The 'Me' in My Why.

On Friday the 7th of August, I was challenged to think about my why.

To be honest, I gave the easy answer, the one I always give. I want to buy the house. I want to build the retreat for educators to come to. I want to show my daughter that there is good in a world that so often feels like it's crumbling around us.

But I was pushed further. What's the me in that why, underneath the mission?

And if I'm honest, that part is selfish. I want the house. I want the land. I want the cows grazing somewhere that's mine. I haven't stopped turning that over since, wondering if wanting something purely for myself is even allowed to sit next to everything else I say I'm building this for.

But then the real question landed. Not what do I want, but why do I do any of it at all? Everything you do has come from somewhere. Is it the way you were brought up? Your beliefs? The philosophy you've built over years without ever naming it? That's the part I'd genuinely never sat down and asked myself.

So let me start further back, because I think the honest answer lives there.

Here's the full extended piece, everything kept, with the recovery section built out in full detail.

Reputation can be rebuilt.

It was the 17th of November 2023. Weeks before Christmas. I was a mum to a three-year-old, and I was still working, a family had just arrived to collect their children, when the email landed. I read it standing in that moment, and I laughed. It listed allegation after allegation, each one dressed up to sound serious enough to justify ending my career on the spot. None of them held up under any real scrutiny. Not one.

Why did I laugh instead of break? I've wondered that myself. Maybe it's the same thing that's always carried me, some belief, built somewhere along the way, that I know the truth even when someone else is trying to rewrite it.

The threat came later. For months, it wasn't fear I felt, it was frustration, watching an approval process for another service crawl along while I waited. I had a plan, so I told myself it was fine. It wasn't until the waiting stretched long enough that money became a real, sit-at-the-kitchen-table conversation for my family, that the fear finally caught up with me.

I want to be honest here, because exaggerating this story would only cost me the trust I'm trying to build with you. I've never named the service, or the person who wrote that email, or even said whether it was a man or a woman. This was never about pointing a finger at one individual. It was about a pattern I didn't yet know was so much bigger than me.

That week, while I processed it, I did what I always do when my hands need something to do and my mind needs somewhere safe to go. I baked. Bread, biscuits, a full Indian feast, the kind of cooking that fills a kitchen with something other than silence. I wrote, because writing has always been how I actually think.

I never expected that writing to become anything more than my own processing. Within two weeks, more than fifteen educators from over eight services across Australia had reached out, each one telling me some version of the same story. One had her coordinator go through her underwear drawer, then empty every plastic bag out of her kitchen holder onto the floor, hunting for contraband that was never there. Another was told that if she didn't leave her dying mother's bedside in the UK to attend a ratings assessment, she'd lose her job. Different states. Same pattern. This was never one bad service. It was the whole sector, and I hadn't known it until people started telling me.

Why did they trust me with those stories? I think because I'd shown them my own first. That's a why in itself, maybe, the belief that truth spoken plainly gives other people permission to speak theirs.

The months after that were long, and quieter than I expected grief to be. I applied everywhere. I watched eight seasons of McLeod's Daughters while I cleaned out the garage and sorted through resources I'd been collecting for years, waiting for somewhere to use them again. Eventually a job came through, offered in July, but I didn't actually start until September, the wait itself its own small cruelty. Five weeks later, I had an accident.

This wasn't the first time in my life I'd had to rebuild from somewhere near zero. I'd been in that place before, and found my way back with the right people around me. So when this happened, I already knew resilience wasn't something you're simply handed, it's something you practice, over and over, until it becomes a muscle instead of a miracle. What I didn't yet know was how much further I still had to go.

On the first of October 2024, after years of quietly following Holistic Approach FDC's ethos, through Wagga Wagga, Tasmania, Traralgon, Mildura, before it finally aligned in South Australia, I was approved to reopen.

Nine days later, my brain broke. Everything stopped, again, right as it had just started moving.

