It was 2017. Peak Australian summer. I was at Kapooka — the Australian Army Recruit Training Centre — and I had 72 days ahead of me that I hadn't fully prepared for. Nobody fully prepares for Kapooka. You think you do. You don't.

The heat was relentless. The days started before the sun came up and ended long after it went down. Every single day someone was pushing you — physically, mentally, emotionally — to find out what you were actually made of. Most of the time I wasn't sure I was made of enough.

And then there was the stutter.

I've stuttered my whole life. In normal life you find workarounds — you pause, you rephrase, you take a breath. At Kapooka there are no workarounds. When a corporal screams at you and demands a response, you respond. Immediately. Clearly. Loudly. My stutter got worse under that pressure, not better. Words that usually came out rough came out worse. And people noticed.

"People made fun of me. That's the honest truth. Not everyone — but some. And when you're already exhausted and pushed to your limit, that stuff lands differently."

I cried. I'm not ashamed to say that. There were nights where I lay in my bunk asking myself why I'd done this. What I was trying to prove. Whether any of it was worth it. I thought about quitting more than once. The option was always there.

But here's what kept me going. I had one image in my head. Just one. Me, finishing. Me, walking out of Kapooka having done it. Not a promotion. Not a medal. Not anyone's approval. Just the simple fact of finishing something that was hard. That image was the only thing I held onto on the worst days.

So I changed what I could control. When I couldn't control the heat, I controlled my preparation. When I couldn't control the stutter, I controlled my effort. When I couldn't control what people said, I controlled whether I showed up the next morning. And I always showed up.

"72 days later, I walked out. Not the loudest. Not the fastest. But I walked out."

Here's what Kapooka actually taught me — and I mean really taught me, not the kind of lesson you put on a LinkedIn post:

You will feel like giving up. In work. In relationships. In life. There will be moments where everything in you says stop. That feeling is not a sign you're weak. It's a sign you're in the middle of something hard. The middle always feels like failure. It's not.

When you hit that wall — don't give up, change your strategy. Reflect on what's working and what isn't. Adapt. The goal doesn't have to change. The path to it can. Life is not a fairytale and it never will be. But things can get better if you decide you want to make them better.

You need a bit of luck along the way. Everyone does. But your mindset is the only thing that puts you in a position where luck can actually find you. You can't control when the door opens. You can control whether you're still standing in front of it when it does.

I survived Kapooka with a stutter, in peak Australian summer, at 72 days.
Whatever you're facing right now — you can survive that too.

Keep going. Change the strategy if you need to. But keep going.