Life Uncut - Uncut with Tara Rae Moss - The Halo Effect, Pretty Privilege and "Ugly Laws"

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Tara Rae Moss is a chronic pain and disability advocate, keynote speaker and bestselling author of 14 books. It’s likely that you originally know Tara Rae from her life as an international model, but her life took an unexpected turn 8 years ago when she developed a chronic pain condition known as CRPS.  In this chat we speak about: Her experiences in the modelling industry as a teenager Why she has returned to using her birth name Tara Rae The halo effect, pretty privilege, the ugly laws and how it all is connected to ableism How opportunities dried up once Tara Rae said that she had a disability What living with CRPS was like and her journey to remission Having to take a lie detector test to prove that she actually wrote her novels Intersectional feminism You can find Tara Rae’s website here You can find Tara Rae’s Instagram here You can watch us on Youtube If you have an question please send it on it to life uncut podcast on Instagram Join us on tiktok Or join the Facebook Discussion Group Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because WE LOVE LOVE! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Walamutta land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Brittany. And I'm Laura. And today's guest is somebody that I grew up seeing in the public eye. Like when I was younger, she was an insanely beautiful and successful model. I remember seeing her on covers of magazines.

Her name then was Tara Moss and that's probably how you know her. But now she goes by Tara Ray Moss and it's actually a really interesting story as to why she changed her name later in life. It is something that we discuss in this episode. Yeah, she was a very successful model at the time and one of the conversations that we touched on in this episode is just how problematic the industry used to be and I mean in some ways maybe it still is but it's she talks about the things that she experienced as a young model we get into this chat about pretty privilege and often we talk about pretty privilege and the

benefits that come with being beautiful but Tara also unpacks the ethics behind and the way in which being beautiful can adversely affect you as well and in saying this she is a very famous world reclaimed author who has published 14 books and at the beginning of her career when she pivoted from being a model to being a published writer she had to sit a lie detector test because people didn't believe that somebody so beautiful and so successful in the modeling industry could be intelligent enough to be a published author it's so disgraceful isn't it like oh you're too beautiful to be smart and I love that she flipped that narrative on its head and she does it with a bit of a laugh too when she's like yeah cool I'll take a lie detector test but we also have a really

deep conversation about CRPS which is complex regional pain syndrome. The pain that Tara says she experienced is something that you cannot fathom and then we speak about what it's like to go from being such a beautiful successful model where your success was purely based on your looks to then being in a wheelchair and getting around with a walker or a cane how different life is and how different people treat you. Yeah we really covered the many facets of Tara Ramos's life and in particular where it led us to was a conversation around ableism and how when you have been someone who has lived in a fully abled body and you've also been someone who's been wheelchair bound she talks about the striking contrast of how she was treated when she

was going through the pain that she was experiencing Tara Ramos is honestly she is such a ray of sunlight dreamboat she is on her own spiritual journey and I think it's very interesting especially for me as someone who you guys know is like self-proclaimed not don't say woo I'm not I can't say woo but I'm not I'm not a spiritual person I deeply appreciated how much she sits in her own authenticity and is able to speak so so honestly from her lived experience without the fear of judgment without the fear of how someone else might interpret her experience in life she really is an inspiration for that let's get into the chat with Tara Ramos Welcome to the podcast, Tara Ray Moss.

Thank you so much. It's just delightful to be here and to hang with you. We start all of our conversations the same way, and that is with an accidentally unfiltered story. So the most embarrassing story that you could possibly find, and you were saying that you don't, you're like, I don't know if this is that embarrassing, but we'll see. Well, it's difficult to pick because life is filled with embarrassing moments and accidentally embarrassing moments.

But I'm going to pick one which was, so I was born and raised on Vancouver Island, like this little island off the coast of Canada. And for me, I had the opportunity to travel and get off the island, if you will, by modeling. So here I was going off to Europe as a 15-year-old, you know, after being hunted by the agents going, yeah, you're the one and tapped for that work. And I flew all the way to Europe with my family. So I'm really glad I was traveling with my mom and dad. We went to sleep one night in the model's apartment. They left the window open a crack because it was summer and it was hot and in Europe. And when I woke up, I was like, I was on a futon and in this room and I was like, God, my face feels really strange.

And in the night, all of these mosquitoes had come in the window, their window, flown over them, not interested, come into the room that I was in. And I'd been bitten 33 times on this one side of my, every part of me that was exposed, one side of my face and my neck, and even in my ear my nostrils everything you're literally the money maker totally i was obviously i couldn't work and that was completely scuppered so that was the beginning of my modeling career but taray this is the thing right if you are the mosquito repellent that's my daughter lola if she's in a room no one else gets bitten and she will get decimated that's me we call her the human mosquito repellent yeah everyone else is fine that's right so you went there to shoot

or just be scouted what happened because you've just flown all the way to europe and then your face is like she doesn't look the way she did on her comcast yeah they're just a little bit different especially on one side they're like is this the model we scouted for malaria are we doing a malaria campaign it was pretty nasty yeah look I I had been scouted and then you go over there and you do castings and of course I couldn't do any of the castings it was all out the window but I also feel like it was a real blessing that we went it was it took being scouted as a model for us to go back to Europe. But very sadly, the following year, my mother passed away. And previous year when we were there in the summer for ostensibly a modeling career

that then didn't happen at that stage, that was her only time going back to Europe since she was four years old when she was born in Holland. After the war, they came across like so many people as immigrants to a new country. So she hadn't actually been back to her birthplace. And we had the opportunity to do that we went to Newman's Dorp where she was born she got to see the you know the chapel where her parents were married where they carved their names into the bell tower she got to see other relatives that she you know I mean she'd left when she was four so we would not have had that opportunity otherwise and I think that's really what that summer was about was spending that really important time making memories getting her back to her homeland before

she became sick before she we knew what was happening and um and yeah she passed the next year were you really close with your mom extremely close we still are yeah that's so beautiful I think it's such a nice way to look at it and it's one of those things that it annoys some people you know when you say everything happens for a reason I think that that's a great quote but obviously when used in the right way because we're you know we're not going to say war happens for a reason no I think some things don't happen for a good reason exactly but in moments like that it's a nice way for you to turn a situation on its head like you're okay that wasn't supposed to be the moment for your modeling career to take off we know it did but it was a moment for you to

without knowing have those final amazing experiences with your mom how did she pass away she had multiple myeloma which is a rare bone disease it's in the bone marrow and at the time it was thought that it was more common in older men so really they just didn't see it coming with her. She was only 43 when she passed. So I am 50 now. And I have found, you know, the last seven years have been extremely bizarre for me. I'm sure we'll get into that later. But I feel really lucky that I'm getting, you know, every one of these days to do whatever it is that's coming my way. Tara Ray. You can also call me Ray, by the way. Yeah, I get called Ray a lot. My birth name is Tara Ray Moss. And it's a little easier for most Aussies because I've been Tara for so long.

