I got the news on a regular weekday morning. As my favorite author Joan Didion says in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life, as you know, it ends. Except for me, it was breakfast. 

I had plunked down into my boyfriend Theo’s blue couch and I was checking my morning emails. And at the top of my inbox was an email from my editor in Canada, and it read:

Kris, I’m really sorry, but with the way the economy is going in Canada at the height of COVID, the company has to cut costs and we’re going to be shutting down the website. I won’t be able to commission any more work. I’m really sorry.

My heart sank into my stomach when I got that news because it was four years of consistent full time work as a freelance writer and it was my livelihood. And being a freelance writer as well, it’s a little bit different than having a full time job where you update your resume and then you can fire it out to other companies and hope in a couple of weeks you have a similar job. 

Freelance writing, contracting is built on relationships and a lot of my work was in Canada. So I had spent the last two years building relationships in Perth that hadn’t resulted in any work yet. So, this was a big blow for me. And it’s sort of the idea that when you’re doing the work, you’re also hustling for the work. 

And then you’re sort of forecasting and worrying, wondering if the work is going to come in and if you’re going to have enough money to pay your bills. I remember going into the kitchen where Theo was buttering toast and to share the news. But I immediately, if anyone knows Brene Brown, I sort of, I put my armor on and I did that thing, you know, and telling him the story that I was like, you know, I’m strong and I’m independent and I’m going to get through this and I’m going to rebuild my business and no worries. 

But when I came home to the beach house and I sat in that brown chair over there every morning and opened my laptop and a word document and, you know, thought about how I was going to keep rebuilding my business. The reality was very different and, you know, when I would do that day in and day out for a couple of weeks, I was getting to this really negative headspace and it just wasn’t working. 

And that negative headspace and that worry and anxiety was manifesting into digestive problems, you know, some headaches, maybe some moodiness with friends and family. One afternoon I was over at South Beach with a really good friend of mine, Mika, who is in Tasmania right now. So she can’t be here. 

But she knew I wasn’t feeling well and she said the borders are opening up in a week. I’m going to walk the Cape to Cape. Do you want to join me? And I love spontaneity and adventure. But because I was in this negative headspace, I just immediately shut it down. And I said, no, you know, I have to be responsible. 

I have to be accountable and I have to be rebuilding my business like I can’t. She’s like, okay, no worries. Like, just let me know I’m leaving on Monday. So the next day, Theo and I were walking around Beaver Lake, walking and talking, one of my favorite things. And I told him what Mika asked and he had a completely different reaction. 

He looked at me and he was like, why don’t you just go? It’s one week. Nothing’s going to change in a week. If anything, it’s going to give you inspiration to rebuild your business. Just go. And this is one of the reasons I love Theo is because he always, well, you’re optimistic, but also he always seems to know what I need before I figure it out myself. 

And sort of his encouragement gave myself the permission to just go and to give my mind a rest and have fun. So we got in the car and I Whatsapped Mika and I said, okay, I’m coming. And that weekend, we were at a party with friends, and I rummaged what I could, which was a sleeping bag and a tiny knapsack. 

And on Monday morning, I walked down the path at the Red Gate, and Mika pulled up in her baby blue [inaudible word]. And I opened the door, and I said, hey, I’m so excited. And I had this sleeping bag just rolled over my arm, and my backpack with all my clothes just shoved in it, half open. And, she said, hey. 

Where’s all your stuff? I was like, Oh, it’s here. Like when we get to Dunsbrough, I’m, you know, I’ll just wrap it up properly. And yeah, it’ll be all good. And she was like, well, I have a tent in the backseat and all of our food and our camping stove. So we kind of need to put it into two bags between us. 

And she was just like, get in. We’re going to BCF. So I went to BCF and I got a bright red, new trekking backpack and we hit the road. And, when we were on the freeway at 12, we looked out the window and the police were pulling down the barricades and we were out of lockdown. We started that day at Dunsborough, at Sugarloaf. 

And I remember putting the backpack on and it was very heavy. And it reminded me of my backpacking days in Southeast Asia, but I had never walked for seven days. in the wild with all this weight, but I was just like, let’s do it. I’m up for the adventure. We got to camp that night. So there was a rainwater barrel, and a drop toilet. 

And we went to sleep in our two-person tent. And in the morning we got up and had coffee and peanut butter on some crackers. And we pulled out our massive, sorry, I’m not used to holding this and I think I’m using a lot of body language. We pulled out this huge map of the Cape to Cape, so we had 127 kilometers to do in about seven days. 

And we said, okay, if we walk every day until about sundown, we can probably do about 20 kilometers. So every morning, that’s what we’d do. We’d wake up, have coffee, look at the map, figure out how long we’re going to walk for, and kept going. Just went on with it. I realized very quickly because I didn’t have my phone, I didn’t have any screens, I didn’t have my computer, I was out of, you know, my regular environment, that I was inviting room for my brain to rest and to think creatively, and also when you’re on that trail, I don’t know if anyone’s done the Cape to Cape. 

