feels like if you get caught doing something that’s not the social norm part of you might actually die. (Not in the joking way you text a friend “I’m dead” after seeing something funny either… )

Obviously we logically know we won’t die… but when it comes to situations like this our brain throws all logic out the window.

So… what’s the best thing to do with a brain that thinks it’s dieing but is actually totally safe…

Lol I know… so clichè. So unhelpful. But here’s the thing I know now;

The cringe doesn’t really go away… you just stop noticing it. You stop giving it air time. You get better at keeping on keeping on while you’re feeling it.

At some point over the past few years I stopped talking about what I was doing. It wasn’t a dramatic decision intended to test people… but It did show me who was watching and who cared enough to ask…

Almost no-one.

Here’s whats most ironic about that; if they weren’t paying enough attention to ask, they probably weren’t paying enough attention to judge either.

And even when I archived some eight years worth of instagram posts - still no questions.

I never actually quit though. To the people watching and not asking it would have looked that way. But all this time I’ve been in building mode. I stopped doing the version that wasn’t actually me and honestly wasn’t really working for me anyway… and spent the time going deep on discovering what actually felt like mine.

And here we are… only borderline cringe now but publishing anyway.

I had a best friend growing up who’s Mum owned a clothing store in the next town over from us.

I grew up in the sleepiest of country towns, bordered close by another only slightly less sleepy town. Not sleepy in a bad way necessarily, just in the way that nothing exciting really ever happens and anything even slightly unhinged makes talk of the town, and we had to find ways to make our own fun.

Our favourite thing to do on a Saturday morning was go with my friend’s Mum to her clothing store and spend the morning “up town”. That’s what we called it. On Mondays through Wednesdays at school we’d speak of what happened up town on the Saturday just passed, and then Thursday and Friday would be spent planning what we would do up town on the Saturday that was fast approaching.

To be clear, “up town” literally just meant walking the main street for three hours while my friend’s Mum worked in her store, popping in occasionally to give her a break or let her run an errand. We’d explore the local shops lusting over pairs of Roxy baggy hipster jeans, and imagine buying the latest Billabong bikini’s to wear to the pool (the other place we spent a lot of time). We’d meet up with friends, hide in the aisles from boys and occasionally walk around to the skatepark pretending we’d have no idea who we might run into.

Around the first week of every month we’d drop into the newsagent to flick through the pages of the latest Dolly magazine. We were thirteen. Babies, really. With zero real understanding of the world outside the one we were living in - a world of school uniforms and weekends pretending to have money to buy new clothes and families who had lived in the same town for generations and fully intended to keep doing so.

The most scandalous thing we read in those pages were the embarrassing period stories and the girls who had somehow, inexplicably, kissed their cousins. We were horrified. We were obsessed. We would laugh for hours about the stories we read.

As I sit here reminiscing on these far simpler times as a now thirty something Mum of two wild boys, I can’t help but wonder about how those days giggling over the pages of our Dolly magazines wasn’t actually about what we were reading… It was a feeling in the pages. The aliveness that came from the stories. This sense of possibility that at thirteen you absolutely cannot explain.

Our town was different from most small places. The stories I hear from other places are that people love to dream about leaving. They’d talk about all the things they wanted to do when they grew up. The cities they’d live in. The careers they’d build. The life that looked bigger than the one currently available.

Read more

Naturally when I heard about it (and resonated) I couldn't unhear it and I couldn't help but wonder…

Is it really a crisis? Or is it a reclamation?

Here's the thing about the word crisis. It implies we're lost. Confused. Falling apart at the seams. And hey I get it… When you're in it there are definitely moments (lots of them) where that's exactly how it feels. And from the outside? Well it does look a little chaotic.

Women leaving careers they spent a decade building. Shutting down businesses that looked successful from the outside. Pivoting, shifting, questioning everything. Going back to simpler work. Starting entirely new things. Doing it all simultaneously and somehow not exploding.

But lost? No.

We are the most found we have ever been.

And so I've decided to declare this not a career crisis but instead The Great Millennial Comeback. (You heard it here first). And I think it's just getting started.

As millennial women, we did everything right.

Got the degrees. Built the careers. Climbed the ladders. Bought the houses. Had the babies. Started the businesses. Said yes to everything that was supposed to add up to a good life.

And then somewhere in our thirties we looked around and went… wait. Is this actually what I want?