Why did you choose to go back to Tara Ramos in the public space? That's a good question. I don't feel like Tara Moss anymore. I've had a very challenging, very extreme experience over the last seven years of the old me dying and a new me being here. Of course, I accept my old self. She was great. She was fantastic.

No shade on Tara Moss. She served me well. No shade on Tara Moss. But I just am not her. I can't. My brain doesn't work the way hers did. My body doesn't work the way hers did. I don't present the way she did. The things I want to do and my priorities are different than what Tara Moss was like. And it's not like it's a choice. I didn't kind of decide I'm going to rebrand or I'm going to go on this new direction. And I've literally just been taken on this path. And I recognized after a while that I needed to embrace all the parts of myself, including the ones I'd previously denied.

And that's why I've taken up all parts of my birth name. So Tara Rae Moss was my birth name. It was the name I was given. It's the name I use now. And I kind of denied the Rae, actually. It's like Taylor Swift, you know. The old Tara can't come to the phone right now because she's dead. Because she's dead.

She's dead. Yeah. I mean, I really, when people call me Tara, I kind of go like, like, I kind of look around and go, oh, right. No, that, that was the past me. And, you know, kudos to her. She was great. She did her best. And as I'm doing my best too, but I don't, I just don't feel like her, my experience of the world is vastly different. And yeah, so I've taken up my full name. Well, I would love to unpack a little bit around what has led you to where you are now and I know that part of that I mean and as we said like you being in an ex-model that was such a big push to you in sort of the world of the public eye and you've mentioned it started when you're 15 years old can you tell us a little bit around

why you got into modeling in the first place and what that experience was like for you so as I mentioned I grew up on Vancouver Island and there are you know there are friends of mine there who've not really left the island you know like that who've stayed in the province of BC and not traveled it's a smallish town say smallish town people there will be like what how dare you but it's tiny but it's not a big it's not a big city right and that's one of the things I love about it but I had this opportunity when I was a kid of you know the dangling carrot of you know do you want to go to Europe and see the world? Well, yes, sign me up. So my experience was being scouted as a model, even though I was a tomboy. I was, you know, the head of the local Navy cadets,

right? So me in a uniform, telling the boys to do push-ups and stuff. I was very tomboyish, which is what they said at the time. Actually, we don't usually use the term as much now. But obviously, if you're into certain things, you're not really a girl anymore. You're a tomboy. yeah so I was one of those types of girls and then I was scouted as a model because as my dad used to say I could stand up turn my turn to the side and stick my tongue out and look like a zipper I was very thin very tall and stretched and that's what they were looking for and so I was invited to come over to Europe and do castings that was the beginning it wasn't like I've had any burning desire to be a model in fact I didn't feel I hated dresses which is ironic

because I kind of like them now. I hated dresses. It wasn't really where I was focused, but it gave me the opportunity to go to Europe and to see these incredible museums, this history, to hear different languages, to see different cultures. So it was a real, a real privilege. It did not go smoothly and I wasn't like, you know, instantly catapulted to some sort of fame, but it did give me the opportunity to see the world. And that is how I became a model. I was a writer at heart and at age 10, I was already writing Stephen King style novelettes for my classmates at Torquay elementary school. And, uh, when I look back at those old stories, they're pretty grisly. They were like horror novelettes, you know, choose your own adventure style as well. So I was really

interested in like writing a chapter and then saying, now, what do you want to do? And then my friends would tell me and I would write the next one. I feel like that's like goose, remember goose bumps, goose bumps, pick page X or pick page Y and then you'd find your own adventure that's exactly right so that was way the way my head worked that was what my initial reinforcement and reward was was just the love of books the love of storytelling and the delight from readers who were at that point were my classmates but then I got picked as a model because people don't come up to young women and say hey you should be a writer yeah of course not but at that time I was constantly being told oh you should be a model and it wasn't because I was

so beautiful was because I was really tall, really thin and really kind of striking looking. And that was the look then. Which is a different thing. Yes. But I think it's so interesting because so many girls at that age desperately want to be models. And I guess I can liken it now to like being influencers, like young girls want to be influencers. Back then when we were young, young girls wanted to be models. It was the aspirational thing. And to think that you were almost offered something or given an opportunity in something that it was brought to you and it wasn't something that you were chasing.

did you have an idea of what the modeling industry was going to be did you have this a concept around it or you were you really just thrown into this world of like what am I doing look coming from a small town and a lower middle class family no I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into and and I had you know my mom we went to Mount Ptolemy it was like after I'd been scouted and we were in my hometown and we drove up to this outlook together and I had like a milkshake or something that she'd got me and she wanted to have a one-on-one chat with me like Tara Ray you know how do you feel about this is this something that you want you know do you want to go to Europe do you want a model and we talked about it and she really spoke with me as an adult

and wanted to know what I wanted and she would support that and she supported me supported my new dream of like yeah I do want to I do want to see what Milan is like I do want to you know maybe go on the catwalk or whatever it sounds kind of exciting and then when she was sick a year or so after that you know she had modeling pictures of me on the hospital wall you know she was supporting me it wasn't sort of something that ran in our family or that we were exposed to or she was very far from the you know our stereotype of a stage mom or whatever well you know we can analyze that stereotype too but but she was just like you know she said she wants to do this and we're going to support her as much as we can. And that was that trip, you know, that they spent a lot of their

savings on getting me over there to support me. What were the early days like for you at that time? Because now we're seeing, I mean, we're talking what, 30, 35 years odd years ago, a different time. And we're seeing a lot of very influential and public figures come out now with the Me Too movement and really exposing and pulling back the curtains on what that industry was like. What was your experience like as a very young, vulnerable, beautiful girl entering that world? Well, I was a kid, you know, I was a minor and a lot of models are and there was a great deal of abuse and exploitation. And I wrote about that in The Fictional Woman, my memoir, because I thought it was important to share those stories and for people to get a sense of what they're

