My Story

I was born in a tiny town on the north coast of Tasmania, the last baby delivered there before the local hospital was decommissioned for being too small to safely run a maternity ward. It's a strange thing to know about yourself, that the hospital you were born in doesn't exist anymore. Maybe that's fitting, because for a long time, neither did the version of me I actually was.

Let me take you back to 2009. I was living in Shanghai with my husband and our two daughters, after two years in Istanbul and, before that, Penang. I had a job I loved, teaching Drama to wonderful students. I travelled to places most people only get to dream about. From the outside, I had everything.

And underneath it, I was highly anxious, depressed, and disconnected. My mood flicked on and off like a faulty light switch.

I tried to fix it the way I knew how. I started a Biggest Loser competition at my school with a group of women, changed how I ate, did an insane two-month training block, and lost 15 kilos. I had the flattest stomach of my life. I looked confident. Inside, I was silently screaming.

In 2013 we moved to Singapore. I kept teaching, kept looking for the thing that would finally settle me. I did an intensive yoga teacher training and nearly had a breakdown doing it, which is its own kind of joke: how was I good enough at guiding other people to their bliss and so frazzled underneath my own?

Somewhere in there I heard a podcast that changed how I understood myself. The host was talking about what we attach our ego to. Most of us, he said, attach it to being right. I did. It meant I was scared constantly, and it meant I didn't trust myself, not even a little. He talked about attaching your ego to being a learner instead, to growth instead of certainty.

In 2018, I was asked to apply for a role leading Positive Education at the school where I worked. Someone believed I had it in me to lead. Being seen like that, believed in like that, was the first step back toward myself. I studied positive psychology like it was oxygen. I finished my Master's. I realised what I actually loved was working with adults, helping them learn how to flourish, the same way children get taught and supported and so rarely get to keep being taught once they grow up.

That was one door back to myself. There was another one I hadn't opened yet.

For years, underneath all of it, my body felt like my enemy. I was tired and bloated no matter what I did. My neck, shoulders and back ached with no injury to explain it. I was living what looked, on paper, like a healthy life, and none of it was landing. I was anxious, stressed, depressed, and responsible for a lot of people who needed me to be fine.

One afternoon, teaching a class, one of my students asked, in front of everyone, if I was pregnant. She meant it kindly. Her classmates lit up, excited for me. I felt humiliated. I answered with something sharp enough to end the conversation, and wiped my eyes while I did it.

I knew that day it wasn't about my weight. It was that I was constantly apologising to myself for being me.

For a lot of years, I dealt with that the way plenty of us do. Wine became my closest friend, the one I looked forward to seeing every Friday. She made me less anxious. Less doubtful. More fun. I was so enmeshed in that relationship that it took three or four real attempts to leave it. Every time, what scared me wasn't my health. It was who I'd be without her. Would I still be fun? Would I lose my edge?

In January this year, I made a decision, though I was careful not to call it that at the time. I told myself it was a three-month break, paired with a strength training block I'd already committed to. Three months became six. I never let myself say "forever." I wasn't ready for that word yet. But morning by morning, I noticed I loved the clear head and the quiet self-respect of a sober Saturday more than I'd ever loved the fun of the night before. Choosing that, I realised, wasn't just choosing me. It was choosing my future.

I'm seven months in now. I've told the people I love that I'm done, out loud, for good.

What's changed isn't just the drinking. A few weeks ago, getting ready for a talk that scared me, I noticed I was doing something differently. In the past, I'd have stalled, avoided starting, poured a glass to take the edge off and sabotage myself at the same time. Instead, I opened my laptop, took a breath, and said, in my head, "I trust you, Nicole." Then I got to work. The fear was still there. It's just that we've made friends, the fear and I, the same way I once had to end a friendship with something that was quietly destroying me.

One relationship ended so another one could begin.

I don't tell you this so you'll feel sorry for the woman in the classroom, or impressed by the woman who quit drinking. I tell you because I think a lot of us are still in that classroom somewhere, still apologising for being ourselves, and I don't think the way out is fixing what's broken. I think it's noticing what's already strong in you, the way I finally noticed it in myself, and choosing it, on purpose, morning after morning, until it's just who you are.

That's the gap I help people close now, in the work I do: between who you know yourself to be, and how you actually show up.