I thought I'd recover quickly. That's what you assume with a concussion, rest for a few weeks and get back to it. That's not what happened. What followed was Post-Concussion Syndrome, a season I never saw coming, headaches, dizziness, fatigue, brain fog, losing words mid-sentence, overwhelm from things that used to feel simple. For someone who'd always been busy, driven, full of ideas, juggling ten things at once, that was confronting in a way I wasn't prepared for. I had to learn how to pace myself, how to rest, how to actually listen to my own body for what felt like the first time in my life.

There were days I felt frustrated. Days I felt lost. Days I genuinely wondered if I'd feel like myself again.

But there were other days too. Days of reflection, days where I started seeing things differently, seeing myself differently. And somewhere in the middle of all that fog, a pattern started to emerge. Every lesson recovery was teaching me kept landing in one of four places: wellbeing first, empower through learning, lead with purpose, lift each other up. At the time they were just scribbles in a notebook, thoughts that kept resurfacing in appointments and quiet moments. It took me a while to realise they weren't random.

They were becoming a framework.

I redefined success in that season too. It used to mean doing more, achieving more, producing more, and being more. Now it sometimes means resting without guilt, listening to my body before it forces me to stop, celebrating a win nobody else can see. My worth was never meant to be measured by my output. That took me most of my life, and a broken brain, to actually believe. Somewhere in that process, I lost her - the educator version of me who thrived on being busy, capable, ten steps ahead of everyone else. I grieved her for a while, if I'm honest. But what came back wasn't a smaller version of her. It was someone built out of everything she'd already learned, just standing a little further back from the classroom now. Not an educator anymore. An advocate. And she's stronger, in every way, than the woman she grew from.

While I recovered, I also retrained. I redid a Certificate III I'd first completed back in 2006. I worked weekly with a psychologist. I studied the actual neuroscience of healing, how the brain rebuilds by choosing joy first, letting those pathways reconnect before the negative ones can take hold. I didn't just learn that. I lived it, one reconnected pathway at a time, leaning on my daughter, my husband, our animals, and the quiet of nature to get there. And through all of it, I was fortunate, on workers' compensation the entire time, still receiving my full pay. This was never a story about losing everything. It's a story about hardship met, again and again, with real support.

Wellbeing first isn't a slogan I teach. It's how my own brain put itself back together, piece by piece. And it's exactly why I believe, without a flicker of doubt, that when an educator is well, children thrive, not despite that wellbeing, but because of it. A frightened, burnt-out educator closes off. A well one goes further, for every child in her care.

Then in March this year (2026), we moved to Queensland, and I met more centre-based educators than ever before. I found the same fear, the same quiet power dynamics, waiting there too, in a completely different corner of the system. That's when I finally understood this was never confined to family day care. It's the whole sector, top to bottom.

So maybe that's the real answer to the question I was asked on the 7th of August. The house, the land, the cows, they were never the whole why. They're what it looks like on the other side of finally getting to rest. The me in my why is someone who has earned the right to stop proving anything to anyone, and simply build the life she set out to build all along.

Here's the truth of where I am right now. I haven't finished carrying any of this. I still fight fatigue some days, still catch myself in old self-doubt, still have things that aren't quite put back together yet. I'm not writing to you from the other side of it. I'm writing from inside it, still building while I go. What I have done is understand it enough to build something real, and I'm handing that to you now - unfinished edges and all.

But it hasn't reached enough people yet, not with the force it needs to. I think I know why. Burnout doesn't just drain your energy, it steals your ability to imagine that anything could be different. The people who need this most are often the very people least able to believe it will help them.

One day, at the centre of that retreat, there'll be a stone well. Not just because it's pretty, though I hope it will be. Because it's the whole point. A place to pause. To refill your cup before it's empty, not after. That's what I want to build for educators - somewhere to come before they're broken, not just somewhere to recover once they already are.

So this isn't a pitch. It's an invitation.

Reach out if you think change is possible.

And before you go, sit with the question that started all of this for me:

Why do you do what you do? And what's the you in your why?

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your support. And thank you for being part of The Educators Well community. I’m so glad you’re here.

With heart,

Rachel x