What if the first step out of fear isn’t a leap, but a line? We welcome Australian poet Nadine Ellis, whose new book The Grey Between distills thirty years of lived experience into poems that hold trauma, courage, motherhood, neurodivergence, and renewal in equal measure.
Nadine shares how undiagnosed autism and dyslexia shaped her early years—feeling out of place, learning English at school, and struggling to be heard inside a strict European household marked by intergenerational trauma. Writing became her lifeline as an abusive marriage unraveled. With three small children and no financial freedom, she chose a path few see: back to school, toward independence, and into a new model of strength for her family.
This hour offers both compass and company. You’ll hear practical ways to begin healing—naming what’s real, allowing grief to work, finding small daily joys, and giving yourself permission to choose a safer, kinder life.
If you feel led, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help more listeners find their way here. Your story might be the line someone else needs today.
To connect or purchase Nadine’s book simply go to her website at www.nadineellis.com or follow her on Instagram @nadineellispoetry
To download a free chapter of host Sylvia Worsham’s bestselling book, In Faith, I Thrive: Finding Joy Through God’s Masterplan, purchase any of her products, or book a call with her, visit her website at www.sylviaworsham.com
Transcript:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt, or worry, and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, Sylvia Warsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, Sylvia Warsham.
Hello my bringers, it’s Sylvia Warsham. Welcome to Release. Today is Nadine Ellis. And she is the author of The Great Between, which is her book that released in July of this year. She’s coming out of one of the deepest and darkest chapters of her life, coming out of an abusive marriage. She had three young children. And the journey to where she landed as an author, I’m sure, has tons of pearls of wisdom. Without further ado, Nadine, thank you so much for joining us on Release Out Reveal Purpose all the way from Melbourne, Australia. Oh my goodness. I don’t know how you’re up at this hour of the morning, but you are, so we welcome you with open arms.
Thank you very much, Silvia. Well, I’m actually in Adelaide, so it’s a further state from Melbourne, but it’s still very early in the morning.
1 p.m. Austin time and it’s 4 30, 10 p.m.
And we’re the next day.
The next day, Australia. So here we are.
No, look, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. So yeah, it’s just good to be here. So basically, I I’m I’m here to sort of basically talk about um my journey. Um and that’s basically documented in the Grey Between. So it’s uh I’m a a poet, an Australian poet. I’m actually mother of four girls now. So at the time when the book uh was first was sort of the manuscript was being written for the actual book, uh we’re going back about thirty years and it was three children at the time, and that first marriage just basically imploded. So uh for me writing was my lifeline. It was something that I just had to do to sort of keep sane and work out what was going on in my world around me. So it’s only um in probably the last two years I was actually formerly diagnosed as being neurodivergent, so I’m autistic. And on top of that, I also was recently diagnosed as being dyslexic. So I’ve had that whole uh early life experience from childhood right through to teens to young twenties in that first marriage. Dealing with life and just having this sort of feeling that I never fitted in and I couldn’t communicate properly and I didn’t feel like I had the support. And a a lot of that was actually due to being autistic and not knowing. So uh for me the way to sort of uh work through all of that and sort of try and make sense of my life was through writing. And um I would just jot notes down or things that people said I would write down, or um when I was sort of in the midst of the the the trauma that I was going through, I would write those episodes down. And i it sort of gave me that ability to sort of objectively look at things and work out what was going on. Um and yeah, I probably had people around me that I could talk to, but I never felt like I did. Um so I felt really isolated and um and I think it’s one of those things and I came from a very strict European family background and we never talked about things and it was very sort of um almost oppressive in in a sense. So um both my parents escaped um Europe during the war um and so they probably carried a lot of post-traumatic stress with them. And so we’ve got this intergenerational family trauma impacting on my life as a child. And English was not my first language, so for me I and with the autism, I actually didn’t start speaking till I was at school learning English for the first time. So I had all these sort of things sort of like starting to pile up before I even started to really getting to know who I was. So for me, I think by the time I was in my early twenties um and going through marital issues, I I was just like lost within myself and spiralling. Um so yeah, so anyway, the Grey Between is basically that documentation of about 30 years worth of poems that sourced from my life experience. So um and my writing itself is very focused on on everyday life and the impacts that we all experience along the way. So I I do write about trauma, um, interrelational breakdowns, motherhood, family dynamics, um, being autistic, um just life in general, and and also uh impacts of life and death as well. So uh yeah, it’s just I it’s just something for everybody because we all live this.
