Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Dawn, thank you so much for joining our show today.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: You're very welcome.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: In full disclosure to the audience, I'll say that, and everybody knows this because it's always the same, but there's no prepared questions. However, I do extensive research, and in that research, after doing it, I was flustered and I held my head as such, and I was like, what the hell am I going to ask this lady? And I just had no idea because there is just so much that we could go into and any question I feel could lead to a world and hours of discussion. So let me ask you. Let me ask you, let me take a different approach.
What did you think about this morning when you woke up? What was the thing that made you get out of bed?
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Well, my dog, to begin with, who needed to get into the bathroom at 05:00 this morning? The only time I'm ever awake at 05:00 a.m. is for my dog. Or if I'm out sailing and I've been on dog watch, or I'm getting up for the sunrise on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Otherwise, I'm, like, proper. I love my sleep. So, yeah, but I woke up thinking about the young lady that I've just hired to join my team.
Because I go to bed every night and I ask the universe, or my subconscious, whatever you want to call it, what do I need to do tomorrow? What decisions do I need to make? Or I ask, you know, where's my next client coming from? Or, you know, what's my biggest lesson of today? And I offer up gratitude. And I woke up this morning and as I was walking around, it's a really beautiful morning.
So glad to be alive. So, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: That is so beautiful.
And again, so many places to go from there.
I think there's an element of gratitude and appreciation and kind of wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I'll tell you a short story.
I had this breakdown when I was very young and I was working 18 hours a day, just work. And I actually had to be hospitalized. I had to get liquids because I was dehydrated. And I got through all that. And then I had this talk with my boss and he said, look, Ari, you need three things in order to have a healthy life, and that's family, work, and a hobby. These three things, something for yourself. And what he explained is, look, if anything goes wrong with one of these, you lean on the other. If it gets tough with family, you lean on work. If it gets tough at work, you lean on family. That's your support system.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: And being in the single mind of, oh, I'm gonna work 18 hours a day, that's not a good strategy.
And I'll tell you, I did not get out of bed. I did not jump out of bed back in those days, but today I do. And I just loved your. Sorry.
[00:03:08] Speaker B: Why? Why do you get out of bed?
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Why? Yeah, well, I'll just stay.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: You have a dog as well.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Well, in fairness, I have three children.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Okay, say no more.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Three children and a wonderful wife.
The question, I think why you get out of bed in the morning is incredibly difficult. Right? I mean, there's the objective answer. The alarm clock.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: I don't have an alarm clock.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: You know what? I do. But I wake up before it every single day almost.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Of course you do.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: And it's such an incredibly difficult question to answer. Right? Because on the one hand, you're asking this, like, simple question, oh, why did you get out of bed? Oh, you know, something happened. But on the other hand, you're asking the question of what makes you jump out of bed in the morning.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: So I get to give life another go. It's like, come on, let's go. Let's go change the world. I actually got out of bed yesterday morning, and I said, come on, let's go change the world one book at a time. Or, you know, like, things like that.
I just.
I just love getting to have another go at life every day, you know, I get to write every day. I get to help people every day. I get to dance to music every day and eat delicious food.
Yeah.
Why would you not get out of bed?
[00:04:39] Speaker A: So, don, you started from humble beginnings.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I did.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: On a farm in, would I call it rural England. Is that a fair description?
[00:04:52] Speaker B: I would say very rural England. Yet there are only 200 people in the village I grew up in.
Did you just come out in hives?
[00:05:04] Speaker A: How do you.
Where does that. How do you go from where you started? Right. 200 people, small community.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: What happened next? Because you made some really interesting decisions when you were very young.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did.
Well, I think when you grow up in that kind of environment and you know everybody and everybody knows you, and everybody knows everybody's business, and then there's an international farm camp where you get all these bloody foreigners coming over, speaking their dodgy languages, and they're going to take all of us away and fill our heads with funny ideas. And when my mum used to say that to me, I'm like, cool. What ideas they can tell me. I wonder what they're saying in their bloody foreigner language. My dad still doesn't eat rice. It's foreign. He doesn't eat pasta. It's foreign.
And, you know, like, the fact that I took aubergine back home and made Baba Delouche like that was just like, what is that shit? Sorry. Excuse my language, by the way. I must say that I swear. Sign of high intelligence, I'll have you know.