And for many of us that answer was no.

We climbed the ladders without ever stopping to ask if we even liked the ladders. We built the careers without asking whose definition of success we were building toward. We followed the rules like the good little girls we were trained to be and never bothered to ask who wrote them.

So now we're burning down the ladders like the women before us burned their bras... paving a new path.

And while we're at it we are as asking all the questions!

You see - that's not a crisis. That's the most important question a woman can ask herself. And right now there's an entire generation of women asking it simultaneously, loudly, publicly and basicslly with zero fucks given.

That my friend is a reckoning.

Just like Hilary Duff, Legally Blonde and apparently Michelle Branch we're in our comeback era. 🎶 This is what dreams are made of. (I hope you sang that with me).

As with every great comeback theres a certain energy of gratitude and an ode to the past. But the women I'm watching right now aren't rebuilding things... They're building something different entirely. Something that fits the life they're actually living rather than the life they thought they were supposed to want.

But here's the part that I think is most important… it's not what they're building.

It's the way they're building it.

Without outsourcing the decision to anyone else. Without seeking a hundred opinions before moving. Without waiting for permission, for the right moment, for someone to confirm they're ready.

They're moving. Doing the thing. Shaking things up. Powered up and inspired and motivated in a way that the previous version of the hustle (the perform, optimise, repeat version we all fell into) never actually made them feel.

We're not following other people's rules anymore.

We're not looking outside ourselves for the answer.

We're not trading one set of expectations for another.

We're literally just deciding. For ourselves. And then doing it.

And yes… we're also proving something that we were told wasn't possible.

That you can be a mother and a business owner and a wife and have a house and creative projects that light you up and a career that challenges you and a life that feels like yours. That you don't have to choose between ambition and presence, between building something and being someone, between the life that looks good and the life that feels good.

We were told we could have it all and then quietly handed a set of rules that made it impossible. The rules said: pick a lane. Choose what matters most. Sacrifice accordingly.

We are a generation that was told to hustle and grind and optimise and perform, finally deciding that the only metric that matters is whether the life they're living actually feels like theirs.

So if this is you… Welcome to your Great Millennial Comeback x

I hope this gave you words for what you've been experiencing. I hope you can see that you're not lost, you're just in the unfolding. I hope you can feel that fire rising inside of you. I hope you will answer the call. ♡

Every time one of us starts feeling a bit off… that vague, hard to describe, not quite sick but not quite right either feeling… we declare it Quantum leap illness! (And try to get excited rather than flop into the “I'm sick” narrative). A sign we are upleveling. We are acclimating to a new frequency. We are expanding, shifting, becoming available for something more. And our bodies are just… purging. Recalibrating around it.

It sounds slightly unhinged… delusional even but I've noticed it again and again over the years.

The periods in life when you're taking massive action, stepping into a new version of yourself, going after something that genuinely scares and excites you… those are often the periods when your body decides to do the most inconvenient thing and get a little bit sick.

Not properly sick though, that's an important distinction.

When I was pregnant with my second baby I got Influenza A and thought I might die… dramatic yes but I felt like absolute trash. I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't function. Life stopped completely and I had no choice but to lie there and let it pass.

Quantum leap illness is different. It's the sinus congestion that never quite becomes a cold. The mild headache that sits behind your eyes but doesn't stop you. The rundown feeling, the random weird symptoms, the vague sense that your body could tip into something but keeps not quite doing it. And underneath all of it, and this is the part that tells me it's not just being sick, there's still this strange layer of inspiration or motivation. The desire to keep going doesn't disappear. You're tired and you're still lit up about the thing you're in the middle of.

That's quantum leap illness.

And I'm in it right now, as I write this, on my phone, laying on my couch watching episodes of Sex and the City praying my toddler has a long nap because this Mumma needs a hot minute.

It arrived off the back of the most expansive week I've had this year…

A midnight power hour with someone whose work I've followed for almost a decade, followed by a week of actually working with her, getting her eyes on my writing, receiving her feedback. The validation of someone I deeply respect reading my essays and saying these are gold. The moment of genuinely, for the first time, seeing myself as a writer rather than just someone who creates content. (The experience was so expansive I wrote about it here).

