Today’s guest shares her experience of leaving a relationship involving domestic and family violence, the gap between knowing she needed to go and being able to, what held her there, and what the jump actually felt like.

This episode is an honest account of the guest’s experience. If her story lands close to home for you, please know that support is available:

1800RESPECT · 1800 737 732 · 24/7 support for people experiencing family violence and abuse. https://1800respect.org.au/

Lifeline · 13 11 14 · 24/7 crisis support. https://www.lifeline.org.au/

Beyond Blue · 1300 22 4636 · 24/7 mental health support. https://www.beyondblue.org.au/get-support

13 YARN · 13 92 76 · 24/7 crisis support for First Nations peoples. https://www.13yarn.org.au 

Full Stop Australia · 1800 385 578 · 24/7 support for sexual, domestic and family violence. https://fullstop.org.au/

QLife · 1800 184 527 · 3pm–midnight daily · LGBTQ+ peer support and referral. https://qlife.org.au/

If you're listening from outside Australia, please reach out to a crisis or family violence service in your country. The International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory of crisis centres worldwide at https://findahelpline.com/i/iasp, and the Stop Abuse Campaign has an international domestic and family violence resource directory at stopabusecampaign.org. Your life and your safety matter wherever you are.

Today's guest shares her personal experience of navigating legal and family systems. Nothing in this episode is legal advice. If you're in a similar situation, Legal Aid in your state can help.

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast, not a counselling service. While the host has taken every effort to ensure that the episode is trauma informed, Belinda is not a trained therapist.

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She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Some mornings you wake up feeling like you're on another level of alive. Some mornings the ceiling feels low. Often both happen before lunch.

This episode isn't a sad one. It's a disorienting one, because the fear and the euphoria aren't taking turns...they're simultaneous. That's the vertigo. And it turns out the vertigo is where the interesting stuff lives.

Episode five is about what it actually feels like to be at the beginning of something real. The specific joys that have surprised you. The pattern you've noticed between belief and fear. The people who've gone quiet, and the ones who show up differently than you expected. The grief that's still there...just not the loudest thing anymore.

Everything at once. Mid-air.

I want to hear from you. The highs and the lows and the bizarre thing that made you inexplicably happy this week. Find me on Instagram @shejumpedanyway or send an email to [email protected]. With your permission, I'd love to bring your voice into this show. Because this was never meant to be just my story. And this podcast was never meant to be just mine...I made it for you.

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She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Four episodes in and I am more scared than I was before I started. I didn't expect that.

Episode five is about what happens when the jump gets bigger than you. When you can see something clearly, something that matters, something real, and you have no idea if you're the person who can build it.

I'm recording this from the middle of my second jump. No resolution. No landing. Just the weight of what I can see, and the exposure of saying it out loud.

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She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

This episode almost didn't exist three times over.

I recorded it on a day when everything went wrong technically. Then I sat on it for weeks because releasing it meant you'd know what I'm thinking about building, and knowing that meant I couldn't quietly back away.

Then today happened.

It's out anyway. Because the resistance is usually the sign.

In this episode: the real difference between my two jumps, why survival and sustainability feel nothing alike, and the first hint of something I'm building for women who are standing where I was standing.

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She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Same woman. Same fear. Same jump into the unknown. So what changed?

I've done this before. The last time I feel apart. This time I feel free.

In this episode I try to answer the question that's been sitting with me since day one of this second leap - why does the same person jump so differently the second time round? What is it that makes the difference between surviving a decision and feeling liberated by it?

I talk about the years between the two leaps. What I learned and who I became in the space between leaving my career. I talk about what it meant to finally have language for the way I move through the world, and what it cost me not to have that language during the hardest moments in my life. And I talk about the difference between isolation as something that gets imposed on you, and the solitude as something you chose. 

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Send us Fan Mail

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Fifteen years ago I left my first husband with three kids and no qualifications. Now I've left my job with no safety net, and my husband has recently been made redundant. This is day three. I'm sharing the unfiltered feelings and the moment I decided for a second time, to jump anyway.

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for women standing at the edge of something they need to leave. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Send us Fan Mail

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Nobody tells you that when you leave, you don't just lose the relationship. You lose the life that was built around it.

In this episode I go back to the first time I jumped, leaving my marriage with three children, no qualifications, an uncertain future, and no roadmap for what came next.

This isn't a story about what was wrong. It's a story about what it costs a woman to leave. The friends who quietly disappeared. The narrative that gets written about you when you're the one who walked away. The loneliness of navigating the hardest decision of your life almost entirely alone...and the psychological weight of carrying it without the language or the support to make sense of it.

I also talk about what I didn't have then that I wish I had... just one person who had already been through it to sit with me and say - "You're not falling apart. You're just leaving."

That person didn't exist for me then.

That's why I'm making this show now.

Send us Fan Mail

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.

Episode 1 coming July 1st...

Send us Fan Mail

She Jumped Anyway is a podcast for all women in all the ways women exist - however you came to yourself. If you've ever stood at the edge of a life that no longer fits, this is for you. New episodes weekly. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen.