I can see now that this was an illness talking to me.
It was not the truth talking to me because my family wouldn't be better off without me.
But in that time, in that moment, it was pure belief that that's what needed to happen for
my family to move on and have happy lives.
Hi, I'm Jess Rowe and this is the Jess Rowe Big Talk Show, a podcast that skips the small talk
and goes big and deep.
From love to loss and everything in between, I want to show you a different side of people
who seem to have it all together in these raw and honest conversations about the things that matter.
I first fell in love with Julie Goodwin when I watched her on MasterChef Australia.
Her warmth, honesty and sometimes chaotic cooking made her the very first winner
of the cooking show Juggernaut.
However, there's so much more to Julie's story.
She's dealt with sexual abuse, mental illness and addiction.
And her kind and generous heart is determined to share her story
to help other people living with shame.
Now, I'm the same age as Julie and I can relate to so much that she's written about
in her stunning memoir, Your Time Starts Now.
It made me weep and I can't wait to share our conversation with you.
But just before we get started, a gentle warning that this conversation does touch on suicide
and child sex abuse.
Julie Goodwin, what a treat to have you in the podcasting studio.
Congratulations on your extraordinary memoir, which I inhaled over a weekend.
I absolutely loved it.
It's called Your Time Starts Now.
And for me, there were so many moments that I was so moved reading it.
And my daughters were looking at me.
They're like, Mum, because I'm very expressive.
They're like, what's happening?
Yeah, I'm familiar with that.
Yeah, they're like, what's going on?
And for me, what it was is you are so honest in this book about mental illness and addiction.
And they were things that really resonated with me.
Well, I think they resonate with a lot of us, but they're really hard to talk about.
Really hard to talk about.
And you've just got to reach a point in your life where you go, well, you know what?
I'm either going to own it, I'm going to put it out there,
I'm going to let daylight shine on it and stop feeling ashamed of myself,
or it's going to live inside me and keep me sick.
And those are my choices, really.
But what a choice you've made because you've very much put it all out there in the daylight.
And I think that point you make about if you don't put it out there,
it does make you sick, doesn't it?
And I actually think, and talking about this mental health,
honestly, we're all using those words more.
We've got corporate responsibility around it.
There's TV commercials about it.
There's days dedicated to it.
But I actually think that what we have to address is within ourselves.
So I don't think there's very many people in the world
who wouldn't want to reach out to someone else who's struggling.
But I think that so many of us, and whether it's generational or I'm not sure,
but I do know a lot of us are raised with the idea
that if you say this is hard or I can't manage this,
that you're weak or you're ungrateful or you're unable to put things in perspective
or that there's always somebody worse off than what we are
and therefore we have no right to complain.
That was the messaging I had internalised.
And so when things got hard, when I wasn't coping,
when I'd taken too much on, I didn't want to let anyone down.
I didn't want to appear incapable or like a flake
or like an irresponsible person or an unreliable person.
So I just kept taking it on and taking it on and taking it on.
And we've just got to be allowed to say this is too much.
This is too much.
And I think so many of us don't.
And so all that mental health messaging doesn't mean anything
if we don't examine our own lives and say,
well, you know, I'm prepared to help whoever needs help.
Almost all of us, I think, would be that person.
But so many of us would go, but I won't do that.
I'm grateful for everything.
There's nothing wrong in my life.
We've got to forgive ourselves and allow ourselves
and just have that part of the conversation.
And that's what moved me so much about your message.
Why it resonated with me is because I had terrible postnatal depression,
especially after the birth of Allegra, who's now 17.
And initially for me, it was very much that same kind of messaging
that you're talking about that I was like,
I shouldn't be feeling like this.
I finally got this baby, this healthy baby, this beautiful family.
And I kept pushing that away.
And I hadn't fully appreciated shame and the shame that I felt.
And that shame kept me silent, not forever, but it did silence me.
And I think what you're doing is saying, no, let's, if we can, push through that shame.
We've got to help each other do that too.
I find that dismissive kind of first world problems,
eye roll is really damaging actually, because yeah,
sometimes you use that phrase to sort of say, oh, come on.
You dropped your second iPhone and chipped the screen.
First world problems.
Also, it's used to put people down when they say, actually,
I'm finding this really hard.