But it was that curiosity and, like, speaking to these foreigners, it was just so exciting. They came from all over the world, and, you know, I'd never been on a train until I was 19. I'd never flown until I was 21. And I actually flew to Egypt to marry my arabic husband, who's no longer my.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: Hold on. Before that, something before that.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Let's just.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: I'm not gonna let you get away with this. Before that, something like, something happened before that. What was that?
[00:06:46] Speaker B: I converted to Islam when I was 15.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Okay, so hold on. You're 15?
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Yes. Never Islam.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: You're 15 in a very rural village?
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: What triggered this?
[00:07:04] Speaker B: How did this come to be my religious education teacher? I blame Miss Eddan. It's all her.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Let's pile on Miss Eden. What did she do, and how should she be punished?
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Okay, so Miss Eddan was one of those teachers that she loved, goddess like, and I was like, what? My parents don't even discuss religion. And I think religion or believing in God is only for posh people or for old people, that's kind of where my head was at. So to see my teacher, who was, like, in her thirties, I think.
And she just loved God so much, I was like, wow.
And then she started teaching us about all these different religions, and we had to choose a project about either Judaism or about Islam. We couldn't do it about Christianity because we were in a christian country. It was all about learning.
And then we went on this school trip, and it was to learn about all the different pilgrimages around the world and from different faiths.
And I saw the hajj, and I was like, wow, everybody is equal. It doesn't matter how old they are, how rich or poor they are, whether they're male or female, everyone is equal.
Although the media wouldn't have you believe that. But that is, if you study Islam, you'll actually realize that that is truth. And you'll also learn that the prophet Muhammad's wife, peace be upon him, she was a businesswoman. She was older than him, so she was probably one of the original cougars. And she also asked him to marry her. So, you know, she broke all the rules.
No wonder I actually were like, oh, she sounds quite good.
And so learning all about that and what I grew up seeing in the media about Arabs and Muslims and all of these terrorism, and I was like, really?
So my head gets extra curious. And I was like, that's not how the history is. Like, Arabs gave us the on off switch. Arabs gave us underfloor heating. Well, it's called the irrigation system. In farming, they gave us universities and libraries and hospitals. And, you know, the first word in the Quran is iqra, which means read, which I love doing. So that was a big bonus.
Anyone that tells me how tells me to read is like, okay, I can be friends with you.
And so that was really interesting. But. So I did my project on Islam and the arab world, and it wasn't until I actually started looking at the arab world that I realized that not all Arabs were Muslim. Lots of Arabs were christian, and they were also jewish, and they were also atheists and mystics. And I was like, this is just great.
My parents have been lying to me all this time, and so is the newspapers. And so I went further down the rabbit hole, and I used to go out raving, and I had quite a hedonistic teenage life, and I met my now ex husband in a rave amongst 10,000 people. And so then he. I was like, oh, so where are you from then?
And he says, I'm egyptian. Palestinian. I was like, oh, so you're an Arab. So are you muslim, christian, or jewish, or do you not believe in God? And he just laughed. And he was like, no one has ever asked me that question. They all assume I'm Muslim. That's just stupid. You can't just assume someone. It's like, when I've been traveling and I've heard english people speaking, I've automatically started speaking a different language because I didn't want to speak to them.
That sounds horrible.
And, yeah, so when people meet me and I start speaking to them in Arabic or Spanish, like, they're, like, they're taken aback because they've assumed I look english or what, I'm caucasian. They've seen the red hair, they've seen the blazer eyes. They automatically assume that I'm, you know, for Scotland.
So, yeah, it's never assumed that that was. So I met him, and that did go down too well, especially when I started seeing him and decided I was going to marry him. So there we go.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: And at some stage, so you're.
I would argue that you have this unquenching sense of curiosity.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Oh, God. I'm insatiable when it comes to curiosity.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: And that led you to learning and ultimately moving to Cairo, or I should say Egypt.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: We moved to Cairo. We did move to Cairo, yes.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: And at a very interesting time at that.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Well, I've been going back to. Back and forth to Cairo in Lebanon and Oman and I'm not really a fan of Dubai.
And I just fell in love with the arab world so much.
And it reminded me a lot of Britain growing up in the village life in the sense that the villages were more about community, like farming. People were together, they respected, they worked hard.
