Victoria Bruce is a 39-year-old writer, adventurer, and single mom who hiked New Zealand’s 3,000-kilometer Te Araroa trail with her seven-year-old daughter, Emilie. (@adventures_with_emilie)
Victoria’s journey stemmed from a desperate need to escape the crushing stress of city life and heal from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, a legacy of her difficult childhood. Through six months of hiking, she discovered a deeper connection with her daughter, her country’s wild landscapes, and herself.
We discuss the physical and emotional trials of walking the length of New Zealand, including nights spent battling windstorms and Emilie’s determination to hike 30 kilometers for the promise of ice cream. Victoria reflects on the economic and lifestyle trade-offs that allowed her to make this leap, and how hiking transformed her parenting, career, and mental health.
Victoria shares her post-trail life, including her move to a 100-year-old cottage on New Zealand’s west coast, a part-time freelance writing career, and ambitious new goals like thru-hiking the Continental Divide Trail. She also opens up about her unconventional and challenging young adulthood, navigating foster care and addiction recovery.
Finally, we explore the delicate balance of adventuring as a parent: considering your child’s needs, avoiding the pitfalls of neglect, and embracing a lifestyle that prioritizes time, connection, and wilderness over material wealth.
Victoria’s award-winning book is Adventures with Emilie, available everywhere.
Full transcript: dirtbagrich.com/victoria
Recorded in November 2024.
AI Notes
This is an AI-generated summary and transcript. Typos and mistakes exist!
Summary
Victoria Bruce, author of a book about hiking New Zealand’s Te Araroa trail with her seven-year-old daughter, discusses her experiences and motivations with Blake on the Dirtbag Rich podcast. Victoria describes the challenging journey, which began as a way to escape her stressful city life and heal from complex post-traumatic stress disorder. She details the physical and emotional aspects of hiking, the bond formed with her daughter Emilie during their six-month adventure, and how the experience transformed their lives. Victoria shares her background, including a troubled childhood and struggles with addiction, explaining how nature and hiking became her path to healing. The conversation also covers the economic aspects of their lifestyle change, with Victoria transitioning from a high-stress job to a more flexible writing career that allows for continued outdoor adventures. Throughout the interview, Victoria emphasizes the richness found in experiences rather than material possessions, embodying the ‘dirtbag rich’ concept.
Chapters
Introduction to Victoria Bruce’s Journey
Victoria Bruce, author of a book about hiking New Zealand with her seven-year-old daughter, discusses her experience on the Te Araroa trail. The journey is compared to other transformative memoirs and begins with a vivid description of a challenging moment on day 106 of their hike.
Motivation Behind the Journey
Victoria explains her reasons for embarking on this journey, including her struggle with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, the stress of her city life, and her desire to reconnect with nature. She describes how hiking became a source of joy and strength for both her and her daughter.
The Te Araroa Trail Experience
Victoria provides details about the Te Araroa trail, describing its diverse landscapes and the challenges it presents. She explains how the journey was both physically demanding and emotionally healing, offering her time for emotional processing and a deep connection with nature.
Emilie’s Experience on the Trail
Victoria discusses her daughter Emilie’s experience on the trail, highlighting her previous hiking experience, her enthusiasm for the journey, and her resilience. She shares anecdotes that demonstrate Emilie’s determination and adaptability to life on the trail.
Life After Te Araroa
Victoria describes how the Te Araroa experience has shaped her life since completing the trail. She talks about their continued outdoor adventures, her new home on the West Coast of the South Island, and her career shift to freelance writing and book authorship.
Victoria’s Personal Background
Victoria shares her challenging personal history, including her unconventional childhood, experiences in foster care, struggles with addiction, and eventual diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. She explains how these experiences led her to seek healing through nature and adventure.
Balancing Adventure and Parenting
Victoria discusses the challenges of balancing her need for adventure and healing with her responsibilities as a parent. She emphasizes the importance of considering Emilie’s needs and interests while maintaining their shared love for outdoor activities.
Reflections on Taking the Leap
Victoria reflects on her initial fears about embarking on the Te Araroa journey, including concerns about her career and financial stability. She shares how these fears were ultimately unfounded and how the experience has led to new opportunities and a more fulfilling lifestyle.
Transcript
Blake Boles 00:01
Victoria Bruce, welcome to Dirtbag Rich.
Victoria Bruce 00:05
Thanks, Blake. I’m happy to be here.
Blake Boles 00:08
You’ve written a really powerful and richly detailed book about hiking the length of New Zealand with your seven year old daughter. And it really felt to me like this sort of journey of overcoming adversity in the same vein as Wild by Cheryl Strayed or Educated by Tara Westover.
Blake Boles 00:25
And it opens with this wonderful passage in which you are huddling inside your tiny ultra light tent in the middle of a windstorm in a pretty wild part of the South Island of New Zealand. You’re cradling your daughter who is sleeping and it’s day 106 of your hike.
