How the quiet, high-achieving, fussy eater child, former registered nurse became the nutritionist who gets it

Content warning: This blog post mentions suicidal ideation. If that feels activating for you right now, please give this blog a miss.

I was born in the 90’s in Melbourne. I grew up with my parents, two siblings, and always multiple cats and dogs. I am the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter (which could be it’s own essay).

Reflecting on my childhood often feels like a contradiction. Our family of five spent a lot of time together and I have so many happy memories from my childhood.

I also spent a lot of childhood intently studying human behaviour and social rules. I didn’t ‘get’ a lot of what was expected. I didn’t understand why certain topics were off limits and to this date I don’t really understand the concept of ‘over-sharing’. I’ve always been the friend who overshared, and that meant that friends would confide to me later, in 1:1 settings, because I always spoke more deeply about things I was experiencing.

Having a mum, aunty and grandmother who are nurses I was always fascinated with the human body and how it functions. I loved learning and my early primary school years were easy in some ways. I didn’t start school until I was six and I would just absorb lessons like a sponge, no effort required. Which is a real miracle to think about considering I truly don’t think I ate much at school as my selective eater tendencies have been with me from 14 months old.

Many of my preferred foods weren’t lunchbox friendly. I liked hot food. I also despised (and still do) the smell of other people’s foods, especially sandwiches. I can see that while I loved learning, school is a bit of a sensory nightmare, and social rules as a young girl are complicated to try and make sense of.

By just ten years old, I felt pessimistic about life. I struggled with the homework we were set, especially if it did not interest me. It annoyed me because I loved researching and learning things on my own, but I’d be set specific tasks by school to complete. From that tender age until way too recently I always wondered if my life would be spent always being told what to do.

I sometimes joke that I peaked at age 12 – I won a medal for the best score on those statewide English tests. Achieving was how I received praise and unfortunately this meant for decades my self-worth hinged on both praise and academic performance.

Interestingly enough,  the same year I failed to get into the Enhanced Learning in Mathematics and Science course at the high school I was going to. But my mum pushed for them to let me in, not because they placed expectations on me, but I was already in some advanced maths classes in primary school (alongside remedial sports classes because I was not the most athletic, coordinated child).

High school started similarly to the start of primary school. I still loved learning and a lot of came very effortlessly.

At age 14 I began volunteering with St John Ambulance, learning and providing first aid at community events. This was from a book my brother had received at his year 6 graduation titled ‘How to change the world.’ One suggestion was to learn first aid and somehow this turned into nine years of volunteering.

I was fortunate to be supported by my family to be a kid, focus on school and volunteer. I didn’t start my first paid job until I was 18, at good old McDonald’s.

As much as I’d always been an overthinker and a worrier, I think my decades of anxiety truly began in my teenage years. I didn’t understand my intense emotions and my mood swings, and I clearly remember questioning if I had bipolar. It was in those teenage years I began speaking to my GP about my anxiety and worries.

After high school I followed a friend and guy I liked to university to study nursing and paramedics. Again, I really loved what I was learning which made it easier but I struggled to know how I learn best if I didn’t take to the content straight away. In one of my paramedic cardiac subjects I failed the mid semester exam and somehow still achieved a high grade in that subject by the end of the semester.

Towards the end of my nursing degree I was becoming increasingly desperate to fix my acne that had bothered me since the age of 15. I’d gone through standard advice at the time (e.g. the OCP, doxycycline) with limited success. It was around this time I was introduced to nutrition in more depth.

I became so interested in nutrition and more holistic ways of looking at health that I really wanted to study it. But being in the last year of my four degree, I figured I was so close I may as well finish the degree and get a graduate year as a registered nurse. I don’t believe in regretting decisions but this would delay my transition to doing what I wanted to do by nine long years.

Well nine years to quit nursing and go all in on my nutrition business. But in reality I finished my nursing degree in 2014, did my registered nurse graduate year in 2015, worked casually as a nurse and travelled a lot in 2016, before starting the nutrition degree in 2017.

It could a story for another time, but in 2016 I travelled solo to South America (a big deal for someone who still doesn’t go out alone after dark) and I had the best time ever. There are very little demands on you when travelling solo plus I could wake up every day and be whoever I wanted to be. It was one of my earliest experiences of unmasking, not that I knew I was neurodivergent at the time.

In 2020 (a super fun time to be in Melbourne in particular) I finished my nutrition degree, and opened my business as I was quite unwell. Noone in my life believed me when I said that I thought I was experiencing mould illness. It wouldn’t be until January 2021 that I would complete a Mycotoxin test that indeed confirmed I had mould illness.

Fortunately for me the treatment worked for me quite fast.

This is actually a common theme of mine – I don’t get the worst version or the worst parts of any diagnosis I have. Which makes it really tricky to be believed and also believe myself – for example the mould illness symptoms for me were really an exacerbation of existing issues e.g. constipation, anxiety, fatigue (AKA undiagnosed autism, ADHD and probably ARFID).

