I was recently asked to speak at a Women’s Day event for a national planning council about the interface between the workplace, my career and trauma. It draws on pieces I have written before and appear elsewhere on this blog.

Here we go:

It is such an honour to be here today.

It is also simply wonderful to see so many female planners. As planners we need to understand and reflect on the spaces, people and communities we are planning for. As planners we need to reflect the reality of where we live.  If we have no link, no connection, no understanding and empathy with those spaces, people and community how do we reflect and plan? When I graduated less than a quarter of the class were female and the vast majority were white. It is such a delight to see how the profession has changed.

Things are certainly looking up, ladies.

I have been asked a number of times to speak to groups of people and relate my story. I have a particular story, a narrative which is unique to me and my life. But so do all of you. All of us have had to overcome burdens we thought unbearable, overcome threats and fears that left us immovable, there is loss of opportunity, there is the loss of dignity when we are rejected due to prejudice and stereotypes, and there is loss of broken relationships and broken people. And sometimes there is loss of life itself – a parent, a partner, a child.

So today I would like to share my story and I would like to share with you what I learnt as I walked my path, and how my life prepared me for what was to come and for what will still come my way – both in private and in the workspace.

I always tell my colleagues that we all carry our own story. And we all deal with our story in very different ways and means. Our fears, hurts and concerns may not be unique, but our stories are and we all have a story to tell and which we carry with us every day. So we need to be kind to each other and remember that we don’t really know until we know.

In October 2013 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Three days later I had a mastectomy, 6 weeks thereafter I started my chemo, and three weeks later my husband and mother were killed in a car accident, in the car that I was driving, wherein my only child was a passenger. This was all sudden and unexpected. In 58 days my life changed so profoundly in a manner no one could ever have expected.

At the time I was a Municipal Manager. It was a job I loved and thrived in. Our daughter was nine, I had a wonderful, caring and supportive husband, who challenged me every day to be the best I could. A husband who remains the funniest, kindest, humblest and most intelligent person I have ever met.

My husband was the primary care-giver to our child, and my mother was his back-up. I was home very seldom, working late nights and early mornings, away almost every week and working many weekends. I had a career which was only possible due to this support from my husband and mother – much like many of us in this room who rely on caregivers for our children, who can only do the jobs we love because of others.

After hearing this story I am often asked how I coped. I respond: I cope as best I can.

As those of who have been through any trauma will know – you do what you can. I am also asked how I coped at work in the year after the accident. I coped by having a plan! Within hours of the accident I was planning my exit from the life I knew. It was to become a year of preparing for further loss – obviously not as bad, but still loss. I planned when I would resign from my inspiring job, when I would leave the colleagues I loved and the town that had supported me so incredibly. I planned on taking leave of my home, leaving my friends, and leaving all that was so familiar in the life that my husband and I had built together.

I coped by drawing on my resilience to help me in the work place to focus and deliver. To commit to what I wanted, and needed, to finish before I took my leave, but also to be pragmatic and understand that there was only so much I would be capable of doing given that I was still recovering from the accident and undergoing chemotherapy.

In the days and months after the accident and operations I would learn so much more than I ever thought possible and truly started to understand what it means to live and thrive after grief with resilience in the home and how to carry that into my workplace.

I am often told: you are so strong. No, I am not strong – I am simply doing the best I can every single day and trying to cope.  I know this is well-meant, but the effect is that it often leaves one feeling isolated and dis-empowered.

We are all, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, doing what we can, with what we have, wherever we are. By telling someone that they are “strong” it presupposes what is actually happening in their lives and actually makes them feel really awful as the wheels come off – as they will. For women it implies that they have to be something that maybe they are not and do not wish to be.

I have learnt that resilience is not about getting through to the other side but it is about truly living through the agony and heartache and finding a way to integrate the impact of what you experience back into your life. That resilience is also about taking your life lessons into the workplace in order to make that space a little kinder, a little gentler.

So here are some of my learnings that I have carried into my workplace:

The powerful force of a team – you never really know how much everyone in the team matters until you need them. I had a management team of five formidable men. Each one of them really good at what they did. Those of us who work in local government know that it’s a hard and demanding job at the coalface – you have to build a team that care for and cover each other, a space that is brutally frank but safe, a relationship that is honest and authentic.

I was diagnosed with cancer on the Friday afternoon and made the decision to have the mastectomy on the following Monday afternoon – note to all: don’t wait for your forties in Breast awareness month to feel yourself up – do it regularly. Early detection does save lives and I am a case in point!

I phoned my colleagues on the Sunday night and asked them to meet me at before work the next morning. The diagnosis had left me feeling so out of control that I was determined that I could and would control the impact on my workplace and my job. Obviously they were stunned when I told them. Tears were shed and support was committed. My CFO, in his inimitable way said: we are going to get you a clean audit to celebrate getting through this.

After the accident I was off work for months. The team would come and visit either individually, with their wives or as a group. It was not for work – suffice to tell me they were all fine and I must not stress – but rather in friendship and love. They were able to offer me a distraction from my empty home and the loss, and help me to focus on the future.