It’s a bit funny, because by the time I got on that call with her I already had half a manuscript written of a book I've felt the pull to write for I don't even know how long. And while obviously there were pieces of me that had been fully committed to this for a long time, my identity hadn't caught up yet. And that week, that particular kind of being seen… was the first real moment of “Oh. This isn't just a possibility. This is actually happening. I'm already in it.”

And like clockwork, my body went: noted. Give me a moment.

Now, I always laugh about quantum leap illness and make a bit of a joke of it… but make no mistake, I wholeheartedly believe it's a very real phenomenon and there's an entire spiritual community who believe it too.

But here's where it gets really interesting and what most people don't know… there might be actual science underneath the woo.

When you go through a period of significant identity change, not just changing what you do, but genuinely shifting how you see yourself… your nervous system has to process it and this flags as uncertainty. Your brain doesn't distinguish particularly well between danger and novelty. Starting your dream business, becoming a parent, making more money, finally stepping into a version of yourself you've been working toward… these are all experiences your nervous system has to metabolise. And that process temporarily affects stress hormones, sleep, digestion, immune function.

Even positive change is physiologically stressful. Which is a wild right?

There's also something that trauma researchers have observed that I find genuinely fascinating, the idea that sometimes your body finally has permission to feel things it's been holding at bay. When you're in survival mode, your nervous system suppresses just enough to keep you functioning. The moment things become safer, more stable, more certai… it exhales. And in that exhale, everything that was being held gets to surface.

This is why so many people get sick after finishing exams, after weddings, after launching things, after the big scary leap finally lands.

I used to always think it was my body sabotaging me… or the universe testing me to see if I would push through and do the thing or even choose myself over the thing like I hadn't so many times before.

I'd get really frustrated and it would become a self fulfilling prophecy of self sabotage and self abandonment.

Now… now I get really excited.

I ponder over whats shifting and whats coming and let that becoming the self fulfilling prophecy instead.

**Disclaimer: If symptoms are persistent or genuinely concerning, please consult a healthcare professional. Love Pharmacist Jaimee 🤣🤣

I have ten essays sitting unpublished right now.

Like ten fully edited, ready to publish essays.

Some of them are literally sitting in my Substack app, unscheduled, waiting for me to hit go.

And every few days I sit and write another one (well more like another flows through me). The idea sparks, the story comes alive, the words fill the page. It's been such a long time since I've experienced a creative space like this.

And yet I'm not publishing???

For weeks now I've been telling myself it was a strategy. I was waiting for the audience to grow a little more. Waiting for more eyes on my Instagram. Waiting for the right moment where there would be enough people to receive what I was putting out.

But here's what I've recently had to get honest with myself about.

That's not strategy. That's fear dressed up as strategy.

And it's not the fear I expected.

There is a whole conversation happening online right now about visibility. About the fear of being seen. About showing up online, putting yourself out there, being judged, being criticised, being too much or not enough for whoever is watching.

I have spent eight years working through that fear. Eight years online with reels that got twelve views to content that went viral with hundreds of thousands. I've had nasty comments and beautiful ones. I've been too visible and completely invisible. I have genuinely, truly done the work around being seen.

So when I started to notice I was sitting on all of this work and not publishing it, my first instinct was to go looking for the visibility fear.

Maybe there was still a layer. Maybe something residual was sitting there. I even joined a visibility challenge to make sure I was working through it.

And then I realised.

That's not what this is.

I'm not scared of being seen.

I'm scared of being seen by no one.

That's a completely different fear. And (I know EVERYONE says this) I don't think anyone is really talking about it.

The fear of visibility is the fear of judgment. Of being too much. Of someone seeing you and not liking what they find.

The fear of irrelevance is much quieter and somehow worse. It's not the fear of being judged. It's the fear that you could show up fully, completely, with your whole heart in it and it wouldn't matter to anyone.

That nobody would notice. That the work would land in silence.

And I had to sit with what that silence would actually confirm for me. If I published all ten essays tomorrow and nothing happened - what's the real fear underneath that?

Honestly? It would feel like confirmation. Of all those old beliefs I thought I'd worked through. That I'm not enough. That other women have some secret sauce I don't have. That the women who are growing, who are building audiences, who are seeing their work land… they all have something I don't. That I could pour my whole self into something and still not be the kind of woman whose work matters.

That's not a visibility fear. That's something older and quieter and sitting much deeper.

