Your Body Has Been Leaving Post-it Notes Everywhere

I'm Narelle Donald. I'm a naturopath, professional untangler of Christmas lights and translator for women whose bodies have apparently started communicating exclusively in riddles.

You know the type.

You used to be able to run a household, manage a career, remember everyone's birthdays and locate a missing school shoe from three suburbs away.

Now you're standing in the kitchen holding a wooden spoon with absolutely no idea what happens next.

Your body feels different. Your brain has 47 tabs open, three are frozen and somewhere, inexplicably, music is playing. Your emotions have become a surprise lucky dip. Your gut has opinions. Your hormones appear to have taken over management without consulting the board. And your tolerance for bullshit- previously an impressively deep and renewable resource - has suddenly been declared critically endangered.

Welcome. You're my kind of woman.

The Post-it notes

I've been a naturopath for more than 25 years, which means I've spent a very long time listening to women tell me things that apparently “aren't connected.”

The bloating. The 3am wake-ups. The anxiety that came from nowhere. The exhaustion. The brain fog. The sudden desire to move to a small cottage where nobody knows their address. The husband chewing too loudly. The fact that everyone in the family seems perfectly capable of finding you but mysteriously incapable of finding the dishwasher.

Individually, these things can look like a random collection of annoying symptoms.

I don't think they're random. I think your body has been leaving Post-it notes everywhere.

One on your stomach: We don't like that.

One on your forehead: Could everyone please shut up?

One on your chest: Something doesn't feel right here.

One on your skin: We're itchy. Deal with it.

One on your sleep: Not tonight. Try again tomorrow. Actually, don't hold your breath.

One on your memory: On strike, effective immediately.

One on your adrenal glands: We would like to formally resign.

And possibly one stuck directly to your husband: This may not actually be your problem to fix.

The trouble is women are spectacularly well trained in ignoring their own Post-it notes. We can detect a microscopic change in the emotional atmosphere of a room from 40 metres away, yet somehow miss the fact that our own body has been standing in the corner waving two enormous red flags and setting off a flare.

Most of us have also spent years reading everyone else's Post-it notes instead. The one on your husband's forehead: hungry. The one on your kid's shoe: missing. The one on your mother's fridge: ring me back. Meanwhile the ones on you have been piling up in a drift, unread, like a whiteboard nobody's wiped since 2019.

What I actually do

So that's the work I do. I help women make sense of themselves.

The body. The head. The heart. The gut. The hormones, the stress, the metabolism, the patterns, the beliefs, the overthinking, the second-guessing and all the stuff you've accidentally picked up along the way because apparently at some point you became the emotional lost-property department for everyone you've ever met.

We go through the notes properly. We work out what's yours. What isn't. What needs attention. What needs changing. And what needs to be lovingly returned to its rightful owner with a polite note saying: I believe this belongs to you.

Sometimes that means nutrition. Sometimes herbs. Sometimes we need to look at hormones, metabolism or what your nervous system has been doing behind your back.

And sometimes your body is doing a perfectly reasonable job of responding to a life that's become completely unreasonable. The note is accurate. The life needs editing.

Not another list

I'm not here to hand you another laminated list of things you should be doing. Drink more water. Meditate. Meal prep. Journal. Get 10,000 steps. Practise gratitude. Chew each mouthful 47 times while facing east. You've got enough to do - and another list is just one more Post-it note stuck on top of the pile, in someone else's handwriting.

I'm more interested in why you know exactly what you need and still find yourself doing the complete opposite. Why your head says one thing, your heart says another, your gut is screaming from the basement and your body has simply pulled the doona over its head and refused to participate.

Because when those parts of you are all giving different directions, life starts to feel like driving with four GPS systems operating simultaneously. Turn left. Turn right. Make a U-turn. Recalculating. Recalculating. RECALCULATING. Eventually you pull over and eat a family-sized block of chocolate in a service station car park.

Where you actually are

I help you turn down the noise long enough to work out which voice - and which note - is actually yours.

Not so I can tell you where to go. You've had enough people doing that. I help you work out where you actually are. What your body has been trying to tell you. What you actually want. And which notes you can finally peel off and hand back, because quite frankly, you've been carrying other people's for long enough.

Think of me as part naturopath, part detective and part Google Maps for women who have spent decades following everyone else's directions, and reading everyone else's handwriting.

Except I'm not going to keep yelling recalculating at you. We'll sit down, go through the notes one by one, and work out where the bloody hell you actually are.

And go from there.

If this sounds like you, book a consult and let's start going through the notes.