And of course the most, the most important person was my bedrock, my dear PA. From the moment I met Anita her abilities and insight absolutely amazed me, and when I moved into the Municipal manager’s office and worked with she astounded me. Her commitment, work ethic, the understanding of my needs, her love and care of me and her deep and abiding faith made her a most precious human being. She literally took over my life and did things that no PA should ever have to undertake: sorting my insurance, fighting with the road accident fund; following up on claims and benefits; shopping and paying accounts; arranging my husband’s memorial service; finding me a new car!; dealing with the undertakers; – and of course the more usual: making sure my office still functioned even when I could not. I need to mention that besides all of this she also had a husband, three small children, a special needs sister and a mother-in-law to care for. The abundance of her love is endless.

Having the love and support of these six superstars allowed me to take the time to heal physically, but it also gave me the space to be honest about what I was going through. I knew that even in the workplace where I was guarded with them I could rail against the forces of life. I truly hope that my illness and accident forged a commitment to each other that usurped our jobs.So be authentic and allow others to see your vulnerability.

Secondly, always employ the expert – I was lucky enough to have been able to appoint each of the Directors very early in my contract period so we grew as a team together. I fully believe in appointing people who know their field so much better than I do. I want them to be the expert – not me. I want to go to them when I need input or advice and I want them to be able to teach me about their work.

By having the comfort that my management team knew their stuff better than I did it gave me a greater comfort during the months that I was away. In no way did I find it threatening. They all knew what had to be done, and they knew how to do it better than I did – and most importantly they got on with it.

Thirdly, I believe that people truly want to achieve and have good intentions. It is a principle that goes hand in hand with my commitment to employing experts. I truly believe in the good in people. We all have an innate desire to achieve something. It is only when life goes very awry that very few may lose this drive. So I like to tell all new staff, especially younger ones, that in my assessment of them they all start with an A+. They all start out as the expert, as the achiever. It is only when they do not live up to their own potential that their ‘scores’ decline. So rather than proving themselves to me, rather than proving their worth, I prefer the approach where staff show me that they are not worthy of my high expectations, not worthy of my great value of them.

Fourthly, in the face of a trauma you can choose joy and gratitude, and find new meaning from your experience. So the first thing I found within myself was gratitude. How ironic that is – to lose my husband, my mother and part of myself and learn to be grateful.

How much worse things could have been? Well my daughter could have died, my husband could have lived but would have been left a quadriplegic, I may have been left wheelchair bound or I could have had an invasive life threatening cancer which left me with weeks or months to live. Instead I was given an illness which I could overcome and which revealed to me the reason I had chosen to marry Eric and make a life with him.

I truly believe that everything happens for a reason and we may never know what that reason is. When people asked “why you” my response was always “why not me?”, after all breast cancer affects about 1 out of every 8 women.

Why not me? I have all the support I have shared with you, and so many women do not. They have so little – rather let it be me than an impoverished rural woman, eking out a life, many kilometers to walk to the nearest clinic and hundreds of kilometers from decent oncology care. Rather let it be me than a single unemployed mother who has no help and cannot afford decent child care and health care, who is poorly educated and every day is a struggle to simply survive for herself and her children.

Finding peace on your journey is a hard one. I had to firstly accept that my life was not as I had known it, and that I had cancer, then to realise I was now a single parent who had in one go lost her safety net. I quickly realized that to question, to mull over, and to be angry was energy sapping and putting what little energy I had to negative use. Being angry gets us nowhere, rather take that energy and use it to be resilient.

I chose to ensure my physical and mental well-being in order to be there for my most precious joy – my daughter.

In conclusion:

I’ve coped with the devastation that loss brought to my life, bringing my plans to a screeching halt. I knew lying in that hospital bed the day after my accident that my life and career as I knew and wanted it was over. I needed to envision for myself a new normal. I could barely get through an hour, let alone imagine standing before you today 5 or 6 years later.

I’ve known what it’s like to be sicker than I ever thought possible… and to get better; to be so fatigued that I couldn’t sit up; to be so medicated that I could not string two words together and remember what I did the day before.  To be in a body so emaciated and broken that walking again seemed near impossible.

I shared with you today, the very worst day of my life, the very worst months of my life and I know in my heart two things are true:

Firstly, I have been engulfed in fear, grief and sadness, sadness is always with me, but I also have a resilience to overcome. I have overcome.

Secondly, I am deeply grateful for what I have learnt and am able to share with others, I am grateful for the kindness of family and friends, I have gratitude for my health, thankfulness for the beautiful life of my child, gratitude for parents who taught me to always do my best and to be humble, and loving gratitude for the life I shared with my exceptional husband.

And, of course, with great humility, I am grateful that my experience has brought a new dynamic into my work space as well, I am grateful for my career, I am grateful for the wonderful and amazing team and colleagues who anchored me and buoyed me, who showered me with love and care, and who showed me that even in the work place there is always a time and space for vulnerability, kindness and deep care.

Thank you.