Yes, we do, actually. As you’re talking, the timing of this is really interesting. I can’t get into too many details because it’s not just my story, and so I always have to ask permission, but it’s hitting home, let’s put it that way. It’s hitting home, and I too never really felt like included or fitted in. So I could totally relate to your story, but for starters, I just wanted to commend you like really bravo for having the courage to step out of your comfort zone and write to discuss these issues and to say it so boldly out loud because it helps people that are currently navigating these chapters to feel a little less alone, number one, and two, to make it less of a stigma by speaking about it and making it public. Um so I commend you. Congratulations for the release of your book and for having the courage. I’m very proud of you, and I don’t know you very well, but I’m just so proud of you because a great deal. You know, bravery to do this.
Yeah, and I think what sort of makes it well, it’s not hard for me. It’s what’s hard for me is actually verbalizing these things. But for me, it’s not difficult to actually put it on paper. So I think it’s one of those things where when we keep things inside of us, we make them worse. You know, our brains just sort of tick over and yeah, we might be in a really bad situation or we’ve experienced trauma or like we’re in the midst of it. And if you’re not able to sort of express that, and it doesn’t have to be verbally, it can be through many sort of ways. You could you could write these things down. You could be a painter, you could be a seller, you could do arts and crafts, but it’s sort of this ability to sort of channel your energy and get it out into something that actually gives you some joy. And sometimes that’s that’s the start, that’s the start of the healing process. And being able to sort of talk to people is brilliant, you know, whether it’s just your friend or your um family if if the family works that way, or um you yourself said you’re very, very sort of um tall-on religion, so your faith is your sort of thing. So we all have something, it’s just about trying to find it so that we can then channel and focus into that and find some joy. And that gives us strength to start moving through these things. Um, but it I think it’s for me, it’s very important to get it out of my head and get out of a paper. So for me, I I started the writing process not realizing that I was actually writing poetry or or particularly wanting to be a poet, but I loved poetry, and I think this goes back to when I was uh at school trying to learn and reading was so difficult. Reading is still difficult for me.
Well, the dyslexia doesn’t make it easy, that’s why. The dyslexia makes it a tad difficult to do.
But for me, when we were introduced to poetry, I thought, I get this, I can read read it somewhat easy. Well, it wasn’t easy, but it’s somewhat I’ll say easier than regular text. And and I could I understood the emotion that was coming out and the release and and I connected with it and I thought that’s what I want to do, I want to be able to be emotive on paper. That’s where I think it kind of really started from those sort of early experiences. So all throughout my teens, I just used right, right, right, you know, um not through not for anything other than purely for myself. And by the time I got to my twenties and then when the first marriage basically started going to pieces, I really relied really heavily on that ability to get out of myself and put it on paper and just realized after a while that the things that I was going through it wasn’t necessarily me. It it was just my sort of um bouncing back off of the people around me, sort of this interaction and and sometimes you know, as much as we we want to make things work or be with the people that we love, sometimes it just isn’t supposed to be.
No. Sometimes it’s not within God’s will. And most people forget that piece, you know, when they’re reading scripture and they’ll say, but we’re not supposed to divorce. And I said, Well, but if you weren’t even supposed to marry that person, uh that’s kind of like an interesting concept though, you know. Um when I was walking down the first aisle, like my first husband, the Holy Spirit basically was telling me, Don’t do it. And out of fear, I married this guy. And this guy was 12 years my senior. So I clearly had things that I needed to work through and wounds that were informing my choices. But at the time I was so young and I was, I didn’t believe myself beautiful enough to be asked again, and so I just answered yes, even though deep down in my heart I knew I was making a mistake.