And I really. That really appealed to me. So lots of people thought that it was a massive culture shock, but it wasn't at all.
It just reminded me of being with my grandparents and like my great aunties and great uncles, they just spoke a different language and they were a different colour.
And we moved out to Egypt because I said to my now ex husband that if we were actually going to. If he wanted to be with me and he wanted to have children with me, then we were going to live in Egypt or Palestine. We couldn't go to Palestine, so we ended up going to Egypt.
Lebanon was also a little bit unstable at that point.
And so we decided Egypt, God bless his mother.
If you've read my books, you'll know why. I said, she was a feisty lady. We clashed. You could probably tell why.
And so we ended up moving out to Egypt because I said, you know, now the boys are young, you know, we're going out there to learn the culture, learn the language, because it's not right that we don't speak the language of your family. It's absolutely necessary. If I'd have married an Italian, we'd have gone to Italy and I'd have learned Italian, same with Russia or wherever else in the world.
And so we went out there and within six months, the egyptian uprising kicked off.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: And I was like, oh, okay, okay, let's bring our audience with us and talk about a little bit about what happened before the arab spring and after, why it happened. And I think most more importantly, except for the contextual introduction, what actually did it feel like to be on the ground?
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Well, we knew it was going to happen. We knew there were going to be protests.
And over the amount of time that I'd been going to Egypt, I started to see that things like Mubarak wasn't taking care of the streets, the education system was failing.
Family and friends that lived there, they were just like things had got to change. Like the price of groceries was going up again. The cost of living wasn't. We're seeing that all over the world.
And Egyptians are, although they're quite feisty, they're feisty. They're never really no one. We knew there would be a few protests, but it was so exciting to see the egyptian people walk the talk.
Like the numbers that came out, it was, it was like this big family of people came together and said, enough is enough. You know, it was, it was like festival time. You know, people were, you know, joining together people. And what you read in the media or what you saw in the media. Sorry.
Wasn't really the reality. On a lot of occasions, at the very beginning, it was something that was very peaceful. People, people were angry and people were upset with what was happening because Mubarak really did disrespect them. And there was some of the ties that he had. And you have to kind of understand the history of Egypt. And I'm obviously not going to give you a 300 year, 500 year history, but Abd al NASA betrayed the people.
And then when you had Mubarak assassinate Sadat, Sadat was a relatively good leader. I mean, are any of them any good, to be honest with you, the world over, even today?
But Mubarak raped the country for 30 years and he drove it into the ground. He stole from the egyptian people. I think with the onset of the Internet and people started to see what was going on around the world, and people were just like, hang on a second.
All of these lies that are being propagated, I mean, religion wasn't like, the differences in religion wasn't even a thing, you know, that you.
And I think one of the most poignant things that happened in Egypt was when the media tried to put a divide between the different religious communities. And we were like, why are they doing that? Well, we knew why they were doing it, but you would actually have, like, a lot of christians outside the mosques protecting the Muslims while they're praying and vice versa, and obviously with the synagogues as well.
And we just felt that it was such an exciting time. I mean, I was almost pushing my ex husband out the door. Like, you are going to go and you're going to protest. You are going to go and stand with those egyptian people because you are not going to sit in this house and bitch and moan about the egyptian state of Egypt with your friends and then just carry on and sit here while everybody else is out there. You're going to go. And if you don't go. You can stay here and look after the boys. And I'm going to go.
Obviously, he wasn't going to let me go.
I'm a bit of a troublemaker because even when we lived in England before the boys were born and before we moved to Egypt, when he had a mercedes and white english woman in a car with an Arab driving a mercedes, very nice mercedes. He's obviously my drug dealer or my pimp. There's no way that a sane white english woman would be in a car with an Arab. God forbid that ever happened.
And we used to get pulled over all the time and there was a time when it took the Leicestershire police less than five minutes to pull us over. And I actually got out of the car when we were pulled over and I gave the police officers a clap. I went, well done, you beat everybody else. And he was like, what? I said, every time we come to Leicester, do the police pull us over?
Every time we went to America, we got random checked in every airport, every airport. And it was like, this is not random.
And so I'm that person. So he was definitely not going to let me go out into the streets of Egypt without him.
