The Girl Who Cried For The Wolf

My Mission:

The world’s getting pretty dark. It feels as if history continues to repeat itself. I felt helpless for a while, unable to do anything but watch as the world continued burning itself to ashes in the flames of hatred and fear. And me with it. But I realised I have a voice, and I have a mind, and I have hands. And surely there are other people out there who feel the same, and want to do something but don’t know what, or how, or where. My mission is to spread knowledge, light and curiosity of thought. I would love to build a community for kind and curious minds, so we can set the world on fire with our love, compassion, intellect and curiosity. Interact, connect with me. Let’s shed some more light on all this dark!

So a little about me…

I grew up in the UK. The grey country. The country steeped in a colourful history (mainly red and black) of violence, oppression, pursuit of material wealth and colonialism – no matter the cost. This was reflected, on an intrinsic level, in the way I was raised: By a narcissistic father and a self-sacrificing mother.  

My father is colonialism personified. Hearing this, it’ll be of no surprise to you that his job was a second-hand car dealer – of high-end cars, I might add (I’m sure he’d appreciate the addition of ‘high end’). He drove Ferraris on tiny English country lanes, dodged tractors in his Lamborghinis, and sped through horse and cow dung in his Porches. Friends would come knocking on my father’s door, excited to shake hands over the deal of their first sports car, only to come back a few weeks later wondering if my father really sacrificed their friendship over a car sale. But once that car was out of his yard, so was his conscious.

“Trauma is stored in the body until it is felt, and I wasn’t at all good at feeling anything much.“

The same philosophy applied to his marriage to my mother. He was a child in a man’s body, and my mother was a person who believed her value was derived from those she fixed. My father would allow my mother to think she was fixing him, and in exchange she was to turn a blind eye to his emotional abuse, absent parenting, abusive parenting (not the most advisable of parenting styles) and multiple affairs. Sounds fair right?

My father believed everything was a commodity. And what do colonisers do with valuable commodities? They try to own them. If they can’t buy them, why not try manipulation? Convince the commodity they are nothing without the coloniser, and so the commodity comes running into the arms of coloniser, having learned ‘not to bite the hand that feeds you’ (my least favourite saying. Please, if the hand that feeds you comes with terms and conditions, tear it to shreds. You are nothing more than a goose being fattened for the slaughter otherwise). But if manipulation doesn’t result in the desired effects, then they move to force.  Unfortunately for me, I was a valuable commodity in my father’s eyes. I was the tool to soothe his internalised inadequacy, to ebb the pain of his unending insecurity. For he was a black hole, all his beliefs invested in the external world, in the material. Becoming, as I see it, antimatter. But, fortunately enough for me (or unfortunately – the older I get the more I see the benefits to ignorance and reduced intellectualism), I was able to decern that I, as a matter of fact, was not a commodity. That’s why it was so painful to watch myself be bought. Then to watch myself be manipulated. Then to watch myself be taken by force.

So, after our lives in the UK became too ugly to bare, dripping in misery, depression and abuse (in all its shapes and sizes) behind closed doors, my mother whisked me away to the other side of the planet: Australia. She gave my father an ultimatum: his family, or his life of lies. He didn’t choose his family.

Life was good in Australia. Especially after the divorce. It meant I didn’t have to spend as much time with my father. Spending time with him was a whirlwind of confusion, self-hatred and overall internalised inadequacy. When parents abuse their children, the child will never blame the parent. A child’s brain just isn’t designed that way (just talk to Gabor Mate or 80% of the population). Instead, the child will point the finger at themselves and wonder what they did to deserve such treatment. And for an intellectual child, the story complicates, as they can see that what their parent did was wrong, but they cannot understand why the one person they rely on for love and safety would make them feel such horrible things. What’s wrong with me? What did I do to deserve this? How can I change myself so that I can be loved?