Yeah.
And my father, and my father was like, Why did you tell me? I said, Well, you had already spent so much money. Oh, in reception, I felt so bad. And he’s like, I could strangle you, you know.
Hindsight’s great, you know. And I think it’s one of those things, you know, we all have these sort of cycles that we go through, and often we sort of we’re yearning to sort of make amends with our parental roles or someone, you know, in in that sort of higher sort of position. And I think, you know, with me, I felt like I was probably marrying my my father, which I had issues with, and you know, it’s kind of when you look back, yeah, it it’s it’s all just there, you can work it out. But when you’re in the midst of it, it’s uh yeah. And I think you as long as and it’s okay, you know, it all the little things, all the bumps that we sort of um experience as we go through our life. All of those things, even if they’re bad, that’s okay because that’s those experiences make us who we are, you know. But I always say this to the people around me, it’s like those sort of moments don’t define you though. Like when you’re in the thick of trauma or bad experiences, it’s okay to feel that pain, but that doesn’t that doesn’t define you. What defines you is how you move through it.
Yes, and you’re moving through it, and that’s that’s a really good point. I’m gonna interject here because people want to skip over it a lot. They want to avoid their pain through their work, they avoided it by achieving. Achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. Oh, but I it’s four years since the trauma. I said there’s a big difference between allowing four years to pass as you’re achieving and not dealing with it. That’s not four years you’ve been grieving. That’s been four years you’ve been avoiding to grieve. Yeah, a big difference between the two. And a lot of what you need to do is in order to get to the side of joy and love and the fruit, what what they call fruit of the spirit in scripture, you gotta work through the pain. You’re not gonna get there just by skipping over it because God wants to redeem us in the in in the brokenness that we feel. He wants to make us whole because that’s what we’re seeking. We’re seeking that fulfillment and that purpose and that livelihood. But part of us need to, you need to accept the broken pieces. Accept those broken parts because they taught you so much. They taught you how to survive. You were a survivor of an abusive marriage, and that’s something to be proud of and to say, okay, now that I’ve survived, why am I going back to that? And that’s where a lot of people stay stuck because they love how they survived through it and they don’t know how to get out of that survival mode into what you and I are now in, which is thriving. Because we’re so used to that peace, we’re so used to fear, we’re not used to joy at all at all. Like we don’t know how to be in joy.
It’s getting out of your comfort zone, you know, and I think people sort of tend to stay where they feel safe, although it may not actually be a safe space for them. Yeah, it’s like what you said, Sylvia, it’s what you know. And I think that’s the thing, you’ve got to actually push yourself, you’ve got to get out of that comfort zone to start growing. And it is scary, it is, but it’s one of those things you just gotta sit with yourself and and say, like, what is it that I need? And you have to give yourself permission to actually be okay with that moment as well. It’s like, yeah, it’s painful, it’s challenging, but we all have the capacity to do it, and and it’s about realizing that and giving yourself permission to move through it, and we are all worthy of a better life for up for each of us. I’ve got my cat down here.
We can bring the cat up, we can meet the category.
But yeah, I think it’s it’s giving yourself permission that you know you don’t have to stay in these awful moments. No, you can move through them, and that’s that’s what I sort of basically decided that I I couldn’t live like I was. And I thought I’m a bad role model for my kids. Yeah. You know, I didn’t want them to sort of be stuck in this cycle. So I made that decision. Um and that at that time I had three young I actually like I said, I’ve got four kids now, but I had three young children uh and I I had no means of um being financially independent. I I was I’d left school early uh when I was originally in high school and by the time I was married in my early twenties I didn’t have a career, I I really wasn’t fully educated and I was very reliant on my first husband and he was very restrictive financially with me uh amongst other things. So I thought the only way that I can sort of get through this is to go back to school, educate myself, get a career where I am financially independent and I have a means of looking after myself, housing myself, looking after my kids and contributing to them and and showing them a good role model. And that’s what I did.
