Lately I’ve been trying to catch Bloody Good Chap checking out hot chicks, which there are no shortage of in Byron bay. I point them out to him in excitement,

Hey look, do you think she’s hot?

I get excited at the prospect of pang of a jealousy. I find it exciting, because it’s now very hard to make me jealous.

It didn’t used to be this way.

I used to worry intensely that my boyfriends would find someone hotter.

I honestly thought that the main reason my former boyfriends loved me was because I had masqueraded as a hot chick by straightening and bleaching my hair and wearing fake tan.

I placed no value in my personality whatsoever.

Which meant I was infinitely replaceable.

Part of the problem was that my personality wasn’t really my own, I was a made up person; a mish mash of everyone I was trying to be and everyone I was trying not to be.

I was a fraud, I had no idea who I was underneath.

The main things that defined me were my triggers.

My life revolved around avoiding my triggers (social anxiety and being left-out especially), and trying to look good and please everyone at all times. Which meant that instead of pleasing people I annoyed them.

I remember lying on Bondi beach with my boyfriend, looking around at the beautiful tanned beach babes, and then back at my non-toned, pasty white stomach with panic. I was sure that if I walked down the beach one would hit on him, and then I’d lose him.

He’d told me and his family that I was “the one” and that he’d never met anyone like me, yet I got stressed when he hung out with his ex girlfriend, and hated that he worked in a bar around sexy, drunk females he’d be around.

I eventually destroyed that relationship with my insecurity and roller coaster moods.

These days I have way more rolls than I’ve ever had in my life. For a naturally skinny body type, I could easily be toned and skinny. Instead, I noticed for the first time last week on the beach that my thighs now touch together.

I no longer have gap. Fuck.

Yet, I’ve never been more comfortable in my own skin as I am now.

And by jove, I know it makes me way sexier than my perfection-crazed uptight former self, guys are attracted to me now in a way they never were a few years ago. Yet I’m less sexy, less youthful, and more ridiculous than ever.

So how did I get here, from my former insecure self?

It’s been a journey that’s for sure, but the most life changing of life changing things was when I learnt what I now teach in Bloody Good Life. A certain way of living using mindfulness techniques that enables us to see beneath our triggers, beneath all the layers we’ve piled onto ourselves.

Under there I started to find this person that was there all along. This person who knew exactly what she wanted in life. Who got overexcited by tiny things. This person who bit by bit, stopped caring what others thought – not because my mind doesn’t still tell me I’m a weirdo, but because I learnt not to listen.

I learnt techniques for handling my emotions so that I could A. step off the roller coaster and B. face situations that caused me social anxiety over and over again until it felt easier.

Including Tinder dating.

I started out a few years ago, nervous, awkward and shaky.

By the time I met BGC over a year after my initial Tinder escapades, I barely felt a twinge of fear.

BGC and I are solid as a rock solid, I don’t feel any instability or worry that a hot chick could sway my dude. I know there are one million billion hot chicks out there hotter than me, but none quite like me on the inside.

I just had to find her.

“You are only boring when you are not yourself” – Kim Anami

The person underneath all the pretending, the hard working and the people pleasing, they’re a legend. They’re so fascinating and unique that when you really know that self, you’ll be certain that anyone you meet will never get bored of you, and neither will you.

It’s a step by step process.

But I have some tools that will help rocket launch you up a few flights.

*Neville (my mind)

wants you to know that he thinks it’s stupid for me to write this because I’ll have to swallow my words when BGC runs off with a Norwegian model and I have to announce that I was wrong to feel so secure in my personality.