I find it hard to be a new parent.
And people go, oh, but it's so much harder for other people.
And you've got a roof over your head.
And I've even had it post this book coming out, some of the commentary on interviews.
People who haven't read it, I might add.
Oh, well, that certainly sounds like she was in a private mental hospital.
Lucky her, she should have tried the public system.
I did try the public system, not by choice.
But this idea that we're not allowed to say something was hard,
unless it was absolutely the hardest, worst thing that a human being can go through,
means that there really should only be one person on earth at a time who's allowed to complain.
And that is not human life.
Sometimes we struggle and we've got to be allowed to say, this is hard.
I'm struggling with a lack of sleep.
I'm struggling with overwork.
I'm struggling with guilt that I'm not doing everything perfectly for my new baby.
I'm struggling with guilt because I have a roof over my head
and I have a partner who's helping me in this.
And I have a perfectly healthy baby that didn't take me years and years to have.
And I still have this thing going on in my brain and in my body that is making me depressed.
We've got to be allowed to say that without being shamed for it.
And that is what, again, I think is so beautiful about your memoir,
Your Time Starts Now, is that you give us permission to have these sorts of conversations.
You write about that you felt you probably did have postnatal depression.
But you weren't going at the time to say that
because you were doing that sort of messaging of, no, no, I'm fine.
There's nothing wrong with me.
The poor nurse who did the questionnaire and basically told me,
it was like, how dare you? How dare you call me that?
And that was pretty much my reaction to a number of practitioners over the years who said,
we need to look at this.
And I'm just like, no, I will not.
I will not have that word applied to me.
That is not the case.
I'm a grateful person.
My cup is always half full.
I mean, my cup had a massive hole in the bottom of it.
As many of our cups do.
Many of our cups do.
You can fill your cup as much as you want.
But when it's cracked, you've got to mend the cracks and then you can fill the cup.
And what was it that you think you were afraid of?
Oh, just my whole idea of who I was being thrown out the window.
If I'm depressed, then how does that sit with all the things that I've tried to be my whole life?
And I've worked so hard towards my whole life.
And the personality that I've built for myself, some of which comes from unresolved trauma,
some of which, you know, we are the sum of all the things that we have done and that
have been done to us and all the experiences that we've had.
And I'd very carefully constructed things to protect me, including being, you know,
shiny and competing all the time, doing well with everything I tried.
And just to be diagnosed with a mental health condition did not fit.
It didn't fit, rejected it, gone out.
No, it was as simple as that.
I'm not a person who does anything by halves.
I was frightened that if I got a diagnosis that that would become my world.
And it did for a while because I wouldn't address it.
And you live and you learn.
And now I understand that experiencing depression, experiencing anxiety,
that's something that I guess will crop up every now and again in my life.
And that's what it is.
But my beautiful therapist, who you would have read about, Heather, who I love,
said to me, and this is something she only said a week ago to me, just over a week ago,
because I was cranky.
You know, I'm doing all the things, Jess.
I work really hard to be well now.
It's its own form of discipline.
And I'd had a couple of really flat days, you know, when my face was doing that thing
where I had to arrange my muscles into appropriate expressions.
And it's exhausting, you know.
And I just said to her, I feel really ripped off because I'm working really hard to not
be depressed anymore.
Is my medication not working?
Is what's gone wrong?
What's gone wrong?
And she's like, depression, sadness.
She said, it's appropriate sometimes.
She said, look at what you're about to do.
You're about to release this book into the public.
It's going to be taken out of your hands.
It's appropriate to be stressed.
It's appropriate to have these emotions.
But what we're going to do is think of it as a hotel.
And you're going to check in and then you're going to check out and come home
and come home to all the things that make you happy.
To come home to love and come home to creativity and compassion
and come home to your granddaughter.
And, you know, so you can check into that hotel as long as you understand
that you can check perhaps.
And that is an analogy that I can carry with me for the rest of my life.
And it's an analogy that I'm going to use.
And I know our listeners, because I hear that and I think, yes,
I almost feel a lightning on my shoulders.
Like, it's sort of like, ah, it is okay.
And you talking about feeling cranky, just as of last week.
Also, that's, I think, almost part of your makeup and mine too.