I’m sorry well, it sounds like you did it for your children. Like what what was the cow list, the the turning point, the the last um this they have another saying, but I seriously am blanking out. What was the last straw for you?
Oh look, it was many things. It really was. Um unfortunately my my first husband was um bipolar and he was also an alcoholic. So i i it we were pushing it uphill to start with, and it’s one of those things that those um issues that he had. Sorry, my cat is now on my drum kit.
No, bring the cat over. Seriously.
Oh this is my baby. Oh, hello. Um what was I saying? Sorry.
Um alcoholic and you guys were un unfortunately I didn’t know all of that when we got together.
Um he was very good at um gregarious and covering all of the his issues up and his family didn’t um share those sort of issues and he wasn’t for you know, it he was just it was set up badly to start with. Um and I think you know it that’s where like communication is so vital between people that you really need to be open. And I think if one side of the party is not open, it’s never going to be um a good solid relationship to begin with. Um so without going into any more sort of details about that, but I think it was just one thing after another after another to the point where I had just lost myself. Um I I felt like I was so um sort of squashed and um yeah, just I I couldn’t live like that anymore. There was no growth for me, and and I just felt like I I was so young and yet life just was like I you know this I can’t even express the words, I’m sorry.
Okay, you are actually doing quite well considering you do better writing. You do better writing, but you being on podcast interviews can be stressful for those that find writing better. I know I’m better a writer than I am speaker, but I’m also hosting. Um I’m a certified speaker with the John Maxwell team. And to do that, you have to do a talk in under five minutes or to do, because most people are, oh, but that’s five minutes, like but when you you’re having to be on stage for 30 minutes to an hour you can actually develop a talk versus five minutes, you have to condense it, you have to move once. It’s a lot tougher to do it under five minutes, and I got under just under the wire to get certified. But um, so I get it, I get that this could be a little bit um hard for you. So let’s move on because you wanted to read an excerpt from the gray between. Pick for us something that really resonated with your journey that you want to share.
Um okay. What well what I’ve got here, I’ve got a feed that I can draw from. Um this one. This one was when I was uh before I actually got married. So I was uh working overseas, so living in Japan for quite a few years. So um this one’s called Maha Island. In later years she searched the map, Taste Island as an outstretched hip, about midway between a full stop and comma, fallen from her country sentence. The ice blue peacocks and albino hens with their flushed eyes, like the pink-eyed fruit backs that hung fruit-wrapped at the dusk strattered wherever she walked. And wherever she turned, Ezra touched her, like unset agar agar coating a layer of salt. She’d never need to see that water again. It filtered to her heart. And later still, when thinking about her auburn hair, no more than just a thought, captured in even older photographs, now replaced with dreary faded brown and white. How she’s pulled to those wistful times upon sand, easing underfoot, or pondering toward a buffalo, killing rice fields she passed, as the launch danced salty upon the blue, heading to Naha. And at that interval, she didn’t know those last East China Sea days just being would be her turning point.
So yeah, I actually got chills as you started to read, and that’s the sign that the Holy Spirit is in the room. And so it’s meant for someone on the other side of this interview. So thank you so much for sharing that because it was so profound and it was so beautifully written. Thank you for sharing your heart with us on here. Do you think this is your purpose? This poet to be a poet and to be a writer now, or do you think this is a seasonal thing?
