Workin' 9-5

Ahhh 2024. New Year, New Me. Or is it?

As many of you would know, I recently spent some time at a health retreat and it was one of the best investments of my life. It’s also the reason I haven’t blogged for 2 weeks. I detoxed from technology and sugar and every kind of toxin you can think of – skin care, moisturiser, make-up, lip balm, perfume, chlorinated pools, fluoridated water, food, alcohol, ENERGY SUCKING PEOPLE and so on and so forth. If it wasn’t natural or in my best interests, I didn’t touch it.

I’m generally a no-fluoride, mostly organic, aluminium free deodorant kind of girl anyway but it’s impossible to rid yourself of toxins in this modern world (despite Jessica from Instagram’s insistence that lemon water cures everything). So instead of obsessing over it like I used to, I just hand over a bunch of my money to people who do their best to keep me as toxin free as possible for one very expensive (but worthwhile) week at a time.

2023 was by far the hardest but in some ways most rewarding year of my career thus far. For 12 months I lived a fast paced, high stress life that eventually led to what I now recognise as total burn out. There were moments where I’d be speaking to someone and couldn’t form a proper sentence, as if my vocabulary and motor skills decided to check out temporarily. My once excellent memory diminished along with my general ability to retain simple information. I became constantly frustrated and resentful towards people around me who weren’t pulling their weight while I worked like a dog well into the evenings. I was the first person in the office and the last person out every day. My patience wore thin and there was an ever-present pit of anger in my stomach that I thought I’d be stuck with forever. I did my best to stay motivated, to put on a happy face every day and to remember why I uprooted my whole life and left my immediate family and friends to go back to PNG. Each morning when I woke up feeling tired, anxious, stressed, downtrodden and unappreciated I remembered the people who relied on me to be the first smiling face they saw when they walked in the door.

Some of our staff walk for miles and then catch 3 buses to get to work. They do their best to show up every day despite the very serious and difficult life circumstances they face outside the safe and comforting walls of our office. They are people who literally need these jobs to survive and who take their attitude cues from me. When I’m stressed, the office is stressed. When my door is closed because I need a quiet space to think, I know they’re all wondering if everything’s ok. Eventually staff started making comments that I never leave my desk, I rarely eat lunch and in their minds I appeared not to have any semblance of a life outside of our organisation. Amidst my “I don’t have time for anything” attitude, I was setting the worst possible example for the people I came to PNG to be the best example for. There’s a difference between working hard and working excessively and I spent the entire 2023 doing the latter whilst simultaneously cultivating a pretty miserable life. For someone who is so invested in their health, I did nothing but abandon mine for an entire year. Not only did I do that but I also started to feel a huge sense of imposter syndrome creeping into my psyche. I have a great boss and have felt nothing but empowered in my job for the 14+ years I’ve been employed. But being a 34-year-old woman of mixed-race heritage in a General Manager position has proven to, at times, be difficult in this country. I’ll be honest, there is very much an attitude of “what would she know” that seeps into my interactions with people and battling that has made for an emotionally exhaustive, isolating and lonely year. Proving myself day in and day out is a fight that I don’t always have the strength for and one I’m sure many people would tell me to get over. And to those people I would say – I agree with you. Seriously. I would also say – I’m trying really hard to accept that some men are egotistical wankers with brains the size of a peanut and dicks of equal measure.

So now that you’ve heard my very long sob story, I want to tell you about the people that I met during my 7-day detox and how they have shifted my perspective.

Firstly – if you’d told me that I would willingly pay an exorbitant amount of money to go somewhere by myself and spend time with complete strangers who I’d have to socialise with, I would have told you to suck my proverbial dick. I’m not the kind of person who ‘tries new things’ solo, I’m very much a safety in numbers kind of girl. Plus, I’ve read Nine Perfect Strangers and I know what happens at these health retreats. I wasn’t ready for micro dosing and psychopathic health nuts to end my life prematurely. But I also told myself that everything good happens outside my comfort zone so I put my big girl panties on and sucked it up. Despite pleas from my girlfriends to rock up a day late so we could get shitfaced (and to use unrelenting diarrhoea as an excuse for my tardiness), I pushed past the social anxiety and turned up on the 31st December.

The first person who said hello to me was a lady named Sarah. A Mum who hadn’t slept properly in 5 years and was taking time out for herself. During our fire pit letting go ceremony she wrote a letter to her late mother and cried as waves of unexpressed grief came pouring out.

