It took being in the depths of postpartum depression to finally sit in a chair and watch as an inky needle etched the Olympic rings into my forearm. Ten years had passed since I became an Olympian, but it took hitting rock bottom to feel the need to brand a permanent reminder that I’ve done hard things before, and I can do it again.

You know what’s wild? Becoming an Olympian was hard but surviving womanhood has been harder. And I can say that, because I’ve done both. There’s no shiny medal for postpartum depression, no podium for chronic migraines, no tattoo for the kind of PMS that makes you want to scream at the top of your lungs when your coat gets caught on the door.

There’s undeniable beauty in this battle, strength born from struggle and forged overtime. It’s a resilience that doesn’t just survive hardship but grows stronger because it has to. There are weeks when pain relief is my only lifeline, a brief escape from the relentless hormonal migraines that hijack a good chunk of my month. And still, we show up. For work, for kids, for dinner. For everything. But we’ve learned what helps. We’ve built our own toolkit over the years: hot yoga and beach walks to clear the mind, a podcast to fuel it up again, and the women around us, our personal pit crew. We’ve turned pain into practice. And practice into strength.

I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with some incredible wahine too in my years as a sports reporter, such as Megan Rapinoe, Lisa Carrington, Ruby Tui, and Zoi Sadowski-Synnott. I hold deep respect for every one of these women; each has endured the wild beautiful force that is womanhood, and turned it into something unstoppable. They’ve shaped struggle into strength.

There are some moments that stay with you. For me, one of those moments was listening to NRLW Warriors prop Harata Butler speak. There was something in her authenticity, the way it felt like she was healing herself just by saying the words aloud. “Just being a wahine, you don’t really think too much about the pain at the time, you just push through. And I’ve got to say, it isn’t always a good thing to fall back to that default of: you’ll be alright, just harden up.” 

And she’s right. It’s not always a good thing to push through. Sure, that collective toughness has carried us far, but I think sometimes we do need to give ourselves the luxury we deserve to rest up occasionally. Of course, that’s easier said than done when you’re a high-performance athlete, contracted to show up at your best, no matter what. But the conversation is starting; the rollercoaster ride female athletes go through, and the cost of pushing through, always.