looking at, when they're looking at photos, like, you know, I would often get cast for skin and hair campaigns and things like that. And you can imagine, you know, a 15 or 16 year old selling anti-wrinkle cream and stuff like that. Right. And then, you know, when you're, when you're seeing the advertisement and just speaking back to what you said about the aspirational quality, you see, obviously you're going to see these pictures and think this is aspirational. designed to be aspirational it's what it is what is being sold but the model does not own the chanel suit yeah you know the model is not someone who has power in this dynamic there's someone who is probably from a foreign country who has gone to whatever milan to paris to new york to be

photographed for a campaign to sell a product she does not own the product she does not own the company. She doesn't own the camera. She's coming in for the day and getting some money and then being sent on her way. It shifted a little bit, of course, with the supermodels because they had their own currency. They were celebrities of a sort. But most modeling is not like that, just like most acting is not, you know, being Tom Cruise or whatever. You don't have that kind of agency, actually. So I got pretty good at a right hook. You know, I threw a man down an escalator at Holborn Station. You actually did? I actually did. Was this on a shoot? No, it was life as a single traveling young woman model. I mean, there's just no one there to protect you or to

guide you or just to be an ally. You're very much on your own. And the thing is, is while you move around different cities because you go and do the castings and then you go on to the next one and you'll notice that when they have, you know, fashion week, it's different weeks, of course, in different centers. So, you know, Paris fashion week is not the same day as Milan fashion week, and those models will move from city to city. So not only are you young, and not only are you not the one with the agency, and probably you don't have a lot of money, probably don't come from a lot of money, but you're going to be in another city every couple, every few weeks. So you don't have roots, you don't have friends. And you don't have allies. You don't have the support or the

safety of being able to like, I'll call my girlfriend who's around the corner. I'll call my mom who's down the street. And it's the stuff you don't think about. And I say this because I remember traveling when I was 18. This is a time when you don't walk around with the easily accessible safety of a phone. And I say that by just being able to call someone for help, being able to Google Maps, to all of these things in a foreign country. Although things happen pretty fast though, I have to say as well, things can happen really quickly. So mobile phones are an absolute boon for safety like it's it is really important but it doesn't necessarily give as much safety as I would like having a daughter now and kind of recognizing from my

own experience it's like some of the things that can happen but yeah I mean I had to punch a photographer unconscious in a studio once I had to throw a man down the Holborn station this was in Germany so that was in Hamburg I'd been told to come and do a test shoot they were called so this is like a photo for your portfolio so it was all like oh I get to do photos with this photographer and I arrived and you do this for free as well no it's like you give your time you sit in front of a camera and it's just for your own well-being basically it's how it's just so that you might have a career yeah someone has just decided that you or someone they want to take a picture of so you go to the studio and I arrived and it was immediately like where is

everybody else there was no one else there was no makeup artist no hair no other models and I was like okay and I had my backpack and then he started offering me vodka and you know I was 15 right and I was like no and then I'm like putting taking out my makeup and still wondering like how do I get out of here really fast if I need to and he came over and said these are the photos I want to do and showed me pornography and I was like no and so I started to put my things into my backpack put my backpack on he lunged at me and I got a really good right hook in and he fell unconscious to the floor of his studio and I bolted and then I was in a lot of trouble yeah what happens then you go to your management like how what do you do in those situations

um be unpopular that's what you do because what happened rather than me being you know the acknowledging that I had been sexually assaulted by this guy who was trying to groom me into doing images as a minor and all whatever else he was grabbing me for, the agency was like, you know, basically you'll never work in this town again because I had, you know, upset the apple cart. Which is very telling of the industry that what was the alternative that you stayed there and were sexually assaulted and then they probably wouldn't have done anything anyway. It would have been keep your mouth closed or you'll never work in the industry again. absolutely and i was told quote unquote you know you're very pretty this this must happen to you

all the time like it was a compliment of course uh it's not a compliment it's so disgusting but when you're 15 years old or 16 years old you don't even have the cognitive ability to understand that that's not necessarily a compliment as well like you still kind of oh i knew it wasn't a compliment but you but you knew when his head hit the floor too but i i think what i mean by that is is and it's great that you did but i think a lot of people that age don't have the maturity to fully understand what's happening to them. And that's the imbalance that happens within the modeling industry is that by the time people are old enough and have enough life experience, they're too old for the job often as well. Yes. You have

spoken about a moment that happened where you were raped by somebody that you knew, a quote unquote friend. Did that situation have a connection to the industry in any capacity? And did you find it difficult to deal with and understand and decide what to do with knowing that it was a friend? Did that make it any sort of challenge within yourself? Because I know that there are a lot of people out there that experience sexual assault by people that they know and they grapple with that. Yeah. Look, I acknowledge that the most sexual violence takes place by people we know or by family members. In this case, that wasn't so much what was happening because it was someone like a new friend, like someone I trusted that was new, that was part of an acting class. So,

you know, it was getting a lift from someone in an acting class who I thought, oh, they're a friend and this is fine. And it was not fine and not safe. And they weren't a friend, you know. So it's not quite sorry now my throat's bothering me my throat bothers me when it's hard to talk about something right isn't that interesting so our bodies hold trauma and part of our what we need to do in this life is to jettison that so when I speak about it it's good it's it's um letting it out so in this case this guy had you know more power than me in the acting industry I never actually got into acting after that so that might have been part of what made me go no, this isn't for me. So when I spoke about what had happened, of course, that was not,

he was the one who was believed and I was not. Within a few years, it was discovered that many other women came forward and he had probably raped at least 12 different people. And no one had been believed. No one had been believed. And so there was eventually a trial. And of course, his defense team tried to make the argument that they should all be done individually, because what happens with sexual assault is behind closed doors for the most part right usually it's behind closed doors so you don't have witnesses that's how it can be so pervasive and so if the women are not believed or for that matter the men or people who don't identify with

the gender if they're not believed when something happens to them behind closed doors then there's not ever going to be repercussions for the abuser so in this case there were many women who came forward there were very similar patterns and MOs in terms of the way that this guy did what he did and he ended up going to jail as a as a rapist so he has to live with that and that was only because enough so many people had come forward and they were able to consolidate the cases precisely and we see this with you know with Weinstein with you know Cosby with uh this guy did not have anywhere near that level of power but he still had enough kind of like you know career kind of had gotten away with it for so long yeah that you think you're able to get away with it like you think

