250 Blogs Later: An Introduction

This is my 250th blog.

And somehow, after all of these years of writing, questioning, reflecting, teaching, and sharing, it feels like perhaps this is finally the right moment to introduce myself properly.

Not the professional biography version.

Not the polished list of credentials, accomplishments, roles, and titles we are taught to use as shorthand for who we are.

I mean the human introduction.

The real one.

The one that explains how a girl born on the West Coast of New Zealand, raised in poverty and wild beauty, became a teenage mother, a high school dropout, an immigrant, an educator, a strategist, a writer, a board chair, a traveller, a creator, and a woman still actively learning what it means to consciously create a life.

Because the truth is, my work did not emerge from theory alone.

It emerged from living.

From trying to understand why human beings suffer.

Why shame can become an invisible architecture inside a life.

Why poverty shapes what we believe is possible.

Why some people become trapped inside the circumstances that shaped them while others somehow begin creating something different.

And perhaps most importantly:

My life has been an ongoing inquiry into that question.

I grew up poor.

And I don’t mean poor as a metaphor. I mean the kind of poor where money was always part of the atmosphere. The kind of poor that teaches you to scan, stretch, make do, and understand very early that not everyone is moving through the world with the same options.

But poverty was not the whole story.

There was also beauty.

There was the wildness of New Zealand.

There was nature.

There was imagination.

There was family.

There was a kind of freedom in my early life that I still carry in my bones.

In many ways, my childhood held something almost idyllic alongside the struggle. It was not perfect. But it was alive. There was simplicity, belonging, and a sense of the world being wide open.

Then came Canada.

Immigration was part of my journey, but not in the way people often assume. It was not simply about moving countries. It was about entering a new chapter of life where things that had long lived beneath the surface in my family began to emerge more visibly.

My parents were both shaped by patterns of generational trauma that did not begin with them.

Like many families, there were wounds, survival patterns, and forms of pain that had travelled across generations long before I arrived. Some of those patterns surfaced in difficult ways. Some created harm. Some shaped the emotional landscape of our family in ways I would spend years trying to understand.

But that is not the whole story.

What I see more clearly now as an adult is that both of my parents were also powerful cycle breakers.

They were human beings trying to create something different from what they themselves had known.

And I think anyone who has ever attempted to interrupt generational patterns understands how difficult that truly is.

To parent while carrying wounds you never had the opportunity to heal.

To try to create safety when safety was not consistently modeled for you.

To love people while still learning how to love yourself.

To build a new future while carrying an old history inside your nervous system.

I think one of the reasons I hold so much compassion for human beings is because I grew up witnessing both things at once:

the ways trauma repeats itself,

and the extraordinary effort it takes to stop its repetition.

There were also the realities that come when a family navigates decades of mental health struggles.

Those words can sound clinical from the outside, but inside a family they are not clinical at all. They are daily life. They are uncertainty, responsibility, tenderness, worry, adaptation, and love braided together.

I learned early what it meant to care.

Not as an abstract virtue.

Not as a performance of goodness.

But as something you do when people you love are struggling.

You show up.

You adjust.

You become attuned.

You learn to read rooms, moods, silences, and needs.

You learn that love is not always soft. Sometimes love is practical. Sometimes it is watchful. Sometimes it is tired. Sometimes it is doing what needs to be done because someone has to.

I do not want to frame caregiving only as a burden.

Because it was also an expression of love.

But it shaped me deeply.

It shaped what I believed was possible.

It shaped how much responsibility I carried.

It shaped the way I understood survival, care, and human fragility.

Long before I had language for systems, trauma, leadership, or transformation, I was already learning how much human beings are shaped by what they are holding.

I became a teenage mother.

I dropped out of high school.

I experienced domestic violence.

There were years where I struggled with suicidal ideation.

There was sexual assault.

There were long stretches of my life where I did not experience my body as belonging to me.

And like many women, I learned very early that my value seemed to live in what I could provide for others.

In being useful.

Reliable.

Strong.

Needed.

Caring.

Capable.

I became extraordinarily good at carrying things.

At helping.

At surviving.

At adapting to what other people needed from me.

But underneath much of that was a profound disconnection from myself.

From my own needs.

From my own body.

From my own worth outside of usefulness.

Looking back now, I can see there were years where I did not fully believe my life belonged to me.

And I became a mother inside circumstances I wished my children did not have to know.

That is one of the truths at the centre of my story.

Not shame about having my children. Never that.

My children have always been one of the greatest gifts of my life.