I had no idea how to run a business. The business subject at uni did not prepare us adequately. My life also wasn’t conducive to running a successful business. I was still working too much as a nurse (not according to my partner at the time who said I needed to work more as a nurse and less on my new business).

In 2021 my relationship of 4.5 years ended and I moved back in with my family. It was peak lockdown time and I was grieving. Weirdly enough though once the acute grief subsided, I didn’t hate lockdown. I found an amazing job working as a swabber (for the virus) with an incredible team. Because of the chaos that was that time, I ended up as one of the ‘senior’ nurses (hilarious because before then I was a casual, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none ward nurse) and would often be running one of those giant drive through tents with a team of maybe 12 people under me.

This was the perfect challenge for me though and my favourite nursing job of my career. My direct managers were incredible and I felt like we were doing a great thing for the wider community in an otherwise shitty time. It meant that when people brought me workplace conflict, I couldn’t choose to be conflict avoidant (like I was in my personal life) and I developed great conflict resolution skills at this time.

Eventually that time ended and I escaped Melbourne the first chance I got, leaving on New Year’s Eve 2021 to travel with a friend before travelling solo.

In the solo part of that trip I met my partner Alex at a backpackers in Noosa. He is Canadian and was on a working holiday. We fell pretty hard (in a way that I’d be concerned if it was anyone else) and spent 8 days in a row together in Noosa before traveling to Brisbane to see Ocean Alley on my 30th birthday eve (I’d won tickets when in Brisbane the previous month but no one from Melbourne wanted to fly up to attend with me).

On my 30th birthday I was very sad to leave Alex. I didn’t think much would come of it as I never pictured being able to do a long distance relationship. I fall hard for people but I’m also very ‘out of sight out of mind’ (classic ADHD).

But Alex and I never stopped talking and within two weeks of being back in Melbourne I already had a ticket to see him the next month. We continued visiting each other and talking via text or FaceTime every single day.

This is now 2022. I found a new low stress but boring once I learned the ropes nursing job. And I discovered that I could access my long service leave as I’d been working for seven years. My business was still running but not a priority and I still didn’t know anything about running a business.

I used my long service leave to spend a month living with Alex, who was at that point living in an apartment in Noosa. It was the best of everything – being paid, being in love and still those electric early stages of a relationship, and being in Noosa. I was also pretty lost during the 10 hours that Alex would be at work during the day.

After that we really didn’t want to be apart. I fly home to attend my uni graduation as my sister was also graduating the same nutrition degree in the same ceremony, thanks to lockdown delays.

Then I said ‘I’m going to send my car to Noosa and go travel around with Alex and maybe stay there’. So I left with a minimal plan and only what fit in my car.

I fly back to Noosa a few days before Alex had to move out of where he was living. So we actually had nowhere to go or live. We went camping with friends and then we were just camping north of the sunshine coast, waiting to hear if we got approved for a house we had applied for. Obviously the adventure was fun but not surprisingly that my impulsivity and lack of routine caught up with me, and I remember crying a lot in our tent at various campsites. I guess I’d never been so unanchored in my life.

We did get approved for the house which was again exciting but then I needed a job. I was burning through savings and Plena Nutrition wasn’t really doing anything, but I thought with my professional background finding a job would be easy.

It was not. After applying for many roles from retail to nursing I ended up with two very different offers – retail assistant at Aldi or Telehealth nursing job for a cannabis clinic.

I took the nursing job, telling myself I’d save up fast and quit and then make my business profitable (sweet delusional girl that I was).

Meanwhile, it turns out jumping from long distance relationship to living with your partner in a 5 person share house is not very grounding either, and I was physically and mentally unwell those early months in Noosa. (Like, stuck in bed with thoughts of unaliving myself because I just didn’t even know which way was up anymore).

In 2023 I started the full time Telehealth job. I’d never had a full time job in my life (I’d worked 8 shifts a fortnight as a nurse which when it’s shift work and that demanding is basically full time in my eyes). I was not coping with life, the job and I was questioning if maybe I was autistic and ADHD.

I decided to invest in the assessment process, desperate for answers.

Because I choose the psychologist route, my assessment was over multiple sessions over many months.

In the meantime, I was extremely mentally unwell. I began taking full weeks off work, burning through my paid sick leave.

In the September, at 31.5 years old I got my autism and ADHD diagnosis. Initially I felt incredible relief that I indeed was not ‘broken’.

The relief was short lived as I realised a diagnosis (or two!) didn’t magically make the world accommodate me.

My workplace insisted I had to wait until I’d been there a year to drop a day a week (even though at this point I was only attending 3-4 days a week).