And for many women, I think, of our age and generation,
that we sort of have to wear these masks and we have to be perfect.
And if we're going through depression or anxiety,
we have to be the perfect patient and do all the right things.
And front row at every group session and tick all the boxes.
And so, therefore, that will make us well.
And that's not life, is it?
No. And it's irritating.
Because I like things to be tidy.
And it's just there's nothing tidy about being a human being.
And I just feel like maybe we've got to embrace that a little bit,
sit in it a little bit.
And, yeah, occasionally check into the sad hotel
and eat the crappy room service and have a shower
with the water that's hot enough.
But while I'm there, I can go, well, you know what?
At least I get to go home.
Yes. And also, and you're right about this,
be compassionate on yourself and be gentle with yourself
because that is difficult.
Oh, that made me really cranky, too.
Just your compassion is not complete until you use it on yourself.
I was like, far out.
I thought I was compassionate.
I thought I was a compassionate person.
But do you know, some of these things that I've gone through
and that I've put myself through and that I've put my family through
and some of the shame that I've had to really chew on
and digest and live with inside me
has made me a more compassionate person.
I'm far slower to leap onto that high horse
and gallop off into the sunset.
You know, I'm far less likely to judge other people
because I know what it's like.
I know what it's like to feel that way.
And I know what it's like to be in the grip of something
that makes you feel that way every single day
and to not know what to do about it.
And the thing is, as many of us do, we keep going.
We put the band-aids on.
And you also share part of that band-aid for you was alcohol,
was that glass of wine at the end of the day.
And sometimes then that can get out of hand, can't it?
It became the thing,
the only thing that would slow me down enough to sleep.
So my brain was just on overdrive
and that's because I was working far too much
and I had a whole lot of all this underlying stuff
that was unprocessed.
And that literally at the end of the day,
if I didn't slow my brain down,
I could put my head on the pillow and not sleep.
And it would just fizz and skyrocket around my head all night.
And after a while, you get a little bit resistant to it
and so you need a little bit more.
And then I'd done that on and off throughout my adulthood.
And because I could do it on and off,
I thought, well, it ain't a problem
because whenever I need to, I can stop.
But I reached a point where I couldn't.
I reached a point where I wanted to and I couldn't.
And in the past, I'd always been able to.
I was like, okay, obviously I'm pregnant.
I'm not going to drink.
I'm breastfeeding.
I'm not going to drink.
I'm on the radio.
I've got to get up at 4 a.m. in the morning.
I'm not going to drink.
I won't drink through the week or?
I won't drink through the week.
Or at one point I stopped for two years.
I thought, this feels a bit problematic.
So I stopped for two years and I did that.
But then this last time around, I'm like,
okay, I've got to stop.
I've got to stop.
I'll stop next week.
I've got to stop.
Next week rolls around.
Well, and I couldn't.
And I couldn't loosen its grip on me.
And that's where I thought, oh, hell, whole hell,
whole fresh level of hell.
And that became just another bloody thing
that I was sick about and ashamed of
and felt like crap about, you know,
and needed to be addressed.
I hope, though, that you don't feel that shame now
because there were times when I was reading your story
and I just wanted to give you the biggest hug
and to say, no, stop being so hard on yourself.
There's a section there where you write about
drink driving when you were pulled over
and how that was the worst thing in your life.
And understandably, yes, it is an awful thing,
but you were so, so hard on yourself about that.
And I really wanted to take you and say, Julie, it's OK.
Yeah, but it wasn't OK.
And I will always carry terrible guilt and shame
about that thing, trying to work on the shame
because, you know, that's the I am bad
as opposed to I did something bad.
I'll never lose the I did something bad because I did.
But what that did was I just realised in that moment
how far away from who I am, I had gone.
And, you know, like I say, quite often in this,
it's not a fairy tale.
It's not a Hollywood movie.
There's no tidy story arcs.
Wouldn't it be neat and tidy if I just went,
well, now I've hit rock bottom.
I'm not going to drink ever again.
And we all live happily ever after.
It just didn't work that way.
It took a lot longer for me.
And, you know, and I went through really, really bleak stuff
before I could start working my way back towards light.
You know, but in that moment,
that was the worst thing I've ever done in my life.
It was the worst night of my life.