And here's what I've been sitting with since I named it, because of course I started to see how this fear shows up everywhere. Not just for me, and not just in the online space.

It's the woman who doesn't apply for the job because she's afraid of getting it and still not being enough.

It's the woman who doesn't say how she really feels in a relationship because she's afraid it won't change anything. That she could say the truest thing she's ever said and it still wouldn't matter.

It's the woman who keeps perfecting instead of launching because the work being out there and ignored feels worse than it sitting in a drawer, hidden from the eyes of the world.

It's the woman who doesn't ever actually start the thing because she's afraid of trying her absolute hardest and still being irrelevant.

Judgment means someone noticed.

Irrelevance means nobody did.

And for a lot of women, myself especially, irrelevance is the scarier of the two.

Here's what I'm learning though…

The audience I'm waiting for before I publish? They're not coming to a Substack full of unpublished drafts. They come because I publish. The work is what builds the audience.

You can't wait for the conditions that only the work itself can create.

And the silence I'm so afraid of…the confirmation I'm dreading… it can't actually confirm anything. Because the work sitting in a Google Doc has zero chance of mattering to anyone. The work that's published has at least one.

The fear of irrelevance only wins when it stops you from showing up entirely.

And here's the deeper thing I've been sitting with:

The women whose work lands… whose essays get shared, whose podcasts pop off, whose videos make people stop mid-scroll and send to a friend… they weren't waiting for an audience big enough to make the work matter first. They published into the void. They start with noone but that Aunty, sister or bestie who always has their back. They kept going anyway.

The work has to come first. And in this case its not the inner work… its the actual tangible thing you're wanting to create. Your own “body of work” (whatever this looks like for you).

So if you're reading this and you recognise yourself somewhere in it.. in the thing you keep not starting, the thing you keep perfecting instead of finishing, the truth you keep not saying because what if it doesn't land…

I want to ask you the question I had to ask myself (and if you’re feeling brave and bold and are ready to draw a line in the same hit reply or comment below)...

What are you actually afraid that silence would confirm?

Because I think the answer to that question is more honest and more useful than any visibility challenge.

And I think the move…the one that changes everything… is making it anyway.

And incase anyone needed to hear it…

Say what?!

I couldn’t believe it - I’d worked my butt off putting myself through university to get my degree, and then worked even harder on the other side of that to land my management position, only to find out that other women had found a way to be able to travel the world writing stories on their laptops and be paid for it!

“How fun!” I exclaimed to my retail manager one random Tuesday as I scrolled aggressively, showing her pictures on Instagram of girls my age in bikinis, sipping iced lattes and typing on their laptops. “One day I’m going to quit being a Pharmacist and you’ll see pictures of me by the beach in Bali writing my blog and making money from it.”

I had no idea where to start or what it even looked like to write for a blog - outside of those vibey laptop by the pool shots of course. But I knew opportunity when I saw it and that all too familiar pull of borderline obsessive desire mixed with an intuitive nudge to just do the thing.

So in 2018 I launched a blog called Whitehouse Wellness… in total secret… with an anonymous Instagram account to accompany it.

The three posts I put on that blog were so fun to write and while (for obvious reasons) I never actually got paid to sit poolside at a luxury villa and share my life it was like I’d tapped into something alive.

Around this same time I’d also started to discover podcasts, mainly just from people I loved to watch on YouTube. I’d follow them on Spotify and listen intently on my drives to and from work Tony Robins “no extra time” style (IYKYK).

One particular day a podcast episode about confidence, creativity and self publishing popped up in my new episodes list. A woman named was talking about her blog The Champagne Diet, her fabulous life in New York City and her soon to be released novel Like She Owns the Place.

Realistically I had absolutely nothing in common with her. I was twenty eight, newly married, burnt out from my career and living on Sunshine Coast in Queensland. But something about the way she spoke had me leaning in, all ears. As soon as the podcast episode was done I metaphorically ran to my Audible and bought her book, Girl Code.

That was the start of an almost decade-long love for her work.

First Girl Code, then Like She Owns the Place, then Girl on Fire - I even went back and added Sparkle and Fearless & Fabulous to my Audible library and these became my replacement for podcasts when new episodes weren’t grabbing me.

Cara’s books became the words I’d lean into when I needed inspiration or to feel like I was on the right track and over the years I’ve listened to them again and again.

