The year was 2015 — a good eight months after 99dresses went down. I was out for my daily jog around town, finishing up on Princess Street — the cute little road where I grew up. When I was in primary school, my brothers and I used to step off the afternoon bus, place our backpacks over our heads, cover our eyes, and run as fast as we could back home. Within a few seconds, the magpies — black and white birds with sharp beaks — would drop down from the neighboring trees and aggressively swoop at our shields like angry little dragons. We'd make it to safety, slam the door shut, and do it again the next day. Dodging angry magpies was a quintessentially Australian game.
There were no magpies to worry about on this particular day, over a decade later. The passage was safe in the summertime and only turned treacherous for a few months in the spring. After sleeping in a windowless room in New York, I couldn't get enough of the sunshine.
That's what my days back home consisted of: sunshine, writing code, reading and re-reading The Holographic Universe and Conversations With God, thinking, dreaming, exploring new ideas.
Every night at the dinner table my father would ask, "Nikki, how did you enrich your life today?" There were only two answers that he didn't playfully mock: "I learned this and this and this," or "I worked." He'd just spent ten hours operating on eyeballs to put food on the table and a beautiful roof over my head. If I wasn't learning or working, then I felt like an entitled millennial mooching off her parents.
You see, both of my parents were highly educated, and they'd built a secure and stable kingdom together as partners in the game. That was their value system: education and work ethic. Sacrifice today so you can enjoy a life of security and stability in two decades.
They drilled two financial lessons into us children:
- Don't borrow money to buy a liability like a car or a holiday. If you can't pay cash for it, then you haven't earned it. Only borrow money to buy assets that accrue in value.
- Don't get into a career where you're paid for your time. The amount of money you earn is limited by the number of hours in the day.
That second point was ironic, given how hard my father and mother worked. My parents owned their own medical practice and a portfolio of properties. Dad operated on eyeballs; Mum was the businesswoman who managed their affairs.
During my time living with them, I'd open the french doors to the second-floor balcony every morning. I'd sit there, drinking coffee and thinking. I was surrounded by the luscious fruits of their labor — singing birds, blue skies, green gardens full of hedges and flowers, and a little cumquat tree.
Zac always joked that I was a Disney princess with a perfect Disney family. One time, Bryce, Pandora, Zac and I dropped in on my parents as we were driving down south. I told Mum not to make a fuss because we couldn't stay long, but she and Dad prepared a big barbeque feast anyway. We sat at the table, and Mum asked Bryce about the startup he was working on. She could talk shop with him all night — about product, fundraising, teams. Bryce left that dinner saying, "My mother barely knows what I do. You're so lucky, Nikki."
I knew that. Mum and I were close. We'd sit on the balcony together in the morning, having long mother-daughter chats.
I learned a lot about her during that time when I was 23 years old — the time when I had no school homework or business things to attend to. My mother had created a beautiful life for herself, but it didn't come without sacrifice. She'd earned multiple degrees and had big plans to use her skills in the real world. Then she fell in love and married my father.
Dad was just starting his career as an ophthalmologist after years and years of study and training. The competition was fierce in big cities, but there were no ophthalmologists in regional areas of Australia. My parents packed up their life in Sydney, moved to a country town, set up a little practice, and were booked out on day one.
Mum dreamed of building a big medical center for the local community. She and Dad purchased the perfect building for the project, convinced some other doctors to move down from the city, and were subsequently betrayed by them. I saw my parents go through it multiple times. I saw mercenaries trample their kindness and generosity, use them, and then dispose of them when they got what they wanted.
Dad is a gentle soul, and he didn't want to work with other doctors after that. He hated the drama. He just wanted to take care of his patients, provide for his family, and have a peaceful life.
My mother had four children and a husband to support. She continued running their little ophthalmology practice — but it wasn't the big medical center she dreamed of building. She felt stifled; like her potential wasn't being realized in a small country town. Her degrees were pretty pieces of paper on the wall. Everything she learned came in handy, but her skills and knowledge were never fully put into practice. Her soul never realized that concept of Self.
Over the years, her entrepreneurial ambitions faded. She stopped fighting her fate and accepted her role as teammate and supporter. She created a beautiful family, a beautiful home, a beautiful marriage, a Disney life — but she lost a part of herself in the process.
That's why my mother lived vicariously through my entrepreneurial projects. She always wanted to talk about them, to brainstorm ideas, to discuss everything, all the time. There came a point in 99dresses where I said, "Whenever I talk to you, you want to help fix my problems. You're watching this business from the sidelines, but you're not getting beaten up in the trenches every day like I am. I'm tired and overwhelmed. I don't want to call you up and talk business. I just need you to be my mother right now."
She backed off after that. It broke my heart. Maybe if I'd let her help me, 99dresses wouldn't have failed. Maybe I wouldn't have been standing there on Princess Street, rejoicing at the lack of magpies in my wake. Maybe everything would've turned out differently.
Or maybe not.
A few weeks prior to that daily jog, I'd been scrolling through Pinterest. An image popped up that captured my imagination. It was a photo of a little bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare & Company, full of mismatched books and wooden ladders resting against shelves.
It looked so magical.
Oh, how I wanted to experience something magical again — the kind of magic I used to thrive on as an entrepreneur. Building tech products was the closest thing I'd ever experienced to the kind of sorcery I'd read about in works of fiction.