that it'll just go unnoticed or unreported we've tended not to be considered reliable narrators of our own experience or of the experience of our bodies yeah and when it comes to sexual assault those things both intertwine i mean if you look at you know the history of hysteria you look at the witch wound i'm going to say the flexner report of 1909 which is when they came in and looked at the health industry and jettisoned you know midwives naturopaths the women's work as well as what they called negro schools at the time and centralized power around authorities being these specific at that time white men and universities from a european background we've continued to kind of say here are the ones we trust here are the ones with authority and they've

come from a certain demographic and that's affected the way our bodies are treated it's affected the way our stories are treated and our experiences are treated. And it's also it has affected the way what we contribute to society is valued. And we have come a long way. And I see such amazing people out there, a lot of women and girls in particular, but all kinds of people who are changing this narrative or changing this reality and shifting it. But we do have a long way to go because it goes back so very very very far whether it's back to the witch hunts whether it's back to the flexner report whether it's back to you know any number of when women were not allowed to be judges we're not allowed to be lawyers we're not writing the laws we're not allowed to be

president right they still haven't had a u.s president who's female right we're still in the process of a transition that's going to take an incredibly long period of time and we can only just keep being embodying the world that we want we talk a lot about this idea of pretty privilege but you've just recently done a chat at the ethics center and this was all around the unfair advantages of beauty can you talk me through a little bit around that sort of correlation like on one hand we give so much emphasis on pretty privilege but there is an unfair advantage of beauty and there is an unfair stigma around being so beautiful so the talk at the ethics center was on the ethics of beauty and we started out indeed as you mentioned with this discussion of what's

called the halo effect so the halo effect actually can be in different spheres but it means that someone you have one attribute and the halo of that attribute means that people assign other attributes to you even though you haven't proved them so the pretty uh the halo effect of attractiveness is one where someone might go oh they've got even features they're trustworthy worthy. This person's pretty, they're, you know, better for the job because, you know, X, Y, Z. It's not a logical association. Why would you think that the even features makes the person a better person? That's the halo effect. So we talked about that. I got very much into ableism straight off the bat because the even features and these issues actually come from a cultural

past where the state, in fact, legislated against people who looked different, people who had visible disability. And there was something called the ugly laws. I'm not sure if you've heard of those. So they were retrospectively called ugly laws that were set in place around 1881. During that time, it was an offense to be seen with a disability, a deformity, even a limp, right? And as someone who spent most of the last seven, eight years profoundly disabled using a wheelchair and with at that time facial difference as well because of the way this condition CRPS affected my body, I would have been fined. Now, the law did not get dropped until the year I was born, 1973. And we might like to assume, okay, well, they didn't actually fine people the last few

decades, maybe, right? I don't know, probably not. But the fact is, it's set in motion a way of thinking around people and what's acceptable in public. And you can feel it when you look different when you're, there's a whole other set of issues with invisible disability that I have spoken to often as well, because I have sometimes had an invisible disability. But when you are visibly disabled, there's also a different dynamic that happens in public. And there's a sense of like you don't fit in, you're not normal, there's either staring or aggressively not looking at you and all of this I think can be traced back to the attitudes around disability and the ableism that is still very much part of our culture and I think also very much influences the lack of

accessibility that we have in our infrastructure. We're actually not welcoming of disability even though, you know, 25% of the peoples in the world have a disability of some type. Tara, I'd love to know, would you openly say, because you're obviously a beautiful woman, you modeled your whole life, would you openly say that you had pretty privilege? Oh, 100%, of course. How would you say your life changed and you were treated differently, still being beautiful, but now you're in a wheelchair? So there's a few things to talk about there. One is that pretty privilege is a real thing,

and we can only really see it when we start to think of the opposite. So it's not so much gender, gender complicates it really fast, really, really fast. And we have to be careful not to kind of go to middle ages morality thinking around sin and beauty. That's a whole big conversation there. But if we're just to say attractiveness for these sorts of studies is even features, that's actually what they're, it's usually the studies are done from the neck up. once we add bodies it gets really complicated really fast right because then what if there's a woman who's large chested or who's considered to be fat or whatever you can have the even features but now there's these other elements or is the person visibly disabled right so yes did

I have pretty privilege do I still to an extent yeah I do it led me to modeling where I lost a lot of privilege because I didn't have power so other types of privileges kind of trumpet to my view especially when it comes to women because gender adds layers of complexity immediately and what we're looking at is really not individuals and individual experience but structural stuff what's happening what's you know so any individual can say yeah i'm pretty privileged but where did it help i don't know i can't tell you have to look at the big picture and look at the structure and again that's why i spoke back to ableism because that's a classic example not even features means not trustworthy not worthy and morally less value that is the value judgment

that has been made for people who don't look i'm going to say uh symmetrical or have this kind of like even feature or look well which again is wellness that idea of looking healthy we go oh it's not about beauty it's about health i'm like yeah but that's also ableism my experience of disability has been one very strongly of everyone calling me inspiring and no one hiring me. Yeah. So I had a very long period of utter unemployment. And I mean that in the complete sense of the word. Right. So this is the reality for people who have a shift in their health experience. And this is also an experience that people would have if they are born with disability. So the opportunities they have are very different and much more narrow.

So do I say pretty privileged? I'd say health privilege was a much bigger factor, in fact, for me. And I knew it because I didn't have it anymore for a time. Now I'm thankfully in remission and I have my health back and opportunities are starting to come to me again. And I know, I noticed that. and yes this is my personal experience and there are lots of people out there with high ranking jobs who have disabilities but we all know that this is if you look at the big picture you see a major trend and shift in pattern and that is that people with disabilities find it

much harder to get opportunities to be offered jobs to continue to get jobs to move up in their fields or to get equal pay it's like you're beautiful and you're brave and you're inspiring and you're doing amazing things, but not for us. You're doing so great, but obviously you're going to either speak for free for us or we just don't know what to do with you. Yeah. And that was very much, and that's also kind of why Taramos is no longer around because Taramos, to the outside perspective,

so for, say, potential employers, represented something specific, I came to understand, because that was just me, right? But I came to understand that was a specific thing. You became a brand. And I lost that. I didn't have that thing anymore that they wanted to hire. It was gone because I was no longer well. I couldn't stand up.