A few weeks ago, one of her articles landed in my inbox - Are Substack Launches The New Book Parties?

Immediate open from me because I’ve been daydreaming about what a book launch party might look like when Magnetise is finally ready to share with the world and what do you mean Vogue (and Cara) are saying I could just do this on substack?

At the bottom of the email there was a PS “I’ve opened a handful of Substack Power Hour sessions this summer. You can learn more here”.

Here’s something about me… I move fast. And this was a no-brainer. Link clicked. Payment made. Timeslot booked - midnight, Australia time.

The week leading up to the call was rough… between the accumulated sleep debt of a baby who often doesn’t sleep through, a midnight 000 call for the ambulance after my five year old had an asthma attack (he’s fine, the paramedics were amazing) and longer days at the pharmacy than usual. By the time the call arrived I was running on empty in every sense of the world.

I messed up the dates, thinking the call was 24 hours later than it actually was, thank god for Google calendar alerts. I stumbled out of the bathroom, totally bewildered, to my husband saying… “umm I totally fucked up… that call is tonight! I don’t know how I’m going to make it to midnight and not be a complete mess.”

He did what all good husbands would do in this situation - sent me to bed for a power nap so I’d be ready for my power hour. He even sat up himself to make sure I woke in time and didn’t miss it. (Ladies, trust me when I say… if he wanted to he would).

This is the very unglamorous reality that’s usually hidden behind peoples highlight reels proclaiming how much money they recently made in their launch/substack/insert whatever other thing here. Doing unconventional things, at unconventional times… often on a whim.

I had absolutely no trouble waking from my nap though, I was by this stage equal parts nervous, excited (and exhausted)... nervous in a way that kind of surprised me. Cara had asked for Substack links beforehand and the thought of someone who had been writing publicly for literally decades, someone whose work had shaped how I thought about creativity and what it looked like to blaze your own trail actually reading my words felt enormous.

What if she thought I had no business writing on Substack, let alone publishing a book?

WTF was I thinking?

And yet, as the zoom room opened, and I sat across the screen on opposite sides of the world, I found myself totally calm and ready to accept whatever came…

She could see my vision from just three posts.

Three essays, the ones I’d published days earlier, and she understood immediately what I was building and why. She told me I wrote beautifully. And complemented my very Australian accent - the one that most people call totally “bogan”.

I told her about the stories I used to dictate to my great grandmother as a child and how this felt so full circle to that.

I took a full page of notes - little tweaks, ideas and pieces of inspiration to take my writing and substack to the next level.

And somewhere in that conversation I realised that I am exactly where I am meant to be.

Here’s what I want to say to anyone who writes, because I think this part matters as much as the advice she gave me.

Sharing your work with someone you deeply respect is one of the most vulnerable things you can do. You want the feedback, genuinely, you want to grow, you want to be pushed and at the exact same time there’s a part of you bracing for the possibility that they won’t relate to any of it. That the thing you’ve been building in the margins of a very busy and full life won’t land the way you hoped.

I sent her three more pieces after the call, off the back of only five hours of sleep, because I woke up inspired and couldn’t not write.

The comments that came back were things like; I just laughed out loud and UGH YES and love this - it’s so true.

I’ll shamelessly admit that I’ve read the comments multiple times now and allowed myself to actually feel all the feels that came with them.

And as I sit here writing this, another night pushing midnight, another article I couldn’t not write, I’m realising that I don’t think this essay is really about Cara, even though she’s the reason it exists. I think it’s about what happens when something you’ve been building alone gets witnessed by someone whose opinion you both trust and deeply respect.

It doesn’t change what you were building. The work was already good and already true before anyone else read a word of it.

But something shifts when someone else sees it too.

Eight years ago I bought a book on Audible because a voice on a podcast made me want to listen more closely. I had no idea that almost a decade later she’d be reading my writing back to me, laughing out loud, telling me to trust my stories more.

And I guess what I’m really hoping and intending on is that this little piece of the internet gets to have this same effect on you.

The year of the fire horse arrived with promises. Big ones.

After the year of the snake, all that shedding, all that healing, all that uncomfortable inner work.. this was supposed to be the payoff. Instagram promised us so, repeatedly, in the most beautiful fonts you’ve ever seen! The shedding was declared over and we were told that it was finally time for us to step into our power. Manifest everything we want. Finally arrive at the promised land (lol).