I would have been arrested. I nearly was. I was followed by secret police because during the protests that were going on, he was reporting back to me. He was reporting with the BBC when they had a little bit more truth to them.
And I'm talking to lots of our friends that are across Egypt, down in Sdouez, down in Asmalaya, up in Askantrea.
Sorry, I'm using all the egyptian names. Rada is Haggadah, Alexandria, Suez and Ismale. Ismaleia. Is that the english way of saying it?
This is a language challenge that I have quite a bit. And so I'm taking all of the information that they're saying to me because they're down there and, like, taking their videos and I'm putting it out on a blog and I'm sending it to other people at the news that I know.
And I started feeling like someone was watching me or someone was following me.
And I spotted the secret police and I went up to them one day and gave them my timetable and said, if you lewd me, I'll be here at this time. And by the way, you're not very secret. And I told my ex husband and he was like, I cannot believe you just did that. I was like, why?
And I'm like, what are they going to do? He's like, they could put you in prison. You could disappear. I'm like, and then what will the news do? The news will go, oh, british woman's been disappeared in Egypt. That's not going to go down too well, especially as you're reporting with John, one of the biggest BBC reporters in the world on international politics.
So, yeah, that was. But it was great. And then I. The police thugs, the people who are paid by the police, the Baltaghi, which we're seeing a lot of these days, you know, you see a lot of peaceful protests disrupted by angry mobs, which are mainly paid by politicians or by the police to go and disrupt it, to actually sway the narratives these Beltagi turned up. And that's when it changed and it became very dangerous, very worrying.
My blog got taken down after like 20,000 people started following it.
Yeah. And it was quite scary for a bit, but you just carry on. And there's no way I was going to leave because even though I had a choice to leave, that was my home, I chose to live there. And I was teaching in schools because all the teachers left. They needed someone who was british and English to teach in the british school. So I went and taught in the british schools and had the best time, met the most gorgeous children.
Yeah, yeah. It was just a really wonderful experience. And Egypt's one of those places that gets under your skin. And I said to some friends, I said, egypt's like, though Egypt's like being married, absolutely love it. But you want to smack it around the head with a saucepan every now and then.
You just love to hate it, but you can't not hate it. You can't hate it because you love it so much, because it makes you feel so alive, because it's so extreme. Extreme in heat. You know, you've got extreme wealth and extreme poverty. You know, it's just such a beautiful country and the people are so lovely.
Yeah.
But I'm not now back there.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Let's jump forward.
The arab spring happened.
Regimes changed.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: It was, I think, more than anybody expected, even people who are more involved. I don't think that anybody thought that there would be such a, such an outspread. And it wasn't just Egypt. Right? It spread out.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: It's not called the egyptian spring.
Yeah, it started in Tunis. My friends were in Morocco, they were protesting in Rabat.
Yeah, it spread out across. And good job, too.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Where did you. So where did you find yourself after all the changes of regimes and after the arab spring started to cool down.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: We were still in Cairo.
And then when we were really looking for. When Morsi took over Mohamed Morsi. And then we started to see narratives that were coming out of.
When Morsi took over, that was probably the safest I've ever felt in Egypt. But people were saying that he was a terrorist because he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. No, he wasn't.
And one of the reasons why that happened is because he refused to have USAID, because he knew that there was so much wealth in the country and so he cut ties with them. They obviously can't have that. I know that you're in America and got probably a lot of american listeners, so a lot of what I'm saying is probably like, what is she talking about?
But when they, when the military coup happened and CC took over, I was like, yeah, we're not doing this. I am not like, now it is really time to leave.
Because the fact that they assassinated Morsi poisoned him slowly in prison, because we actually lived opposite the prison where my Barak and Morsi, and you wouldn't believe it was a prison. You just had this big high wall and lots of land where you had ostriches, you had stables. So all we saw were the ostriches and the stables and the farms that were inside the prison because they actually get people to actually take care of them and learn skills and.
But when CC took over, I was like, yeah, this is just Mubarak tag two. We're going, we're not having this. And it was really sad because we saw a lot of positive changes under Morsi because he started repairing the roads, the lighting, the electricity systems that have been neglected for 30, 40 years. He started repairing and life got better and we felt, everybody felt safer in the streets, so.
But again, he was just a puppet. Most presidents are for the system that runs, that's in the background.
