My body spoke first. Digestive trouble no one could explain, psoriasis and acne that made me hide my face, constant pain, and a worry that never switched off.
Behind it all lived a perfectionist in a nice girl mask, trying to be liked by everyone while the real me went unseen and unheard. Every doctor, healer and remedy taught me something. But the deepest shifts came when I stopped chasing symptoms and went after the root causes: the suppressed pain, the unspoken words, the things I had buried in my body because they were too scary to face.
I am still doing this work, layer by layer, and I always will be. There is always another layer of the onion when we are willing to look, and the more shadows we face, the more light we can hold. I no longer see it as a forever journey of healing. It is a forever journey of listening. Not digging for problems, but paying attention when something in my life or my body falls out of alignment, and treating it as an invitation to look deeper.
The mask went on early
I had a pure start. My parents raised me alternatively: vegetarian, no processed food until I was five, weekends at body-mind-psychic fairs with a pocket full of crystals. I was a sensitive little girl with a big interest in the unseen.
Then I found sugar, and I started bingeing and hiding the wrappers. My teenage years weren’t kind to my body. I ate badly, started drinking young, and kept it all behind a bright smile. Nice to everybody, easy to love, never any trouble. Nobody knew, because the mask never slipped.
When my period arrived my skin broke out, and doctor’s orders put me on the pill for the next ten years, before I had ever met my own rhythm. In my twenties came the obsession: yoga and gym twice a day, the perfect diet, the abs. My first detoxes were just another swing of the yo-yo. Exhausted, and never enough.
I can’t remember ever feeling good in my belly growing up. I was so bloated I looked pregnant & unhealthy, my skin was flaring, & behind the nice girl smile I was quietly miserable, pleasing everyone but myself.
Nothing worked, but the whispers grew louder
My belly always felt heavy, like I was carrying bricks. Never quite empty, constipated, uncomfortable with gas. My skin got worse, my cycle was all over the place, and an anxiety underneath it all never quite let me enjoy my life fully.
I was so hard on myself, and the hours I spent worrying down research rabbit holes made me feel worse, not better. But I learnt a lot, that’s for sure. I spent thousands on doctors and specialists, then widened the search: naturopaths, coaches, healers, supplements, one experimental diet after another. Everyone handed me a piece of sacred information. Some I took, some I left.
I didn’t give up. I started taking courses and taking my health into my own hands. Because deep down I knew the work was mine, and there was no magic pill or fix!
The crash that turned my life around
In 2013 I left Australia for Spain and found my way to Ibiza, working as a photographer and journalist. I spoke on the radio and even learnt to DJ. One week I was shooting nightclubs, the next yoga retreats, and the party side was winning. Partying was another way of not being present.
I interviewed some of the biggest names in the music industry. At the time it felt like an achievement, like I had finally got somewhere, and I still felt empty. On the last day of a juice fast I did twelve back to back interviews backstage at the DJ Awards, and my head had never been clearer. That was the moment I walked away from all of it.
I went cold turkey: no alcohol, a season of celibacy, all the way within. It was the first of many times I would face a fear and choose myself. Ibiza’s quieter side found me, full of natural health experts who changed my life. I juice fasted, did workshops on Ayurveda, trained in holistic nutrition and abdominal detox massage, and walked the Priestess path all the way to a pilgrimage in Egypt.
I also went too far. Deep in one detox, my period stopped. It taught me something I now hold sacred: the feminine body is delicate, and she is not designed to detox like a man. I kept seeing men dive into deep cleanses with endless capacity while women needed so much more care, and I wanted to know why. That question shaped everything I do now.
I knew there was more to life than surviving my own body. Something quiet in me refused to give up until I found it, & that knowing carried me through every year of searching.
The world became my classroom
For years my life moved between Spain, wider Europe and Bali, with Australia always calling me back in between. Later, Mexico and Turkey joined the story. Everywhere, food led the way.
I worked as a food journalist, took cooking lessons wherever I landed, and studied each culture’s medicinal foods. I trained as a cellular detox and regeneration coach, cooked through an internship in Bali, sat in cacao ceremony, and in Mexico met Mayan women keeping traditional cacao alive. Back in Australia I foraged and studied herbs, learning from native food wisdom.
Bali became my biggest classroom. I did a 200-hour shamanic yoga and breathwork training, explored tantra and astrology, and read everything I could find on the female cycle, fertility, and detoxing and fasting in a feminine way. And I began to teach, hosting workshops for women, including at The Yoga Barn.
By then I was grounded and strong in my body. But I knew a deeper layer was waiting: my nervous system, and the emotions I was still hiding from.
When my old life crumbled, the deeper work began
I hadn’t cried in years. So I began, slowly: somatic experiencing therapy, breathwork, and in time, ceremony and ancient plant traditions. Things I had been too scared to feel finally started to move.