I came into this year clear. Focused. Ready. Lit the F up to be completely honest.

I had just come through a really hard private season, the kind you don’t post about and can’t quite explain to people who weren’t inside it. But I was on the other side of it. I could see the silver lining. I knew what I was building. I knew what I was creating this year. I had a plan. Bloomè The Method was ready to launch. The Substack was beginning. This was the year it was all going to come together.

And apparently… the fire horse had other plans.

Here’s what actually happened.

Bloomè didn’t launch the way I planned. The Substack I’d started didn’t feel like the right container anymore (honestly I struggled to write for it no matter how hard I tried). The version of the brand I’d been building; the wellness meets manifestation methodology, the frameworks, the offers, all kept feeling like it was someone else’s. It all made sense on paper… and honestly I could have run with it… but I’ve learnt better than that.

And so I did what I always do when something stops fitting…

I followed the nudge.

Which, this time, looked like burning the version I’d planned and building something I hadn’t expected. This publication was part of it. A book called Magnetise. (Apparently I’m an author now???) A compounding pharmacy I was genuinely scared to walk into, that’s very quickly become one of the best jobs I’ve had in a long time. And a whole new iteration of what Bloome is destined to be… all landing one after the other (in the messiest way possible of course). Some of the biggest pivots of my life, simultaneously, in the year that was supposed to be about arrival. In the year I declared my year to receive.

(Ironic because I’ve also learnt that all of this IS in fact receiving… thats definitely a contemplation I’ll dive into another day).

The reality - when you can pull back and look from a different lens…

The fire horse delivered exactly what it said it would. I just didn’t recognise it because it didn’t arrive in the packaging I was expecting. (Something we all do all too often).

I came into this year thinking I was finally going to step into what I’d built.

It turns out I was being called into something I hadn’t built yet. Something bigger. Something far more important than the map i’d made back in January. In fact, something I couldn’t have mapped out or planned.

And that’s the thing about the fire horse, about any year the internet decides is going to be the one… the magic was never in the forecast. It was never in the portal or the astrology or the collective energy shift. It was in what you were willing to walk toward when the plan stopped working.

So here we are… six months into the new year… I’m finishing my first book. I’m writing essays that feel more like me than anything I’ve created before. I’m thirty five, rebuilding from scratch, and for the first time in a long time (possibly ever) what I’m building feels completely, unmistakably mine.

The year of the fire horse didn’t give me what I planned.

It gave me something better. Something I couldn’t have planned.

And I couldn’t help but wonder… maybe that was always the point.

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Be impressive before thirty.

Build the business, blow up on social media, hit the revenue milestones, acquire the property portfolio, become someone worth talking about. Do all of that before thirty and you’re exceptional.

Do it after thirty and you’re just… doing what everyone else is doing. Afterall, there is no Forbes, 40 under 40 list that anyone is hyped up to be on and add to their instagram bio for the world to see.

And because I’m not immune to these unspoken and only felt rules… I too was obsessed with making something of myself by thirty…

And so the closer I got to thirty, the louder the noise became.

I turned thirty four weeks after my first baby was born.

In the lead up to it…in the months that were supposed to be the ones where I finally went all in, finally built the thing - the business I’d been obsessing over in every waking moment outside of my 60hour pharmacy weeks, finally became the version of myself I’d been working toward, the pandemic happened. The world shut down. As a Pharmacist, I was an essential worker so my life looked almost exactly the same as it always had, just the addition of some new, very expensive perspex screens that now separated me from the public at the pharmacy counter.

I was pregnant. Working casual locum shifts after having only just quit my six-figure salary management position. Sleeping on the couch most evenings because that’s what the first trimester asks of you and nobody tells you how total that exhaustion is.

This was not the “year I turn thirty” I had planned.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started noticing something that made the noise louder than it had ever been.

The women who had started building their online businesses right alongside me… same starting line, similar dreams, similar early years of figuring it out, were all beginning to cross a threshold. In the language of online business at this time, this meant one thing: five figure months. Six and multiple-six figure years. The numbers that meant you had made it, that the algorithm had chosen you, that the years of showing up had finally compounded into something real.

And here I was… it felt liek I couldn’t have been further away from where I wanted to be.