And so he came back to Britain.
Well, me and the boys came back to Britain.
The ex husband had projects to do. He was wrapping up some projects, and if you switch the word projects for mistresses, that was the end of an 18 year marriage.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah. So that was pretty tough. So the boys and I had not only just reintegrated back into Britain and we were learning to speak English again in a british way, but we also had to do it by ourselves.
And a month after we came back to Britain, my father in law died and I was very, very close to him, so that was grieving.
And then in the April after, so we came back to Britain in October, my father in law died. In the November, my ex husband asked for a divorce without warning. In April.
And I was like, okay, game on. Gotta own those ovaries. You've got a step up door, and it's now all on you. So, yeah.
And then 18 months later, I got arrested by scottish police.
You're right there, Ari.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: You know, I started with this, that. I have no idea how this is gonna go. And I'm not sure what questions to ask. And here I'm feeling it again. I feel like no matter what my next question is, the audience is going to be, why didn't you ask about that?
[00:27:31] Speaker B: When they send all your questions in, you can just invite me back on and you can ask me those questions.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: So there is no. Right. Next question to ask.
Let me just say that on the one hand, the travesties and challenges that we go through in life are what define us. They're what make us strong. They're what they are what make us who we are. But on the other hand, as human beings, we're deeply empathetic. Well, some of us.
To the pain and suffering of others. So when I hear that you went through all these travesties, I just want to give you a hug.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: How did you. This. This is just. You got slapped in the face, kicked in the one after another.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: But you found the strength to take that next step to get out of bed.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Now, for me, it would be the kids. What was it for you? Absolutely.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: My boys, they were watching. Their eyes were on me.
And I think this is the thing. I was talking to a friend who, she doesn't have children. She can't have children.
Not now, anyway.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: That's not something that I would wish on my worst enemies.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: What, to not have children?
[00:28:57] Speaker A: To not be able to have children.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
That is. Yeah.
And I think this is the interesting thing about people always say, well, how did you get to be an international best selling author of almost 21 books and do all of what you've done and live in 44 countries and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm not dismissing what I've achieved, because I know that I'm so blessed to have been given opportunities and to have been able to have the character to. Able to spot those opportunities.
But when Miss Collins, my careers teacher, when I was 14, she never said, what job do you want?
She always said, who do you want? What are the things you've always wanted to be?
And I always knew I wanted to be a mum. I always knew I wanted to have my own business. I just didn't know what that looked like. So I did child development and I did drama, because believe it or not, I'm quite shy.
I am like, I've been put in the finals of the national Business Women's award for social justice.
And I'm like, I've got to buy my tickets to go. But because I know there's going to be like a couple of hundred people down.
That's a lot of people that's like, I'd rather just stay home and read a book.
I like my books, as you can probably tell from my background, and this is not all of them.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: It's hard. It's hard for people to believe you because it's hard for people to believe me. I tell people I am an introvert, an extreme introvert, and they don't believe me. And I was like, yeah. When I was, you know, when I was twelve, I, you know, I had this, like, dirty t shirt and baggy pants and I was behind the computer and that lasted into my twenties. And this idea of being social is something that I learned and practiced. And my wife is, why do you.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Think I did drama?
[00:31:00] Speaker A: So it definitely isn't a, you know, you can acquire the skill. That's the good news.
But I don't know if you would agree with this, but, but if you started as an introvert, you know, it's still work to those social interactions. Right. It's not your sweet spot.
[00:31:19] Speaker B: No, that's why I wear. Wear earpods all the time and, yeah, it just shuts out the world because I like my own space. And traveling the world myself was just great.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: That's right.
You're back in England. You're pulling yourself up literally by, you know, by your bootstraps. Maybe not literally, but pulling your bootstrapping.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Yourself back up by Adidas trainers. Yeah.
[00:31:49] Speaker A: Yes. There you go.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: I was putting my. Because I see, this is the thing with. Wearing Adidas is what we call it in Britain. We call it Adidas. We don't need Nike to tell us to just do it. We already earn our stripes.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: That's why I wear Adidas.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: I love that.
As you're emerging from this turmoilist time in life, what did you learn? What was your new new insight? How did it change who you were going through that period?
[00:32:33] Speaker B: I didn't feel that I could trust anybody.
