I wrote a memoir
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I stepped into a dark and dusty giftware shop in the Blue Mountains, its shelves laden with leather goods. Book marks, brass globes, hand carved wooden geese, and quirky clocks lined the wallpapered display units.
I sucked in my belly to avoid knocking a lamp off an antique table and squeezed my daughter into my chest as I wiggled past overstocked shelves. Mackenzie was three years old and heavy in my arms but she couldn’t walk yet. A long list of diagnoses slowed down her progression to achieving developmental milestones like a mother would expect of their child. She would learn to walk, in years to come, but some things she would never learn to do, like see from her sightless eyes.
Her dad and his partner, who, unlike me, would one day become his wife, were waiting for us outside. Our relationship had been severed by hospital visits, grief and fear when our daughter was airlifted to a newborn intensive care unit soon after her birth.
I left his homeland, the land of the long white cloud, with our daughter in one hand and a medication bag in the other, days after her first birthday, returning to the familiarity of my childhood bedroom. Although an ocean lived between us, him in New Zealand, us in Australia, we visited his home, and him, ours, to nurture the relationship between a father and his disabled daughter that could not be done under the same roof.
He was visiting us with his young love so we holidayed in the mountains; me and Mackenzie in one bedroom, and them in the other. Sleet silently fell from an icy sky as they stood on the path waiting for us outside the shop.
A blistery cold wind howled and the shop door creaked against its chill. I greeted the shop keeper at the back of the store and behind him, was a journal. It stood alone on a wooden shelf beside its hardcover box. I placed Mackenzie in front of the heater and she shivered at the sudden warmth on her back. I outstretched my arm, somewhere between pointing and my palm upturned, and asked him to hand it to me.
I caressed the cover decorated with vintage images and slowly unclipped the leather button to expose perfectly crafted unlined paper with deckled edges. I closed my eyes as my hand danced over the pages made from recycled cotton, a welcoming softness beneath my fingers.
For your story, I heard my inner voice say.
I grabbed my wallet from my bag.
‘What will you write in it?’ the shopkeeper asked, as he wrapped it in brown paper and tied it with string.
‘My story’, I replied.
He stepped back and placed his arms across his chest. He looked at Mackenzie standing on the floor, and saw her seeing-eye cane wedged into my jeans’ pocket. He smiled and nodded.
It would be four years before I released the knot of the string and a black inked pen would touch its pages.
I was studying to become a yoga teacher and attended a breathwork experience that would, without exaggeration, change the course of my life. I returned home from that event, awed by the healing power of the breath, and inspired to write.
My pen swam across the page.
‘I have a story’, I wrote. ‘This is my story’.
I sat anywhere I could - parks, cafes, my bedroom, the backyard, the car - and documented my journey as a single special needs mother. I wrote about my childhood, my daughter’s diagnosis, leaving the love of my life, living for eight years in a shared bedroom with my daughter, the hatred I had felt towards her father, and the horror of raising a disabled and medically unstable child alone.
It was messy and without craft, but it was a beginning.
It is now ten years since I first wrote in that beautiful hand-crafted book. And I can, after all this time, finally say that I have completed, crafted and edited my manuscript. The Road Unseen is an 80,000-word memoir that helped me process, heal and grow through the tragedies that were thrust into my heart, and the unmet expectations of the twenty-seven-year-old version of me who thought her life would be something different to what it was destined to be.
Ten years of remembering.
Ten years of wondering what the core of the story is really about.
Ten years of living, crying, suffering, expanding, learning, healing, striving, struggling, growing.
Ten years of writing, deleting, editing, clarifying, fine tuning, stripping, rearranging, and preparing the manuscript for a professional network of people.
Until it was ready.
The start of 2026 presented the task of looking for an agent or publisher to share my manuscript with. The title, hook, description, synopsis, cover email, chapter outlines, summary and personal details were carefully crafted into submission emails which sat in my drafts folder until I was ready to let them go.
A lover of astrology and numerology, I decided to send them to my chosen agents at 9:26am on the 26/2/26. But on the chosen morning I woke at 4:26am and felt a familiar yet subtle hum inside my body - what can only be described as a vibration in my cells. As I stood to go to the bathroom, I felt a little wobbly. My stomach was swollen, full and painful. And as I settled back into bed, I cupped my warm hands around my distended gut and meditated, my head nestled back into the warmth of my pillow.
