If you haven’t seen La Sociedad de la Nieve (The Snow Society), stop what you’re doing and watch it immediately.

It’s an incredibly moving new take on a true story from the 70’s - a plane that crashed into the Andes on a flight from Uruguay to Chile carrying a Uruguayan rugby team who were forced to turn to cannibalism to survive.

I can’t tell you how many times during the film I said aloud “Wow. HOW are they soldiering on in these incredibly adverse circumstances!? I’m sure I would have just laid down and given up.”

Of course I wouldn’t have - it’s just that we humans are so quick to underestimate ourselves and our capabilities.

Of course I’m not talking about extreme circumstances like that, but if a group of people could survive 72 days in the Andes post-plane crash, there’s really no excuse for you or I to believe we’re incapable of doing anything.

To put this into another (way less admirable or extreme!) context:

When I tell someone I moved to Mexico alone with no Spanish, no job, no friends and no contacts in the country, they often respond with “that’s so brave. I could never do that.”

I’m quick to refute that, ‘cos what they don’t know is that I learnt to ‘be brave’ completely by accident, after finding myself in a situation I didn’t expect to be in, and having to soldier on.

Around 10 years ago my boyfriend at the time and I decided to spend a year travelling around South America. Back then, I would NEVER have had the guts to do it alone.

Cut to scene, we’re two months into our trip, somewhere along the Ecuadorian coast, and we break up.

‘Fuck.’ I thought to myself. ‘What the fuck will I do?’

I remember the fear that gripped me at the prospect of spending the next year alone on the other side of the world, in a foreign place, where I knew exactly zero people and didn’t speak the language.

I was scared and nervous to go it alone, mostly ‘cos I genuinely wondered if I were capable and competent enough to do it. I imagined myself getting on the wrong bus and ending up in some far flung corner of nowhere, lost forever.

The words of a complete stranger that I’d met at an Aussie Rules footy match just before leaving Australia rang in my ears. The stranger in question was a guy seated next to me at the stadium. We got chatting over some good-natured heckling (opposite teams, innit) and I told him I was leaving for South America with my boyfriend.

He said - and this is a direct quote:

“Leave him at the airport.”

Naturally, I was all “but I LOVE him!?”

And he said (another direct quote), “you will experience a third of what you would if you go it alone.”

And honestly - where’s the lie!?

I came across many people travelling with partners or mates who just didn’t have the same necessity to walk up to a random group of strangers and say ‘hi!’ - and it showed.

The next year was the most transformative of my life. I had the best, the worst, the funnest and the loneliest times.

The photos you see here were taken somewhere in the jungle the night after an ayahuasca ceremony. I only even found out about ayahuasca two nights beforehand from an Ecuadorian friend who’s uncle was a shaman who lived in the jungle. Getting to his house was almost as wild as the ceremony itself.

We got on and off many different buses, each one smaller and shabbier than the last, until we finally arrived to a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. We hitched a ride with a passerby to another, intersecting dirt road that we trudged along, in the rain, until we reached the shaman’s house. He was brewing ayahuasca outside in a pot over a fire when we arrived.

The woman in the pics is the shaman’s wife, and she’s piercing my ears with a stick from a tree. She gifted me those earrings, along with an ice cream, before she saw me off in the back of a ute, the first part of the looooong journey back.

Long story short - I lived experiences that simply wouldn’t have presented themselves had I not been forced to step completely out of my comfort zone.

Look, I didn’t survive a plane crash nor did I hike 10 days through the mountains for help in a near-death state, but I did learn some important things about myself.

I learnt that I could depend on myself, that I didn’t have to make fear-based choices, and that I was capable of so much more than I thought.

And so are you. You’re SO capable of SO much more than you think, and all you have to do is trust in your own capacity to navigate the trail as it unravels in unexpected ways.

Oh, and the more resilience we can build, the better prepared we’ll be - but stick with me for that, I’ve got you covered, ok?