What’s only just occurred to me thanks to a viral reel on Instagram (this is particularly for my girls who “grew up” watching Sex and the City) is that Carrie Bradshaw was 32 in season one.

Thirty-two.

Which means everything we watched her become; the writing career, the loves, the losses, the friendships, the shoes, the outfits, the woman she grew into across six seasons and two movies… all of it happened in her thirties.

**Pause for dramatic effect because say what?!?!?

We literally spent our twenties thinking we were supposed to have arrived by now. That thirty was this peak pinnacle position and after that nothing else mattered. We romanticized a version of life we didn’t even realise was set in the decade we were racing toward (some would even call it a downward slope toward).

The timeline was never real. It was just more noise from the outside world. More stories designed to keep us deep in conditioning.

And the noise was loudest right before something important was about to happen… which, in my experience, is always how it goes. The comparison, the falling behind, the watching others cross thresholds you thought you were supposed to have crossed by now… that’s not evidence that you’re losing, or that the universe is testing you or that your journey just has to be longer harder or anything else for that matter. It’s usually a sign that you’re about to find out what you’re actually building.

My thirties have not looked like what I planned. They’ve looked better, better than I could have imagine despite never reaching the pinnacle five figure months in an online business.

The women I watched hit milestone after milestone the last few years… some of them are still there, but most of them have moved on to something else entirely. Some of them are quietly wondering if it was worth it.

And me? I’m thirty five. I’ve just made three of the biggest pivots of my life simultaneously. I’m finishing my first book. I’m building something that finally, actually feels like mine and yet feels bigger than me at the same time. I know who I am. I love who I am. I love my life and everything we’re building as a family. (By the way did I mention I now have two boys?)

Season one didn’t look impressive. It rarely does.

But if Sex and the City taught us anything…the best episodes are still coming.

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It seems like every six months, the internet remembers we had goals.

January brings the vision boards, the word of the year, the declarations. June brings the reckoning…the mid-year reset, the “lock in” challenge, the carefully designed programme to help you become (in the next six months) the woman you promised yourself you’d be by now.

No shade to the women who run these things, I know the intention is to help women win. Thats what we all want. And to the women locking in, I totally understand the appeal. I really do. There’s something genuinely comforting about a fresh start, a clean slate, a new system that might finally be the one that works.

But I’ve been watching this cycle for years…

And what I notice underneath it is a woman who is actually exhausted from the relentless pursuit of a version of herself that seems to keep moving just out of reach.

It started with the pursuit to become her highest, best self and somewhere in the middle of it, she lost herself entirely.

I know this because I was her.

A couple of years ago, I made a decision that felt equal parts inspired and completely unhinged. I was going to run an experiment. I was going to follow the nudges, you know those quiet inner pulls that don’t come with logic attached. I wanted to see where they would lead me if I just committed to follow only what I used to call “the obvious next step. I was quite vocal about it too - I shared it all over my Instagram stories, no doubt if you scroll back far enough there’s a TikTok video or two on it as well. I was all in.

And then the very first nudge arrived.

Stop posting. Archive everything. Take six weeks off social media.

Weirdly specific I know.

Excuse me what? I thought, staring at the words scrawled inside the brand new journal I’d purchased for the occasion.

Eight years of work. Hundreds of posts. A business (albeit small) I had built from nothing.

It was clear as day - this wasn’t about a pivot or rebrand. I was essentially being asked to disappear. Ok that probably sounds dramatic since written above it clearly says six weeks, but to someone who’s lived eight years chronically online six weeks is alot.

I breathed, announced on my stories that the first “obvious next step” was a little break from socials and deleted every single post.

What followed was one of the strangest and most beautiful years of my life.

I went on a trip I didn’t share. I got the car I’d been wanting, manifested it, actually, in the most undramatic way possible and I didn’t post about that either. It felt sacred. Private. Like something that belonged entirely to me, and sharing it would have somehow made it less real.

I actually remember the day I picked up my new car. My husband has surprised me by asking the dealership to make a big deal about it. She was covered in a black sheet with a giant red bow, they filmed me pulling it off and took photos of the salesman handing me the keys. I had the most surreal, pinch me moment driving it out of the dea;ership and later up to Port Douglas for a celebratory Prosecco… none of which made it to Instagram.

After six weeks I had no desire to return and I was guided in other directions instead.

