Life Shift | True Stories of Healing, Grief & Loss

Maybe you have ticked every box and still wondered why the feeling never showed up. The degree, the job, the right age, the right house. You reach the milestone and happiness quietly slips over to the next one.

Charu grew up believing a good life was a checklist. On the first morning of her honeymoon, she woke up unable to feel her hands, and within hours she was paralyzed. Lying in that hospital bed, all she could think was whether she would survive. That morning was the first crack in a life built to be approved of. Over the years that followed, it led to a divorce, a complete restart, and the slow work of learning to hear her own voice.

This conversation holds a lot of tenderness. A father whose life ended just before retirement. The grief of years given away to pleasing people. The first time she said no to a friend after practicing in front of the mirror. If you have ever lived a life for someone else's approval, I hope you feel a little less alone here.

What You'll Hear

Guest Bio

Charu Moorjani is an Australian Author, a mindset coach and a wellbeing storyteller known for her honest memoir-style writing and a grounding approach to personal growth. Her debut book, The Happiness Pathway, blends her lived life experiences with practical tools to help readers rebuild their self-worth by creating boundaries without guilt and developing simple daily habits to cultivate lasting happiness. Every chapter in her book includes stories and reflections from her life and little exercises that readers can use to make gentle shifts in their own lives.

With a warm and relatable voice, Charu writes about healing after emotional pain, choosing resilience during times of change and the power of choosing yourself first. Through workshops and community conversations she creates safe space for reflection, connecting to yourself and making a lasting change in your life through simple tools, reminding people that happiness isn't something you find once, it's something you create daily.

Website: www.thehappinesspathway.com

Instagram: @thehappinesspathway

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living by a checklist, people pleasing, Guillain Barré syndrome, starting over after divorce, learning to say no, healing journey, finding yourself, loving your own company, setting boundaries without guilt, redefining happiness

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Content note: this episode includes a detailed account of discovering a loved one's suicide.

Todd Maguire spent twenty-seven years with the Queensland Police Service, most of it as a detective, including two years working undercover under a new identity: Donny Wilson. But the badge and the alias were only part of the story. On New Year's Day 2000, Todd's girlfriend Karen died by suicide in their home. He and her four-year-old son found her. Todd was twenty-five.

Twelve months later, almost to the day, Todd became Donny. He grew his hair out, got tattoos, bought drugs from dealers, and walked toward danger most people would run from, chasing a recklessness that let him feel like nothing was worth protecting, including himself. He escaped death more times than he can count and once had a hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Looking back, he calls it a bit of a death wish.

It took years of drinking, undiagnosed PTSD, and a wife telling him it felt like walking on eggshells before Todd started to find his way back. Therapy that didn't work the first time around. Reading about other undercover officers who'd lived through something similar. And eventually, writing it all down in a memoir, Donny: Undercover Cop with a Deathwish, that he wrote for himself and ended up helping strangers he'll never meet.

What You'll Hear:

Guest Bio:

Todd Maguire spent twenty-seven years with the Queensland Police Service, largely as a detective, including two years working undercover as "Donny Wilson." He is the author of the memoir Donny: Undercover Cop with a Deathwish, which tells the story of the grief, the undercover years, and the long recovery that followed the loss of his partner, Karen, in 2000.

Website: www.toddmaguire.com.au

Facebook: Todd Maguire

Instagram: @todd_author_donny

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undercover policing, PTSD, suicide loss, grief, memoir, Queensland Police, Donny Wilson, complex trauma, recovery

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Content note: this episode includes discussion of suicidal thoughts and a crisis hotline call.

Travis White was twenty-three, newly engaged, and by his own description living the dream when his body started sending signals nobody had taught him to read. One ordinary night, studying for a web development class, he felt off. Hours later, he woke up surrounded by paramedics and police, unable to remember any of it, and the first question they asked him was what drugs he'd taken. He hadn't taken any. He'd had a seizure, and over the next six weeks he had forty or fifty more.

What came after was almost harder than the seizures themselves. Medication that made him hallucinate. Neurologists who ran out of answers and handed him off. Jobs he walked out of mid-shift and never returned to because he was too ashamed to explain what had happened. Dissociative episodes that once had him driving an hour and a half home without remembering the trip. For fifteen years, Travis mostly kept all of it hidden, even as the seizures came and went, even as he built a career, got married, and became a father.