Blake Boles 00:43
And you have more than 450 kilometers left to go before you, you reach the end. And I wanted to start by asking you in moments like this, did you ever say to yourself, what am I doing here? And, and if so, what was the answer?
Victoria Bruce 01:00
Yeah, absolutely. I can remember that night very clearly. It’s an amazing thing to be caught in the middle of a storm in the southern Alps of New Zealand. There’s a lot of power, a lot of energy coming through.
Victoria Bruce 01:16
And that particular night, the wind was so strong that it was just flattening the tent against my face. And every inch of my body, every cell was just screaming to fight my way out and run, screaming to safety.
Victoria Bruce 01:33
Only there was no safety because we were hundreds of kilometers from anything resembling civilization. And I just remember having this big internal battle where part of me was wondering, what the hell am I doing here?
Victoria Bruce 01:54
As a single mother, I’ve walked my way thousands of kilometers to this place where it feels like the wind is trying to destroy us. And yet, at the same time, this is the same country that had held us in its arms and allowed us safe passage, wandering through it for the past so many months.
Victoria Bruce 02:21
I knew that while I was terrified, and rightly so, I was exactly where I needed to be.
Blake Boles 02:32
Why? Why did you need to be there? There are so many other places, especially with a young child that people could say you need to be, like maybe need to be providing a stable home and a regular school experience, not out here risking possible life and limb for some sort of wild romantic notion of adventure.
Blake Boles 03:01
So what was the deeper reason that brought you and Emilia out onto the Te Araroa?
Victoria Bruce 03:11
Yeah, look, it’s a good question. And there’s definitely some backstory there. Like at the time I was a single mom living in the city in the South Island of New Zealand. And I had all of those things for Emilie, a stable home.
Victoria Bruce 03:30
I just got my first house. I had a huge mortgage that was being funded by my busy full-time very stressful job as a communications advisor with the local city council. We had everything in life. And yet for me, I was just dying inside.
Victoria Bruce 03:53
I was going through a really difficult period of adulthood where a lot of ghosts from my childhood years had come back into the fore. I’d been diagnosed with a condition called complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which developed due to adverse childhood experiences, difficult experiences, traumatic experiences in my younger years.
Victoria Bruce 04:24
And I basically had a breakdown. I couldn’t go on with that busy hectic life where little Emilie would be the first child before school care. And I would rush off to work and put on my game face and work hard and then come back home and pick her up from after school care, feed her, wash her, read her a story, put her to bed.
Victoria Bruce 04:58
And then I would just go to bed and cry myself to sleep, plus have nightmares and flashbacks as memories was resurfacing from within me. And all that was really keeping me going during this period in my life was that Emilie and I had discovered tramping, which is the New Zealand term for hiking.
Victoria Bruce 05:23
And on our weekends, we were getting our backpacks and our little yellow tent and going off for adventures in our local hills. And it was out here in these wild places where I was discovering another side to myself, a side of myself that was joyful, that was strong, that felt free and felt at home.
Victoria Bruce 05:56
I felt connected, very deeply connected to the New Zealand bush. It felt as though actually out here was the real world, with the trees, breathing and living and dying and all the beautiful plants and the birds and nature, big mother nature, just doing her thing, keeping us all alive.
Victoria Bruce 06:24
And yeah, I guess it was a deeply kind of spirit spiritual time where, for somebody who’d felt very disconnected in life, I felt very deeply connected out there. And so at this point in time when I was having a breakdown, I thought to myself that that’s where I need to go.
Victoria Bruce 06:54
I need to get away from all of this mess and noise and chaos. And I need to go out into nature and reconnect with myself and yeah, find out what’s hurting me so badly and take my little daughter with me and show her all the joy and magic that can be found in a life lived outdoors.
Blake Boles 07:21
And we’re going to circle back later to your earlier experiences, which you, you detail and, and harrowing, uh, precision in the book. And also, uh, I’ll be asking you about, you know, your, your daughter’s part that she was playing in this, uh, you know, was she just being, uh, invited or dragged along by mom or was she buying into this?
Blake Boles 07:43
But first I want to focus on the, the experience of tramping itself. And I actually would like to read a short passage from your book that I took down because it really encapsulates, um, what you just said about this, this different kind of feeling that you had being out in nature.
Blake Boles 08:01
Um, this is what you wrote. There’s that feeling of excitement and anticipation when you’re sending off on a tramp, carrying everything you need to be self contained on your back, the way your heart races, when you’re scrambling up high, every muscle awake and your body strong and alert as you place one foot in front of the other, grasping for rocks and roots as you pull yourself up, there’s a deep satisfaction when you finally pop above the tree line and see the views or arrive at your destination after a long, hard day of navigating rough terrain, fallen trees, and flowing streams. Then there are those quiet moments of peace when all your thoughts have blown away in the breeze and you’re simply present you, your breath, your body, and the bush all around you. That’s why tramping makes me feel like a bad-ass.