I didn't feel that I could trust myself to trust others. And I think that's a very big distinction, that when you have just discovered that your husband of 18 years has been cheating on you for the whole entire time that you've been together and you're pretty good judge of character. And like, you know, even clients that would, or people that wanted to deal with me, I'd be like, yeah, I'm not going to deal with you. But it was quite interesting when we did run our business together, he brought three people into the office. I said, we're not working with them. He was like, what? I'm like, we're not working with them. I just get a really bad feeling about them. They're not. I don't want them anywhere near our business. And he ended up working with them anyway. And they were the ones that ended up owing us a lot of money. Everyone else I knew, like, I had this, I think in over the hedge, the turtle gets a wobbly tail. And as a parent, you'll know what I mean.
He gets a tingle, doesn't he? And it's like.
And it was like, I'm so, I've been always been such a great judge of character. And there were a few times when I suspected he was cheating, but he made it out that it was all in my head because I just had a baby and I was feeling down and I was lonely. He was working overseas, nothing to worry about.
And you believe him or you believe them.
And I had to learn that I could trust myself again. I also had to learn how to sort out technology, and I also had to learn how to deal with family accounts. Because he was good at maths, he was good at technology.
They were his roles. I dealt with the boys, I dealt with the running of the house. Very traditional roles, not because of, I am quite a traditional woman. I, you know, I want to be home. Like, you know, even when my son said recently, when you get, when you find the guy, he's going to be, you work from home, you cook great, and he's going to come home to a home cooked meal. I'm like, you bet you're out. See it?
Because I am going to cook for him. If he's been at home all day, he shouldn't be coming home to cook, you know, especially because I like to cook and my cooking is absolutely exceptional. And I am home all day because I write from home, I write from wherever I am.
And learning how to manage the finances because I've always avoided finance because I was very bad at maths.
And numbers don't make sense to me, especially when they start putting letters into mathematical equipment. Like, letters belong in sentences, they don't belong in maths. And that was like my block. So I had to learn how to take care of the household finances. And I learned how much, how good I am at business, because, again, I also learned that I had been the one driving our first business that we've been running together, and he was the one that was siphoning off all the money to go and spend on his mistresses.
And I also learned a very important lesson, that the woman who he went off to America to get engaged to, so he left us on the 4 May, couldn't get out of the car fast enough to catch the train. But ten days after telling me he wanted to divorce, he announced his engagement on Facebook, which was shocking for me and all of our friends.
But she contacted me. She was a woman who makes films in America about female empowerment. She's on this female empowerment journey, and here she is sleeping with another woman's husband.
And she emailed me a lot to try and become friends with me. And I realized just how some women, and I think this was a big wake up call for me, that so many people espouse so many things, and yet their actions are the total opposite. And I realized I could not trust people as much as I had been. I had been giving people too much trust.
And so that was huge for me. So I had to learn to trust myself again, to trust other people.
But I also learned just how competent and powerful I am.
And that his behavior was not a reflection on me.
His choices were not a reflection on me. And even though I did take some time once the divorce happened, to go, actually, how could I have been a better wife? Where did I not? Because it takes two people in a relationship to work. Not all of the blame lands on his feet. I am feisty, and I do set the bar very high.
And I did neglect him over our children. But they were children. He's a grown ass man. He can you want your dinner? Like, I'm taking care of the children. You know how to make an egg, surely you know how to make an omelet. You know how to boil some rice, get them in the kitchen and get done with it. These are babies they need taken care of.
And I also realized that I had been the one that had built the businesses and that I was a great businesswoman. I also learned that it didn't matter how much experience you've got, and if you've run your own businesses before, no one wants to employ you.
So that was okay. I can't get a job. I've got to set up another business. And it was all of. All of these things that I then started to go, actually, all of these things are working out in my favor. Everything happens for a reason, and everything is happening for me. It's not happening to me. It's happening for me.
We understand that distinction. We step in mode. Do you?
[00:38:34] Speaker A: I do.
All over.
Good.
You've said something so important, I want to linger on it.
First of all, I think the journey that you went through is absolutely incredible from this perspective of the bravery and commitment to supporting your kids as you're going through this incredibly difficult journey. And I think that's an inspiration to everyone because each and every one of us have a point in life where we need to pull ourselves through a very dark tunnel.