Then in late 2024, months after his third child was born, the seizures returned in a brutal cluster. This time doctors gave the condition a name: psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, stress firing through the body in a pattern that looks like epilepsy but isn't. The diagnosis didn't come with a clear treatment plan, and Travis spiraled into a depression severe enough that he became suicidal. A call to the 988 hotline and a brother-in-law who reached out and meant it were the turning point. From there, Travis went all in on therapy, functional medicine, and a handful of simple tools that finally let him stop just managing his life and start rebuilding it.

Today Travis hosts Overcome, a podcast built around the same honesty he fought to find for himself.

What You'll Hear:

Guest Bio:

Travis White is a speaker and the host of Overcome with Travis White, a mental-health podcast featuring honest conversations about trauma, grief, addiction, identity, and resilience. After seizures disrupted his independence and sense of self, Travis spent years trying to reclaim his old life before learning to grieve who he had been and build a meaningful new one. Through Overcome, he has hosted more than 80 conversations designed to help people feel less alone and recognize that difficult seasons do not have to define the rest of their lives.

Website: https://overcomepod.com

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seizures, PNES, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, mental health stigma, dissociation, depression, 988 hotline, therapy, fatherhood, project manager, Overcome podcast

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Content note: this episode includes discussion of sexual assault and an abusive relationship.

Sometimes the yes that changes everything looks, at the time, like an escape.

Angela Harger Thompson has been a storyteller since she was four, waving a feather duster in her sister's home movie. At 30, she packed her Honda Civic and drove to Los Angeles with no connections and a very big dream. Two months later, a producer who had promised to keep her safe drugged and assaulted her.

Angela reported it. She went to the hospital, then sat with police for six hours, then waited nine months for a district attorney to tell her the case wouldn't be prosecuted. And she made a very intentional choice. She would heal right there in LA, through therapy, yoga, and a lot of anxiety attacks behind a bar, because he had already taken enough.

A few years later, burned out and waiting for her big break, she said yes to crewing a sailboat from Panama to the Marquesas. She had never sailed. One week out, the world shut down. Borders closed, plans changed daily, and what was supposed to be six weeks turned into 49 days at sea, including sixteen days with just two people on board and a storm straight out of Castaway.

She kept the camera rolling the whole time. That footage became her documentary Quarantine at Sea, and the rest of the story became her memoir, Worst Tits Ever. This conversation is about survival, faith, and the moment Angela realized she could stop waiting for someone to hand her the role and start creating it herself.

What You'll Hear:

Guest Bio:

Angela Harger Thompson is an actress, filmmaker, and storyteller whose work spans film, commercial, voiceover, and now the written word. Her screen credits have included Sense of Urgency, Something in the Woods, the web series Austin Wannabes, and the video game DC Universe Online, where she voiced the iconic DC Comics character The Question.

Her transformative experience began in January 2020, when she wrote a single goal in her journal at a church Dream Day: let God tell a great story through me. She had no idea that would soon unfold in the most unexpected way.

A few weeks later, she boarded a sailboat in Panama and set out on a three-to-four-week passage across the Pacific. One week in, a satellite email changed everything. COVID-19 had become a global pandemic. With island borders closed and nowhere to land, Angela found herself stranded at sea, navigating squalls, relational conflict, and her own spiritual awakening.

She kept the camera rolling the entire time. That footage became Quarantine at Sea (2022), a feature-length documentary she directed, produced, and starred in, now streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play.

But the story was bigger than what the documentary could hold. Her memoir Worst Tits Ever tells the rest: a raw, laugh-out-loud funny, heartbreakingly honest story of faith and the hard work of rebuilding. Foreword writer and actress Jen Lilley describes it as "a love story, a survival story, and a coming-of-age-in-your-thirties story."

Believing every person carries a story worth telling, Angela founded The Storytell Initiative to help others find and share theirs. She lives in Southern California with her husband, Dustin. She is grateful to catch the sunsets over the Pacific, though now safely from a beach.

Website: https://angelahargerproductions.com

Quarantine at Sea on Prime Video: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0LZUYBIYA02UYEYORJXKNF3D33

Worst Tits Ever on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Tits-Angela-Harger-Thompson/dp/B0G8R4BLXF

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Some goodbyes don't come with a conversation. They come with a phone you keep picking up and putting back down.

Brittany Perham grew up in a house full of friends and happy memories, with a mom who protected her and her brother, and a father whose drinking nobody named out loud. In college, when things got scary, she made one of the hardest grown-up decisions of her life. She stopped answering his calls. The silence stretched to almost fifteen years.