Oh no, no, I look, I’ve done this all my life. This this is part of me. It’s something that I just need to do. I’ve I need to sort of get these emotions out or these words out or work out what’s going on in my life. So for me, it’s like breathing, you know. Um, and I don’t I don’t always sit there and actually write a poem out. Sometimes it’s just um a thought or or a sentence or I’ll capture something that someone said and then later when I need to sort of have some quiet time, I’ll sit there and I’ll write these things into poems. And sometimes two o’clock in the morning I’ll wake up and I thought, oh no, I’ve got to get this poem down, and then I I might just churn it out and and then fine-tune it later. But it’s yeah, it’s just part of me, and it’s something that um we we can all find something like that. It we don’t have to be poets, we don’t have to be writers, but we all have some little little gem inside us that gives us joy, and this gives me joy. And I think now I’ve just recently turned 60, so I’m at that point in my life where um time is on my side, I I can now write to my heart’s content and I’m in a I’m a wonderful um second marriage now, I have a fourth or daughter, and life is just it it it’s like I I’ve gone through all the turbulence and and um it’s like my mother always used to say, you know, you’ve got to go through that sort of mud pit um the quagmire, you’ve got to go through the quagmire and have a bit of mud stick on you to actually get to the other side. And I think we all need to have these awful moments in our life to actually be able to appreciate the beauty around us. And when we’re in that lovely, supportive, um, peaceful moment or moments, we can appreciate them, you know, and they are brief, but hopefully there’s so many of them that it sort of buoys us uh along the way. But we need that awful crap to have been able to experience the nicer things. And so I you know, I would say to people, don’t be frightened of those awful moments because that’s all part of life, but embrace the beautiful ones around you and appreciate the beauty that is all around us and the beauty that is within us, and I think that’s what makes us feel more whole, and like for you, it’s your faith that helps boys like you.
Yes, it’s part of it, absolutely, but there’s other parts to me, it’s my brightest part, the faith. And when I asked people to tell me what they thought my greatest strength was, and they said your faith, your faith is something that lights you up, it’s not something that you push on others, you share from a space of knowing him personally, because I have, because of the dark spaces. When you when you receive three miracles in 72 hours, it’s really hard to deny him. When doctors who are the experts in the world in a world and mountain medical center tells you they don’t think you’re gonna survive, and they look not hopeful at all. And I surrendered to God in that moment and I asked him for a second chance at life. This was during Easter weekend in 2012. And what transpired on Easter Sunday morning, which was Resurrection Day for the Christians, was that a woman with a Catholic diocese, because at that time when I when I entered the hospital, I considered myself Catholic. I was in between faiths, if you will. Um I’m not a religious person, I’m not a big uh proponent of religion, I’m a proponent of relationship with him. So, in my from my perspective, I go to an incredible church, it’s non-denominational here in Austin, because the motto is no perfect people allow. I love it because we’re not perfect, we’re fallible. We’re humans and we’re gonna make mistakes, and we have a heavenly father that has already forgiven us, he’s already redeemed us. The gift is all for us to take. We just we’re the ones that muck it up, we’re the ones that insist on doing things that go against the joy that he wants to give us. And um, so on Easter Sunday morning, she walks in and he was my boyfriend at the time, it’s now my second husband, and uh she said, Hey, do you want me to pray with you? And I said, I need a miracle because the doctors had explained that the therapy they’d give me was not uh conventional. Uh, they were trying to do it um very conservatively because they thought I would die on the table. Uh they went really um aggressive with me. Um so that was had been explained, so I needed a miracle to survive. And um, so we formed a circle and we started saying the Lord’s Prayer or Lord Father for the Catholics, and um halfway in the in the prayer, I loved that I there was no way to describe this love. It’s it just filled the entire room, and I had a peace wash over me almost immediately, and then knowing that I was okay, that I received my second chance. Um, that he said, I heard your prayers and I’ve got you. And that was the feeling I got. And she left the room, and my boyfriend turned to me and said, You felt them too, didn’t you? And I just I couldn’t even speak. There were no words that there was just tears and tears and tears, and the nurses that saw me later said, Your your face was so illuminated, it was so radiant. It was undeniable that you were at complete and total peace. And that peace you don’t get in the world. You this is out of this world. That understanding and that love. Uh the only time I’ve ever felt seen uh in reference to that love was a book I read on near-death