Trauma is stored in the body until it is felt, and I wasn’t at all good at feeling anything much. I spent all my teenage years heavily dissociated, and I developed a raging eating disorder which had me in and out of hospitals for the better part of a year. I played parkour between all the ways to cope that weren’t really coping. I discovered alcohol; the elixir of life – or so I thought – for it was the only thing that stopped my pain. The alcohol made the highs so much higher, and, as everything requires a balance, the lows so much lower. My childhood repeated itself unconsciously, leading to multiple assaults and hypersexuality. I had been taught I was a commodity, and my body was the nearest thing I could barter my worth with. I fell into the cycle of self-harm, of eating disorders, of substance abuse, of risk taking and impulsive behaviours. I’m sure, during that time, a part of my soul died, and I got a front row seat in watching that happen, but at least I’ve got a few hectic stories I can tell my grandchildren around a woodfire (I’m joking, those stories aren’t suitable for children).

On the surface I thrived. I got straight As, a 98 ATAR, and got into my desired course of Physiotherapy. In university, I topped a fair few of my classes and was offered to graduate with Honours. But underneath it all I was dying. I had become the very man I ran from; My father, the human embodiment of a black hole.

I met my current partner, and I treated him as my father had treated my mother. I lied, I cheated, I manipulated, and I abused. I saw his self-confidence and intrinsic sense of safety as a commodity, and I wanted to own it. But our wounds sung to one another. We were attracted to the very things within the other that would result in our downfall. Chaos was my familiar. Pain was my familiar, and I would’ve rather danced with the devil a thousand times if it meant I never had to leap into the unknown.

I was living in a town up north, Karratha, and I had just quit my job. I was falling apart, and I was on the verge of ending it all together. I didn’t see a way out, not a clear one anyway, and I couldn’t get off the wheel. One night, I woke at three in the morning, my partner had left for work, and I had felt the most impending sense of terror I’d ever experienced. The shadows seemed to literally close in around me. It was like they were screaming at me to get out the house. And so I did. I finally listened. And at three in the morning I packed up, got in my old 80 series Landcruiser, and drove the sixteen-hour drive back down to Perth. The entire drive I was plagued with this sense of terror, but it grew less the closer I got to home.

I made the move, I ended things with my partner, I got a new job, but I was still running, I wasn’t changing anything, or understanding myself in terms of why I kept choosing to live the way I was. One morning I woke up, still drunk from the night before. I hadn’t been able to leave my apartment in days. Even the alcohol, I ordered to the door – seven bottles of champagne to see me through the day. I had reached the point where I couldn’t live without intoxication. It was, quite simply, too painful. So one such alcohol delivery arrived, just in time for my morning beverage (it was 8:30am). I’d already finished off half a bottle of the left-over grog from the day before, so I was unsteady on my feet. I ended up fainting, and woke up with my head split open, blood all over the wall, and my roommate peering down at me telling me I had a serious problem – but he got it, because he’d been through it too.

I knew I did, of course I did. I’ve always been far too self-aware for my own good. And I’d lived with addictions before. But alcohol was the only thing that could put a stop to the self-torment, and I was six years deep in the spiral of this specific coping mechanism. I was stuck on a loop in my mind. The alcohol would numb the unprocessed trauma, so I could go out and numbly traumatise myself further, and then I needed more alcohol to numb from that as well. I was a hamster on a wheel, and I had no idea how to get off.

“You see, alcoholism, and any addiction, is a symptom. Symptoms are not causes and will continue to come back until the cause is addressed.”

I got back together with my partner, who, and still to this day does, help me see through the bullshit I was living, and helped me make constructive choices to set myself up for success instead of failure. I left my old group of friends and got away from the city and all the temptations it brought.

You see, alcoholism, and any addiction, is a symptom. Symptoms are not causes and will continue to come back if the cause isn’t rectified. My cause was a fear of feeling. It was an inherent terror of the present moment because that meant I had to get inside my body (that’s where the emotions live – SPOOOKKYYY) and there was too much trauma for me to process without help (and no, medications didn’t help, we are all different, that’s why there’s no blue print for healing).