When her brother reconnected with him before his wedding, Brittany found herself back in a little bit of contact, just in time for her father's final year. There was one good phone call, a recipe, a "good to talk to you." And then there was a hospital room at Mass General, where she and her brother had to decide to let him go.

Then came the surprise. Weeks before he died, her father had changed his will and named her the executor of an estate that turned out to be buried in debt. It took almost seven years to close.

This is a tender, honest conversation about estrangement, about guilt and sadness living side by side, and about how a story keeps changing each time we tell it. Brittany is a poet and a teacher, and she talks about her father with so much care and so much honesty. I loved every minute of this one.

What You'll Hear:

• Growing up in what looked like the perfect childhood while living with a father's quiet addiction
• The decision at 21 to get a therapist and step away from her dad
• Why estrangement never really feels like freedom
• Walking around the house holding the phone, unable to make the call
• The one good phone call, and a recipe she'll never forget
• Taking her father off life support and the strange intimacy of that moment
• Being named executrix of an indebted estate she never saw coming
• Why the story of her father is ultimately a story of not knowing

Guest Bio:
Brittany Perham's new memoir, Executrix (University of Georgia Press), won the 2025 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is also the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. She taught for fifteen years at Stanford University before joining the English faculty at Endicott College, where she is an associate professor. She lives in San Francisco and Massachusetts.

Website: www.brittanyperham.com
Executrix (University of Georgia Press): https://ugapress.org
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Keywords: estrangement, grieving an estranged parent, alcoholic father, children of alcoholics, executor of an estate, grief, memoir, memory, family stories, complicated grief

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• Grief and Fatherhood: The Song That Changed Everything
• Part of Me Died That Day: Learning to Live After the Worst Day of Your Life

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Some of us carry a weight for so long that we forget it isn't supposed to be there.

Chloe Kelly spent 35 years being very good at being someone she wasn't. She learned the rules early. Play sports. Earn man points. Don't stand out. Never let anyone see. She got so good at the performance that even she couldn't see through it for decades. There was a soulmate. A house. A good job. Everything that was supposed to add up to happiness. And underneath all of it, a quiet leak. A dripping tap that just wouldn't stop.

Then, at 45, on her lunch break, she downloaded a face filter app. She pressed a button. And she couldn't look away from what she saw.

This is a conversation about what it feels like to live inside the wrong story for 35 years, and what it feels like when the real one finally starts. Chloe is warm, funny, honest about the hard parts, and sickeningly happy in the best possible way. She's calling in from Buenos Aires, because of course she is.

What You'll Hear

Guest Bio
Chloe Kelly is a British writer who transitioned at the age of 45 after decades of suppressing her true identity.

After leaving a 25 year corporate career, she is rebuilding her life through writing, travel and sharing her experiences to help others navigating major life changes.

She has written for PinkNews, is currently writing a guide for people transitioning later in life, and is also working on a travel memoir about travelling solo around the world as a trans woman in her forties, exploring identity, courage and reinvention.

She documents her travel adventures through her Girl:Avanting YouTube series.

YouTube | Instagram | Substack

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gender identity, late transition, transgender story, transitioning later in life, self acceptance, authenticity, performing for others, telling your wife you are trans, solo travel as a trans woman, finding joy

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Maybe you know what it is to be the steady one. The person who shows up, holds it together, and makes sure everyone else is okay before anyone thinks to ask about you. Jeff Abbott has been that person for more than 25 years in emergency medicine, most recently as a Critical Care Flight Paramedic and base manager.

On April 26th, 2022, his friend and pilot Jim died in a helicopter crash. Jeff responded to the scene in another aircraft, kept his people together all day, and then went home and broke down in his wife's arms. What followed was eighteen months of anger he couldn't name, nightmares he couldn't shake, and a slow realization that being built for this work didn't make him immune to what it carries.

This is a conversation about what happens inside the people who show up when everyone else needs help. We talk about EMS culture, dark humor, and the quiet cost of never asking for anything in return. We talk about Boulder Crest, EMDR, breathwork, and watching chickens until his nervous system remembered what calm felt like. And we talk about a book Jeff started 25 years ago, found in an old email, and finally finished because it was time. He tells it plainly, the way someone does once they've set some of the weight down.

