Nic Robertson

Built a world. Lost it all. Finding out what’s underneath.

The illness was already there before any of it. Twenty years of chronic fatigue, autoimmune patterns, a body that never quite worked the way it should.

I was a sworn perfectionist with much to prove and more to hide. Terrified of the rooms I was about to walk into, and quite good at not showing it.

So I buried it all. Scaled an agency group to $10M across eight countries, hired hundreds of people, learned to hold a boardroom – and pretended I wasn’t falling apart.

I was. The business wound down, bankruptcy followed, and the body got its turn to speak. Without anything left to perform, the question finally landed.

For years, the answer had been whoever the drinking and the drugs would let me be. Now came the real work.

Peruvian shamans and ayahuasca. Acupuncture, ice baths, hypnosis, energy healing, somatic work. Countless hours cross-legged, watching my thoughts from the living room floor.

And the ocean, the one teacher who stuck with me through it all.

Somewhere in it, a discovery arrived that reframed everything I’d spent a lifetime fighting. Not broken at all. Just built different.

Music found me again too – the guitar and late-night studio sessions of my youth, making way for afternoons of flute and didgeridoo in the park.

But the deeper return was finding my voice. Not the one I used to fill rooms with. The one underneath.

Fifteen years of strategy and creative production, and twenty of the other kind of work. What I do with it now is fairly simple. I see the story someone’s telling, and the one they’re living. The work happens in the gap.