I'm working at getting past it,
but it just remains there as this terrible thing.
And the good thing is that I know that will never happen again.
I don't drink anymore at all.
And I've changed my life.
The parts of me that needed that alcohol
have been nurtured back to health
and brought out of the dark into the light
and are now an integrated part of who I am
and how I go about my life.
So I don't actually need to slow my brain down like that anymore.
I don't crave that anymore.
I just don't need it.
It took a lot of work to get there.
A lot of work to get there.
It was hard, but it gets easier every day.
And I would say to anyone, and I don't preach,
Jess, I do not preach because I'm not in a position to.
All I can talk about with any authority is what I went through.
But I have been asked, how did you know it was a problem?
I would say anyone saying to themselves,
maybe it's a problem.
If you've even had to ask yourself the question,
maybe just examine it a little.
Maybe just examine it a little.
And if it's not, then it's not.
And if it is, then maybe nip it before it gets you
by the balls and won't let you go.
Because as you know, addiction, alcohol, drugs,
whatever it might be, often is hand in hand with mental illness
because it's a way of self-soothing,
dealing with symptoms, numbing things.
But it comes hand in hand with that.
And I think there's a sort of a chicken and egg thing going on there.
And if you're in AA, a lot of those organisations say
you become mentally ill because of your addiction.
And I would say I didn't take up drinking for many, many years
after I was diagnosed with depression
or attempted diagnosis with depression.
For me, there's no chicken and egg question.
I know that I had mental health issues
before I ever had alcohol issues.
And I do talk in the book about trauma, about childhood trauma
and complex PTSD and that sort of thing.
But there's the saying that not all dogs are German shepherds,
but all German shepherds are dogs.
So not everyone who's experienced trauma ends up with an addiction.
But in my experience, and I've met a lot of addicts
through this whole thing, everyone with an addiction has a trauma.
I did not meet a single person with an addiction problem.
And the thing about that is that we're talking ordinary people.
We're talking ordinary people who found themselves in a position
where they are hurting other people.
They're spending money they don't have.
They're engaged in behaviours that they don't see
as what they want for their lives.
Nobody chooses that.
Nobody goes, you know what?
Today, I want to piss everybody off.
I want to make my beloved partner hurt.
I want to not be there for my kids.
I want to, you know, leave my colleagues in the lurch.
Nobody wakes up with that as their intention for the day.
But when you're addicted to something, that's quite often what you do.
And the reason that you do it is because there's unprocessed crap
that needs to be dealt with.
And I'm just here to say that for me, processing that
and the bloody painful it is to do,
but processing that moved me through that addiction out the other side.
You talk as well there about childhood trauma.
And you touch on in your book that you were abused,
sexually abused when you were a child.
And you don't talk a lot about that.
Well, partially because it's really bloody awful to think about.
It's really awful to write down.
Partially because, you know, I think that in relating some of these experiences,
it's more important that people see the similarities between us,
not the differences.
Which is the reason why I didn't write,
well, this is how many glasses of wine I had at night.
Because I don't want anyone to go, oh, wow, that's way more than me.
And I don't want anyone to go, well, she calls that a problem?
That's not a problem.
You know, this is a problem.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is what you were using it for
and how it impacted your life and what you were doing.
The reason I don't put detail around that was partially because it's hard to.
And secondly, because really the only reason I put it in there is,
well, first of all, because it gave me some context
for the stuff that happened subsequently,
which I actually had never put together until I wrote this book.
I didn't see the timeline until I wrote it down.
This happened at seven.
I remembered at 16.
This happened at 17.
Oh, do you think that's connected?
And then, you know, my life kind of went a little bit to hell
in those couple of years.
And I didn't even realise that it was at the time
that that memory came back, that the wheels fell off my life then.
And at 17, you attempted to take your life.
Because of now, as you say, you put the pieces together
because you were sexually abused when you were seven.
The memory came back and I, with that memory, was just,
oh my God, so much shame and just this feeling of being filthy dirty.
And so the other reason to write about it at all,
like it was so easy, I really very nearly didn't,
but then it wouldn't have been true.
The other reason to write about it is just because of the therapy
that I've done since is internal family systems
and it talks about the different parts of yourself
and how they step up to help you in certain times of your life.
