Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: omar idmassaoud
The human experience fascinates me.
It drives me to research and understand what it is that creates reality.
Now, of course, there's a multitude of layers to that.
We've got what creates physical reality
and then we’ve got what creates consciousness,
and then a beautiful blending of the two of them
to create what we know as our human experience.
So over the last 20 odd years,
I’ve been researching and trying to understand: Who are we?
And on a more selfish level: Who am I?
Because this question of who am I,
I believe, is intrinsically linked to the answer to a broader question
of what are we here for?
Now, I’m what introverts like to often shudder to verbalize: an extrovert.
I have been driven by my connection with other people my whole life.
I find it very easy to make friendships and to adapt myself to social situations.
I used to wear a badge of honor around being a “chameleon,”
someone who can show up in any situation
and become whatever it is that is required from me
in order to mold into that situation
and to make sure that everybody in that situation is at ease
and that I am accepted in that situation.
Now, being an extrovert and having a capacity to mold myself has benefit,
and it also has challenge
because within the ability to mold oneself
what can often happen is we can lose ourselves
and we can find it a challenge to actually know,
Well, who am I in this mix of the colors of the chameleon that I wear?
Who am I in amongst the masks that I put on,
the hats that I wear, the outfits that go on,
the barriers that come up?
Because we’re all born into this world,
this beautiful, pure piece of consciousness
that comes into the physical form,
and through trauma, through challenge, through heartache,
through being human, we put on these masks,
we put on these hats, we put on these clothes
and we put on these barriers around us that protect us and keep us safe.
And then we get to a point where those hats and those masks
and those barriers no longer keep us safe but keep us weighed down.
Now, through the 20 years that I’ve been researching what it is
that actually creates this experience that we call life,
through spirituality, through human behavior,
through neurolinguistics programming
and more recently, through psychosomatic healing,
or the connection between the body-mind.
Through that whole time, I’ve really always come back to this question,
Who am I?
And I’ve never really found a way -
or hadn’t found a way to uncovering that truth.
Not really.
I felt like I had found pieces of that puzzle,
but I always kept showing up in these ways that would betray myself
for these promises that I made to myself.
In order to have a good family, I had to betray myself and my needs.
In order to have a good relationship,
I had to compromise myself and give up on myself and my needs.
In order to be myself, or be accepted,
I had to mold myself to other people’s expectations
or my perceptions of other people’s expectations.
And so it was very interesting.
I found myself going for a run in October 2019.
At the time, I was training for my black belt,
and I was also training for the Rottnest Channel swim.
So as you can guess, I like to move,
(Laughs)
and I also like a level of control.
Don’t we all.
So through this process, though, I was running through the streets
and it was a neighborhood that I had recently moved to
just maybe 10 months earlier.
And I was running through the streets
and I’m hearing my voice going on in my head.
And you know, that familiar voice
that tells you all the things that you should be doing
and make sure you don’t forget each thing.
Then you reflect on these conversations
that you might have had a week ago
and really remember these witty responses that would have been perfect in the moment
and then congratulate your ego for being so smart.
(Laughter)
So it's this voice that I'm listening to,
and I quite enjoy listening to this voice
because it helps me unpack my experience
and it helps me unpack the reflection that I see with my experience.
And all of the sudden, as I’m running,
I hear this voice say to me, “In order to be fully seen,
you must be willing to be completely invisible.”
(Phoo)
Light bulb.
It was like the answer to that question that I’ve been asking my whole life.
How am I able to be known? How am I able to be seen?
What is it that makes me unique?
And how am I ever going to experience that if I can’t express it?
In order to be fully seen, I must be willing to be completely invisible.
Now, with any new realization, there comes a time of integration.
And often integration into a new level of understanding of oneself is not easy,
it’s not graceful and it’s certainly not clean.
And mine was very reflective of that.
As we birth ourselves into a new version of ourselves.
it’s messy, and it’s full of contractions and pain.
So January 2020,
it was the first Monday of the year,
and I remember walking back into my house.
I had gone for an appointment after I had received a diagnosis of a UTI,
which I don't normally get.
And I opened the door to my house
and I remember seeing my daughter Tatsi standing at the end of the hallway.
And so, you know, I’m quite fit and I’m quite healthy.
I had been noticing some symptoms of some nausea and some dizziness,
but I’d been on antibiotics for the UTI, so, you know, that’s kind of acceptable.
So I'm standing there at my doorway,
my daughter in front of me at the end of the hall,
and I took three steps and then it hit.
I had excruciating pain in my head.
It was like a white light went on.
My legs started to feel like jelly,
and I found it really, really hard to stand.
At the same time,
a numbing sensation that I had had in the the fingertips of my right hand
moved from my fingertips up my arm,
up my shoulder and into my face
instantaneously.
And I started feeling as if I had eaten some psychotropic plants
and the trip was just kicking in,
but I hadn’t.
(Laughter)
And so my first thought was, Holy crap, I think I’m having a stroke.
My daughter looked at me and she goes, “Mom, are you okay?”
And I held on to the wall, and I said her,
“No, sweetheart, I’m not. I need to go to the doctor.”
So very quickly, I ended up in emergency room
and spent the next five hours with doctors telling me
that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me
and that I should go home and rest.
So I knew my body.
I have a very good awareness around my body,
but I had been pushing it.
I’d been working hard in my business,
I had been training for two, you know, decent physical adventures.
And so I thought, okay, maybe they’re right.
Maybe I just need to go home and rest.
So I did, and took the next three days to rest.
And then I started feeling better
and patted myself on the back for being very good.
