Two days after my birthday
Collapsed in despair on my kitchen floor two days after my 31st birthday. A phone call from my mother-in-law that my husband Brian had died by suicide meant that the version of my life that I thought I was living stopped existing.
My birthday now sits permanently in the two days before everything changed, and nothing about that is something you get used to. There aren’t words that accurately describe what that kind of loss does to a person, so I’m not going to try to find them. What I can tell you is what I did next, because that’s the part that eventually became my turning point.
In the months that followed, I faced a choice that I didn’t even recognise as a choice at the time. I could disappear into the grief, or I could decide, deliberately and daily, to stay in the world and build something from what was left. Eventually, after a lot of very hard days, that’s what I chose to do.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment
Here’s the thing about turning points that nobody tells you: they don’t always look like a lightning bolt from the sky. Mine didn’t. My turning point looked like getting out of bed on the days I didn’t want to, eating something when food felt pointless and going for a walk when my body felt like it was made of concrete. It was quiet and hard and it required a decision I had to keep making, over and over again, before it ever started to feel like anything other than survival.
I’d been teaching group fitness before Brian died, so movement was already part of my world, but in the aftermath of losing him, I threw myself into bodybuilding and bikini shows. Not because I wanted a trophy, but because I desperately needed somewhere to put all of that pain, and training gave me structure when everything else had completely collapsed. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also developing orthorexia along the way, tying my worth so tightly to my body in ways that were quietly doing a lot of damage.
It was only when I came out the other side of that world, eventually becoming a personal trainer because of everything I’d learned about myself through it, that I could see how much I’d been running from the grief rather than actually through it. Grief has a way of stripping everything back, and what I found underneath wasn’t broken. It was just real, and real, it turned out, was something I could actually work with.
What I built from the wreckage
I remarried. I sold a business. I wrote a book called Get The F*ck Unstuck!, became a professional motivational speaker and lifestyle coach, and built an online coaching community called The Mojo Dojo where I work with people, mostly women over 40, who are exhausted by toxic wellness culture and just want to feel like themselves again.
None of that would exist if I hadn’t made that quiet, unglamorous, deeply human decision to stay. The version of me who runs a business with four staff and speaks at events across Australia was built, brick by brick, on top of the version of me who chose to get out of bed on the worst morning of her life.
What I know now that I didn’t know then
Resilience isn’t a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a practice, and sometimes it’s a very boring and unglamorous one. Your turning point doesn’t need to be the moment you became strong. It can be the moment you stopped pretending to be okay and finally asked for help, or the moment you admitted that the life you were living wasn’t the one you actually wanted. It can be small and private, witnessed by absolutely nobody, and still count as the moment everything changed.
The people who’ve sat across from me in coaching sessions or in my audiences and told me they feel completely stuck aren’t stuck because they’re weak – they’re stuck because nobody ever taught them that they were allowed to choose differently and that choosing differently doesn’t have to look heroic to be life-changing.
You don’t need a perfect story
If you’re reading this and you’re in the middle of your own mess right now, I want you to know that your turning point doesn’t have to be behind you yet. It might be today. It might be the moment you finish reading this and decide that something, however small, is going to shift. You don’t need a polished redemption arc or a before-and-after photo. You just need to make the next right decision, and then the one after that.
That’s still how I do it, one decision at a time. The kitchen floor feels like a lifetime ago, and in a lot of ways it is, but I’m deeply grateful for the version of me who chose to get up off it, because she’s the one who built everything that came after.
What was the moment that quietly changed everything for you, and did you recognise it as a turning point at the time?
By Loz Antonenko
About the author
Loz Antonenko is a motivational speaker, lifestyle and nutrition coach, personal trainer and author of Get The F*ck Unstuck! Based in Queensland, Australia, she’s known as The Mojo Mentor and works primarily with women over 40 who are ready to ditch toxic wellness culture and build sustainable, feel-good habits. Loz is the founder of Loz Life and The Mojo Method and has been recognised as AUSactive Australian Personal Trainer of the Year and former Ipswich Business Person of the Year. She speaks at events across Australia on resilience, habit change and living well without the rules. You can find her at lozlife.com and on social media at @lozantonenko.