You’re basically surviving outside for seven days. So, you have no choice but to pay attention to what’s immediately in front of you. We definitely saw tiger snakes and that was a little frightening, but fun. And, you know, like, are we walking over boulders? Are we going over sand dunes? What’s coming in front of us? 

My mind didn’t have that space to be worried, you know, in the past or to worry about the future. And I started to get excited about what my work was going to become. I, you know, Mika one day was way ahead of me on the trail and I started to talk to myself and I started saying, what is the work that I would be really excited about doing? 

And I said, wouldn’t it be cool if I could interview women and girls in sport about their mental wellness and how they’re overcoming, you know, self doubt and confidence. These are the things that I’m really passionate about as a soccer player. And I kind of kept this dialogue going. Our most memorable day was Hamelin Bay. 

It was a couple of days before we finished. It was our longest and hardest day. It was about 28 kilometers, and it was 12 kilometers on the beach. With our packs. All the weight. When we got down there, we were like, wow, this is amazing. We’re out of lockdown. We have this whole stretch of beach to ourselves. 

How lucky are we in WA? Like, clear blue sky. Went for a swim. We put our backpacks on and kept walking and if you’ve done the trekking on the beach, you know, the easy thing to do is to just walk in someone else’s tracks and it makes it a little bit easier. So we did that. A couple of hours in, we needed to get to Hamelin Bay. 

We hadn’t had a campsite booked. We were out of food. I don’t think we had any goon bag wine either. We were enjoying that every night, and I can’t tell you how good ramen tastes, when you’ve been trekking all day. But, yeah, as we kept going, I started to get massive amounts of pain shooting through the bottom of my feet. 

And I was genuinely concerned about continuing, you know, and being able to get there. And… I don’t know where it came from, but this sentiment that my mom shared with my brother and I 15 years ago when my dad died came up and she had said to us, it was two weeks after he passed and she wanted us to go back to school because she could see how much pain we were in and she knew it wasn’t good for us to be, you know, sitting around and she said, you have a choice. 

You can sit in the corner over there and you can curl up in a ball and you can let grief consume you. And it will. Or, when you wake up every morning, you can plant your feet on the floor, and you can tell yourself to put one foot in front of the other. And that’s all you have to do that day, and that’s enough. 

So I did that, while I was on the beach. I talked to myself out loud, and Mika and I did it together, and I just said, okay, one foot in front of the other, you get there. And we did. And I remember when we were getting there, everyone was fishing and drinking nice cold beers, and, we really wanted one. 

We walked up the stairs, and the ranger was there, and she had closed up for the day, and… I guess she’d seen it all before. And she said, oh girls, just go, you know, get an envelope. There’s a site that you can take. And we said, oh, also like, are you willing to open up the store? Because we would really love wine. 

Like, we’ve been walking all day. And she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t. So we had, yeah. We had somewhere to sleep. We had a little bit of food. No wine. We survived. We laughed it off. So a storm was coming. We needed to get up the next day at 4 a.m. to finish the walk at 10 a.m. in Augusta and we got up at 4 a.m. and it was pitch black and we had our head torches on and the waves were crashing in and it was the most amazing feeling. 

I felt very alive and we could see the lighthouse so we knew we were going to be finished soon and we did finish at 10 and we high fived and it was a great celebration of our friendship and just finishing such a massive journey. 

And I think in that moment I sort of realized it’s the same thing in life that, you know, we have these hard journeys sometimes. And if we look at the whole thing, we might be really overwhelmed, but if we break it down into small steps, we’ll get there. On the drive home, I had a bit of doom and gloom because I knew I needed to come back and rebuild my business. 

That night I was reading a wellness magazine and it said, when you have negative thoughts, turn them into positive thoughts by, you know, saying, if I was worried about my writing not being good enough, I wrote instead, I am a great writer, and I have important messages to share. And I, you know, I am going to rebuild my business in a way that makes me excited to get up every morning and do the work. 

And when I woke up in the morning, I had four writing offers in my inbox. That has never happened in six years of being a freelance writer. And one of them was from the Centre for Stories, from Logan. I’m looking at Logan down there. I was going to be, and we’ve done the work now, but I was going to be interviewing WA Olympians about their COVID 19 experiences. And a big part of that was mental health. 

I also kind of went on to rebuild my business in ways that I never have with more clients, with work here in Perth. I have my own office now in my own creative space. And I realized that because I started believing in myself on the trail, that the energy, that positive energy I created, the world was like, well, here’s four people. 

Who also believe in you and who want you to do this work. So, my message for you today is that when you get stuck mentally with anything in your life, get up from the four walls that you’re in, and move your body, because movement is medicine. And, as I mentioned, Mika couldn’t be here because she’s doing the Overland track in Tasmania. 

And, in May, we’ll mark one year of finishing the Cape to Cape by walking Walpole to Denmark. And I will be prepared. Thank you. 

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