Blake Boles 08:45
Certainly. Uh, and for those who are not familiar with this trail or the terrain of New Zealand in general, just give us a little slice, give us some details of what it’s like to walk and tramp in New Zealand, uh, on this trail called the Te Araroa.
Victoria Bruce 09:07
Yeah, absolutely. New Zealand is a beautiful country and Te Araroa is, you know, it’s like a jewel in the crown of our country. You know, we have these north and south islands. They are about 2,000 kilometers long each and this trail, it comprises its multiple walking tracks and trails crossing a tapestry of diverse landscapes, you know, from sandy beaches to rugged mountain passes, peaceful farm tracks,
Victoria Bruce 09:48
forestry trails, even winds its way through urban streets, you know, going throughout through our capital city of Wellington. So it’s in the south island, and, you know, it’s very remote. You’ve got the massive, almost like a backbone of the southern Alps, which runs the length of the south island.
Victoria Bruce 10:13
And, you know, the trail kind of sticks to the eastern side, you know, going up these massive foothills of the southern Alps and mapped out into various sections, you know, the longest section could be 12 days at a time before you pop back out anywhere near civilization or can resupply your food.
Victoria Bruce 10:35
So, you know, it’s very important to be extremely self-contained. You know, the weather is very fickle. We are this tiny island in the, you know, middle of this huge ocean. We get massive fronts that sweep in and, you know, really heavy rain that turns quiet side creeks into roaring rivers.
Victoria Bruce 11:00
And, yeah, huge, empty, wild spaces. Beautiful.
Blake Boles 11:10
And what is the mental and emotional experience of tramping for you? The passage I just read reveals some of it, but what do you find tramping that you can’t find elsewhere?
Victoria Bruce 11:24
I just love the sense of being with the sense of connection, with the landscape that I’m passing through, but also that sense of being completely present within myself. And I don’t mean in my mind, I mean with my entire being.
Victoria Bruce 11:50
That focus when every part of your body is moving in this perfect synchrony, your balance and your breath. And the way that your eyes, how deeply you notice, is the rock slippery? How much weight can I put on it?
Victoria Bruce 12:16
How fast can I jump across it? The way that the sunlight dapples through the canopy onto the leaf litter, little birds that come to visit you. There’s this immense sense of peace and joy and physical challenge that kind of all comes together in this wonderful sense of completion.
Blake Boles 12:51
And was it the healing experience that you were hoping it would be?
Victoria Bruce 12:59
Yeah, it was absolutely healing. The experience that I thought it would be, I think, you know, naively, it was naive to assume that one can heal a lifetime of hurts in, you know, a set time frame, a period of six months, which is how long it took us to walk the length of Te Araroa.
Victoria Bruce 13:25
But there was a lot of time for emotional processing, and there was a lot of big emotions that were released. So, yeah, absolutely, it was healing. And we have to remember too that healing hurts, you know, it’s meant to hurt, it’s normal, but it’s also very confronting and uncomfortable.
Victoria Bruce 13:54
And, you know, combine that with having a, you know, 10 to 15, maybe even 20 kilo pack on your back at times. And, you know, your dirty socks and damp clothes, difficult terrain. Plus, you know, the responsibility of having a delightful little seven-year-old girl at your side, chattering away, you know, making sure that you’re taking care of her happiness and well-being.
Blake Boles 14:29
Yeah, that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about next, which was Emilie’s experience. And in the book, you detail how she is very outgoing and talking with everyone on the trail and in the towns and is a nice counterweight to your more reserved nature.
Blake Boles 14:50
But I think the first concern that a lot of people have is just what was it like for her physically? And was this a sort of unwanted endurance event? And so yeah, tell us about how she dealt with it both physically and socially, emotionally.
Victoria Bruce 15:11
Absolutely. I’ll start off by saying that Emilie and I had started overnight hikes together when she was four. So we’d been on dozens of trips and some long multi-day trips together before we even started Te Araroa.
Victoria Bruce 15:34
In fact, for us, tramping or hiking was definitely our happy place and somewhere magical where we could go off together into the forest and put up our tent beside a little stream and look for forest mermaids in the streams and pick flowers.
Victoria Bruce 15:56
And so, yeah, for me, a big part of my own childhood was deeply connected to nature and I wanted to instill this joy and this creativity in her. So before Te Araroa, Emilie was already a very well-traveled little girl.
Victoria Bruce 16:19
She’d been to over 50. We have these huts, backcountry huts and shelters throughout New Zealand. It’s about over a thousand of these huts and shelters in our network and she’d been to more than 50 of them by the time she was seven years old and I think our longest hike together was maybe six days.
Victoria Bruce 16:43
So when I said to Emilie, how would you like to go on a big adventure with Mummy? A six-month adventure walking the length of New Zealand, she said, wow, Mummy. She was keen. She was up for the adventure and she found it all very exciting.
Victoria Bruce 17:09
And of course, being only seven, there was only so much that she could carry. So of course, physically, I’m making sure that she’s safe and not hurting her body. And the reason it took us six months to complete this walk, we’re on the Te Araroa website.