I could still think I was still writing books, but the support was very different. And also the fact that you say that there's an expectation that you'll talk on your lived experience for free at people's seminars, at people's workshops, at events where people are charging money for ticketed events and then be like, but come and do it for free. Come and do it for free because it's such an important topic. I'm like, yes, it is because I'm living it. And we do this to people with disability all the time. We do this to people who have lived experience of abuse. We do this to people who are indigenous or who are First Nations, and they have really important things to teach us and life experiences that should help to shape our understanding of the world. but we will not pay for their knowledge and pay for their, you know, what they're able to offer because it's, they're outside of this, I don't know, this thing that we value as a culture. I think it's important now that we talk about what your disability was and what happened to

you because a lot of people right now listening saying, hang on, hang on. I missed how she was in a wheelchair. I missed the disability part because you weren't always that way. Can you talk us back to when your life changed, how and why. So in 2016, I suffered from a hip injury and that hip injury led to something called complex regional pain syndrome. So complex regional pain syndrome is a very, well, it's complicated as the name implies. It's complex for a reason. So it affects different organs and areas of the body, different body systems, but it's most known for pain. So it's like being burned alive. And on the McGill pain scale, they rate it above childbirth without anesthetic or amputation of a digit.

This is something people might remember. There was a Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya, and there was a little girl with complex regional pain syndrome. So anyone that's wondering, this is the same thing. That's right. And where was your region of pain? It started in the hip and then spread down the full right leg. And then after several years, and I did all the things. So I saw medical experts on two continents and lots of procedures and attempts for treatment. Unfortunately, it then spread, which can happen with CRPS. Mine spread ipsilaterally, which means that it went upwards. Sometimes it goes sideways. And to give you an idea, like not all pain is caused by damaged tissue. So it's really important to understand

how the body works. We usually think of acute injuries, like I broke my ankle. And there's a process of healing that we kind of understand. It's visible, you go in, you get the cast or whatever you get, you know, they strap you up, and then you have a healing. And then that's gone from your life. When pain continues after three months, when the healing is completed, that's when chronic pain is starting to be acknowledged. With CRPS, there's these other factors as well. So it may begin with the broken ankle or the nerve injury or the car accident or whatever but it then can spread through the body parts of the body that weren't initially affected and this is because there's a neurological component to it so the peripheral nervous system the central nervous

system are affected but also other aspects of the body's functioning become affected so you know you get gastroparesis in my case and most of the people that i met had gastroparesis a lot of them we're using feeding tubes. Your eyesight might be affected, your ability to regulate your temperature, your circulation changes. And in fact, I still have kind of like slightly scaly skin on one side from the lack of circulation that was happening. So this spread to my full right side so that I was split like a ruler right down the middle. I mean, really in a very precise way where half of me was on fire and I had cold CRPS. So it was like being in dry ice, burning, burning in the ice and the other half was normal and I would turn kind of bluish so one half of me

was bluish and you know my face would drop was dropped on that side and was kind of not the same as the other side and this left side of me was as normal. Is it a 24-hour experience like is there any reprieve ever? No it's it's constant burning pain but with flares so it varies in intensity And sometimes it's fairly typical for people to have spasms to, you know, they might pass out. They might, you know, have other extreme moments in the day. And it comes with a whole host of issues, fatigue and brain fog and problems eating, problems thinking. How did you manage it as well? Problems movement, obviously, that speaks back to the wheelchair.

So once it spread to my leg, I was unable to use the leg in a normal way. and that was an ongoing struggle from like cane to wheelchair sorry cane to walker to wheelchair and then I began to heal and it went sort of the other way so back to walker and then eventually to cane and now I'm not using any mobility aids but I was told I would never get better. It's incredible and also we were saying before that the last time you were in Sydney you were in a wheelchair. I was in a wheelchair and furthermore I had a friend pushing me a lot of the time because I had lost a lot of my ability of my right arm to function so there was a while that I was really ripped. I kind of missed my muscles. Oh, you're looking pretty good,

don't you worry. No, no, no. There was a while I was like Linda Hamilton Terminator level ripped because my arms became my legs in the sense that I was using a manual wheelchair. Then it spread to my full right side and I began to lose the use of my right arm. And that's when using my wheelchair became difficult. And so when I was here last, I had a friend that was pushing me a lot of the time because I actually couldn't propel myself when you're dealing with such a just prolific pain that you have to manage every day but you're also mom how do you do it because you know even as a mom you can't prioritize yourself all the time but in this instance you almost have to prioritize your health oh gosh you just don't have any choice but to do what you can do and I think that love

caring and compassion are the most important gifts you can give as a parent and that was always there could I physically get up and make her a meal no I couldn't do that could I get her to school often I could not you know and one of the low points was you know I was living in a bed in our living room for some time essentially housebound because if I was if my bed was in one of the bedrooms I would never see anyone so at least I was like in the center of this little house I could see the kitchen over there. I could see the front door and my life was that bad. What was the diagnostic process like at the beginning of a lot of people's experience? They're not believed, their pain isn't believed and their symptoms aren't believed. Was that your experience?

Very much so. And diagnosis is a privilege. That was a wake up call for me, recognizing that diagnosis is a privilege and that as a person with privilege, i.e. you know, someone who was still reasonably articulate despite the amount of pain I was in. Not always. Sometimes I couldn't form words at all, but I could speak. I could speak English in countries where the doctors spoke the same language as me. I was a middle class person who had a middle class type education. How do you navigate this if you are not a white middle class or upper class person who speaks the same language. I have no idea how people manage it all. And often they do not. There's privilege there and just being taken seriously at all. And often I was not. So it was it was

difficult. And, you know, it was a rare disease day not so long ago. And CRPS is considered a rare disease. It is a little bit more common in women and girls than it is in boys and men. And when I went to the Spiro Clinic, which is where I got ultimately into remission, I met, you know, a heartbreaking number of kids, almost all who were girls, you know, my daughter's age and younger than her, who she befriended, they were hanging out. But they had, you know, some of them are Australian, actually, there's some Aussies there. There's Australians, people from Norway, Canada, Costa Rica, everywhere in the US, in Arkansas to get treatment for CRPS, because it's almost impossible to heal in our standard medical system. They don't