And then I got back into work, and I got back into training.
And two days later, my legs went again.
Now, over the next couple of weeks,
this would continue to happen.
Basically, I would rest for a couple of days and then I'd feel better,
and then I’d try to get back into things, and then my legs would go.
And then all of the sudden, it was the time between episodes was shortening
and the duration of the episodes was lengthening.
And so the time that I had outside of that was very minimal
to the point where it got to the stage just before the Rottnest Swim,
where I actually wasn’t able to leave my house by myself anymore.
I couldn't go anywhere unassisted.
I couldn’t stand up to do the dishes by myself.
I couldn’t walk to my toilet by myself. I couldn’t check my mail.
I certainly couldn't look after my kids.
And so all of these promises that I had made to myself,
either before becoming a parent, always a great one,
or since becoming a parent started being brought into question.
They started really coming to the forefront
and triggering my emotional response
as to how I was then dealing with this thing that I was dealing with,
that we didn’t really have any answers around what it was.
At the time, the doctors were saying potential for MS
and so I was researching that.
And it’s really interesting
because some of these emotional triggers that were coming up for me
was loneliness, severe loneliness.
I felt so terribly alone.
And I felt like a complete failure.
I felt like I was failing my kids.
I felt like I was failing my community.
I felt like I was failing myself.
I felt like I was failing my profession,
like my intellectual mind.
I had failed my intellectual mind even.
All of the ways that you can possibly fail anything,
that’s what I was doing.
Just being super kind on myself, obviously,
(Laughter)
This is what we do.
We hit hardship and instead of being kind and supportive to ourselves,
what do we do?
We beat our selves up,
and we tell ourselves how wrong we are
and how if only we had done it another way we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Especially those of us who - extreme control freaks,
although I do believe that we all are to a quite large degree -
we can really take that and run with it and find ourselves the bottom of a pit
of a spiraling of self- deprecation and punishment.
And I found myself there.
Now what is very interesting is at the same time,
my community was rallying.
So very soon after I had my first symptoms,
my community had organized a meal rotation.
There were people who were coming to my house
and cleaning my house for me, doing my dishes.
There was one friend in particular,
she would come and grab my dirty washing.
She would take it home, wash it, dry it, fold it, and bring it back.
I love that friend.
(Laughter)
Amazing.
My partner would come over every day after work
and check on me and my kids,
make sure we’re okay, give me a hug, reassure me,
see if there was anything that we needed before going home and checking on his own.
That same community raised over $7,000, both in a one-off payment
and in ongoing payments to help me while I got back on my feet.
And still I felt alone.
But that didn't stop there.
They also organized massages, healing treatments, whatever I needed.
They took my kids to school.
They made sure that their extracurricular activities were still taken care of.
We were well and truly taken care of.
We were so supported.
And yet I felt so alone.
And I would cry for hours at how alone I felt.
And then I would cry for a few more riddled with guilt
when I looked around at how supported I am.
How can we feel so alone when we’re so supported and so loved?
But I'm certainly not alone in this.
Back in 2018, the father of my children took his own life,
and I believe he did so because he had that same feeling.
He felt so alone.
And I think that a huge part
of why we have the issues with mental health that we have today
is because we have that same feeling.
We feel so alone.
We feel so isolated, and we feel so wrong all the time.
And it’s one of the biggest lies that we could ever possibly believe.
And it’s also one of the biggest lies that has infiltrated through our society.
Because it sells.
Buy this, you’re going to be more accepted.
Buy that, you’re going to be so much cooler.
If you buy this, you are going to be so pretty,
people are going to love you way better, right?
So we’re constantly fed this story, this lie that we aren’t good enough.
That if only you were a little bit different in this way and that way
and that way,
and don’t forget about that because that, it’s horrendous.
But if we could fix all of those things, then you would be worthy of love,
then you would be acceptable.
But the reality is, is that it’s complete nonsense.
And what I learnt through this process of sitting in the depths of my loneliness
was that not only was I sitting in the depths of my loneliness,
I was also sitting in the depths of myself.
Because for the first time in my life, I didn’t have my hats.
I didn’t have my masks.
I didn’t have these barriers anymore.
In my own crumbling, what was actually crumbling
was the barriers that kept me separate from the people in my life
and from life itself.
You know, it’s really fascinating
because I had this talk really well-rehearsed about a week ago,
and then I ended up in emergency.
I had a cyst that burst on my left ovary,
and it actually burst through a vein and created internal bleeding
that was quite prolific and well-timed.
FYI, I’m here.
(Laughter)
But what I find is really fascinating is the difference
between how I’ve been able to move through this journey
compared to how I moved through that journey.
And one of the things that stands out for me the most
is that I don’t feel alone anymore.
And I think that’s because I’ve learnt how to show up in a way
that I’m not showing up to be seen.
Because I don’t need my masks, and I don’t need my hats,
and I don’t need my barriers, and I don’t need your acceptance.
I am who I am, and you are who you are.
And I highly encourage you to try on the idea
that you can strip yourself down naked
and for the first time be seen completely in all of your glory,
in all of your beauty and in all of your humanness.
Because we are human beings and none of us are supposed to be perfect.
We are supposed to be messy.
Life inherently is messy
from the second that we’re born to the] moment that we die, it’s messy.
Think about birth in and of itself.
I don’t know anyone who does that gracefully.
(Laughter)
I certainly don’t proclaim to do life gracefully.
But maybe, just maybe,
by being willing to be completely invisible
to those around you who can’t see you,
you may become a shining beacon for those who can.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)