Victoria Bruce 17:33
It says a fit person could take three to four to complete the 3,000 kilometer journey. But as we had little legs and a slower pace, we thought, yeah, maybe we could take six months and have regular rest days to lie around the tent and play and so on.
Victoria Bruce 17:53
I also thought for Emilie, there is such wonderful experience and education to be had in our natural world, learning firsthand about how the plants grow and what the birds eat and what’s it like when the sun rises and all of these experiences I thought were beautiful for her.
Victoria Bruce 18:24
And in terms of endurance, I remember our first section, which was 100 kilometers walking the length of this place called 90 Mile Beach, which runs from the very, very northern tip of the North Island from a place called Cape Ryinga, this wild, rugged coastline and this huge beach as wide as the highway with sands as hardest packed cement.
Victoria Bruce 18:56
We decided to take six days walking down this beach. And on the last day, we had 30 kilometers to go until we reached this little tiny township, which we knew had a holiday park. And I said to Emilie, when we get there, say a night at the holiday park and we’ll have a nice shower and a bed, get ice cream.
Victoria Bruce 19:21
And on that day, it rained, a massive front swept through and it just lashed us all the way down the beach and then it was windy. And I kept saying to her, sweetheart, shall we just pop in the sand dunes and mommy will put up a tent?
Victoria Bruce 19:36
And she would say, no, I want to keep going. I want to get an ice cream. And she dragged me 30 kilometers down that beach. You know, it got dark. We navigated by the stars and by seeing the lights of the town miles away down the end of the beach.
Victoria Bruce 19:57
I was totally just to put up that tent and yeah, just get there in the morning. But that little girl, I had never seen her so determined. She just kept on walking. all the way up to the holiday park.
Victoria Bruce 20:12
We staggered in, covered in sand. I tried to speak to the person at the desk and Emilie beat me to it. She skipped right up to the desk and she said, we’ve just walked the length of night. Have you got any ice cream left?
Victoria Bruce 20:28
So right from that early days, I could see that Emilie was a little trooper. And yeah, she took so much joy out of her surroundings.
Blake Boles 20:50
Were there any moments that your interests did not align, mother and daughter, where there was friction, conflict, someone did not want to go and the other one did want to go, someone needed a long break, the other person wanted to get moving again?
Victoria Bruce 21:10
Yeah. Well, in terms of conversation topics, a seven-year-old’s choice of conversation topics sometimes are conversation topics, didn’t align. Emilie still has this fabulous talent for almost memorizing stories and books and cartoons, and she would tell me cartoons and narrate them and put on the funny voices, and they were wonderful.
Victoria Bruce 21:49
And I remember, oh, one time we were staggering through this place in the Hurunui, which is in central Canterbury in the North Island. South Island. And I had this big, heavy pack, and I was tired and sore.
Victoria Bruce 22:09
And she kept talking about dolls. There was these 18-inch dolls called Our Generation that kids like, and all the clothes. And, mommy, did you know that they can get clothes, and you can get shoes, and you can get fridges, and you can get this?
Victoria Bruce 22:24
And after a while, I said, sweetheart, can we just, let’s just talk about the birds. Look, I think I sort of tumped it. She’s like, I’m going to talk about your stupid birds.
Blake Boles 22:37
Wow.
Victoria Bruce 22:37
Yeah, and so she storms off, you know, with her little hiking poles, snacking at the tussocks, and I just staggered along behind. Yeah, but I have a really good relationship with my daughter, and I think, you know, that helps a lot, obviously, you know.
Victoria Bruce 22:58
I really value and honor the absolute trust and love and deep bond that we have. You know, how much trust that she put in me to come with me on this big journey and make it our big journey, you know?
Victoria Bruce 23:22
Our big, badass, bush girl journey, you know, giggling and talking and walking the length of New Zealand. It’s very special.
Blake Boles 23:35
So if you had to get off the trail, or if one of you became sick or injured or just wanted to quit, what would have happened at that point? Because you were renting out your house in Christ Church, and the rental income was covering all the expenses, and so you were able to not worry too much about money during that time, as I understand it.
Blake Boles 24:00
But yeah, did you have a you had to get off the trail?
Victoria Bruce 24:09
Yeah, I did have a 15-foot caravan, a lovely 1970s retrocaravan that I’d left at my property, and in our minds, that was, I guess, an option, that we could just hook up the caravan to the car and road trip around New Zealand and do hikes to huts and come back to the caravan.
Victoria Bruce 24:37
Yeah, I guess that could have been a slightly less arduous plan, but it never eventuated, so we stayed on the trail.
Blake Boles 24:53
So going on this length and depth of a trip with a child, I feel like is a dream story for many parents and especially many families who have more resources than you did. But what a lot of people lack is the time to do this.