So I built a community around myself, and I tried a variety of therapies until I found one that worked for me. I truly didn’t believe I could ever be okay. I didn’t believe that my story would be one that wasn’t just relentless suffering. But one day I went to a breathwork session, and for the first time in my life, I allowed myself to feel. I screamed and I howled and I cried and I yowled until my throat was raw and my voice was broken. But more importantly I allowed myself to feel my pain. With no expectation. With no need to act. I just felt. And then I got space. I got the space to think new thoughts, and to choose new choices that weren’t just my unconscious conditioning. It was terrifying. But I’d made a decision. I had walked the path to hell (or whatever you want to call it), and I knew the path well. The only decision I made was that I wanted to start walking a new path. It didn’t matter what it was, just as long as it wasn’t the same one.

The act of quitting alcohol was the easy part. The hard part was choosing, each and every day, to address the cause. To continue to feel every feeling. To continue to cry when I needed to cry, and to speak when I needed to speak, and to scream when I needed to scream. I spent months in tears. I didn’t think they’d ever stop. But they did. And then I got to experience joy. And I got to experience curiosity, and passion and pain and frustration. I got to experience feelings that weren’t just unending grief.

I surrendered myself over to the process of living. I relinquished the control I never actually had. I took my faith away from the material world, and I placed it within myself. Now that’s terrifying, because it means stepping away from the victim mentality. It means taking responsibility for each and every choice you make. It means knowing that if I am miserable, it is up to me to create a new reality where I am not. I have always thought of myself as a follower, but unfortunately, or fortunately, I have a wildfire in me that can’t be tamed, and if I don’t follow its beacon, or if I try to gutter it out, the cold it leaves in its absence will destroy me.

I continued to confront my demons – for want of better linguistics – and the more I healed, the more magic started to happen. One evening, purely by chance, I channelled someone’s spirit (wild right?). I found out this was called being a Medium – a trance medium to be specific. I had always been sensitive to the spirit world as a child. But adult hood painted over my canvas with grey, and I put it all down to an overactive imagination.

More and more incredible things started to happen the more that I healed. I rediscovered my freewill, my passion, my intuition, my wildfire and started being able to develop my skills as a psychic medium (trust me, I didn’t want those skills when I started, I didn’t want to “see dead people”, but I’ve grown to love and appreciate the gift I have). It allows me to bring peace to my family and friends who have lost people dear to them, and that is an incredible gift to be able to facilitate. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

But, as life would have it, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer shortly after my one year anniversary of sobriety. She’s been diagnosed with stage 3 four years prior, and that almost killed me. She was given six to twelve months to live. My mother has, and always will be, my closest friend, my saviour, my confidant, the one I call about anything and everything, and it will destroy me when she passes, I wouldn’t be human if it didn’t, but I know it will be another metamorphosis, and I know, better than most, that life isn’t over after we die. Of course I’m scared. But I know I’m going to be okay, simply because I want to be okay. And that decision alone is all I need to have the hope to continue my journey.

I am now training to be a psychic medium, an energy healer and am continuing to practise as a physiotherapist alongside all this whilst also spending time with my mum. I’m writing a book – The Girl Who Cried For The Wolf – which I hope to publish in 2026. The book is my baby. My pride and joy. A bit of my soul in the form of paper. Many tears have been shed in its making and I’m sure many more will before it is published. My dream is to provide a scaffolding of healing for others. I understand there is no one way to heal, and I understand that it is not a path we all survive, but I hope to offer a light in the darkness for those who are struggling to find their way, and for those that want to find their way.

I have no idea where I’m going, but I’ve learnt to trust in the ways of the universe, for they have led me so far already. I am excited about the future, because I know it’ll be big, it’ll be bold, and it’ll be vibrantly colourful.

I hope this little iceberg of me resonates with some people, and I would love to hear about your journeys, about your hopes and dreams. I would love to celebrate our differences and add your colors to the masterpiece. Thank you for showing up, thank you for hearing me, thank you for being you. I love and appreciate you <3