CHAPTER 1

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​I had disappeared inside myself — and called it strategy.

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I was never trying to be different. I was just always okay in my differences.

I remember being eight years old, stepping out of the elevator at the top of the CN Tower with my brother Greg. He was amazed. I looked around at the concrete skyline and thought — is this it? I wanted the forest. I wanted nature. Animals, horses, forests, rivers, oceans. I always did.

My parents let us both be exactly who we were. Greg chased sport and knew every stat — he would pick me up after a softball game not understanding how I didn't even know who won. I played sport, but I was always drawn to something else entirely. I chased nature. That was the gift they gave us — the freedom to be completely different, and completely loved.

And then, slowly, in a home that became deeply unpredictable, I changed. I didn't notice it happening. I just know that somewhere along the way the forest became my safest place — and keeping the peace became my armour.  After years, I found my way out.

 

I learned how to settle the doubts that were projected onto me — quietly, quickly, without making a scene. I stayed one step ahead of the chaos and told myself this was intelligence. This was how you storm well. You outsmart it. You absorb it. You keep moving.

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And I was good at it. So good that I kept wondering why, despite everything I knew and everything I tried, I couldn’t retrain my habits of people pleasing. I would notice the pattern, name it, resolve to change it — and find myself back at the beginning. Laughing at something that wasn’t funny. Settling someone else’s discomfort at the cost of my own.

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“I thought keeping the peace was me outsmarting the chaos. I didn’t realize it was my nervous system trying to keep me safe.”

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When I began studying the neuroscience.  I learned about fawning — not as a character flaw, not as weakness, but as a nervous system response. A survival strategy the body learns when it has spent too long in environments where being fully yourself felt dangerous. My body hadn’t been failing me. It had been protecting me, in the only way it knew how.

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That understanding changed everything. Because you cannot rewire what you cannot name.

 

The seeds of this work were planted earlier than I realised. My dad left self-help books around the house for me to find. I devoured them. More of that story is coming.

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​CHAPTER 2

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I was fully alive out there. And quietly disappearing in here.

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There is a version of me that has paddled wild rivers on international expeditions, skied endless peaks, and spent more nights than I can count stoking a fire alone at the end of a 2km driveway in the woods. A woman who felt more at ease in a tent along a river than in a room trying to fit a mold. People called me an adrenaline junkie. But that was never it. I just always felt most myself when the world got quiet and I was fully inside it — no performance required, no version of me that needed managing.​

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My passion for life ran deep. I chased dreams without apology. I led expeditions. I created. I competed at a national level as a member of Team Canada. And I was also, underneath all of it, a sensitive soul who saw and felt everything as connected — and had spent a long time learning to hide that holistic nature beneath capability.

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“Strong and struggling are not opposites. For a long time, I was living

proof of both.”

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From the outside, I looked like I had it handled. I was parenting while pretending I was okay — an empty shell inside, someone I didn't recognise. Navigating criticism that arrived like clockwork, running on a reserve I kept pretending was full. The wildness that lit me up in nature — that same aliveness — had gone quiet in my daily life. I was functioning. I called it fine.

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The woman who didn’t flinch in Class IV/V rapids was flinching constantly in her own kitchen. And for a long time, I didn’t let those two women meet.

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That gap — between who I was in the wild and who I was allowing myself to be every day — was exactly where the exhaustion lived. My body knew. It had been keeping score long before I was willing to look at the board.

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CHAPTER 3

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I learned to carry what cannot be put down.

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Six months pregnant, I lost my mother to cancer.

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Twenty-eight days later, my father died in his sleep.

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There are losses that change the atmosphere of your life permanently. Losing both parents before your first child is born is one of them. My body was already holding new life — and now it was holding grief that had no bottom. My nervous system absorbed all of it. My son felt every wave of it before he ever took his first breath.

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“I was six months pregnant, grieving two parents in 28 days, and learning — without knowing it — everything I would one day teach.”

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​​I healed the only way I knew how. The forest. Nature. The quiet that had always held me when nothing else could. And I was held — by aunties, by other families, by a community of beautiful spirited people who showed me what it meant to truly live even inside loss.

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And by Greg.

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Greg stepped into everything then. For my children he became uncle, grandparents and brother all wrapped into one person — an entire family held together in a single soul. He was my steady. My most grounded soul. Present when I needed it most.

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I had already survived the unsurvivable once. I had already learned that loss doesn’t end you — it changes you, if you let it. I carried my parents forward into my healing, into my practices, into the way I showed up for my children.

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I had no idea I would have to learn that lesson again.

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The mask I wore to protect others was the very thing that separated us.

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My whole life, I practiced mind-body connection. Taoism. Somatic awareness. Nervous system regulation — before it had that name. I lived it as an athlete and cinematographer and was called a woo-woo hippy for it. So I learned to hide that part of myself. I thought the hiding was protection — for me, for the people I loved.  I didn't know it was also a wall.

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While I was quietly carrying these practices inside me, Greg was reaching for a better place. He was prescribed medication with the hope of getting there — and for a time, that felt like the path forward. I believe deeply that there is no single road to healing, and that medication helps many people find their footing. But I also believe in a world where people are supported to tune into themselves first — where the nervous system is understood, not just managed. Greg eventually hired a coach to help him find his way back to himself. He just didn’t have enough time.

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“I was living the practices that might have helped him feel less alone in his struggle — and I had learned to keep them to myself.”

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Two days before Greg took his own life, we had a conversation I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I shared some of the practices that had carried me through my own hardest moments. He stopped me. How do you know all of this? And then it all came out. Everything. The practices, the struggles, the darkness I had carried alone. For the first time, I let him see me fully.

I didn't know that conversation would be our last.

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Greg’s death broke something open that will never fully close. And in that opening, I made a promise: no more hiding.Not my practices. Not my beliefs. Not my vulnerability. Not from my children — my most cherished gifts, and my only family left. Not from the world.

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We cannot storm in isolation. And the people who love us cannot reach us through the mask.

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