Blake Boles 25:16
Maybe the ability to do the preparation. You visited over 50 huts with Emilie over some years before embarking on this. So you were physically prepared for it. So in a way, you were especially rich, even though you were very constrained by other material circumstances.
Blake Boles 25:43
It also helps that New Zealand has very liberal homeschooling laws. And so you were able to not go to school for a number of months and it wasn’t a big legal problem. How do you think about your richness?
Blake Boles 26:01
This podcast is called Dirtbag Rich. Did you feel rich during this time? And if so, how?
Victoria Bruce 26:11
Oh, absolutely. I would do remember thinking very clearly at times, as my daily schedule was to get up and have breakfast and pack up a tent and would start walking. Sometimes my mind would flip back to my colleagues at my office where I used to work and think about, oh, is it morning tea time?
Victoria Bruce 26:38
And oh, no, I bet they’re all standing there in a meeting. And I think, oh, I’ve so done it. I’m so glad I got out of that. I’m so glad that’s not me. Yeah, here I am, you know, swinging my legs in the sunshine, walking freely, and I can choose to put up my tent tonight anywhere I like.
Victoria Bruce 27:04
And I’ve got my beautiful little daughter just glowing by my side. And yeah, I’m free.
Blake Boles 27:16
were you worried about what would happen after the hike ended? Was there a clear path forward? Were you going to rejoin your kind of normal high pay, high stress career path, move back into the house that was rented for six months?
Blake Boles 27:36
Or did you not know what was coming next?
Victoria Bruce 27:40
Hmm. I think after the first week, I realized very clearly that that lifestyle was making me sick, and it was not where I, as a person, actually wanted to be. In fact, yeah, I had many questions for myself such as, you know, how did I even get here?
Victoria Bruce 28:05
Of course, you know, I understand my career trajectory in that sense, you know, earning money to pay the bills to provide stability and resources for my child. Yet, yeah, within the first week of walking to Araroa, I could feel inside myself very clearly that I did not want to go back to that lifestyle.
Victoria Bruce 28:35
I did not even want to go back to that house. But what the future held was still unknown. I felt that what I wanted was a slower pace of life, one where I could be more present with myself, take better care of myself so that I could be a better mother to take care of my daughter.
Victoria Bruce 29:11
What that was going to look like, I wasn’t yet sure, but I just tried to walk with an open mind
Blake Boles 29:26
So the walk ended a few years ago now. Can you tell me what your life looks like now in terms of work, in terms of money, in terms of time? What is the new balance that you’ve struck? And I’m especially interested to find out if the Te Araroa feels like this one big time thing that you did that may never happen again.
Blake Boles 29:51
It’s all in the past. It’s a memory, it’s a book, or whether you are still able to dedicate time, significant time, to being in the outdoors both by yourself or with friends or with your daughter.
Victoria Bruce 30:07
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a way, for us Te Araroa was, it was almost like the launching point for a much richer and deeper outdoor career. Our hiking adventures together have really, we ended the six-month trail with an incredible amount of accumulated fitness and much more confidence.
Victoria Bruce 30:43
You get everything down to a pretty slick regime when you’re used to packing up and knowing what to carry and knowing how to read a map and how to navigate what the weather looks like. After Te Araroa, our hiking adventures have just gone to next level.
Victoria Bruce 31:09
Only a couple of weeks ago, we were on a mountaineering trip with a girlfriend of mine. We all got our ice axes and crampons. On the first day, we climbed from 100 meters elevation up to 1,500 meters elevation, which was a big day.
Victoria Bruce 31:31
We put up our tents on the snow line. Next morning, we fit the crampons and got the ice axes and climbed on up to 1,900 meters. As we speak, I’ve just got my kitchens full of dry bags full of food because Emilie and I are about to do a 25-day trip with some food resupplies through some fairly rugged country in Tasmania.
Victoria Bruce 32:04
It’s our hope that either next year or a year or sometime soon that we can go overseas to try one of the longer through hiking trails, either in France as a trail called the Hexatrack that I’d very much like to take a look at or something like the Continental Divide Trail in the States.
Victoria Bruce 32:26
But all of that, we have such beautiful wild landscape right here in New Zealand that you could spend years wandering through. Ever since completing Te Araroa, you know, I put my house in Christchurch on the market and sold that.
Victoria Bruce 32:52
With the proceeds, I have bought a lovely little 100-year-old cottage on the west coast of the South Island, which is probably the most beautiful place in the South Island. I am biased, I have to say, but we have wild rivers and amazing lakes and coastline and big hills on the western foothills of the southern Alps.
Victoria Bruce 33:19
So very close to nature, lots of places to go and play. I’ve written a book, Adventures with Emilie, and it’s published by Penguin Random House, so that’s out there now. I do freelance writing articles for various publications, which doesn’t earn as much as working full-time as a communications advisor, but I have so much more time for myself and for my daughter and for my well-being, which is really important.
