MID

Are you "difficult" if you speak your mind, or have you just grown into yourself? 

Do you just finally know what you want and how to ask for it? We asked Tina Arena. She's a Gen X icon with immense success under her belt, who can speak and sing and win awards in four languages, who has lived all over the world, and who, in recent years, has been refreshingly open about everything from politics to parenthood and to ageism in the music industry.

Not everybody likes that. But as Holly learned in this conversation about standing up for yourself, speaking your mind, about the music industry, about her son moving overseas with his dad, about beauty and ambition and truth… is that Tina doesn’t mind if you disagree with her, she just wants us all to tell our stories fearlessly. She’s going first.

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Jackie O was deep into a years-long addiction to pills and alcohol until one phone call changed her life.

There’s a reason Jackie O kept her addiction to pain medication and alcohol a secret for so long: shame. But now, she wants to share her story of recovery and healing with the world and to help other people get the help they need - and so she’s sharing the hard truths of the years she spent struggling.

Jackie and her best friend Gemma sit down for a searingly honest conversation with Mia Freedman about how Jackie found herself at her low point and finally had to admit her addiction to Gemma - and how Gemma got Jackie to rehab without the press finding out.

This is a story about addiction and recovery, but it’s also a story of the life-saving quality of friendship.

Nikki Parkinson's husband kept assuring her that her suspicions about infidelity were all in her head. And then one day, she got an email in the middle of the night that changed everything...What happened next took Nikki's life apart piece by piece. 

Six years on, former lawyer Nikki says she made so many mistakes during that time she never wanted other women to do the same. Now she's turned that into her work, becoming a Divorce Coach, Separation Strategist and Co-Parenting expert, and she wants us to celebrate the end of bad marriages as much as we celebrate the beginning of good ones.

This is a story of the hard-won expertise that only comes from lived-experience - no matter where you are on the relationship spectrum, Nikki’s story has something to teach you about self-preservation, smart preparation, and rising from the ashes of a life you thought was set in stone.

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The Divorce and Separation Hub

For many years Paulina Porizkova was the most recognized face in fashion & beauty - from her iconic Sports Illustrated cover to being the face of Estee Lauder. When she married rock star Ric Ocastek from the iconic band, The Cars. From the outside looking in, it seemed like she was living the dream.

To look at her, she really did seem like the woman who had it all. But while Paulina was as visible as you could be…she didn’t feel like she was being heard. Not by the photographers and fashion people, not by producers and directors, and not by her husband, Ric.

But then, during COVID, she became known to a whole new generation of women for an unlikely reason…crying on Instagram. And as you’re about to hear - Paulina had a lot of really good reasons to cry. (But, she also gets the last laugh).

When Paulina hit her low point, she shared her grief and pain - and tears - with Instagram. As you’ll hear, Paulina had a lot of reasons to cry (and a lot of new reasons to laugh).

It’s not an actual list of dickheads, although let’s face it, by this stage of life, we’ve all met a few of those.

No, this list is for Kasey Chambers herself. It’s a list that signals to her that she isn’t listening to her gut - something that, by now, many of us MIDs have learned is our secret weapon...

Kasey has built a career tuning into her gut - she calls it her little foghorn. The foghorn told her that her first album should be called The Captain, despite the suits thinking it was a terrible idea. The Captain went on to go platinum three times. The foghorn who pushed her to ask Ed Sheeran if he might like to sing with her, even though she was pretty convinced he might be… busy. (Spoiler Alert: He did). 

The foghorn that told her to seek help for an eating disorder that brought her to her knees, to leave a marriage that was no longer working, to parent against the grain, and to step off the glamorous but arduous international touring circuit to get back to what she loved. She travelled around Australia, in a van, with her family, singing songs to people who wanted to hear them.

This conversation is an absolute gem because Kasey is. It’s dripping with hard-won mid-lessons, good advice and stories of times everything went tits up, many of them recounted in Kasey’s book, called - you guessed it - Just Don’t Be a Dickead.

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