And my seven-year-old was stepping in in ways
that were unhelpful at the end of the day.
And I needed to bring her back in from the cold and say,
this is not your shame.
This is not for you to bear anymore.
You're going to be okay.
And I want anyone else who's experienced anything like that
to understand that that part of yourself
shouldn't be banished from you, that little child.
You wouldn't do it if a little child came up to you
and said, I'm hurting.
You wouldn't say, I don't want to think about you.
You would say, this isn't your fault.
And that was a process of such lightning for me
that I just want anybody who's holding onto something like that.
It's making them sick inside.
You might not even know yet the connection
between something that happened in your childhood
and what's going on for you now.
And if what's going on for you now is not your best life,
then find someone who can help you do that work
because it could really be the difference
between life and death.
Thank you for sharing in that way.
You're an extraordinary woman, Julie.
Julie, you really are.
You are so brave and beautiful.
And for you to be vulnerable in this way,
it helps so many people.
I hope you are aware of that.
And when you have cranky moments,
that because I'm such a believer in what you do
in terms of sharing our stories,
it's how we make sense of our place in the world.
It's how we can understand not only ourselves
but help other people.
And you are doing that by what you do.
So many people know you from MasterChef
and this beautiful smile that you have
and that sort of exterior.
But I think even more so what you're doing now
is so much more powerful for people.
I thank you for that.
That's my hope, you know.
And, you know, actually in trying to figure out
what the hell's the purpose of all of this,
what did I go through this for?
And, you know, I think it's important for me
to find a silver lining, to find a purpose,
to find a reason for things.
If talking about it does that for someone else,
then that's enough.
That's enough reason.
That's truly my hope is that there's a way through.
There is a way through.
Just let yourself say it out loud.
And that is the very first step towards healing.
And all the things you have to do, you know,
the physical things, whether it's medicinal things,
therapeutic things, exercise things, nutrition things,
addiction, resolution, whatever it is,
it feels hard to do when you start.
But my God, it's nowhere near as hard
as going all the way to the bottom of the well.
Nowhere near as hard.
And also as well, I think what's so powerful
about your story is you make the point
that we are still works in progress.
It's not as if suddenly you're better.
After doing the work, the medication,
going to hospital, it takes time.
And that there are moments when we are back
at that bottom of the well.
And if I can talk with you about another moment
that you share when the kindness of strangers kept you going.
Yeah. Yeah, that was my, that was a really terrible day.
It was a really terrible day.
And I just sort of looked around at the wreckage
I was leaving all over the place and I couldn't bear it anymore.
And I came to what I thought was a realisation.
It was like a dawning on me.
Oh my God, everyone would just be so much better off
if I left them alone.
And so I set off to make that happen.
And I can see now that this was an illness talking to me.
It was not the truth talking to me
because my family wouldn't be better off without me.
But in that time, in that moment, that was my,
it was pure belief that that's what needed to happen
for my family to move on and have happy lives.
My son, my husband, he deserves someone
who doesn't bring this chaos into his life
and ruin everything, you know.
It was a realisation and it came to me fully formed like that.
And so I thought, well, that's what's happening.
And so I took off for a walk and yeah,
this beautiful young couple spotted me.
There was no one else around, not another soul around.
And I was walking through the sort of gates of the park
and they spotted me and I was crying
because I was saying goodbye in my heart.
And she gave me a hug.
She said, you look like you need a hug.
She gave me a hug and I sort of tried to rein everything in
and she said, are you all right?
Really what I wanted was for them to be on their way
so I could go and do what I needed to do.
And, you know, just sitting there by the water
and they popped back and just said,
well, you look like you need some company.
And they just sat with me and they didn't ask me what was wrong
and they didn't ask me what I was thinking of.
They just talked to me about their little kids.
I told them about my kids.
They told me about their dog who was with them,
beautiful dog, was giving me good pats,
you know, giving me lots of cuddles.
And I told them about my dogs.
And in the space of that couple of hours,
I actually laughed a couple of times.
And by the end of that two hours,
you know, my more healthy voice had chimed in
along with the illness and just said, you know,
they made me promise I was all right.
I rang Mick and from there I went to a hospital.
That moment for people to have come up to you
I think is so powerful too that we never know
what someone is actually going through in the moment.