Then 2020 stranded me in Bali, and my whole life flipped. The Ibiza chapter crumbled, my photography income disappeared, and I reinvented myself from the ground up. I finally wrote my books, ran a free online detox that brought so many women into my world, and lived with my detox mentor for five months, sitting in circle together every day. The coaching and women’s circles I had quietly begun in 2018 grew into my life’s work.
The day my body finally made sense
Through everything, my digestion still changed by the day, and no one could tell me why. Then it landed: my digestion was moving with the phases of my cycle.
Most health research has been done on men, who run on a 24-hour rhythm. Women cycle closer to 28 days. I had been eating, training and living by instructions written for a body nothing like mine. So I began to sync my food, my movement and my work with my cycle, and everything I had built finally clicked into place.
And I stopped guessing. Proper gut testing, full hormone panels, and registered experts to read them with me. Knowing what was really happening in my body, instead of flying blind, changed how I care for myself forever.
I had been living in a masculine rhythm, in a female body science had barely studied. Women are not smaller men. We are cyclical, & everything from how we eat to how we rest changes with our phase.
The surprise that explained my whole life
A few years ago my psychologist asked a question I laughed off. Do you think you might be autistic? Of course not, I said. Then I started reading. Oh my gosh. That’s me. That is me.
Back in Australia, burnt out, I was formally assessed: autistic, with ADHD, recognised late, the way it so often goes for women. It felt like a permission slip to fall apart, and I did. Realising I had masked my whole life just to fit in was heartbreaking, and it explained so much: the exhaustion, the silenced needs, the rejection sensitivity and demand avoidance I finally had names for.
So I am doing the deep work hardcore these past few years! Somatic therapy, psychology, occupational therapy, inner child work. I am learning my sensory needs, shaping my home and my days around them, and practising the edgiest skill of all for a lifelong nice girl: asking for what I need.
It is a rebirth, still fresh. And the checklists and tools helping me rebuild my days are becoming guides I will share, because so many late-diagnosed neurodivergent women are walking this path too.
Perimenopause, the great unmasking
Around 35 my cycle began to change, and I recognised my next initiation: perimenopause. Even with years of cycle knowledge, this season has asked me to go deeper, so I am learning it the way I learn everything. Living it, reading everything I can find, and working with experts I trust.
Nobody told me perimenopause is a great unmasking. Pleasing and performing became impossible to keep up, emotions rose in deeper layers, and I believe this season strips a woman back to who she truly is. I don’t think it is a coincidence that so many women, like me, discover they are autistic or ADHD in this exact window. When the energy that fuelled the mask runs out, the truth underneath finally gets her turn. I am letting it strip me back, and I am meeting who I find there.
Taking off the masks is the slowest, kindest work I have ever done for myself. Layer by layer, the nice girl everyone loved is becoming the woman who speaks her truth.
Love, & what we are building together
My relationships used to follow the same old pattern: override the signals, keep the peace, lose myself. So I studied love the way I study everything. I explored tantra, faced why I kept blocking intimacy, and grew the confidence to be truly met. In 2021 I attracted my partner.
We are engaged now, and we practise the unglamorous things: honest conversations, boundaries, repair, real consent. It is the safest love I have ever known, but it’s also taken me deeper than I have ever known (and sometimes that’s tough).
Together we run Inphinity Design, designing wellness spaces for the New Earth. I spent my whole adult life searching for home before I understood why: so few spaces are built for sensitive nervous systems. Creating harmonious spaces for the future generations is part of my life’s work now, and my dream is to create a New Earth space of our own here in Australia, and hopefully many more around the world.
This chapter also holds a choice I am proud of. We are choosing children in my early forties, taking our time on purpose: deepening the inner work, strengthening my nervous system, and building the home we want to welcome them into. Conscious parenting is my deepest current study and my greatest excitement.
Where I have landed, for now
I have tried almost every way of eating there is. Where I landed is simple: nourish yourself, take a little of everything, and let your rhythms change with the seasons. Build resilience in your body and your nervous system, work on the core issues underneath the symptoms, and your body can live in harmony.
These days most of my old body troubles have settled, and I live in a far more feminine way. I keep unravelling what no longer serves me, tending my relationships, and building a peaceful, harmonious life. I spend my days writing new recipe books for the chapters of life ahead, creating tools for late-diagnosed autistic women like me, and dreaming up New Earth spaces.
Somewhere along the way, all of this became my work. I founded The Nourished Woman, where I guide women back into rhythm with their bodies as a hormone health educator. And that is one thread of it, because life keeps handing me more to share.
My training
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You deserve to feel your best
Once you stop approaching your health like a man, you get to meet the body you actually have, and everything she is capable of.
The Nourished Woman is where I walk with women through cyclical nourishment and gentle detox. It is the heart of my work with the body. And my writing reaches further, because my life did. Love, intimacy and sacred union. Boundaries, consent and speaking your truth. Sensitive nervous systems and the quiet relief of late self-discovery. Perimenopause and conscious parenting. Homes and spaces built for the future generations.
If any part of my story felt like yours, stay close. Everything I learn, I share.