And I appreciate you being so vulnerable and sharing the story of vulnerability with our audience.
But you said something so incredibly important.
You're not the victim.
And just by saying that, I feel those goosebumps again.
What does that mean?
How did that realization come to you, and how does that give you strength?
[00:39:58] Speaker B: I really do believe that there are two kinds of people in life when it comes to how we handle challenging times. There are the people that just love the victim, the stress, jealousy, and the pity party. And they get addicted to it, and they drag it out, and they just love living in misery.
Because you have. Well, there are probably three types, four types of people, and they go together. So you've got those that love their pity parties and their drama, but you've got the people that feed it because they need to feel needed. And they help keep people in a state of victimhood because it plays to their martyr syndrome. And then you've got the other kind of people that will not allow you to be a victim. They're the ones that, like, come on, pull your socks up. You know, like. Or put your bridges on or own your ovaries or whatever you need. Yeah, just get your shit together.
I didn't have many of those people, but I also, because what we saw happen when I got divorced is I had to distance myself from a lot of people because either people stood by him, and I'm like, if you can stand by somebody who has lied and deceived and manipulated you as well as me for that amount of time, and you agree with his behavior, we can't be friends.
Why would you want someone who's lied, deceived, and manipulated you in your life?
Excuse me. And then there was the other people that would be telling me what he was up to. I'm like, I don't need to know. But I also realized those same, very same people would be telling him what I'm doing, they would have to be cut off. They had to go as well.
And it became a time. It's okay. Do I trust this person? What's this person's intention?
And then I had a very small handful of friends who supported me. And when I say what I'm about, most of them were men, because the women became very territorial, because I get on very well with men because of the kind of conversations that I have. I'm not really into talking about fashion and makeup and hair and all of that stuff that a lot of women talk about. I don't like talking about other women and other people. I like to talk about situations, solutions, politics, business. Let's just go down those rabbit holes and see where it takes us.
And I channeled a lot of my pain through my mixed martial arts because I did mixed martial arts. And so instead of getting angry with him and feeling like a pity party, I chose to do mixed martial arts with my boys. And we all went to the dojo three nights a week, and we just kicked the crap out of each other.
It was great fun. I got into the best shape of my life, and it was just like, I can do this. I can do anything I set my mind to. And this is where people, you know, the mind over matter, and be careful what you wish for.
There's a reason why we say those.
The pain doesn't. I don't mind, so the pain doesn't matter, you know, and it's about how we use words. And, yes, I'm a writer, and I can play with words and things like that, but it is so very. It's like if you. If I'd have gone down that road of surrounding myself with people who wanted to keep me a victim, one more to portray me as a victim, I wouldn't have got anywhere. There was a very dear friend of mine, Ali, and another one called Debbie.
Both of those ladies, Allie. I remember her saying to me, dawn, you've been a single mum since I've known you. Because he'd lived away a long, and that put things into perspective. Debbie, she didn't accept any excuses, and she's like, just. Just get on with it.
I was like, okay. But the rest of my friends were male, and it was their support of me, and they were married, and it was just that we were just friends. So it wasn't that they were trying to hit on me or get into my niggas. They were just wanting me to own who I was and reflect back to me what they saw. And they saw a very powerful woman who was very confident, very intelligent, and who was very determined and who had been betrayed, and that meant the world to me. But they wouldn't allow me. Neither would sensei. Sensei would always tell me, he goes, dawn, you are not a victim. You're already a black belt in your mind.
And that, I remember one day, we all stood in a gauntlet in the dojo, and he came down, and he was right up in our faces. He said, what makes you fight?
And I was like, I just pretend you hurt my children.
From that point on, everyone else was like, hey, we're not fighting with her. I got the nickname scrapper, and so that was good fun. But I just surrounded myself with people who celebrated greatness and celebrated strengthen, and they just cheered you. We all cheered each other on. And when I got into quite a bit of trouble a few years ago, because I said, depression is a choice, and a lot of people didn't like that.
And I get that there is a chemical imbalance in our brain, like serotonin, dopamine, and all of those, and you've got your cortisol and your adrenal.
But when you're depressed, you have a choice to stay depressed, or you can make a choice to manage your depression or to get out of depression. And a lot of depression comes from the people you surround yourself with, staying in a job or a relationship or a home, you not thriving in the. The food you eat, the things you consume.