And for that woman to give you a hug
and to sit with you along with her partner and her dog
and to talk about those small, seemingly small things.
But they're the things that matter, aren't they?
They're the golden things in our lives.
Yeah, I'll always be thankful to them.
And because, you know, I don't think that would be
an easy thing to do, to walk up to a stranger
who's in some distress and just say,
oh, I'm just hanging out here.
Because I could have been somebody who turned around
and told them where to go or told them not to interfere.
It takes a vulnerability on their part to do that as well.
And, you know, I just, I'm very thankful
and my family is very thankful.
Let's talk about your beautiful family.
Mick, your husband, we all need a Mick in our lives.
Well, you can't have mine.
And your love story.
I mean, you met, what were you, 19?
Yeah, not long out of high school when we met.
Yeah, you know, St. Vincent de Paul,
like Vinnie's youth group.
And he was just one of a bunch of these ragtag, rough fellas
who, you know, they were so far outside my circle of experience.
I went to Hornsby Girls High School.
I had a very sort of matriarchal family.
And so to walk into a room with all these rough blokes,
it was a little bit intimidating,
but they were just hilarious.
And they just had hearts of gold, you know.
They were doing all this charity stuff.
Some of my best times were spent with those guys
and they're still my friends now.
But, you know, we'd drive down to the city together,
go to Matt Talbot Hostel,
load up their van with sandwiches
and a big urn of dreadful coffee.
And we'd go around to, you know,
people sleeping rough around Kings Cross and Central and all that.
That was what we did on our weekends, you know.
And I just, you know, I fell in love with Mick.
I fell madly in love with him.
He's just calm and gentle and all things I'm not.
Well, you're a good, you balance each other out.
Absolutely, we balance each other out.
And, you know, he's tall and I'm short
and he's skinny and I'm not.
Those are all those things.
And he has just been so steadfast and faithful
and just everything I've needed in my life.
And, you know, you talk about strangers
who got between me and Brisbane Water.
He's got between me and the edge over and over and over again.
There's that beautiful story about the moon.
And that was when you knew.
That was when I knew.
So we'd been going out for a little while.
And, you know, to paint the picture, he played in a band.
He had a mullet or was wild.
Had a pierced ear, you know, had his own car.
And I was just this straighty 180, you know,
good student type, you know, good girl.
But I fell for this boy.
And one night he dropped me home from,
we'd been out and he dropped me home
and he lived about 15 minutes away.
And my phone rang and I picked up the phone.
It was, you know, pre-mobile.
Thank you very much.
And picked up the phone and he's just gone.
This real cool guy who's never presented himself as cool.
He just was because he didn't care, you know.
He's like, you've got to go outside and look at the moon.
You should see it.
It's an awesome colour.
He goes, go, go now.
And I hung up and I went out and I looked at the moon
and it was an awesome colour.
And I just thought, oh my God, this is him.
He's my human being.
For all our differences, I love the moon when it rises
and the colour it goes.
And the idea that he did too, I just knew.
And I have been knowing that for 35 years.
I loved as well a story about when you're in the midst
of MasterChef and it was four and a half months
that you're away from home.
You didn't realise that that would be the length of time.
And they gave you a pass out for your Nan's then 90th birthday.
And Nick organised something special yet again for you, Julie.
Well, he had previously said, because we didn't know
we were going to be apart.
And he had previously said, in frustration one day,
it'd be easier if you were in prison because at least
then we'd get conjugal visits.
Well, we drove a van.
And so we all met at my Nan's nursing home.
And he said to me in the middle of my Nan's 90th birthday,
he said, I've got some clothes for you out in the van.
Just come on out and we'll see if you want to take them
back to the house with you.
And I went out and he'd folded all the seats down.
There was a mattress, a mattress and pillows and a dude.
So five minutes later, we were back inside the party.
Puffing and panting and trying to look smooth
for my mother and my grandmother and my dad and all my children.
I could not stop laughing.
And that's just a little illustration of how we laugh a lot.
And that's so important, I think, laughter.
And as you say, you're such a team because you're different,
but you balance one another out.
And you've got your three beautiful sons
who you write about so lovingly.
And now your granddaughter, Delilah.
