The Talk That Was Never Truly Mine

On COP28, a TEDx stage, and the liberation hiding inside public failure

Many speak about the liberation of pursing your dreams.
Today in this article, I want to speak about the exhaustion of pursuing a vision, that was once your own, but that is no longer alive. And why sometimes, we need to fulfil our dreams to realise that we are still empty inside of them.

Sometimes exhaustion can be present in our bodies, and it has nothing to do with effort. It is the exhaustion of performing a self you have already, without ceremony, begun to leave behind. It’s the exhaustion of standing in a room the world considers important and feeling, somewhere beneath the composure and the prepared words, a sense of grief for the person you are pretending to still be.

I have felt this twice now, on two stages, in two different years.

And it took breaking down in utter exhaustion on both occassions to finally understand what I was being shown.

Dubai. December 2023. COP28.

COP28 — the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Dubai. One of the most visible gatherings of minds, policies, and global urgency on the planet. I was there to speak about something I genuinely believe in: the role of integrative and esoteric medicine in the climate conversation. The body’s wisdom as ecological wisdom. The inner world as inseparable from the outer one.

The material was true. The work was real. It still is. And it is still at the forefront of what I teach and represent through my way of moving in the world.

And yet.

When I stood on stage and felt myself split — the way a river splits around a rock — into the woman speaking and the woman watching herself speak. A performance within a performance. I heard my own voice delivering words I believed in, from a body that had somehow gone silent. Shaking, and silent.

But my inner voice — loud.

This is not you, anymore, it said.

I was totally and utterly exhausted even arriving at this point, standing beside Dr. Zach Bush to present was a dream of mine. I mean, technically it meant that I had “made it”, right?

Well, that is what my mind told me.

My body told me otherwise.

Afterwards, people approached me. Said kind things. And I smiled, and I answered, but something in me had already left the building.

I filed it away. Told myself I would settle into this version of my life — the one with stages and global conferences and the particular prestige that comes from being taken seriously in rooms like that.

I told myself this was what I had wanted.

And then came the TEDx talk.

The Stage That Finally Broke the Dream

I will not dress this up: the TEDx talk did not go the way these things are supposed to go.

I flew to America to run a training in New York, the week of the elections, when Trump came into office again. The atmosphere there was alive and ecstatic.

Following the training, I had flights and Airbnb booked to Wilmington, North Carolina to speak on stage for Ted X, presenting on The Human Energy Biofield, and why “mystery illnesses” don’t really exist — we just haven’t learned to detect them at the subtle energy level (yet).
That was until I received a phone call, from my friend Jo’el Adifon who was accompanying me as my guest, who said to me, “Sigourney, are you sure your Tedx talk is in North Carolina, and not Delaware?”

My belly dropped with a sinking feeling.

“The biggest TedX stage is in Delaware, not North Carolina” — I remember those words distinctly. And when I checked my emails, it turns out he was right — I was presenting, that evening in Delaware.

Luckily, for me, Delaware was within driving distance from New York City.

It’s just… I hadn’t driven in America before, and was quite nervous about navigating the city in a car, the morning before my big talk. That kind of stress was the last thing I needed.

So I hustled to hire a car, to book a new airbnb (and cancel my old one) and make my way to Wilmington, Delaware.

I arrived at my Airbnb just an hour before I was due to present, completely shaken, exhausted from driving and coming down off my Matcha high.

I had to quickly get dressed and race to the venue. No preparation time. Still landing after hours of driving through New York and on very unfamiliar highways.

My body was riddled with panic — the panic of being on a large stage, the panic of coming down off the exhiliration of the sudden change of plans.

And my body, by then, had stopped cooperating with the projection entirely.

Because the body always knows before the mind is ready to.

It knows when we are performing a self we have already outgrown. It knows when the dream we are chasing belongs not to who we are, but to who we were — or worse, to who the world decided we should want to be.

And then, when it was finally my turn to present, what should happen, but my slides being confused with anothers — what came up on the screen was not my presentation, but another persons presentation about their family dog.

I had a large image of a dog, on screen, whilst gazing out at a large audience, with cameras positioned everywhere ready to capture me.

I froze.

“These are not my slides” I said.

At first, laughing, nervously.
They stopped the presentation, apologised and then reorientated themselves to put my slides up. All seemed fine at first, with my slides finally being projected onto the screen accurately.

And then, half way through my presentation — it happened again. My slides stopped and the same dog, appeared on screen. 8 minutes in.

At this point, I didn’t feel like there was any recovering from this.

“Just keep going, without the slides” they said.

