My life and working career has been a diverse journey: chef, factory worker, student, journalist, media and communications officer, Reiki practitioner, freelance writer. People always comment on how much change I’ve been part of, including at least 20 jobs across my life. But it never felt like it was radical change, or even change. I just went where I was taken, looking back on it, and where I wanted to go. And when this didn’t happen, it was obviously never meant to be. In my late teens I was in a job I hated. Strong word I know, but that’s how I felt. I wish I knew then what I did now, and I would have moved on, rather than staying there feeling stuck. Lying in bed until I had to get up and go to work was a terrible feeling, staring at the numbers on the alarm clock as if demanding they cease ticking over…

In my teens I enjoyed cooking, so became a chef for many years (not very fulfilling ones, admittedly). Tiring of that, as multitudes do, I was fortunate to land a job in a factory, and enjoyed working there until life changed and circumstances in the job altered, and I made the decision to take up study, and enjoyed two of the most content years of my life. Writing had always been a passion since I could write, particularly fiction. However the Diploma of Writing & Editing I completed would lead to my becoming a journalist, a vocation I had only thought about in the year leading up to enrolling for the diploma. Undertaking a journalism degree held no allure – three-plus years studying and being out of paid work was too long. Two years was OK, and I look on those years with more fondness as the distance increases between the present and those two years of study, which it never felt like while I was doing it. Having been employed full time for the vast majority of my adult life, I treated the diploma like a job, and am glad I undertook it, despite my journalism career lasting less than six years.

However this year – 2016 – I have taken control of my destiny more than ever in the past. The decision to change my mindset from seeking a job to creating a job (and another, but that’s a different story) was an easy one: it felt like the right time, and if it was ever going to happen, then now it would be. There has been a nagging

Reiki has been part of my life since 2011, when I was introduced to it in Gladstone. In 2010, I decided to do something ‘spiritual’, and a masseur I was getting treatment from suggested I think about doing level 1, after explaining a little about the modality. It was a conversation I am pleased took place, as Reiki has fitted well into my life, my curiosity about the spiritual side of our being, and thinking about the Universe and how it operates on the metaphysical level.