By February 2024 my mental health was incredibly low. I’d had many periods of suicidal ideation in my life, but usually ‘short lived’. In February 2024 they persisted for 10 days and I couldn’t figure out how to change my life. I recognise this now as autistic burnout, which requires a life overhaul, not simply rest.

I began searching for alternative income. My business was closed at this point as one of my attempts to help myself in 2024 was to remove as many demands as possible. Looking back this was an error as my business has always been my special interest.

I applied to my current workplace, an hour’s drive away. I was so desperate to leave that I told my now manager that as long as I could have three shifts a week I would take the job. I got the job.

In March 2024, eight months into taking regular unpaid sick leave, my manager at my nursing job set up a meeting to ask if I was OK. I was like ‘don’t worry about it I’m actually quitting today’ and sent in my resignation.

I was so optimistic at this new chance at life that I set myself a plan to restart my business. I’d just discovered my now mentor Hannah Sands, and realised content creation would be how I got my business noticed.

Transitioning from nursing to retail melted a lot of my stress away. Retail is hard and essential to society, but it’s unlikely someone will come to harm if you make a simple mistake.

In May 2024 I completed a course on content creation called Personally Branded by Hannah Sands. It felt like the biggest permission slip to be authentic, after being told my whole life that I was ‘too much’ ‘too sensitive’ ‘an over sharer’.

I began showing up online and quickly fell in love with content creation. I had a few clients that year but wasn’t consistent with getting my name out there.

I was also still recovering from autistic burnout and working at my retail job three days a week.

Towards the end of the year I identified with obsessive compulsive disorder. This was key to me because I had been trying to accommodate myself as much as possible, as is the general neuro-affirming consensus.

However what I learnt and realised I had known on some level, was that for OCD behaviours accommodating or completing the compulsions could escalate things. I had already known this on some level, knowing that if I found myself washing my hands too often I had to interrupt that behaviour before it became disruptive or I gave myself dermatitis again from overwashing.

I also realised that my struggles with food likely went beyond autistic sensory sensitivities and were potentially more ARFID related. I struggle with a low appetite and struggle to have food variety in new environments.

At the end of 2024 I tried to access ADHD medication to see if that would help, only to be told I was simply anxious and needed medication for that. That terrible experience would delay me seeking help for another 17 months.

Something that did help my mental health was nine months of business payments through the small business assistance program. With that income I gradually reduced my retail hours to 1 day a week.

Things started improving for awhile. I ran some group programs which I really enjoyed. I found non-nutrition supports (business mentoring, movement, sunshine etc) that eventually improved my capacity and helped me to make some changes to how I ate as well (coffee and hashbrowns wasn’t quite cutting it).

Then all of a sudden (so it felt) my nine months of support payments were coming to an end. I felt tired and sort of ridiculous – I’d been posting every day to my Instagram feed since March and yet it was August, and I hadn’t had a paying 1:1 client since November the year before.

I fell into a bit of a hole but refused to give up on my content creation streak (I was determined to make it to posting 180 days in a row).

I was starting to share more online about how I recognised ARFID traits in myself and my lifelong food struggles, and two things happened.

One, I was approached to be paid to give a talk about my story and my struggles to allied health professionals and parents. Now I actually had developed a public speaking phobia so this was simultaneously an amazing opportunity and time for me to get over one of my worst nightmares. I said  yes, I prepared and even though my body felt incredibly stressed the whole time, I did it. And I realised I had important things to say.

Two, a parent reached out to say they related to my content and asked if I could help their child. My initial reaction was ‘who am I to help?’ but I had naturopathic mentors in place, and I knew that helping this family would draw on my lived experience just as much as my nutrition qualifications. I was so nervous for that consult and now I still get to help that family and that child and it’s just incredible to be able to support families through that.

After that, it wasn’t an avalanche, but the snowball kept rolling. All my efforts in building my business and my personal brand started compounding fast. More clients booked in and I secured my second public speaking gig.

Something I haven’t managed to weave in here is partner privilege. After my business support payments ended (or maybe earlier and I wasn’t paying attention) Alex began providing more and more for us. I could write a book on his life story, but since I met him he has gone from being a casual labour hire to a full time position, to a promotion, to another promotion.

I promised that if I didn’t have to work so much at my retail job I would do more of the things around the house e.g. cooking, cleaning, washing. But that stuff isn’t the biggest dopamine hit and I definitely ignore it all way too often.

Alex sees my big business vision and somehow doesn’t really care about the chaos of the house. I tell myself it will be different when we move from this studio into a 2-bedroom house next month and I will keep the different zones organised. Right now the back area of the studio is my office, our dining room, the drying room, the lounge room and the store room. So it doesn’t take much for it to look chaotic.

That brings me to today, 9th July 2026. I am hoping this website will help me reach more people I can help – whether that’s through being relatable, through my course for parents of selective eaters or through 1:1 nutrition consults where I can support their health through nutrition.

Thank-you for reading and please let me know if anything resonated 😊