There is a moment in every life that quietly divides time into before and after.
It may not look extraordinary from the outside. There is no music, no announcement, no clear beginning or end. But for the person living it, everything shifts. A diagnosis lands. A relationship fractures. A truth emerges that can no longer be ignored. And from that moment on, life is no longer quite the same.
For the past year, I have been working on a project rooted in that idea. That Day, a podcast co-hosted with my great friend Kylie Orr, is built around the stories we rarely tell out loud – stories carried quietly, often for years, by women who have endured life’s most difficult experiences and, somehow, found their way through.
These are not stories of perfection or performance. They are stories of grief, of illness, of profound loss and reinvention. Women who have faced the suicide of a partner, a cancer diagnosis, childhood trauma. Moments that could have defined them in the narrowest sense and instead have expanded them. What emerges on the other side is not a neat resolution, but something far more compelling: lived wisdom, a deeper capacity for love, and a renewed sense of meaning.
There is a particular kind of power in the telling.
For many of the women who join us, this is the first time they have spoken their story in full. Not in fragments, not softened for the comfort of others, but truthfully. And in that act, often uncomfortable, sometimes confronting: something shifts. The story loosens its grip. What once felt heavy and defining becomes integrated, understood, even purposeful.
We often think of vulnerability as exposure, as something risky or even indulgent. But what becomes clear, repeatedly, is that it is one of the most generative forces we have. To speak honestly about what has shaped us is to reclaim authorship. The story no longer owns you; you begin to own it.
And when one woman does this, it rarely ends with her.
There is a quiet contagion to honesty. A woman who has done the work of facing her own life with courage inevitably gives others permission to do the same. Healing, in this sense, is not contained. It moves outward, through conversation, connection, and recognition. One story makes space for another.
This idea, that a healed woman helps heal others, is not abstract. It is something I have witnessed, repeatedly, both in my work and now through this podcast. The more we are willing to step into the discomfort of our own experiences, to ask what they have taught us, to search for meaning even in the most difficult moments, the more expansive life becomes.
None of this suggests that the process is easy. It is not.
Growth, the kind that alters the course of a life, rarely arrives gently. It asks something of us. It asks that we sit with uncertainty, that we confront what we would rather avoid, that we take responsibility for how we move forward. But it also offers something in return: clarity, depth, and a sense of aliveness that is difficult to access any other way.
That Day was not simple to bring into the world. There were false starts, technical challenges, long stretches of uncertainty. In the midst of recording and producing the first season, life intervened in ways we could not have anticipated, including an unexpected cancer diagnosis that reshaped the experience entirely. And yet, perhaps because of that, the work took on even greater meaning.
What has emerged is a collection of conversations that feel, in many ways, like a testament to what it means to be human. Messy, complex, at times devastating, but also resilient, transformative, and deeply connected.
To listen is to recognise something of yourself in someone else.
To share is to step into a kind of quiet power.
And somewhere in between, something remarkable happens: we begin to understand that our lives, in all their unpredictability, are not just something to get through, but something to engage with, to learn from, and, ultimately, to claim as our own.
THAT DAY Podcast now found where all your favourite podcast streaming services are found.
THAT DAY Trailer – That Day with Jac Hawkins & Kylie Orr | Podcast on Spotify
That Day with Jac Hawkins & Kylie Orr – Podcast – Apple Podcasts
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