Victoria Bruce 34:02
And we have another exciting writing project in the wings where we’re going to be, Emilie and I will co-author a children’s book about seven-year-old Emilie’s Adventures on Te Araroa, which will be a beautiful story with lots of photographs and illustrations that I’m sure lots of parents, grandparents will like to read.
Blake Boles 34:27
Excellent. And so just to be clear, you are able to fund these adventures and live in the cottage on the west coast of the South Island on a freelance writing income in which you don’t work full-time.
Blake Boles 34:46
Am I getting that picture correct?
Victoria Bruce 34:50
Yeah, that’s correct.
Blake Boles 34:51
Okay. You are dirtbag rich. Uh, how, how do you manage to, to secure these, these contracts? I feel like the picture you’ve just painted feels economically infeasible to many people. And so do you have a special way to, to pull this off?
Victoria Bruce 35:14
No, I don’t think so particularly. I mean, my background is in journalism and communications, and so writing is sort of my hustle, I guess. We also, at the time where we were walking to Araroa, we set up social media channels called Adventures with Emilie to run our journey through, and so through that we, I guess, have a following.
Victoria Bruce 35:45
And through, you know, being quite active and engaged as a new author, I have, yeah, taken every speaking opportunity that’s come my way, plus also, you know, tried to be proactive with these opportunities, with finding opportunities, but we don’t have much money.
Victoria Bruce 36:07
We are very ash or, you know, we were recently got some news tramping gear through sponsorship, which was amazing, but otherwise, you know, we just have a very modest little life, grow vegetables in the garden and collect firewood off the beach.
Victoria Bruce 36:28
We know I’m very fortunate that selling my house in the big city, you know, gave me the profit to be able to purchase this little cottage. So yeah, there aren’t big pots of money to tap into, but we’re making ends meet, and we’re out in the hills, we feel like two little queens.
Victoria Bruce 37:00
So I think that’s where I need to be at this time in my life.
Blake Boles 37:09
and you’re not reliant upon any money from family or inheritance or anything like that.
Victoria Bruce 37:19
No, I don’t have money from the family or from inheritance, but in New Zealand, we are quite lucky to have a social welfare system as well that people can get support if their earnings are not high or if they live with permanent injury or disability, which is something that we sort of touched on earlier in the conversation about getting diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Victoria Bruce 37:52
And for me, yeah, it’s just been about exploring not only the events that led to this diagnosis, but actually how it affects my ongoing struggles and challenges and how it affects me in day-to-day life.
Victoria Bruce 38:12
So one thing that I’ve had to, I guess, say to myself and put boundaries on how much energy I can expend. And I don’t think that working a full-time stressful job, I don’t think I would survive doing something like that for very long.
Victoria Bruce 38:37
So I just, yeah, working part-time and keeping things small and keeping things real is better for my wellbeing.
Blake Boles 38:50
You, again, anticipated the direction I wanted to take our conversation in. Uh, I was hoping you could tell a bit more about your early life now. Um, something I learned by reading your book is that, uh, although you don’t know much about your, your own parents early years, they did live in political squats, they bought an old yacht that sank in a storm, rode bicycles in Morocco and Egypt before bike touring was a cool thing to do.
Blake Boles 39:19
And so you came from pretty wild, adventurous, semi-nomadic parents. And, uh, things it’s, it seems like things seemed pretty rosy for a while.
Victoria Bruce 39:35
Hmm. Yeah, it’s really interesting. I used to look back on my childhood. I was born in New Zealand to these adventurous Scottish parents. We had a little yacht, a trimaran that my parents attempted to sail around the world when I was less than two years old.
Victoria Bruce 39:58
Me and my brother, we got shipwrecked and ended up living in Australia where we were homeschooled and traveled in a bus with bikes on the back and canoes on top and bunk beds homeschooled until I was nine years old.
Victoria Bruce 40:17
And then my parents broke up. My mother left my father one day and took my brother and they drove away. And I have this memory of sub standing on the deck of the house and watching this car drive down the long driveway and up over the hump at the end.
Victoria Bruce 40:43
And then it vanished. And then I don’t have a lot of memories from then on. I know that my dad descended into deep depression and alcoholism. I know that I went to conventional school and developed eating disorders and wagged school and cut myself.
Victoria Bruce 41:14
Listening to Kurt Cobain has seemed to be the thing to do back then in the late nineties. And when things got worse, I eventually went into foster care back in New Zealand of all places. I was awarded the state in foster care from 14 to 16 and declared a legal adult at 16, which I think we’ll both agree is a bit young to be released.
Victoria Bruce 41:52
Your brain’s still developing. You’re not making very good decisions. You’re not really equipped with the tools to manage in this crazy world. And yeah, I went back to Australia, to Brisbane, where I tried to watch go to school, but I couldn’t go to school because I’d dropped out of school years earlier.
Victoria Bruce 42:18
I think I tried to do, I don’t know, a computer course, but it was too hard. I asked my flatmate for some dope to smoke and he said he didn’t have any, but he had some heroin. So I told him to fuck off.