What You'll Hear

Guest Bio
Jeff Abbott is a Critical Care Flight Paramedic, author, and speaker with more than 25 years in emergency medicine. His career has taken him from ground EMS to critical care and flight medicine, where functioning calmly in chaos became both a skill and part of his identity. He is the author of Built For This: A Paramedic's Reckoning, a candid memoir about EMS culture, dark humor, camaraderie, loss, and what happens when being able to keep functioning is mistaken for being unaffected by the work.

paramedicabbott.com
Book: Built For This: A Paramedic's Reckoning

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first responder mental health, paramedic PTSD, grief and anger, asking for help, EMS culture, flight paramedic, trauma recovery, Boulder Crest retreat, EMDR therapy, losing a friend

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Maybe you know what it is to lose someone in the middle of building something together. To be left holding a piece of unfinished work and a hole where a person used to be, with no idea how to carry either one.

Jan Becker is a filmmaker who set out with his close friend Christian to make a documentary about a vision quest in the high desert. They finished shooting, went their separate ways for the holidays, and then, on the fourth of January, Jan got a text. Christian had died in a plane crash, along with his two young daughters. What follows is the story of the year Jan spent alone in an editing room with his friend's face on the screen, turning grief into something he could hold. He talks about the strange sense that the desert had been preparing him, about losing his father two years earlier, and about how finishing the film became the way he learned to mourn.

This is a conversation about what we do with the things left unfinished, and about how the work of our hands can carry us through the parts of grief that words cannot reach.

What You'll Hear

Guest Bio

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sudden loss, losing a best friend, grief and creativity, finishing what someone started, film as healing, plane crash grief, processing a father's death, vision quest, meaning after loss, storytelling as healing

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Some of us have known something about ourselves for a very long time. And we have spent just as long trying to pretend we didn't.

Kate Saint Clair grew up seeing and hearing things no one around her could explain. She was the curious kid who asked too many questions and got lies as answers. The sensitive one who felt everyone else's feelings as if they were her own. For years, she tried to be the tough kid. The normal one. The person who didn't see anything. But the knowing didn't go away. It never does.

This episode is about the long, quiet war between who you are and who you think you're allowed to be. Kate's shift didn't come from one single moment. It came in pieces: a voice in a park that moved her and her toddler away from danger. A skin cancer diagnosis that stripped her of every way she'd been performing. A six-year-old girl making a deal with her dead grandfather in a dark bathroom and then spending two decades honoring it. What she eventually found wasn't just peace with her gift. It was herself.

What You'll Hear:

Guest Bio:

Kate Saint Clair is a Human Intuition Expert, psychic medium, and intuitive advocate who has been teaching intuition as a practical, embodied skill since 2007. Her work is devoted to normalizing intuition and helping people trust their inner guidance with clarity and confidence. Through her books, live programs, and communities like The Clair Club, she supports people in understanding how intuition communicates through the Clairs: clear knowing, feeling, seeing, hearing, and sensing. Known for her grounded, direct approach, Kate empowers people to move from self-doubt to self-trust and live guided from the inside out.

‘Find out which Clair you use the most to access your personal Intuition’: https://www.katesaintclair.com/quiz

A chapter of her book Be Guided and Be Great and some free resources including energy meditations, an intuition tracker, and more: https://www.katesaintclair.com/resources

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intuition development, psychic medium story, trusting yourself, childhood shame, sensitive people, spiritual awakening, self-acceptance, life shift, finding your purpose, embracing your gift

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Maybe you know what it is to finally exhale. To reach a season where the noise quiets down, the plan starts to work, and for the first time you let yourself believe things might actually be okay.

Ryan was 24 and living in Denver when he reached that place. He had married young, moved more times than he could count, and spent his whole life feeling unsettled. And then, quietly, life started to come together. One ordinary Tuesday he went to work, and at lunch he got a call that his wife had not shown up for hers. She had been killed that morning by their next door neighbor. What followed was almost twenty years Ryan spent trying to outrun that day, through grief he could not name and an addiction that nearly took his life. This is the story of how he finally stopped running, and found his way back.

Ryan does not tell this story to shock anyone. He tells it because he spent two decades believing he had to carry it alone, and he wants you to know that you do not.

What You'll Hear

Guest Bio

Digital Diatribe |

sudden loss, losing a spouse young, grief and addiction, recovery from alcoholism, feeling settled, complicated grief, finding purpose again, sobriety, memory loss and grief, telling your story

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