I worked back at the pharmacy. I journalled. I fell pregnant with my second baby and after he was born turned my entire front garden into a veggie patch with nine raised garden beds from Bunnings.

And then I felt it… the pull to make my comeback on socials… no rebrand or lesson or content strategy though. I started posting about my garden.

That was my re-entry. The girl who made her husband build nine raised bunnings gardens and then planted thousands of flower seeds (alongside the herbs and veggies of course).

Twelve months of silence from a woman who had spent eight years building a public body of work and what brought her back was a garden.

Here’s what I learned in that year that no reset could have taught me:

The exhaustion most women are feeling right now is not from doing too little. It’s from doing everything in the wrong direction.

The self-development industry has spent years telling women there is a gap between who they are and who they need to become.. and that the work is crossing it.

More healing. More optimisation. More becoming.

Another reset, another challenge, another layer to work through before she is finally, fully herself.

But the gap was never about becoming anything.

It’s remembering and returning, back to the version of you that existed before the world (and the internet) told you who you should be. Before the optimisation and performance. Before you started measuring your own aliveness against a highlight reel of someone else’s becoming.

That year I went quiet, I wasn’t becoming anything. I was remembering.

Of course I’m not suggesting you archive your posts and disappear for twelve months. The nudge I followed was mine, you could say I did it so you don’t have to?

But if you’re standing at the mid-year mark feeling behind, feeling like another reset might finally be the thing that fixes the gap… I want to offer you a different question.

Not: what do I need to do differently in the next six months?

But: what have I been doing that was never actually mine to do?

I know it sounds cliche but I believe the most radical thing a woman can do is simply come back to herself.

Not the optimised version. Not the highest self. Just herself.

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Depth.

Devotion.

Discernment.

If I’m honest, this past Full Moon feels like it’s asked me to go deeper - to a depth Ive never gone before.

Deeper into my craft, my work, my health, my self trust, my knowing, my spiritual practices.

Deeper into the life I keep saying I want, but if im really hinest have been kind of snoozing on bringing to life.

And its abundantly clear to me that it isnt about shedding old versions or becoming someone new. And its not about new depths of healing or needing to alchemise more shadows or limitations. Because as you to step into truth - all of that begins to melt away.

If I’m really honest, I think there’s been a part of me waiting for clarity. Waiting for the perfect plan. Waiting for some sort certainty of things to come. Waiting for life to feel calmer, quieter and more spacious with time (which is a long way off - I have a 1 year old and a 5 year old haha)

And while I actually believe there are chapters of life for waiting (truly), I also think there comes a point where waiting quietly turns into avoidance.

Where overthinking disguises itself as preparation and collecting ideas becomes a substitute for devotional movement.

One thing I know for sure - clarity and certainty come from momentum, not contemplation.

So… I’ve decided to try a little experiment. I've done this before and holy moly did my life shift - from deleting instagram to stepping away from a business id spent years building - it was wild!!!

For the next 90 days, I’m recommitting to living a little more devoted.

For me this isnt a hustle culture make it happen, optimise-my-life, perfectly-curated-morning-routine kind of thing...

Its simply a;

“What feels aligned?”

“What feels alive?”

“What is the next right move?”

kind of way to move through life.

And I know massive momentum is built from here. This kind of Devotion sends to greatest of ripples through the quantum field.

I want to see what happens when I stop waiting to feel ready and simply begin following the things I feel genuinely called toward.

These are things I feel matter and will most likely become a huge part of the experiment (I say most likely because whn you move in this was you reallh don't know what could play out)

• My health.

• My creativity.

• My writing.

• My work.

• My business.

• My family.

• My wellbeing.

• My skin (yes, genuinely 😅).

• The projects that keep whispering to me.

• The ideas I can’t stop thinking about.

The life I know I’m quietly building.

No rules, no burnout, no forcing, no abandoning myself in the process.

Just devotion.

Small, aligned, consistent devotion.

And documenting what unfolds because I’m genuinely curious to see what unfolds this time.

Maybe nothing dramatic, but maybe something massive. I feel like I'm on the verge of the greatest quantum leap of my life.

I’m calling it The Experiment.

And if you’d like to come along, I’ll be sharing little reflections, messy middle moments, observations, behind-the-scenes thoughts and things I’m noticing as I go.

No grand promises or perfectly packaged lessons.

Just real life as it unfolds…

Let’s see what happens.