She behind Chi. – the deep dive
The first piece introduced us to Rae Nimmo – communicator, creative, founder of Chi. Connects. This is the rest of it. The part that doesn’t fit neatly into a founder story. The part that matters most.
There’s a version of your story that is very polished. Successful career, came home, built something. But that isn’t the whole picture, is it.
No. Not even close.
The polished version leaves out the years where I was genuinely not okay. Where I wasn’t building anything – I was just trying to stay upright. There were periods of my life that were so heavy I’m still amazed I got through them.
I think it’s important to say that out loud. Because women in this region – women everywhere – are carrying things that nobody can see, and they’re doing it while showing up for everyone else. I was one of them for a long time. In some ways I still am.
What was the hardest period?
2020. Without question.
My Dad passed away that year. We’re an extremely tight knit family – and he was a constant. A quiet, steady presence that I didn’t fully understand the weight of until he was gone. Grief like that doesn’t arrive all at once. It keeps finding you in unexpected moments, months and years later, in the middle of ordinary days.
In the same window of time, I lost a court case I had been fighting for years. A long, exhausting, deeply personal legal battle that had taken so much from me – financially, emotionally, mentally. Losing it felt like the floor giving way.
I had a breakdown. A real one. Not a burnout, not a rough patch. A breakdown. The kind where you look around at your life and you genuinely don’t know how you got there or how you get out.
I had my son. I had responsibilities. I had to keep going. But I was starting from below ground zero. Not rebuilding. Just trying to find the ground first.
What did that actually look like, day to day?
Getting through. That was it. That was the whole goal.
Some days getting through meant doing the school run and coming home and sitting on the floor and not moving for an hour. Some days it meant doing everything that needed doing and feeling absolutely nothing while I did it.
I’m a high functioning person, which is both a gift and a trap. I can appear completely fine while something inside is fracturing. I’ve done it for years. A lot of women have. We’re very good at it.
What I remember most from that period is the silence of it. Nobody really knew how bad it was. I didn’t have the language for it, and even if I had, I’m not sure I would have used it.
You mentioned imposter syndrome. But it sounds like it goes deeper than that.
Imposter syndrome is the polite version. What I’ve wrestled with my whole life is something messier than that. A constant hum in the background that asks whether I’m enough, whether what I’m doing matters, whether I have the right to take up space with my ideas and my ambitions.
I’ve always known there was more in me. I’ve always felt it – this pull toward something bigger, something meaningful, something that was actually mine. But knowing that and trusting it are very different things.
Grief does something to that. Loss does something to it. When everything falls apart in the same year, the voice that already doubts you gets very loud.
There’s something else you wanted to talk about. Someone.
Yes.
I lost a close friend when I was in my early twenties. She took her own life after a long battle with her mental health.
I’ve thought about her so many times over the years. Watched her struggle from close range and not fully understood what I was seeing. Not known what to do with it or how to help. She was one of those people who was so full of life when she was well – funny and warm and the kind of person who lit up a room. And then there were the other times. The times when she was somewhere the rest of us could not reach.
Losing her the way we did left a particular kind of mark. Not just grief – though it was that too. Something more like a question that never fully goes away. What did I miss? What could have been different? What does it mean to really see someone?
I think about that question a lot in the context of Chi. Connects. About what it means to build a space where women feel genuinely seen. Where someone having a hard time can find a story that sounds like hers, or a community that doesn’t require her to perform okayness to belong.
She is part of why this matters to me.
Single parenting sits across all of this too.
It does. And I think it’s one of the most invisible kinds of hard.
There is no switching off. There is no handing it to someone else when you are depleted. There is no sick day. You are the emotional anchor, the logistics manager, the income earner, the cook, the homework helper, the person who stays calm when everything is not calm – all of it, all the time.
I love my son more than anything I have ever loved. But solo parenting while also grieving, while also fighting a legal battle, while also trying to hold a career together – that combination nearly broke me. Some days it did break me. And then I got up the next day and did it again.
What I’ve learned is that asking for help is not weakness. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that. I am still learning it.
You talk about questioning why we’re here. That’s a big thing to carry.
I think a lot of people carry it privately and never say it out loud because it sounds either dramatic or ungrateful.
I’m not someone who has ever been satisfied with going through the motions. I need to feel like what I’m doing means something. When I lost that sense of purpose, I lost my sense of direction completely.
The question of why we’re here isn’t a crisis for me now. It’s more like a compass. It’s what led me to Chi. Connects. It’s what makes me work late into the night on something that has no guarantee of success. It’s the thing underneath the thing.
I think that question – what’s the point of all this? – is actually one of the most important questions a person can ask. The mistake is being afraid of it.
What pulled you back up?
Time. Therapy, which I’m a complete advocate for and which I think more women should access without shame. My village, the family and friends who showed up in the small ways that mattered more than they probably knew. My son, who needed me to be okay and whose existence gave the days a shape when I’d lost my own. Small things that started to feel meaningful again – a creative project, a conversation, a moment outside where the light was good and the world felt briefly manageable.
And anger. At the circumstances, at the things I’d lost, at the voice in my head that kept telling me I wasn’t enough. At some point that anger became fuel.
I’m not the same person I was before 2020. I’m not trying to be. The version of me that came out the other side is harder and, I think, more real.
What do you want women reading this to take from it?
That the hard years do not disqualify you. They build you.
That falling apart is not the opposite of having it together. Sometimes it’s the necessary step before you can build something that actually holds.
“That the things you have survived – the losses, the failures, the quiet breakdowns nobody saw – those aren’t things to hide from your story. They are your story.”
One last question. What does rebuilding actually feel like, from the inside?
It feels like Chi. Connects.
It feels like deciding that the thing you’ve always known was in you deserves a chance. Like choosing to build something for other women partly because you needed it yourself and it didn’t exist.
It feels like being scared and doing it anyway.
It feels like the Central West on a clear morning – a bit raw, properly beautiful, and more than enough.