Victoria Bruce 42:33
And then a few hours later, I was feeling really awful. So I went back out there and had my first experience with injecting heroin when I was 16 years old, which wiped more than a year of my life and took a long time to recover, to get off heroin, because ironically, the methadone programs, which is like a medical substitute, you’re only eligible for 18 year olds and older.
Blake Boles 43:21
Wow.
Victoria Bruce 43:21
So I have a memory of staggering my emaciated self up the hill to the doctor to try to get on this program, being told to get lost. So anyway, time passed in my life and I did come clean of drugs and I did go back to night school to get my university entrance and I had a few false starts but ended up studying journalism which I really enjoyed and I worked in Sydney and then I took myself to Southeast Asia and I worked in Burma,
Victoria Bruce 44:03
Myanmar as a business journalist and wanted to be a foreign correspondent and met Emilie’s dad and got pregnant and he wasn’t interested but I was 27 years old and or 28 perhaps and thought that I should, I had no excuse really to not go through with having a baby.
Victoria Bruce 44:34
And so I came back to New Zealand and I had a little baby and all the joy and all the wonderful things that, you know, the books and the movies and the labels tell you you’ll feel, I didn’t feel them, I just felt dead and I just knew there was something wrong with me.
Victoria Bruce 45:05
And somehow at that time is when I first looked up to see a therapist and I thought maybe I had postnatal depression. I felt like, you know, there was a mask, you know, a concrete mask just pulling me down and I just wanted to weep, cry for days which was a hard place to be when you have a tiny little person dependent on you.
Victoria Bruce 45:31
So I went into therapy and the lady asked me questions about my early childhood and she asked me if I’d ever been raped, had I ever been sexually abused and I said yes. And she said, well, let’s explore some more.
Victoria Bruce 45:52
And we pulled out a whole heap of events that, you know, actually are not considered normal actually are considered quite traumatic to young children with, you know, developing brains, young children who don’t have caregivers present to hold them and to soothe them and to calm them.
Victoria Bruce 46:16
Young people like me who in my two years in foster care I went to maybe 30 different homes. There were multiple, you know, predatory people wanting to hurt you. And earlier, you know, earlier dynamics with my parents, which, although, you know, it sounded lovely on the surface, was actually probably quite damaging and quite hurtful.
Victoria Bruce 46:43
And all of this exploration culminated in this diagnosis of understanding that, you know, I wasn’t damaged or broken or worthless like I felt, but I had developed complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Victoria Bruce 47:04
And yeah, that was really the start of a big healing journey, trying to understand what this meant and how it affected me and who was the real me, you know, once you take away all the kind of adaptations that, you know, you’ve developed to survive these adverse childhood experiences, you know, who are you inside?
Victoria Bruce 47:40
And I really credit, you know, rediscovering nature and wild places and, you know, the joy of an adventurous lifestyle for giving me, you know, the time and space to, you know, really come to face with myself and do a lot of, I guess, grieving and forgiveness and healing.
Victoria Bruce 48:10
And yeah, once that’s, it’s still ongoing, but once a lot of that pain that holds you back is released. I know I have felt a lot lighter and a lot more joyful and yeah, a much better person for it all.
Blake Boles 48:44
Thank you for sharing so openly and vulnerably. And you share even more in the book. But never in a way that feels self-pitying. It’s just like, here’s some hard stuff that I had to go through. And by and large, nature and my relationship with my daughter were the solutions to navigating this.
Blake Boles 49:14
And I’d like to dwell a bit longer on the subject of mother, daughter, or parent child. Because you told me in an earlier conversation that you had these experiences that pushed you to need and to want to be in nature.
Blake Boles 49:32
And it’s really great that Emilie, at her age, was very enthusiastic to come with you and spend time in nature. But she’s also a different person who has a different and much less dramatic background.
Blake Boles 49:46
And she now might want to have a bit more, quote unquote, normal life to go to school and not be home schooled. Maybe she wants to do something like height the continental divide trail, which is amazing.
Blake Boles 50:02
But also might not want to keep going on hikes with mom for that much longer. And you mentioned that there’s a book called Wave Rider. And it’s a seemingly amazing tale of childhood travel on a boat.
Blake Boles 50:20
But really, there’s a lot of neglect that is taking place behind the scenes there. And so this whole idea of parents adventuring with children, you are very aware. It’s a fraught subject. And it involves both the needs and the backgrounds of the parent and the child.
Blake Boles 50:40
How are you navigating this? Just tell me what you think about all this. I’ll stop right there.
Victoria Bruce 50:49
Yeah, no, absolutely. It’s a big one indeed. I think for me, I guess because one of my greatest wounds was the lack of maternal and paternal, but the lack of maternal guidance and support from my mother, you know, the mother wound.
Victoria Bruce 51:14
And so, you know, for me, that has made me want to, you know, be a really good mother to Emilie and, you know, really consider her wants and needs. You know, I want so much for her to grow up feeling great about herself and, you know, knowing that she is loved and supported and knowing that there are, you know, plenty of people around who deeply care for her.