really understand CRPS very well so I was told by multiple doctors on two continents that I would never recover and I would never improve and you have I have in remission I'm not in pain anymore what was the process in Arkansas what did they do so I had already begun a healing journey I'll be completely honest about that I was improving so from that real low point of being essentially housebound, I began to improve. There's a whole lot of processes involved in that. Complex regional pain syndrome and chronic illnesses in general need to be approached with multiple modalities and from multiple angles. One of the things we don't help each other out with is the turf protecting that we see in our medical system where we say there's only one way. It's surgery

and its prescriptions and surgery, those things are really important, but they're actually not everything. And they're not even the most important thing for some conditions because there's a great deal of complexity in the world. That's a very specific set of skills and fields that people have been trained into. So I'm a big believer in complementary medicine. I'm a big believer in widening and also having the experts in different fields of health speak to one another, respect one another's areas of expertise. So I began to move outside of the conventional Western surgical and pharmaceutical approach because I'd done it for six years and I was getting worse. I didn't really have any choice. I had to be pushed literally out of my comfort zone

to start trying other things, which is extraordinary actually that it took that long. But when I did, I began to experience improvement. I got from, you know, housebound back to wheelchair to walker. And when I reached the Spiro Clinic, I was by then in a walker. I had gone off my medications. I'm not saying to your listeners that they should go off their medications. But in my case, that's right. And also I was getting a lot of terrible side effects that were by then acknowledged by my people prescribing those medications.

are like, yeah, you're all these, these things are causing problems now. So there's a limited use sometimes in people's lives with these other tools. And at the clinic, they use multiple modalities and, you know, they're doing neuromuscular re-education. They're doing naturopathic. They're doing chiropractic. It's not a standard, like what I was expecting, but they're doing lymphatic drainage. They're doing detoxification. They're doing these things. They have been doing it for 14 years and they have really high rates of recovery. And that is a lesson to us. Like if someone just showed me when I was initially diagnosed and said, oh yeah, you can listen to these medical doctors at your hospital, or you could go to this clinic and

they could do these. I'd be like, well, obviously I'm going to go to the hospital. Totally. After six years of my experience, I really came to know the absolute limits of what was available in our conventional medical system as regards crps and we had gone well and truly past the window of knowing whether that was going to work for me or not it was not working for me it can work for some people but not very many with crps and so these multiple modalities was incredibly important and there's an aspect of energy work to what they do and that should be a great lesson to us opening our minds a little bit because there would be my experience with crps and it's specific to me but I would take a guess that this could also be applied to many other chronic illnesses that

are not shifting, that are not well understood, where people are told you're never going to get better. This is just how it is. I think that's a good reason to get the antenna up and go, well, wait a second. Maybe it's just that this system is not going to be the key for me with this particular disorder. And I should look elsewhere to see what might help to complement the therapies I'm getting. Just be a little bit more open-minded. Did you ever think that there was a time where this wouldn't be something that you could overcome? Did you ever think this is going to be it forever? Oh, I was told that all the time. And I had to accept that as a possibility because

all probabilities were that I was never going to recover. And not only that, but it was getting, it was progressing. So, you know, I was staring down the barrel, so to speak, of not being able to use my lower body or my right arm and the right side of my the rest of the right side of my body and not also being able to use my brain I mean I my vision was affected my ability to to bring together patterns and see information and like read words was affected as a writer that was pretty hard so it's not like I was just lying in bed going like well I'll just lie in bed and write books. And, you know, I actually couldn't retain things in the same way or work the same way for some of that time, not all of it. Going back to something that you mentioned at the

very start, which was around, you have had a very visible illness and a very visible disability and then an invisible disability. How did you find people treat you differently between the two and people's perspectives around disability? That's a huge topic. One of the challenges with an invisible disability is that people are going to dismiss or ignore your needs, because we have a society that's built around, you know, I'm going to say able bodied, it's a problematic term, but the non disabled life, it's also built around non disabled life of a certain age group. So we all become disabled. I think it's like 51% of people over 65 have a disability. We ignore them and their needs and we kind of also ignore women and their needs and mothers because actually they

also need accessibility there's prams there's little ones you know right so we've built our society physically and in terms of structure around essentially white men of a certain adult age group and kind of not kept in mind any of the other groups right so if you have an invisible disability you're you're sort of forced to and that includes like neurodiversity or other aspects that are you know not considered the norm and I'm doing the quotation where the air quotes here folks you are forced to work within that system that has not been designed to be friendly to the rhythms of your body your physical and mental needs right so you've already got that so as in someone with an invisible disability it's just like oh yeah I get tired too it's like no no fatigue

or chronic fatigue is a medical condition. It's different. But if I can put lipstick on, I look fine. You know, they don't understand that people's experiences are varied and our world is not really set up for that variance. Right. Then when you have a visible disability, then it's like now you're really well and truly on the outer. You know, you're not one of us anymore. So before you could kind of maybe cover the boy that takes a lot like masking takes a lot for people with neurodiversity. It's a lot of energy that's put into just trying to maintain a version of the status quo. And that also makes you sicker. You're spending a lot of energy and you're in more pain because you're trying to continue to do things like other people do. So there's a lot of complexity

there to be had around visible and invisible and the benefits and drawbacks of each. But I certainly noticed that when I was able to kind of like things that were unraveling massively when I was invisibly disabled once I was visibly disabled that was that was it I mean that was it it was like a it was like a distinct cut off and when I came out as disabled so I was asked are you a person with disability I'm like yes I am that was it I didn't get hired anymore and I wish you know I wish that wasn't the case and I know that there are people in the disability community right now listening to this going wait wait wait I work and I'm glad there are so many people with disabilities who are working and doing amazing stuff but the challenge is there

whether it is that they never get the opportunity in the first place or whether they have a health shift and i meet those people all the time because i get letters and messages and meet people on the street who have these experiences where they live their life a certain way and then they had a change of fate and that is all of us you know we are all pre-disabled actually statistically it just depends and how long we live. I would love to talk about your writing here because, I mean, you have so many aspects of your life that we could talk to you for hours about, but unfortunately we don't have that time. But you're an amazing writer, hugely acclaimed writer. You have been published in 19 countries, in 13 languages. You have bestsellers, including your first nonfiction

book, The Fictional Woman. Were you able to continue that journey of writing in the time that you were unwell and when you said before you were housebound and bedridden and I say that because you feel like okay well if there's going to be a time to write it's it's when I'm not being hired and stuck inside but maybe your disability didn't allow for that it's a really good question yes I was able to continue writing and I'm deeply grateful to my publishers for their patience because it took me longer and for that matter to my readers for their patience because it took me longer to complete my work. So during this period, Speaking Out came out around the time that I became injured, but I'd already written it. And then after that, I started the Billy Walker series.