She is so beautiful.
And it's so funny because now I'm looking at Facebook.
Only this morning, another one of the girls I went to school
with has just become a grandparent.
And I'm just like, oh, you grow a whole other heart.
It is divine you wait.
It's just next level.
Having children is the most profound thing.
Having a grandchild, it's like having children,
but without all the stress and worry
that you're going to accidentally break them
when you touch them or lose the roof over their heads
or that people won't like them.
Nobody else needs to because I will like her enough
for the whole world.
But I don't need to because she's just so lovable.
And the special gift, too, is because Mick was a teenage boy
when I met him and he became an adult and a working man.
And then he became a father.
And now I get to fall in love with him all over again
as a grandfather.
And it's just so special to go through those stages
of life with somebody like that.
See, we all need a Mick.
We all need a Mick.
And you pay tribute to him in such a beautiful way
when you share that you thank him for loving you back to life.
Yeah, well, that's how it went.
I don't know too many people who would stick around
for what he stuck around for.
I think a lot of people would have run for the hills
when we were still teenagers, but he did not.
He's such a sure person.
He just knew I was his person too.
And so there was no question ever in his mind
of finding someone else, of finding an easier path.
It was whatever path we were on as long as we're on it together.
He said that to me over and over again.
We're better together.
And that's what made MasterChef so hard
is that we were apart for that long.
And that was harder than either of us anticipated.
But yeah, he has stayed with me through all the hard stuff.
He stayed with me through all the great stuff as well,
you know, and loved that as well.
And taken everything in his stride, you know,
this quiet sort of introverted guy who's suddenly getting,
he gets recognized in his own right.
And how does he cope with that?
He's taken a back bite every time.
But, you know, he's just taken it all in his stride.
All of it, the good and the bad.
And he has held me through it all.
But again, I think this is why people love you, Julie,
is that you share that.
You share that life isn't about our highlight reels.
Life is messy and painful and hard.
But we can do the hard stuff.
Yeah, we can do it.
We can get through it.
There's times when you don't feel that way,
but you've got to make sure there's something in you
that holds onto that shred of
this is going to get easier.
Because when you lose that shred,
that's when you find yourself in dire need of intervention.
You know, if you can do that for yourself,
if you can even find a single thing in my story
that resonates with you where you think,
actually, maybe I am working too hard.
Actually, maybe I do need to have a look at something
that happened a long time ago.
Actually, maybe I do need to let go of some shame.
Or I do need to do things a bit better
in terms of my physical health or my mental health.
Anything, any one thing,
if any one thing resonates with you,
act on it, please, and talk to somebody about it.
And that could be the thing that makes a difference.
It could start you down a whole new path.
Julie, your story has made an enormous difference to me
And I know it's going to make such a difference
to so many people.
I thank you for your bravery and beauty and vulnerability.
And I really urge our listeners
to get a hold of your extraordinary book.
Your time starts now because you are quite a woman.
Thank you so much.
Well, Julie and I shared tears,
my glasses were fogging up,
and we shared some laughter.
Isn't she remarkable?
Her story, her willingness to share it
in such a brave and open way is just phenomenal.
Now, make sure you get your hands on Julie's beautiful memoir,
Your Time Starts Now.
I read it in a weekend.
And do you know what, as well?
There are some really easy recipes that even I could do
that she's put at the end of each chapter.
Now, if this conversation brought up some issues for you,
remember Lifeline is there on 13 11 14.
And we've also put some other resources in our show notes.
And if you enjoyed my chat with Julie,
I reckon you're going to love my conversation with Matt Agnew.
I've had a long battle with mental illness for a long time.
I first started seeing a psychologist when I was 12 years old.
When I'm in a trough or a low, it's exhausting.
I get frustrated sometimes because it just feels like
so much effort and work and financially very expensive for me.
And I imagine thousands of Australians to exist.
But for me to have a baseline that isn't dangerous is so much work.
The Jess Rowe Big Talk Show is hosted by me, Jess Rowe,
executive producer Nick McClure.
She's a wonderful leopard lady.
Audio imager, Nat Marshall.
Supervising producer, Sam Kavanagh.
Until next time, remember to live big.
Life is just too crazy and glorious to waste time on the stuff that doesn't matter.