Victoria Bruce 51:54
So, for Emilie, you know, yes, she’s now a 10-year-old girl, you know, she’s going through a whole different stage in her development where, you know, having a close connection with mum remains, you know, very important.
Victoria Bruce 52:19
And she’s also, you know, developing socially where she’s having friendships with other people and, you know, building our own, I guess, little tribe or little village over here where there are, you know, other caring people in our lives who she can learn from and attached to and be motivated by and inspired by.
Victoria Bruce 52:45
So, yeah, I guess it is a balance that we’re trying to achieve between, you know, supporting Emilie to achieve what she, her own goals, what she is interested in, pursue what she’s interested in, yeah, as well as me pursuing what I’m interested in.
Victoria Bruce 53:10
And very fortunately for us, she is, yeah, very motivated, very keen to go tramping. And I think I’ve been, I’ve noticed that when she was little, we would be able to spend a lot of time together. But now definitely drawing on the energy of other people, bringing other people into our trips.
Victoria Bruce 53:39
Yeah, Emilie really, we both really like this. So, we can, yeah, have adventures with friends, which can, you know, also fulfill that need for the social, social emotional connection. But, yeah, Emilie’s 10 years old, she doesn’t have a device.
Victoria Bruce 54:02
We have the internet on at home so we can, you know, stream documentaries or movies if we want to. But, yeah, we don’t, it’s never been our style to, you know, have be very device focused or TV focused.
Victoria Bruce 54:22
I see a lot of kids who, you know, I think their brain development gets definitely altered by too much time on their device. You know, they don’t seem to know how to do creative play. Yeah, it’s a, I know from my own experience that there’s a lot of busyness and stress when, you know, children are kind of stuck in this busy world too soon.
Victoria Bruce 54:50
And so, yeah, when I see Emilie out there in the hills, you know, laughing her head off or, you know, skipping by the turns or, yeah, collecting tadpoles, you know, I can see that she is just loving her life and it’s filling her with all these, you know, warm and wonderful experiences.
Blake Boles 55:21
Let me ask you one final question. Back just before you started the Te Araroa when you were dealing with the burnout, PTSD, stress, the house, and you were making the decision to rent it out, to go hiking for six months, to go on this huge adventure that could go very sideways.
Blake Boles 55:44
Like, what were some of the worries or concerns that you had at that moment that later turned out to be not really something you need to worry about? And if the opposite is true, if there was something you weren’t concerned about, but you realized later on, oh, maybe I should have been concerned about that.
Blake Boles 56:04
I’m curious to hear that too. Mostly, what were your expectations and your anxieties and how did they evolve? And I’m asking this question for anyone out there who might be thinking about embarking on an adventure of similar magnitude.
Victoria Bruce 56:25
Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, I’ve worked so hard in my life to develop my career and get a quote unquote good job, stable job, job of local government. And I had just bought this house and I thought, oh my God, I’m going to lose it all.
Victoria Bruce 56:49
I’m going to lose it all and I’m going to have nothing. And yeah, everything will be taken from me. And that was a big fear. I’m going to quit my job. I’ll never work again. I’ll never get hired again.
Victoria Bruce 57:17
And yeah, things change. You walk up, the whole saying of closing one door and another door opens. I have worked in the communications industry since completing Te Araroa at a senior level, actually, and a part-time contract, which was very nice to work from home, all the flexibility that I didn’t have at my previous role.
Victoria Bruce 57:46
Like I said, we’re not flush with cash, but I own my own house, almost outright, which is very nice. And yeah, my writing career is developing. And yeah, I think maybe we might be world famous in the New Zealand outdoor community, but if you say the name, Adventures with Emilie or Victoria and Emilie in the New Zealand outdoor community, yeah, a lot of people know who we are, which is very lovely.
Victoria Bruce 58:30
I certainly don’t feel so disconnected or lonely or afraid, like I did when I was struggling to juggle that big, busy job in the big city. Yeah, I think that things will always work out. And that’s really part of the journey, is just seeing where things will take you.
Blake Boles 59:06
And for those who want to find your book or follow future adventures with Emilie, what is the best way for them to do that or to find you online?
Victoria Bruce 59:19
Yeah, absolutely. So we are on Instagram and Facebook on Adventures with Emilie. That’s E-M-I-L-I-E. And you can also find my book, Adventures with Emilie, online. If you are not in Australia or New Zealand, you can purchase it as an ebook or you can order it through Amazon or any of those sites, Adventures with Emilie.
Victoria Bruce 59:46
And if you are an international publisher, listening to this podcast, well, you should purchase the rights. There are some international rights.
Blake Boles 59:56
that are available.
Victoria Bruce 59:58
Absolutely, there you go.
Blake Boles 01:00:00
Victoria, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Victoria Bruce 01:00:04
Thank you so much for having me Blake, it’s been wonderful.