Later in Life

For two years, Dina's life revolved around trying to prevent her next flare-up. Living with chronic hives and food intolerances, she had eliminated nearly everything from her diet, spent thousands searching for answers, and slowly stopped participating in her own life. Then she came across one phrase that changed everything: Stop chasing safety. In this episode of Inside My Journey , Dina joins Ja...

For four years, Carly Banks lived with long COVID, chronic fatigue, histamine intolerance, food reactions, and an increasingly restricted diet. She had seen specialists, tried medications and supplements, explored brain retraining, and repeatedly attempted to reintroduce foods—only to find herself right back in fear when symptoms appeared. Then something shifted. After finding our work, Carly stop...

In this episode of Later in Life , Tori opens up about her experience with bipolar disorder and the questions she has started asking after learning how to recognize patterns, observe internal states, and change her relationship with symptoms. After years of being told bipolar is something she would have to manage for life through medication, restriction, and avoidance, Tori is beginning a differen...

Kelly had spent decades doing the work. Therapy. Trauma healing. Recovery. Spiritual practices. Nervous system work. Then chronic illness changed her life almost overnight. In this episode of Later in Life , we sit down with Kelly O’Melia to talk about what happened when she began applying self-safety and the Recognition Framework not only to her physical symptoms, but to the emotional patterns sh...

We’re back — and a lot has happened. In this episode of Later in Life, we catch up on getting married, our chaotic adventure wedding, adjusting to life in Canada, and the very different ways we each move through the world. From hiking in wedding shoes and culture shock to self-safety, relationships, chronic illness, nervous system healing, and learning to trust your own lived experience, this conv...

We’re getting married—so we decided to put our relationship under the microscope with a completely unplanned wedding Q&A. In this episode, we talk about who fell first, who said “I love you” first, what surprised us about living together, the biggest differences between us, and why our relationship moved much more slowly than people assume. We also get into the parts of our relationship that a...

What if love is not asking someone to change so you can feel better? In this episode, we talk about why we rarely experience conflict, even when we disagree. Not because we avoid hard conversations, but because neither of us needs to control the other person’s perspective, behaviour, emotions, or healing. Tori shares what it was like to be in relationships where people were waiting for her to get...

Last week, Tori shared how she changed her relationship with her symptoms—and how that changed everything. This week, we're talking about what happened next. No one prepares you for the moment survival ends. The burnout that follows. The grief. The boredom. The uncomfortable realization that your worth may have been tied to productivity for years. Or that the life you built around staying safe...

For six years, Tori believed she was doing everything she could to stay safe. She was diagnosed with MCAS and CIRS, survived on one food, carried EpiPens everywhere, sold her house, sold her car, avoided restaurants, and slowly watched her world become smaller. She wasn't just living with symptoms. She was organizing her entire life around avoiding them. In this episode, we share the moment ev...

One of the strange things about loving someone is that sometimes you get a front-row seat to their healing. Not the Instagram version. The real version. The setbacks. The accommodations. The fear. The determination. The tiny victories that nobody else understands. This week on Later in Life, we talk about our trip to Toronto, Tori's first hotel stay in six years, the challenge of navigating severe...

What do mattresses, chemical sensitivities, friendship, and getting engaged have in common? Apparently... us. In this episode, we share the continuing mattress saga (yes, there are more mattresses), the story behind our engagement, and why our friendship became the foundation for everything that followed. We talk about what it felt like to "just know," moving quickly without feeling rushed, naviga...

This week on Later in Life, we finally tell the story of how we met. What started as a coaching call turned into a two-year friendship, daily conversations, voice memos, songs, album releases, failed attempts to create distance, and two people having completely different experiences of the same connection. In this episode, Tori shares what was happening behind the scenes long before Jackie realize...

This week on Later in Life, we attempt to solve a mattress crisis caused by chronic illness, detergent allergies, a crumbling 15-year-old bed, and what can only be described as lesbian survival mode. What starts as a simple Marketplace inquiry quickly turns into U-Hauls, plastic-wrapped mattresses, emergency cleaning missions, asthma attacks, and an unexpectedly emotional conversation about patien...

Welcome to the first episode of Later in Life. What started as a plan to tell our relationship story quickly turned into a conversation about the absolute chaos of our Mother’s Day weekend — losing the cat, meeting the parents, accidental allergic reactions, emergency room visits, cuddle alarms, laundry detergent wars, and what it actually looks like to build a relationship later in life. This epi...