But I carried deep shame about the circumstances I had brought them into.

The struggle.

The instability.

The hardship.

The feeling that I had somehow failed them before life had even properly begun.

And if I am being honest, what moved me forward in those early years was not some polished vision of purpose.

It was love.

And shame.

And a fierce, fiery desire to create something better for my children.

I wanted to fix what I felt I had broken.

Not them.

Never them.

But the conditions around them. The story they had been born into. The limits I feared would close in around their lives if I did not find a way to create something different.

So I went back to school.

I pushed myself.

I worked.

I studied.

I learned how to survive and then how to build.

I began creating possibilities where I had previously only seen walls.

Looking back now, I can see that much of my life in my late teens and early twenties was shaped by both love and survival at the same time.

I was not simply trying to build a career.

I was trying to rewrite inheritance.

And underneath all of that, there was something else too.

From the time I was a small child, I carried a knowing that I was here to make a difference.

I could not have explained it then. I did not have language for it. It was not ambition in the traditional sense. It was not about titles or status or achievement.

It was quieter than that.

A sense that my life was meant to matter.

That I was here to contribute something.

That there was more possible than the circumstances I could see in front of me.

For many years, that knowing lived beside shame.

Beside fear.

Beside survival.

Beside the voice that told me I had already made too many mistakes.

And maybe that is why I care so much about the idea of a created life.

Because I do not speak about creating life from a conceptual place.

I speak as someone who has had to create and recreate her life many times.

Not once.

Not neatly.

Not perfectly.

Again and again and again.

But when I look back now, I do not only see a story of overcoming.

I see a love story.

Not the kind of love story we are usually taught to look for. Not a story where someone arrives to save us, complete us, or make us whole.

I mean the long, difficult, sacred journey of learning to fall in love with myself.

That has perhaps been the deepest work of my life.

For much of my life, I knew how to push.

I knew how to survive.

I knew how to achieve.

I knew how to care for others.

I knew how to carry responsibility.

But loving myself was different.

Loving myself required me to stop relating to myself only through what I could produce, fix, carry, or overcome.

It required deep healing work.

It required turning toward the parts of me I had judged.

The younger versions of me I had blamed.

The frightened parts.

The ashamed parts.

The parts that thought they had to earn their place in the world by being useful, strong, capable, and endlessly responsible.

And about a decade ago, something significant began to shift.

Not all at once.

But slowly, consistently, and undeniably.

I began to understand that creating a life was not only about building something better on the outside.

It was also about changing the relationship I had with myself on the inside.

It was about learning to meet myself with compassion.

To acknowledge what I had survived.

To forgive what I did not yet know how to do differently.

To understand that my worth did not need to be earned through exhaustion, caregiving, usefulness, achievement, or survival.

To learn that my body belonged to me.

To see my life not as evidence of failure, but as evidence of becoming.

Over time, I returned to education.

I built a career.

I became an educator myself.

I worked in many organizations, causing transformation, leadership, governance, strategy, and digital innovation.

I raised children.

I travelled.

I asked better questions.

I made new choices.

I healed parts of myself I once thought were simply who I was.

I kept becoming.

And eventually, those inquiries became this body of work.

Two hundred and fifty blogs later, I can see that I have really been writing about one thing all along:

Not reinvention in the shallow sense.

Not manifestation detached from reality.

Not pretending pain does not exist.

Not denying the force of poverty, trauma, systems, history, mental health, or inherited wounds.

I mean the ongoing human ability to participate in who we become.

Because a created life is not a perfect life.

It is not a life free of grief, contradiction, fear, uncertainty, or old patterns that still rise up asking to be healed.

I still experience all of those things.

I am still learning.

Still healing.

Still undoing.

Still discovering myself.

Still creating.

When people encounter my work now, they often meet me in the middle of the story.

They see the educator.

The strategist.

The writer.

The woman living in Bali.

The leader.

The creator.

But none of this emerged fully formed.

My life has been built slowly, imperfectly, painfully, joyfully, curiously, relationally, and consciously over time.

And I am still building it.

In many ways, these 250 blogs are not a collection of answers.

They are a living archive of inquiry.

An ongoing conversation with life itself.

A record of one human being trying to understand what it means to live with greater awareness, freedom, humanity, courage, tenderness, and participation.

If you have been reading my work for years, thank you for walking alongside me.

Thank you for your reflections, your questions, your vulnerability, your openness, and your willingness to explore these inquiries with me.

And if this is your first time here, welcome.

I am grateful our paths have crossed.