And under normal conditions, if I hadn’t already had been so stretched, perhaps I could have. And I tried. But I fumbled. My body was shaking in exhaustion.

They stopped the presentation, again.

And again, they apologised.

They asked me if I wanted to re-record the whole presentation.

I didn’t want to, to be completely fair. I had had enough. I was ready to surrender.

But, I was also aware that I had travelled all of the way from Australia for this. It made no logical sense to give up on it… so I said yes, and started over.

The only thing was: they did not have all of my slides. Only half of them. They were not even ordered correctly. And they did not have time for me to troubleshoot what was happening with them.

Normally, I am okay with improvising.

That night, I was not okay. Not okay with improvising. My body was grieving and in collapse, underneath my external presentation.

I did the talk. I improvised. I hated it. I was celebrated by the audience, told that it was great — but, I didn’t feel it. I felt horrible.

I had spent years building toward visibility. The conference circuit. The speaking engagements. The credibility that comes from being seen in the right rooms by the right people. Some of it was genuinely mine — born from curiosity and care and the real desire to contribute. But beneath it, running like a quiet current, was something else: the mythology of success that says impact requires a stage. That if your work is serious, you must be publicly, legibly, measurably serious. That the podium is the proof.

That mythology is very old, and it is very convincing, and it had shaped me — particularly the maiden self I used to be: ambitious in the particular way young women are taught to be ambitious, measuring herself by proximity to importance, to platforms, to names that open doors.

Standing alongside Dr Zach Bush — a genuine dream, a man whose work I deeply admire — I should have felt it. That arrival of a vision that had been precious to me, for years.

Instead, I felt a disorienting stillness of getting exactly what you wanted and discovering the wanting was the point, not the having.

The TEDx stage simply confirmed what COP28 had begun to whisper.

I do not want this.

I am done with this.

What Motherhood Did to My Ambition

I am a mother now.

I say this not as context but as transformation — because it is the thing that reordered everything, including this.

I even wrote a book about Motherhood and the iniation and transformation it offers us. It’s called The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism and it is available worldwide in book stores. And you can buy it here.

I had a woman message me just the other day, telling me that she picked up a copy in Dymocks recently.

Wow, I thought.

I have always walked past big book stores dreaming of my work being on shelves there- and now it is.

And what I want to speak to here, is the quality to mothering that is entirely outside the gaze. It asks nothing of you that can be measured or performed or placed on a stage. The most important work of it happens in the dark, in the ordinary, in the private repetition of showing up for something that will never applaud you.

And I found, in that, something I had been circling for years without knowing it: the relief of existing outside visibility. The strange and nourishing quiet of creating from within a life, rather than projecting outward from it.

When I came home from that TEDx stage — and sank into my mundane life, without fanfare, with the internal reckoning that follows a public stumble — I sat with what had happened and felt, underneath the bruise of it, something else entirely.

Relief.

Not failure’s shadow. Relief’s warmth.

Because the talk had done something conferences and applause and proximity to important names had never managed: it had finally, irrevocably, freed me from a story I had been wearing for so long I had mistaken it for skin.

On the Gift of the Dream That Empties You

We speak a great deal about the courage it takes to pursue a dream.

We speak very little about the courage it takes to let one go — especially when the letting go looks, from the outside, like defeat.

Sometimes we need to fulfil our dreams to discover we are still empty inside of them.

This is anything but failure. In fact, I want to redefine failure here, because I believe that failure relates not to the external, but to the internal… it lies within our own self abandonment.

The kind of “failure” that I experienced is the most clarifying information a life can offer. It is the body’s way of pointing — firmly, without apology — toward what is actually true for you, underneath the accumulated expectations of who you were supposed to become.

My maiden self needed the stage. She needed to know if the thing she had been reaching for would, in the having, feel like home.

It didn’t.

And so this self — the mother, the maker, the woman who writes to you from the quiet interior of her own life — was freed to stop reaching for it.

I am quite content here. Creating from the comforts of home, in the intimate, unglamorous, deeply nourishing work of writing words that move between me and you — no podium, no lighting rig, no room of strangers measuring credibility.

No stage required.

What I Want You to Hear

If you have ever stood inside a dream and felt the strange silence of it — the moment when the thing you reached for reveals itself as hollow — I want you to know that silence is not nothing.

It is information. It is sacred, even. It is the moment your life stops performing and starts telling the truth.

Visibility is not the same as impact. Stages are not the same as service. Ambition dressed in society’s clothes is not the same as desire that was ever really yours.

You are allowed to want less than the world wants for you.

You are allowed to come home.