experiences. These people clinically died and went to heaven, and they were across the board, across all religions in the world, Buddhist, you know, atheists, Catholics, Christians, you know, whatever, Jewish across the board. They all had the same account. And they said that the love that they felt in heaven, there were no no other love like that on earth. They had never felt that before. So, so accepted, so understood, so seen, it was it was incredible to be in his presence and to receive my third and final miracle on the day he resurrected, to receive a new chance at life. How symbolic is that? You know, I just I feel that’s why they say, What is your anchor? Well, it’s faith, it’s my relationship with him because when he comes through for you like that, and and every time you turn to him, he comes through for you, and not in the way that you desire, but even greater than what you desire is how he comes through for me. So that’s why my faith is so strong. But those people that have faith and and or they have other things that they hold on to, the love from their children and the purpose that they have. Here I know it, that’s very powerful, right? All of us have a purpose to fulfill in a way that we each um connect with human beings. Like you and I are connected right now through this interview, but I feel a deeper connection to you beyond this interview. I guess as you were speaking, I could just you and I had some similarities, and God was making sure that I understood what those similarities were because I had prayed to have someone to be able to rely on on situations that had just been uncovered three weeks before that really did my light. So thank you for your support and for your courage, because that’s how you have touched me today. Any last words of encouragement you want to leave with the listeners of released out reveal purpose?
Yeah, I think the bottom line is, you know, I think we have to be kind to ourselves. It it’s about, you know, um like when we go through life, we are going to have moments that are going to challenge us. And I think it it’s more about not feeling as if it’s punishment. You know, sometimes it’s not that we’ve actually done anything and we weren’t these things happening to us. It is just life. No one has uh a rule book about you know what’s gonna happen. We just have to experience things and and make those moments as as nice as we can, but we’re all doing the best that we can, and I think we have to realise that and it’s about accepting the people around us at face value, not wanting them to be more than they are, or you know, it’s this sort of accept the reality, not the fantasy um and be kind, be kind to yourself, be kind to other people. And I think it’s about sort of finding those nice moments in life that will give us the strength to move through things and then know that even when we are in these awful moments, it’s just a brief moment, it’s temporary. And you will be able to get through it, is finding something that will give us focus and peace that gives us the strength to keep going. And sometimes that’s challenging within itself. Sorry. Um she’s a distraction and it’s yeah, I think I I mean I’ve s I’ve said this before, it it’s about finding things that gave us drawing when we’re children. Sometimes those little things are the same things that we should draw on as adults and that gives us that peace. And I think if we can find those moments, oh my god, just sitting down with pencils and colouring in or reading a book, or going for a lovely walk, or meeting up with a a friend that that gives you energy. Those sort of little things those are the things that then we can focus and find joy in life and that gives us the strength to move through the awful moments when they come across like be kind to yourself. I think live in the moment, sort of be present.
I think I’ve said a lot that Well, if I wanted to purchase your book or get in touch with you, how do I do that?
Yes, well the book itself is uh available globally on Amazon. Um it’s also bars and mobile in America, so um it’s quite easily accessible. Um I have an author site, so that’s www.nadeenellis.com. And I have um Instagram, so that’s at Nadine Ellis Poetry, or one word.
That’s wonderful. Okay, so I’ve got you down because I’m gonna look you up and I’m gonna connect with you on Instagram and I’m gonna purchase your book because this is how I support people that come on my podcast. So we just say thank you. Um I am so grateful that you came today. You came at the perfect timing, and I always find that so I’m like, yes, it’s his timing, and I get why he’s doing this, and so I I laugh because he and I have that kind of relationship of like, yep, he sent you to me at precisely the right time. So I appreciate you being on, Nadine, and sharing your beautiful story of transformation. And for the listeners of release that review of purpose when we alert Matthew 5.14 to be the light because this world desperately needs you to step into your purpose fully and to live it out in the best way that you can live it out. Have a wonderful week, stay safe, love y’all. Bye now.
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt Reveal Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a twenty-five thousand dollar private VIP day with Sylvia Worsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.