I spent a lot of 2013 on a couch in North Manly, watching the light move across the wall because moving myself was too hard.
That's where I was when my wise friend, neighbour and acupuncturist asked me a question I couldn't answer. She didn't ask about my symptoms. She didn't ask which specialist I was seeing next. She asked, "What do you think your body is trying to tell you?"
I wanted to throw the cushion at her.
By then I'd been dismissed by so many doctors that any question pointing inward felt like another polite way of saying it's all in your head. I'd been bitten by forty-plus ticks at the end of 2010 and fully sick by 2012, and the medical system had mostly shrugged at me for years. So no, I did not want to gently explore what my body was telling me. I wanted someone to fix it.
It took me a long time to understand she'd handed me the most useful thing anyone gave me in all my years of being sick.
Why the right question beats the next protocol
Here's what I've learned, both from my own crash and from sitting with women in the same hole. We go looking for the next supplement, the next diet, the next practitioner who might finally crack the code. Sometimes that matters. I'm not knocking nutrition or detoxing, they rebuilt me.
But underneath all of it sits a quieter layer most of us never touch. The meaning we've made of being sick. The truths we've buried. The things our body has been trying to say while we kept overriding it.
You can't supplement your way out of that. You have to ask better questions and then be brave enough to answer them honestly.
A few I've answered for myself
What truth did I learn the hard way? That no one was coming to save me. Not the doctors, not a miracle protocol, not my own stubborn hope that someone else would sort it out. The day I stopped waiting to be rescued was the day my recovery actually started. It's a lonely truth and also a strangely powerful one.
Where did I override my inner knowing, and what did it cost me? For seventeen years in PR and corporate comms, my body whispered that I was running on empty. I called it ambition. I pushed through the exhaustion, the headaches, the sense that something was off. The cost was getting so sick I lost my career, my income, and three years of being a present mum. My body had been sending memos the whole time. I just kept marking them as spam.
If my body could speak without fear of being dismissed, what would it say? Mine would say, "I tried to tell you. For years I tried to tell you, and you kept silencing me with caffeine and willpower and someone else's idea of what a good life looked like." That one still makes me cry, if I'm honest.
I share these not because my answers are yours. Everyone's different, and your story isn't mine. I share them so you can see what it looks like to actually answer, instead of writing something neat and tidy that protects you from the real thing.
The seven to sit with
Don't rush these. Pour a tea, grab a notebook, and pick one. You don't need all seven in a single afternoon.
- What truth did I learn the hard way, and how did it change me?
- If I could go back to the moment I knew something had to change, what would I whisper to myself?
- What part of my healing journey was the most unexpected, and why?
- Where did I override my inner knowing, and what was the cost?
- What would my 80-year-old self thank me for doing differently?
- What did I need to hear most during my lowest point, and why didn't I believe it at the time?
- If my body could speak without fear of being dismissed, what would it say to me?
That sixth one is worth a word of warning. When I was at my lowest, what I needed to hear was that I'd get better. People said it. I didn't believe a word, because I'd been let down so many times that hope felt dangerous. If that's where you are, you don't have to believe it yet. You just have to stay in the game long enough for it to become true.
What to do once you've answered
Nothing clever. Just read your answers back as if a friend had written them, and notice how much kinder you become.
We're vicious with ourselves when we're sick. We treat our own suffering as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be cared for. These questions interrupt that. They turn the volume back up on the part of you that's been talked over for too long.
I can't promise a question will heal your nerve pain or lift your fatigue. I'd be lying, and you've had enough people promise you things. What I can tell you is that the women who get their lives back are almost always the ones who stopped outsourcing their knowing and started listening to it.
Your body has been talking the whole time. Maybe it's worth finding out what it's been trying to say.
If you want a gentle structure to do this work alongside the practical stuff, the rest, the food, the support, that's the heart of what I do with my private clients and inside the Mojo Detox programs. But you can start tonight, on your own couch, with one question and an honest answer.
That's where mine started.
