The Weight of Survival
For a long time, I moved through the world as many women do—balancing the needs of my three children and simply getting on with things. After an early career in nursing, I spent many years focused on raising my whānau before eventually returning to the wider health sector.
But inside, I was living in a state of high alert—a survival mode that had been with me since my early teens. I became an expert at silencing the internal noise, pushing my emotions down so far that I eventually stopped feeling anything at all. In my late teens, I found a release through sports fighting, and later, through the physical challenge of boxing and HIIT classes. It was the only way I knew how to move the tension I didn’t yet have the words to explain.
I was surviving, but I wasn’t yet truly living.