I sensed that my body had stories about letting the book go.
But whatever secrets my body was holding, didn’t feel aligned with the stories and beliefs in my mind. Intellectually, I felt so ready for my book to leave the nest.
But my body told a different truth. I felt physically sick. I couldn’t eat my breakfast. I had low energy. So I closed my eyes and asked my body,
What is this feeling?
Dread, it replied.
Determined to commit to my preparedness to let it fly out of my hands, despite the dread and the physical discomfort I was experiencing, on the 26th Feb 2026, I sat at a café, a soothing tea in hand, with Eminem’s Lose Yourself blasting in my ears, and I hit send. My memoir left my hands and landed in the inbox of strangers.
It was a mammoth moment - a decade of working towards that very moment - and my body was thrown into a spin. Curious about what I was feeling, I had an urgent kinesiology session to help me identify what stories and memories were stored in my body to help shift that feeling of dread.
On the table, memories swiftly surfaced. I frowned, confused.
‘Why this memory?’ I asked my therapist.
‘Let’s have a look’, she replied.
Memory 1:
Mackenzie was eight months old. I handed her to a nurse and they walked around a corner, but as she disappeared out of view, I remembered feeling that same sick feeling in my stomach that I’d woken with that morning that I was ready to send my book out. Mackenzie was having a feeding tube permanently inserted into her stomach due to failure to thrive and a severe sensory processing disorder that saw her vomit multiple times, every single day. I let the memory play out and as she disappeared out of sight, I remembered feeling dread. There were also feelings of not being in control and having to trust that my daughter would be safe in the hands of strangers.
Memory 2:
I was running with my uncle and his daughter, my cousin. I was ten years old. He was ahead of us and I felt a huge amount of pressure to perform. He was the leader, firm and non-negotiating, and I had to run my little ass off to stay close to him. He didn’t look back, just powered on ahead and expected me to follow. It didn’t feel like we were working together or on the same team. I was scared of not being able to perform to his expectations and being left behind.
Through the session, we discovered these memories have a relationship to my book.
My memoir feels like my second baby. I’ve nurtured it, cared for it and worked on it for over a decade. Handing it over into the hands of strangers felt the same as when I handed Mackenzie over for life changing surgery. I recognised that I had an unconscious fear that publishers, editors, graphic designers, etc. will change my book, like the doctors changed my baby. And I have to trust that it will be okay in their hands.
The memory of my uncle was linked to an unconscious fear that I will not be part of a team. I want this run to the finish line to feel more like a leisurely stroll, where I am walking alongside my team mates. I want to be connected to them, working together, where I feel valued, seen and understood. I want it to be in our hands, not their hands while I’m puffed and terrified that I can’t keep up.
My kinesiologist helped me rewire the fear, dread and feeling of loss of control about letting my book go, into a feeling of pleasure, joy and love. When I left the session, the symptoms in my tummy were gone, and when I hit the send button on all the emails I’d saved for the publishers the following day, they were sent out with a feeling of peace, lightness and joy.
The body is so wise, always working to protect and support us. I truly believe that physical symptoms in the body are not random ailments. As Bessel Van Der Kolk says in his book, The Body Keeps the Score,
In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
If we have the courage and insight to use the body’s symptoms as a doorway and enter curiously, gently, honestly and lovingly, we create a safe pathway to a new experience of living. To understand that moments in our past are actively affecting and impacting on our present, and willingly seek an understanding of the impact of past moments on our now, we create an opportunity for healing, and freedom.
I am now in waiting, like a mother waiting for labour. In this incubation phase, I have received three rejection emails from two agents, and a publisher. Each one celebrating the quality of my writing and the richness of my story. But for reasons outside of my skillset (such as, memoir isn’t selling unless you’re famous), they did not want to represent it. I’m currently waiting to hear from the other agents and publishers, without a doubt that in some way, shape, or form, my memoir will be published soon.
I have the option of self-publishing, but I can’t help but think I’m meant to do this with others.
I’ve done a lot on my own. I chose to, to protect myself from the fear of losing control or people letting me down na failing to meet my expectations. But I sense that this baby is meant to be carried in the hands of many. A team who gets me, and my story, and walks beside me to the finish line, so it can land in your hands, and hearts, the way it was destined to. However and whenever that may be.
❤️