Calm, Capable, Confident

(This piece mentions child sexual abuse, if you’re not ready for this right now, skip it or come back to it when you’re ready.)

I want to start with where I am now, because it matters that you hear this part first.

I'm okay. More than okay. I'm free. I'm safe. I'm calm, capable and confident - and I chose those three words deliberately, because for a long stretch of my life not one of them was true. They started as a mantra I'd whisper to myself fourteen years ago on mornings when I could barely lift my head off the pillow. Now they're just a description of my Tuesday. That's the story, really. The distance between those two things. Let me tell you how I crossed it.

When I was a child, I was sexually abused. More than once, over a span of years. I'm not going to lay it all out here, partly because it's mine to hold and partly because the details aren't the point. The point is what it cost me afterwards, and the longer, stranger story of how I got it back.

For the best part of thirty years I carried it the way a lot of people carry these things - quietly, badly, while telling everyone including myself that I was fine. Depression. Anxiety. Years later, a diagnosis of PTSD that finally gave the thing a name. I braced against life. I held my breath through it.

The winter I didn't choose

There's an old word for the kind of season I eventually hit. Catabasis. It comes from the Greek - literally a going down, a descent. The hero goes into the underworld before he comes back changed. I didn't know the word at the time. At the time I just knew I couldn't get out of bed.

Fourteen years ago there was a string of days where I simply couldn't do it. Couldn't rise, couldn't function, couldn't pretend anymore. If you've never been there, it's hard to explain how total it is - not sadness exactly, more like the lights going out one room at a time. And here's the part I didn't understand until much later: that descent wasn't the thing breaking me. It was the thing turning me around.

Because lying there, in the worst of it, something quiet and stubborn in me said: this is not the life I want. Not as a lightning bolt. Not as a turning point you'd put in a film. Just a low, clear fact. I think I probably needed that winter, needed to go all the way down to the cold floor of it, before anything could start growing again. Rest disguised as ruin. The descent was the beginning of the climb.

There was no single moment

I want to be honest about something, because the tidy version of these stories does more harm than good. There was no turning point. No morning where I woke up healed, no single decision that fixed me. What there was instead was a long string of ordinary days, and on each one, a choice to show up.

That's it. That's the entire method. Show up. Do the next small right thing. Go to therapy. Move my body even when I didn't want to. Eat something that helped instead of something that numbed. Sleep. Breathe - really breathe, on purpose. Build one honest habit and then, when it held, build another. None of it was dramatic. All of it was deliberate. I was laying down scaffolding, one plank at a time, around a structure that had nearly collapsed.

And life didn't politely wait while I did this. The fourteen years since have been full - more loss, more hard things, more challenges I didn't ask for. A pandemic. A divorce. But also more discoveries, more opportunities, more proof. Every single one of those hard things became a rep. A chance to practise the grit, the hope, the resilience. You don't build those by reading about them. You build them the way you build anything real - by doing them.

What does “better than you expected” actually look like?

Here's the part I most want you to hear, if you're reading this from inside your own hard season.

Today I'm completely independent and in control of my own future. There are still challenges - some of them daily - but I now have something I didn't have at the bottom: evidence. A hundred per cent track record of getting through the awful days. Not perfectly. Sometimes clumsily, sometimes in ways I'd do differently if I had them over. But I got through every single time. I'm still here. That's not a feeling anymore. It's a fact I can point to.

A few weeks ago I was in Vietnam, helping my partner Keren run a retreat for eighteen people. Me. In a foreign country, with a nervous system that has every reason to be overloaded, doing the exact work I always dreamed of doing. There was a day there where it nearly got the better of me - the old wiring lit up, the way it still does. But I didn't have to white-knuckle it. I leaned back on the foundations I'd spent fourteen years building so deliberately. The scaffolding held. I showed up. I got through.

That trip would have been impossible for the man who couldn't get out of bed. Not unlikely - impossible. And I think that's the thing I'd carve into stone if I could: the life on the other side of this isn't just the old life restored. It can be bigger, better and a thousand times mor beautiful than the one you were trying to get back to.

If you're going through it right now

So here's what I've got for you, and I mean it plainly.

Keep going. Keep showing up. If you're in the descent right now - the winter, the catabasis, the cold floor of it I'm not going to tell you it isn't real or that it doesn't hurt, because it is and it does. But I will tell you, as someone who's been all the way down and come back up: that floor is not where the story ends. It might even be where it turns.

You don't need a turning point. You don't need a lightning bolt. You just need the next ordinary day, and the willingness to show up for it. Then the one after that. Build your scaffolding one plank at a time. Keep the evidence. Watch what it adds up to.

Life can work out better than you ever expected. I'm the proof. And one day, if you keep showing up, so will you be.

Calm. Capable. Confident.

If you're struggling right now, please reach out for support. In Australia you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, any time, day or night.