I sat next to a man named Rob and his lovely wife Bianca at our welcome lunch. Rob turned to me and whispered that he was hungover as shit because he’d been on the turps since Christmas - as I stared deep into his bloodshot eyes, I knew that we were going to be best mates. I would later find out that this amazing couple had been through hell the last few years after their triathlete daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury from a cycling accident. It tested their marriage in all the ways possible but not only did they keep their family and marriage together, their daughter is now a walking talking miracle who’s on her way to the Olympics. Not bad for a girl who had to learn how to do everything from scratch.

Along with Rob and Bianca, James and Jessica from Byron Bay were repeat visitors when it came to this retreat. They loved the place so much they made it a point to return every year and often arrived by helicopter. Despite their success (which you only found out about from everyone else), they were humble and unassuming people who walked around in organic cotton and Birkenstocks. When he was 47 years old, James accidentally rode off the side of a mountain while travelling 240km/hr on his motorbike. When he finally came to and realised he actually survived the fall, he saw that his bike had landed right next to him and resigned to the fact that he’d now die from its impending explosion. Apparently, luck was on his side that day. It took his riding buddy an hour to find him, an ambulance a while longer and despite them only having a few minutes worth of happy gas to tie him over, James made it out of there on a helicopter in better shape than anyone expected. He spent two long years recovering and at 70 years old is now healthier than ever with no niggling aches or pains. When expressing his gratitude for a second chance at life, James credited his wife Jessica for “putting him back together”. They’d enjoyed 20+ years of marriage so far and witnessing the playful, caring and attentive way they loved each other was such a privilege. It reminded me how transformative the love of a good woman is when paired with the right man. To all the women reading this – you are extraordinary, please never forget that.

Hayami was a Japanese force to be reckoned with who had almost 0% body fat, slept 4-6 hours a night, got up at 4am every morning and did no exercise except to walk her dogs. We all marvelled at how much she ate and wondered if a ginormous tape worm would be released during one of her colonics (spoiler alert, that didn’t happen). Hayami doesn’t allow herself to sit down for more than 2 hours a day, eats plenty of nutritious food and manages to look 40 despite being 59. Rob referred to her as “Mrs Miyagi” for the duration of the retreat which further reiterated how much I liked him.

Olive was abandoned by her father when she was young and struggles with a large number of health issues. She had no filter when telling you about all the things the retreat had to offer including the emotional release people had after a colonic, the hasty evacuation of your bowels from herbal remedies and the fact that she just never cries. Ever.

Joanne’s husband passed away and she later found out that he was keeping a number of secrets. All of which were revealed by his iPhone. Despite her anger and confusion, she never told her Stepchildren. She wanted them to grieve the father they knew.

Hannah was staying at the retreat for 3 weeks which is not a cheap endeavour. Every time she shared something with us it was done behind a screen of held back tears. I don’t know what was happening in her life but whatever it was, she wanted it to change.

Bec was a Cancer survivor who’d had a complete mastectomy and would make us all laugh as she unknowingly snored during our sound healing classes. During our fire pit ceremony she kept it very simple – Bec was grateful for life, she knew how quickly it could be taken away.

3 months prior to the retreat Laura’s husband had a brain aneurysm that no one saw coming. His sudden passing took her and 9 children by total and utter surprise. When George passed, Laura realised she’d been the supporting actress in the story of his life and was now left with no choice but to write one for herself. George said yes to everything and lived life on his own terms, something that comforted Laura knowing he would have had no regrets. Despite being in the midst of deep shock and grief, she vowed to spend the rest of her days being more like George. Laura was going to say yes to everything.

Each night when I went to bed I thought about all these people. I thought about Bec surviving cancer, John riding off a mountain, George having no regrets, Sarah’s Mum, Hannah’s tears and Olive’s lack of them. I thought about all the stories I’d heard and all the assumptions we sometimes make about people we don’t know. I thought about how much healing happens when we talk to each other. About how powerful it can be when strangers show you the beauty of humanity and community. I thought about the life I lived in 2023 and how tired and miserable and resentful I’d been.

And as I stared up at the ceiling wondering how many parasites would come out of my butthole in the morning, I realised that while spending time with a group of strangers, the lingering anger I’d been holding onto for 12 months had quietly dissipated.

I was finally free.

With love, always

J