If you're drinking alcohol or drugs or cigarettes or you're eating processed food, you're not working out, you're not out in nature. All of those things lead to depression.
And there was at one point in my life after, because I got really severe postnatal depression with my second child, because I was given 24 hours to live with him, because my body had started to go into osmosis. Yeah, I know, but it just keeps on coming.
But if you understand, I had almost given up at that point, and that's why my body went into osmosis, because it was almost like, well, if you don't feel the value of living and you don't see the value of yourself, well, you might as well die. And it was like, okay, no, I had to find that courage to keep going.
And you do because you see your child and you can't leave them. And I've written a book on female what causes women to want to take their life. And I've also just published a book about men wanting to take their life. So the women's one was life to thrive. The men's one was tough to talk. All the proceeds from those books goes to mental health charities.
And I had been put on some of the strongest antidepressants at that time. And when I spoke to the doctor and I gone cold turkey, and I was like, I don't want to be on these anymore. I mean, I was convulsing because I didn't. I was. I put myself through cold turkey because I made the choice. I did not want to be on antidepressants because whilst we're on antidepressants, we're numbing that pain, we're not dealing with it. And I equate it to having a splinter in your finger. You can keep that splinter in there, keep putting cream on it and put a plaster on it and keep medicating it and numbing it, and it's still going to be there. But it's not until you take that out and you deal with that root cause of your depression.
And when you have that depression, it leads to these neuro problems and the autoimmune deficiencies, because you're effectively telling your body to give up on itself. Anyone that's ever heard of doctor Joe Dispenza or Abraham Hicks, any of these like, epigenetics, like the quantum realm, when you start playing in that field, you actually realize how powerful we are.
And I remember when I was giving birth to my second son, I was rushed to hospital and they were like, we need to give you a cesarean. You've got 24 hours to live. I'm like, I'm not giving birth to this baby until my husband and my son are here. This is a family event and it's not going to happen.
And they kept giving me syntosin on, which is like the pregnancy hormone that sends you into labour. They gave me two doses and I was supposed to have gone into labor. I was like, it's not happening. You've got to try something else. My husband is not here, my child is not here. This is a family thing. And it took four lots of pin to none, and I still hadn't gone into labour, and I refused to.
And it wasn't until my ex husband walked in the room with my youngest son, right, they're both here now. I can give birth. My water's broke.
We have so much power within us, and it's when you go through these challenging moments in life, when you tap into that power, you can achieve anything. You can transform your life like I have, but we have to choose it. And that's why I say depression is a choice. We can choose to stay depressed, or we can choose to take that and turn it into our power.
[00:50:22] Speaker A: I think that's the.
I think that's the main point, right? That you decide what is the next step that you take. You decide that no matter how difficult it is, no matter what is the situation that is happening to you, your perception of I'm a victim, I have no control, is choice number one.
Choice number two is this happened to me, but I am not for you. Happened for me.
[00:50:54] Speaker B: Everything happens for us.
[00:50:56] Speaker A: Not to another goosebumps just going down my right shoulder. This happened for me.
But even saying that this happened for me, you've already made the choice. You've made the choice that I am not a victim. And this is part of my journey, and this is part of what is making me who I am. And I've made the choice that I'm not a victim. I have control. I have power, and I can take that next step.
[00:51:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:30] Speaker A: I am at loss of words. And we knew this was going to be a problem I would have today.
Let me ask you one last question, okay.
And it's a two parter. One is, what is the time at life that you would go back to and answer yourself the following.
What should I do differently? What advice would you give me?
[00:52:04] Speaker B: I wouldn't do anything differently.
[00:52:09] Speaker A: Why?
[00:52:11] Speaker B: Because I wouldn't be the woman I am today.
And I wouldn't be able to sit here with you and share my journey that would inspire others and give you goosebumps and make people rethink who they are. And I would have missed out on so many things that I've got to enjoy. I might not have my children.
To go back is to have regret. There's no regrets in life.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: Dawn. Thank you so much for today.
[00:52:41] Speaker B: You're very welcome.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: I appreciate you and your bold, unapologetic braveness from the depths of my heart. Thank you.
[00:52:53] Speaker B: You're very welcome. Thank you.
