Hello there and welcome to today's episode of the manifest podcast. I'm so

excited to be here with you today because I want to share with you something

that I wrote on my substack recently and if you are not subscribed to my

substack which is where I do and share a majority of my longer form writing and

you guys know I love to write go to Sarah Proud dot substack dot com and so what I

did is I wrote an open letter to a struggling yet hopeful past version of

myself and this was this was actually quite an emotional process because what I

did was I saw myself as my future self writing back nearly 14 years later so

it was like getting in a really complicated time machine to check in on this

past version of me so I recently stumbled upon a photo of me from 2009

when I was living at my mother's house in Nusa Australia just leading up to my

divorce in fact I just I'd been separated for nearly a year and I was up to my

eyeballs in debt and I remember that my daughter Olivia took this photo of me

and if you go to the substack article you'll see and I'll link to that in the

description of this episode you can see the photo for yourself that I'm sitting on

my mother's deck holding a cup of tea and I'm just kind of looking outwards and I

remember in that moment that frozen snapshot in time was that I was thinking how

am I going to pay these bills how am I going to get out of debt how am I going to

set myself up and so what you really can't see in the photo is the worry and

the concern and the fear that I had for the future and the number one

intention that I had was to hide those feelings those emotions because I

didn't want my children to sense that anything was wrong and I'm really happy

...