If I’m honest about … vulnerability

Podcast Launch

The public telling of a very private story.

On a random Tuesday in April, I hit publish on our new podcast and immediately felt sick.

To anyone else, it was just a new icon in their library. Another show to scroll past or sample on a walk. But for me, it was the public telling of a very private story. Those in my inner circle have known this story in snippets, but I’ve never told it in its entirety, nor properly reflected on how it impacted me throughout my life.

Until now.

That Day is built around women in midlife who have been through something—loss, disruption, trauma, reinvention—and found a way through. We wanted it to be raw and real stories of everyday people. Not celebrities, but people we can relate to. My co-host, Jac, and I knew from the beginning that we couldn’t ask other women to step into that space without going there ourselves first. There’s something deeply uncomfortable about being the one holding the mic and also the one cracking open.

I spoke about motherhood, and the slow, almost invisible erosion of identity that can come with it. How I walked away from a career in HR and reshaped my life around my children, choosing freelance writing because it gave me flexibility. On paper, it looked like a good trade. In reality, it came at a cost. The instability, the financial insecurity, the sense that I was always just holding things together. It chipped away at my confidence in ways I didn’t fully recognise at the time.

Then my youngest turned eight.

There are moments in parenting where time folds in on itself. You’re looking at your child, but you’re also looking at yourself at that same age, and something catches in your chest. I had more than a flicker of recognition, it was a memory I had tried to forget. I was eight when a family member sexually assaulted me. That sentence is heavy in my mouth and those words next to each other continue to feel wrong. More than forty years have passed, yet it still sits so close to the surface.

In the same year of my daughter’s eight birthday, there was the public outcry after the rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon. It was everywhere. The grief and the anger, as well as the conversations about safety and violence against women (including police officers saying we should be keeping ourselves safe!). I watched it all play out while carrying my own trauma, something I hadn’t fully named or processed. It wasn’t one thing that broke me open, rather the collision of all of it: the past and the present, then the personal and the public.

At first glance, the threads don’t seem connected. Motherhood, financial insecurity, a national tragedy, childhood trauma. But they are. Or they were for me. There had been a low, steady hum of rage under the surface for years. Not loud enough to demand attention, but constant. When everything collided, that rage became impossible to ignore.

That was my ‘day’. That day.

Recording the episode felt manageable in the moment. Being in conversation with someone I know and trust, having a structure and a shared vision, held me steady. But when it went live, when it moved beyond the safety of our recording and into the world, I felt physically ill. There’s a particular kind of exposure that comes with being truly seen. Not the curated version so many like to polish for Instagram, but the uncontained version.

Vulnerability, for me, felt like having a tooth pulled and no stitches to close the space. Just an open gap you keep prodding with your tongue, half expecting it to start bleeding again.

I turned the words of support into art

The response was immediate and overwhelming. Messages filled with kindness, with recognition, with words like ‘amazing’ and ‘strong’ and ‘brave’. I did feel brave for making a police report all those years later, but in the moment of the podcast release, I felt completely exposed. It was an exhilarating and exhausting week. I began to understand that what people were responding to wasn’t strength in the traditional sense. It was honesty.

Then, people began sharing their own stories with me. Stories of abuse, of silence, of sadness carried for decades. The connection to our audience was indisputable, but it’s impossible to just hear these stories and not hold onto them, at least for a while.

We talk about vulnerability a lot now. It’s become one of those words that gets used so often it risks losing its edges. But in practice, it’s not clean or performative. It’s messy and uncomfortable and, at times, bloody frightening! It asks you to stop in places when all you want to do is bolt.

Brené Brown writes, ‘Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.’

On a screen or in a book, these are important words, but living it is something else entirely. Because vulnerability doesn’t come after you feel worthy. It’s the part of yourself you expose before you have any guarantee that you’ll be met with care.

What I’m beginning to understand is that vulnerability isn’t about oversharing or putting everything on display. It’s about telling the truth, your truth and having no idea how it will be received. It’s about allowing yourself to be seen in your wild inconsistencies. Strong and uncertain, composed and unravelled.

Launching That Day has shown me that when one person speaks openly, it creates a kind of permission for others to do the same because they see that it’s possible to survive the telling.

And maybe that’s the point?

Not that vulnerability fixes anything or neatly ties up the past, but that in choosing to open up, even just a little, we loosen the grip of shame. We remind ourselves, and each other, that we are not the only ones carrying heavy stuff.

It doesn’t close the gap completely. The space is still there, tender, something you can’t help but notice. Eventually it starts to heal over.

To anyone who has messaged, called, or commented, I have read every single one and thank you for your virtual group hug. It’s made it all so very worthwhile and a little less scary.

Have you listened to the podcast?

You can find it on Spotify, Apple, as well as other podcast platforms. New episodes weekly.

Kylie

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