What Remains Wild_E1_The Courage To Come Undone

The podcast "What Remains Wild" hosted by Lauren Moss explores identity, transition, and untamed aspects of ourselves. In episode one, Moss shares her personal journey of leaving a high-pressure political role, experiencing mental health challenges, and seeking help to reframe her experiences. She emphasizes the importance of addressing mental and emotional health, setting boundaries, seeking support, and rediscovering joy. Moss invites listeners to reflect on feeling safe in their bodies and minds, offering a safe space for connection and growth. The episode ends with a practice to identify where one feels safest. Moss encourages self-care and exploration of a more joyful and creative life. Welcome to What Remains Wild. I'm Lauren Moss, and this is a podcast that's about identity, transition, and the parts of us that won't be tamed. I want to be clear from the beginning. This is episode one, and this certainly is not a finished story. I am very much inside the season of really discovering what the courage to come undone actually means. And starting here really matters because so many of us go through times in our life where everything around us falls away. It's stripped back, and we're really forced to confront what we know about ourselves and what the next chapter might look like. You can either think or you can shine. I want to acknowledge that this is a time of year when we do start to think about all of those things. We reflect on the year that's been, and we reflect on the year that's to come. And let's face it, we're all collectively pretty tired by this time of year. Although maybe you're coming alive by the spirit of Christmas, quite possible. But this episode's about what happens when pressure changes and your inner world finally has room to speak, and you start to process the things that perhaps you've been ignoring for quite some time. I'm gonna start by talking about mental health. I mean, our mental health is part of our health overall. It's an incredibly important part of just being human. We still separate mental and physical health. Maybe it's easier for us to talk about it in those terms. But of course, for those of us who experience mental health challenges and mental illness, we know that these two things are intrinsically linked. Your hormones can impact your mental health, your mental health can impact your physical health, and we need to think of them as two sides of a really important coin. Secondly, I wanna touch on the fact that when you are in leadership or you're in high-pressure roles, it can really distort your self-awareness, your ability to listen to your own body's signals about what is going on for you. You learn how to cope and even thrive under pressure. You think about your ability to live in flight or fight as a strength because you thrive in it and you're very used to it. But the cost of being fine for a really long time is pretty bloody huge. My own story is long winding, but today I'm gonna start in August 2024 when I left a high-pressure public role. I was a member of the Legislative Assembly in the Northern Territory in Australia, a role that I had performed for 10 years of my life. The first thing I remember realising when it was all over was how tired I was. It's what happens when the adrenaline leaves your body. You've been operating on fumes. You've been running on adrenaline. It stops and you realise how tired you are. I think it's also important to note that I had a four-and-a-half-month-old baby at this point in time as well. And so when I talk about being tired, I mean every sense of the word. I've always been a person who has experienced anxiety. I know that about myself. But over the next few months, it took on a whole other shape. My anxiety spiralling became my life. I was spending whole days just in my own looping thoughts and all the physical symptoms that come with that. And if you're somebody who experiences anxiety, whether you have a diagnosis or don't have a diagnosis, but you know that this is you, you know what that's like to live with the physical feeling, sometimes constantly, of anxiety. My hormones, the exhaustion, the nervous system overload, it was all there. And I found myself in January of 2025 as my partner was plating up dinner for the family, as I was leaning into this new life on a text exchange with Beyond Blue, because I knew I could not continue to live in the way that I was, that I was being robbed of joy with my two gorgeous girls, who are absolutely joyful, wonderful. That I could not get outside of my own head and my body feeling really unsafe. I think it's fair to say that during that time, I really lost the shape of myself. And there was this idea of excitement of a new chapter and grief existing together. And this professional network that I've had for a really long time, where I was often spending really long periods of time with my colleagues. Some weeks we might be there from eight until midnight. You're spending way more time with these colleagues of yours some weeks than you are your family. And then it all falls away. And while you all still have a shared experience, and you're still sharing that amongst yourselves, everybody starts to go off on their new paths. And those relationships in that family really starts to fall away. Your relationships shift and change. And essentially everything you have known disappears. Now I'm talking about a very specific example here, and I know that. And I will say that from my perspective, politics is not just a job. It is how you live your life. You can't go to the shops without having a conversation with someone, either about an issue or just because somebody wants to have a chat. And that's a beautiful part of the job. But your family has to support you. They come along to things with you. You can be at six events across the weekend. It is a life. It's not just a job. You can be really visible all of the time. You know that optics are important. You know that media love a story where they might be able to get a gotcha, as well as the good news stories. And that builds a really big level of hypervigilance in your life as well. And so when all of that changed, I still felt that deep anxiety about being visible publicly while I was feeling quite fragile privately. There's a real loneliness, I'll be honest, in leadership, but there's a real loneliness in the transition from a high-pressure job or a really public-facing leadership position. What I will say is that the reason why I'm talking about this now is I am now seeing this in others, particularly women of my own age. When circumstances significantly change, many of us are realising how many other parts of our mental and emotional health we haven't actually dealt with. Because finally, our brain has got the space to think about it. It's like our brain says, thank God you're now paying attention to me and all of the things that you haven't properly processed. And so I'm gonna make you think about that and I'm gonna attempt to process it. So what I'll say about that period of my life was that I really needed to set some boundaries I wanted to retreat, but I knew that I needed to keep putting myself out there. I needed to think about my next professional chapter, my next personal chapter. And seeking support was a really important part of that. And I had been seeing a psychologist on and off for 18 months, two years, and it just wasn't getting there for me. But what I did was I did get on the waiting list for a mental health nurse practitioner who did a full assessment on me, was very clear about the fact that she thought I had been undertreated for quite some time. And we went down the treatment pathway of ENDR. I'm not gonna go into that today, but it's really super interesting. And I would encourage people to look it up because it's fascinating in terms of how it works. But ultimately for me, this was about putting the tools in place for my brain to be able to reprocess events, beliefs, memories in a way that allowed me to reframe them and learn what safety in my own body felt like again. And it was a pretty scary thing to realize probably in about February of this year that what I was feeling was a complete lack of safety in my body pretty much all the time. That's a really awful thing to have to admit to yourself. But I invite you to think about that. Do you feel safe in your body? Do you feel safe in your mind? If you don't, you need to reach out and you need to actually address that because you deserve to find joy. You deserve to know the difference between nervous energy and excitement. You deserve to not spend every day feeling anxious. So this is what, what Remains Wild is about for me. Because over the course of this year, I've dealt with some pretty big things that I have spent a long time pushing down. I have connected and reconnected with particularly women who share my values, who feel completely synchronized with me and whom I feel exceptionally safe with and can challenge me. And I wanna be able to offer that to you as well. I want to be able to offer a safe space where we can connect and we can challenge ourselves and we can think about living a life that is joyful and connected and creative and not setting up camp in the anxious and the negative. Before we finish, I do want us to think about doing a small practice. Something that kept surfacing for me this year was the difference between coping and actually feeling safe. So over the next few days, you might gently ask yourself, where do I feel safest right now? Not where you're most productive and not where you're needed, just where your body feels a little less braced. You know what I'm talking about and you don't need to change anything. You just need to notice. I really hope that you stick around. I have got some really interesting conversations to come. This is just the beginning. Please take care of yourself. Thank you for being here and take care of what remains wild.