Jordhan Mullen is 22 years old, Carolyn's PA, and one of the most self-aware people you'll meet at any age.

In this episode, Jordhan opens up about growing up with a mum who was unwell for as long as she can remember, a dad who worked around the clock to hold everything together, and a childhood where moving around meant her older sister was often her only constant.

She talks about the unspoken rule that held her family together for years, not talking about it, and how that silence followed her into adulthood. About arriving at her mum's door as a kid only to be turned around and taken home without explanation. About blaming her dad for years before finally understanding why.

Jordhan also shares the moment a best friend changed everything, the grief of losing her mum during COVID and missing the funeral, and the realisation that moving to Wollongong wasn't coping. It was deferring.

Honest, tender, and quietly powerful, this conversation is a reminder that opening up isn't weakness. It's the whole point.

What does it mean to be the person who holds everything together, even when you're the one who needs holding?

This week, Carolyn sits down with Kristie Melling, a Brisbane-based marketing consultant who spent most of her life as the quiet anchor for everyone around her: her friends, her partner, her clients, her team. From the outside, Kristie looked like someone who had it together. On the inside, she was managing a level of chronic pain most people couldn't imagine, and doing it without telling anyone how bad it really was.

Kristie grew up in Gladstone, Queensland, in a family she describes as genuinely wonderful, entrepreneurial parents, a community-minded mum, and a tight group of childhood friends. Life felt close to idyllic. Until, at 13, she woke up one morning unable to move.

What followed was years of chronic sciatic pain, undiagnosed, mismanaged, and quietly reshaping who Kristie was becoming. Bracing against physical pain taught her to brace against emotional pain, too. She became the tough girl. The protector. The one who stepped in front when someone came for her friends. The one who stayed sober so someone else didn't have to be responsible.

In this episode, Kristie speaks honestly about what it felt like to finally be chosen by someone and why that feeling kept her in a difficult relationship for nearly a decade. She talks about the moment she closed her massage business in two days to move home and be with her mum, who had just been diagnosed with stage four cancer three months after Kristie gave birth to her daughter. She shares what it was like to sit with her dad on the balcony after the funeral, and what he said that she's never stopped thinking about.

And she talks about burnout, the kind that sneaks up on you so slowly you don't realise how deep you are until the day it stops.

Kristie's advice at the end is simple, and it's something most of us avoid every single day.

"Say the thing."

Born on a farm near the Ugandan border with no electricity and horses as her best friends, Julia McDonald Buchanan has lived more lives than most people could dream of. Sent to boarding school at five, shipped to England at thirteen with nothing but a suitcase and a sister, then uprooted again to rural Queensland, Julia learned early that home is wherever you plant yourself next.

What followed was a life lived entirely on instinct: teaching kindergarten in Nairobi, running photographic safaris in Tanzania, sailing across the Pacific in a 54-foot steel sloop through Force 11 storms, running expeditions around Cape Horn, and somehow eventually landing on the Sunshine Coast with a macadamia farm and a question she'd spent decades avoiding.

It took a horse throwing her off at 4am, a marriage ending, and her son leaving for England with his father before Julia finally stopped running. A yoga teacher training course cracked open something she'd been holding shut since she was five years old.

This is a story about a woman who built her resilience so high she couldn't feel anything underneath it, and what happened when it all came down.