Naomi was born a bold and free spirit who loved to entertain people with stories. From knocking about the outskirts of Melbourne's northern suburbs until the late 1990s to finding herself enrolled at a socially uncomfortable elite private girls' college, she developed some increasingly problematic coping strategies for life's challenges. Determined to outrun these issues, her dalliance as country waitress concluded with further heartbreak. Then, while living it up on Melbourne's iconic Chapel Street and editing her university newspaper, her university degree concluded but her buried accumulative volatility did not.
Simmering with increasing complexity, her challenges eventually culminated in Naomi's dramatic nervous breakdown. Her rock bottom climaxed with her riding in the back of a divisional van and being locked up in a psychiatric ward. Her ongoing confusion and indirection, coupled with suppressed trauma, eventually almost costing her life. In the decade subsequent, however, she learned to embrace a comeback journey that involved personal development, advocacy and ultimately rediscovering her bold and free-spirited inner self. Far richer for the diverse lived experience, this book reinforces the fact that with hope, grit and determination, the human spirit can indeed take us A Very Long Way.