So through the whole Billy Walker series, the main character is a kick-ass PI woman in the 1940s. There were PI women in the 1940s, by the way. And she's Sydney-based. And she has an assistant, Samuel Baker, who is a disabled war vet. So I'm in a way talking about ableism within a certain context. Because obviously, now that he's lost part of his hand to an Italian thermos bomb on the front lines, he's not of any use anymore to the army or to a lot of society. But he's working for Billy Walker. So they make a wonderful team. But throughout all of the writing of that series, I was grappling with varying degrees of disability, at one point severe disability. and again there's like a scale for that and you know with pain scales and disability scales like

I don't know how useful they are but again they give you some context so at one point I was severely disabled it meant that everything took longer it meant that it was very hard to kind of like find my words hold the whole book in my mind because my books are like a hundred thousand words or more and I hold them largely in my mind so I had to find new ways of working I started working in more like bite-sized little sections. So while I'm not someone who's neurodiverse in the sense of getting a diagnosis in that regard, I feel like there was like a neurological change that took place that I needed to adapt to, to make it possible for me to continue to do my work. And so I'm especially proud of those books. I've just finished my third Billy Walker novel,

which will come out next year. And The War Widow, the first one of those is coming out in the UK today. So I'm really proud of those books and the stories they tell. And it was harder. It was much, much harder to complete those works. And I'm very proud of them and proud of the extra layers that I'm able to add to it because my experience is now of so much variance in my life. And we can bring that to our work. We can bring that to storytelling. It's even when you say, describe the way in which you write and you say you know you hold an entire novel in your mind when you're dealing with pain and i think anyone who's even dealt with like a minuscule amount of pain in comparison you can't concentrate on anything else yeah so the thought that you're even able to still

break it down and approach these books in bite-sized portions is incredibly remarkable but going back to talking about these many iterations of taray moss when you very first started publishing and writing books people questioned whether you had actually written the books in the first place is almost disbelief that someone who is a beautiful model and that's their background could pivot to becoming such a prolific author. Not even almost, it was quite an overt actually. So when my first book came out in 1999 in Australia, there was like a little rumor campaign that came out like, oh, she couldn't have possibly written her own book because she's this model, right? Women can't write, they don't have brains.

beautiful and smart. I was in my twenties. I was blonde. I was a model. There were lots of stereotypes around all of those groups, put them together, not a novelist. Right. So that's how ridiculous our, our thinking is. We put people into boxes and, and stereotypes. And I had a few of those foisted onto me. So I ended up being dared to take a polygraph test to prove that I write my own books. Yes. You heard that right. A lie detector test. Was it from readers or critics? who was this criticism coming from it came through the media as well as in fact there's even an article like floating around in the Sydney Morning Herald about the attitude that you can see in the article is so extraordinary this kind of like oh she's written a novel has she well it'd be great

if I could you know get a nose job and be a model and write a book and you know write a book and stuff like this because I would have loved I was like what you know they would have loved to have had an aha moment where they're like told you she didn't do it she's no way she didn't do it exactly so in 2002 when my second novel came out I was dared by a journalist at the Australian newspaper to take a polygraph test and I I know I well this journalist was coming from a slightly different perspective she was actually like a feminist journo who was like you know let's flip the bird at these because she was hearing this all the time from people like put it to bed oh yeah you know like, and so she was like, no, let's, let's go for the science here. So, you know, I found myself

in a Melbourne hotel room with a retired police officer who usually a polygraph test suspected rapists and pedophiles. And I was a suspected author, you know, same, same. And I ended up with a 33 page report telling me, you know, guilty as charged. I'm a writer. And it was so bizarre for me because I'd been wanting to write my whole life. I'd been writing since I was 10 years old here I'd finally done it. It was hard. And you're proud of yourself. I was proud of myself. I was like, I wrote my first book. It became a bestseller. This should have been a really beautiful moment of celebration in my personal life. And instead, I felt like hunted and attacked and disbelieved. And to an extent, that polygraph test, as completely bizarre as it is that that

took place, was a gift. And it helped to break the cycle because it was like, yeah, we need to actually look at the stereotypes that work here and question our assumptions. But could you imagine, like, Ian Fleming or any, like, could you imagine any man having to prove that they wrote a book or they wrote a script or anything in their job? Never. And part of them probably are plagiarized. But that's the thing, right?

So many men are able to have these, like, almost like identity overhauls. They could be a model. Then they could be a businessman. Then they could be, you can jump around as a guy. Like no one's going to question your ability to be able to achieve the thing that you've done. They might, you know, you may get some questions around, or can they do it?

but once they've done it, it's not, well, did they do it or did they have someone, you know, cloaked up and ghostwriting? I'm sorry to say it, but modelling is a temporary occupation, like it is, and so work as a ballerina or whatever. So you do have to make a transition. When you're looking at a model, that is not their life. That is how they're paying their bills this weekend or whatever, you know, and paying their way through college was the classic

that most of the models I met were paying their way through their education. and the whole reason they're doing that job yeah like sure it looks glamorous on the outside you wouldn't keep doing it unless you needed to do it and you wouldn't need to do it if you didn't come from money so this idea that it's some like glamorous you know and then you're set up for life it just is not how it works for 99.999 percent of people who are photographed for fashion or beauty but it's so interesting because I know we just you just said Laura like men can jump between any occupations and do whatever they want to do right yes they can

but it's viewed differently whereas women women have to women have to continuously reinvent themselves to stay quote unquote relevant and we see that and we hear it a lot more because women in the public eye speaking out about it now we never used to speak about it and we never used to really understand it but you look at so many people in the public eye that are having to constantly reinvent themselves purely because they're a woman that feels like they have a bracket age bracket and then they're no longer relevant it's it's wild the disparity yeah look there's an invisibility over 40 and you know that that is a thing it's a it's a phenomenon for women specifically and it's being challenged and it's shifting and that's wonderful but I would also

say that some evolution has nothing to do with the way you're viewed on the outside and it's that kind of evolution that really interests me and it's sort of where I'm at now is more about the personal evolution and actually knowing that someone looking from the outside can have no idea what the F is going on with me because this evolution is a personal one. It's the stuff that happens on the inside that is really not a public thing in that way, you know? Well, speaking of that evolution, I mean, we started this conversation with you saying that you don't identify with who you used to be. What do you think is the biggest change for you? Dying, I think, was a big one. That was a fairly profound thing. So I had what I call mini NDEs. I had quite a number of them. So