I decided, then and there, that I was going to visit that bookshop in the next twelve months. I'd already deduced that reality was a non-dual paradigm, but I still hadn't figured out how to control the game. I had a hypothesis, though, and this was the perfect opportunity to test it.
I devised an experiment. I was going to convince my mind — my internal model of reality — that I was in Paris.
So that's how I found myself jogging through my quaint hometown, projecting holographic images of cafe-lined Parisian streets onto my surroundings. I could look up and see the Eiffel tower in the sky. As I ran past Australian dairy cows and horses, I soaked up the French ambiance in my mind.
I began studying French on Duolingo. Every day I'd spend fifteen minutes learning new vocabulary in preparation for my impending trip.
I'd close my eyes and run my fingers along the books in that Parisian bookshop, as if I were right there, in the room.
After a few days of my experiment, I began seeing French things everywhere. My ego called it confirmation bias. Perhaps it was. Yet I distinctly remember saying to my mother, "I have a feeling I'm going to France this year." She'd smiled and said, "That's nice, Nikki," knowing full well that I couldn't afford it. I hadn't worked since 99dresses went down, except for tiny little contracts when I visited Sydney for a few days.
A couple of months went by. I stuck with the experiment.
And then it happened: a man I'd never met before tagged me in a tweet.
Toulouse, I thought. Where's that?
I performed a quick google search and nearly spilled my coffee. Toulouse was in France. Of all the places in the world, I'd been invited to speak at a conference in France.
Seven weeks later, I was physically standing in Shakespeare & Company — the little Parisian bookshop from Pinterest. I ran my hands along the spines of the external books — just like I'd done internally in my mind a few months earlier. I laced up my sneakers and wandered through the streets of Paris in real life, revisiting a place my consciousness had already been. It felt like my imagination had somehow leaked into physical reality.
The trip to Toulouse nourished my soul. It was the beginning of summer, and I experienced the very best of French hospitality. Wine and cheese were as abundant and free-flowing as laughter and fun. On my second night, I met a group of entrepreneurs that I clicked with. We spent the rest of the week dancing together in little Toulouse nightclubs, talking until four in the morning on the steps of gurgling fountains, picnicking by the river, enjoying the beautiful sounds of Fête de la Musique on the cobbled streets.
I flew to Paris after Toulouse and spent ten days aimlessly wandering around the city. I sat by myself in Parisian cafes, and at my solo baguette-and-brie-fuelled picnics, re-reading Harry Potter books like I was a child again — starting with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. On that trip, I rediscovered something I intuitively knew but had somehow forgotten: magic.
I loved JK Rowling's writing — particularly how the final book tied together all the little loose strings and hidden clues throughout the entire series. The ending changed my perspective on the whole journey. The dots all connected looking backward.
I'd love to write a story like that one day, I thought as I lay in bed, reading. But I probably won't. Creative fiction isn't my forte. I prefer writing from personal experience.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Benjamin was the CEO of the company that flew me out to speak at the conference. He'd taken a few days off work to show myself and the other international speaker around.
We were eating cheese and melons at his friend's place, which was stacked high with old records and vintage guitars. Benjamin was telling me about the startup scene in Toulouse — in particular, the French Tech Ticket program he was involved in. I'd just spent the last hour playing with his friend's five-year-old son, Nemo, who spoke no English.
Nemo was so shy and so adorable. Once I'd earned his trust, we played hide and seek as I chased him around the little apartment. He'd run and duck and giggle and talk to me in French. I couldn't understand his words, but we spoke the same language of laughter and fun. Afterward, we sat on the couch and he read me a story about a moon from a French picture book — La Lune.
At one point, I was kneeling on the ground to get to his eye level. The little boy tilted his head to the side and looked at me with those big, innocent eyes. He turned to his father and pulled at his hand before asking him something in French.
Benjamin burst out laughing.
"What" I asked.
Nemo stared at me in wonder.
"He just asked if you were the Queen."
I chuckled. How odd. For some reason, Nemo's question seared itself into the archive of my memory with an asterisk placed next to it: *refer back later. Maybe it was the way the boy looked at me. Or maybe it was the sharp bolt of energy entering the nape of my neck and running down my spine — a sensation that often occurred when I received one of my eerie intuitive hits.
I looked up at Benjamin. "Just tell him I grew up in a little Australian town on Princess Street, so I was always destined to be a queen one day."
Nemo didn't understand what was happening. He just looked at me again, as if he saw right through me. "Es-tu la Reine?" he asked. Are you the Queen?
So go ahead now. Ask Me anything. Anything. I will contrive to bring you the answer. The whole universe will I use to do this. So be on the lookout. This book is far from My only tool. You may ask a question, then put this book down. But watch. Listen. The words to the next song you hear. The information in the next article you read. The story line of the next movie you watch. The chance utterance of the next person you meet. Or the whisper of the next river, the next ocean, the next breeze that caresses your ear — all these devices are Mine; all these avenues are open to Me.
The Oracle: So, what do you think? Do you think you are The One?
Neo: Honestly, I don't know.
The Oracle: You know what that means? It's Latin. It means "Know Thyself."
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Being The One is just like being in love. No one can tell you you're in love. You just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.