NDEs are near-death experiences. There's a whole area of study on near-death experiences like Raymond Moody and that aspect. If you look up Raymond Moody's work, for example, so I had those types of experiences. So leaving my physical form, that tends to change you. How did that happen? Can you describe a bit more about that? Yeah. It's a huge topic, very hard to distill in this conversation. But what I will say is that when you have a near-death experience, or for me, I say a mini NDE because I wasn't on a surgeon's table and flatline that I'm aware of. It was through my experience of severe disability and severe pain that I had these experiences of death. And when you have an experience of death,

you recognize that you are not your physical body. You have a physical body, one to honor and cherish and love and live in, but you are in fact not just your physical body. So there's a big active debate out there, of course, about this quantum physicists arguing with other scientists about the nature of things or the nature of consciousness. And things are not decided. But my personal experience makes very clear that we are not our material bodies, that consciousness is non-local and that we continue after death. What about in your personal relationships? When you've gone through such a radical change in your personal life, how have your relationships shifted? Because I can only imagine that some people who knew you and loved you and maybe still do, I don't know

what the difference is, but like maybe there has been some people in your life who you're too different now to the person that they thought you were. How does that affect your relationships? Well, for me, the experience of disability showed me, I want to say who my true friends are, but I don't mean it in a harsh way. It's not actually throwing shade. It's acknowledging that we had a certain type of relationship. An aspect of me was the aspect that they connected with. When I no longer had that aspect, we didn't have a connection. And so they disappeared long before these other things went underway in my life. Now, the people who know me and are close to me and have been close to me through that experience, our relationships have grown stronger,

considerably stronger. And in terms of my personal close family relationships, now that I'm a healer, I'm actually able to do healing on them that's life-changing for them. I couldn't have done it when I was very sick, but that is part of my world now is that they have known me since, you know, whatever, 10 years. And now they're like, I'm doing a session with them and they're having, they're able to let go of things that they've been caring for a very long time. So it's a beautiful, beautiful thing and a privilege like doing Reiki on my dad. Yeah. What a connection, what a beautiful experience to be able to work with healing energy with

someone who raised you who loved you because you now have this new way of nurturing others it's very beautiful but yes shifts massive shifts but the shifts came mostly through disability as opposed to this spiritual side spiritual side for me is like it's very fluid i don't care what people believe mine isn't a religion it's not and i'm not saying this is the way or not the way it's very uh it's very fluid and open but there's a lot of possibility there for healing for connection and those connections are actually stronger than they were before you have been through many versions of your physical body and also of your own physical beauty and you know we've talked about and touched on this idea that women become more

invisible as they reach over the age of 40 you are incredibly beautiful but how do you view your beauty and also your physical body now versus how you would have viewed it when you were in your 20s or your early 30s oh wow I feel very comfortable in the skin that I'm in I appreciate my body for so many different things I feel lighter actually having healed through what I have been through and I'm toddler level enthusiastic about walking so just being able to do some basic things is like a real joy that I want to retain the rest of my life. How do I view my beauty? I don't know. It's weird. I got wrinkles. I look more like Maleficent every day. That is absolutely untrue. No, it actually is. Right? The similarity is hot.

Yeah, but she is. It's Angelina Jolie. It's like, she's a flex. Like if you want it to be a character at all I started I mean my daughter says she's 13 and she's like it's like you used to be Buffy and you became Maleficent and she's like they're both kind of great and I'm like I will take that that is a great compliment right but um but also I look a little more so just you know looking at myself from the outside I can accept that I look a little bit like a villain sometimes now because my hair is dark i'm a little bit like older and and that and it actually speaks back to like isn't this interesting that when a woman gets older she has to fit into a new stereotype maybe you've got good witch vibes happening now i've got good witch i've got i'm

in my villain era but my villain era is like as a healer that's weird so like what what am i a in two maybe uh maybe like shaking up the system i don't know i'm i breaking down the shackles threat i'm a threat well you would have been hanged in the 1700s i would have been hanged in the 1700s for witchcraft i would have been yeah very much seen as a threat because i'm a woman who owns property who speaks publicly who can write can write and who does healing work and these were all verboten in a major way but i have actually just kind of like noticed my own perception when I look and I go, gosh, I look more and more like a Disney villainess. I like that. I'll take it. But isn't it interesting that an older woman automatically either needs to fit

into the grandmotherly apple pie version or she becomes Cruella. I do not think you look or turn into anything like Cruella. But I think when, yeah, I think it's the dark features and the strikingness that you have maintained but i love it yes it's because that facial structure like the bones the cheekbones not many people have those except maleficent i'm just hiding my horns really well tara thank you so much for coming on the podcast today you are a force to be reckoned with absolutely you're so enlightening and intriguing and engaging and like i would love to see the report from the lie detector test just to prove that you did write that book yeah i know it's really questionable after another 14 of them but also just unapologetically you and it's such a

beautiful thing to see somebody speak so honestly and so boldly be yourself without the fear of how someone might interpret the things that you say I think that is like a beautiful takeaway that anyone who's listening to this apart from all the lessons that you've shared but seeing you be you and owning that space is really incredibly powerful my advice right now if anyone's asking You might not be asking for my advice, but if you are, I will say be as authentically, fully yourself as soon as you can in your life. It gets easier as you get older because people care less what you're doing. No, we're changing that narrative.

But be as authentically, fully yourself as you can as early as you can in your life, because that is why you're here. Yeah. Enjoy it. Guys, if you love the episode, please share it with your friends. you can hit us up on instagram life uncut podcast in the dms for your ask on cuts accidentally unfiltered you can share any stories with us we also have the facebook discussion group which with all the good juicy chats go down then we also have a youtube now you can go and watch us

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