When Excellence Is a Trauma Response

Musings of a Scientist | Dr Anneline Padayachee

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2025 — Looking in the Rear-View Mirror (and Refusing to Go Back)

2025

Looking back through the rear-view mirror, this year has been a riot.

Canada.
USA.
USA again.
Singapore.
South Africa.
Criss-crossing Australia.
A detour to the Northern Territory to learn about live export and step onto a $40-million animal cruise liner.
Perth is practically another country, right?

Different countries.
Different rooms.
Different audiences.

Same message.

Nutrition in context. Food Systems approach. Joining the dots to the complexity that is food and nutrition.

FYI:
- There is no hero food product.
- There is no hero nutrient.
- All nutrients matter — in the amounts the body needs to function optimally.
- And all foods matter — especially within the context of affordability, accessibility and culture.

Diet is so much more than nutrients.

It’s cost.
Affordability.
A full belly.
Disease prevention.
Disease treatment.
Disease development.

It’s pleasure.
Culture.
Food poisoning.

It’s flavour, taste, smell, history — and learning tried-and-tested recipes from my 89-year-old grandmother, who learned them from her mother, who learned them from her mother before her, en route from India to South Africa via a brutal stop of indentured servitude in Mauritius.

Food: where science, anthropology, economics, human behaviour — and hopefully humanity — collide.

From the outside, it looked like a dream year.
Big stages.
Repeat business.
Packed rooms.
Standing ovations.

The kind of success people assume equals nailing it.
Excellence.
At the cost of wellbeing.

Because behind closed doors: Panic attacks.
So many panic attacks.

They began on 9 January 2015 — the day I was king-hit.
By a woman who told me she didn’t want “black people in Australia.”

Her words. Not mine.
They never really stopped.

Sometimes they eased.
Then life would push down again — especially when I started rising.

That push looked like this:

Being called the diversity card — to my face.
Having my PhD reduced to a colour quota.
Being told people like me have “always had to work twice as hard”, so why would now be different?
Step up. Justify your existence. Or leave.
(The irony, when I did leave, my one role was split across 3.5 full-time positions.)
Sexual assault.
Being propositioned by a stranger who wanted to “try” a black woman and asked whether we were “the same as white women down there.”
Being taunted on public transport.
Being told to give up my seat because “white people shouldn’t stand while black people sit.”
Being pushed off a train platform — my body just missing the tracks, my laptop not so lucky.

In the last few years, it escalated:

A stalker in Melbourne.
Explicit threats of violence online.
Being punched in the head in broad daylight in Brisbane CBD, then threatened with a broken glass bottle.

That was the only time I fought back. Because my life was genuinely on the line.

Every incident was reported.
Every incident was quietly side-stepped.

Eventually, it became too much.

Recently, a psychiatrist asked me a question that stopped me cold:
“When did you first realise something wasn’t right about your skin colour?”

Five.

I had just arrived in Australia from South Africa.

My parents left apartheid because they wanted me to grow up without colour lines — to attend any school, live in any suburb, apply for any job, walk any street without fear of police or passes or being arrested for existing in the wrong place.

Freedom.
To just be human.

Australia was where I first heard the word nigger.
Where my skin was described as “black.”
Where children were too scared to touch me because they thought they’d “catch it.”

Prep to Grade 3 — not a single friend.

What did the teachers do?
Nothing.

What did my parents do?

They told me to stand up for myself.

At five years old.

So I did what five-year-old me knew how to do.
I pushed my way into classrooms.
I dominated academically.
I topped exams.

I proved my worth.
(“Proved my worth” — what a terrible sentence to write.)

Because that became the pattern.

Achievement as armour.
Excellence as survival.
Outputs as proof I deserved to exist.

In many ways, everything I’ve ever done — professionally, publicly — has been an attempt to say: Me too. I matter. I belong.

That conditioning took me to extraordinary heights of achievement — and to devastating depths of self-worth.

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I didn’t lose who I was.
I never had the safety to find her.

For most people, a captive audience sounds like the goal.

People leaning in.
Listening.
Nodding.
Taking photos of your slides.

Proof you’re an expert.
Proof you know your stuff.
Proof you have something of value to offer.
Proof you have arrived in the world.

For me, it’s never been that simple.

Standing on a stage is split down the middle.

One half is performance — delivering, explaining, translating complexity into clarity.
The other half is something else entirely.

Proving I am equal.
Proving I am worthy.
Proving I belong in the room before I’m even allowed to speak.

And layered through all of it is hypervigilance.

Not for disagreement — disagreement is healthy.
But for hate.

For the person who doesn’t just disagree with my ideas, but resents my existence.
The person whose problem isn’t my science, my competence, or my credibility — but my skin.

I am always scanning.

Who is safe?
Who is dangerous?
Who sees me as a peer — and who sees me as subordinate?
Who is listening — and who is waiting?

I told my dad recently something I’ve never said out loud before:

I hate being brown. I wish I had been born white.

Not because I don’t value my heritage — but because white people in general have no idea what it’s like to move through the world without this constant calculation.

They don’t have to wonder whether praise is real — or conditional.
They don’t have to pre-assess every room.
They don’t have to decode intent before conversation.
They don’t have to work out who might harm them, undermine them, use them, or erase them.

I hate what being brown has required of my nervous system.

The vigilance.
The readiness.
The knowledge that visibility is never neutral.

That cost doesn’t show up in bios, speaker reels, or LinkedIn metrics.

But it lives in the body.

I read the social media posts of colleagues.

The highlight reels.

X conferences.
Y media features.
Featured here. Quoted there.
Already excited for even more next year.

And I look at my own highlight reel.
Yes, it’s glowing too.
But the cost for me has never been neutral.

For me, visibility carries a tax that doesn’t show up in metrics — a tax that can include panic, fear, hypervigilance, and at its worst, genuine threat to my life.
That’s the part no one sees.

So yes — in a strange, uncomfortable way, it bugs me.
It triggers me. Not because others are succeeding — success is not a zero-sum game — but because the price of success is not evenly distributed.

How is it fair that for some people, visibility is energising — and for others, it’s dangerous? How does that make sense? It doesn’t.

Historically, people with dark skin were positioned as subordinates — not because of merit, but because systems were built that way. That legacy doesn’t vanish just because laws change or diversity statements exist.

Most people are decent.
But it only takes a few — a handful of human grubs — to poison entire environments.

When you’ve lived long enough knowing that some people don’t just dislike your ideas, but resent your existence, your body learns a different rule:

Success is not always safe.

That injustice sits deep.

Not as jealousy.
Not as bitterness.

But as grief — and anger — that excellence can be celebrated in one body and punished in another. Because it comes wrapped up in different coloured skin.

On 3 December 2025, with two boxes of medication and no desire to see the next day, I tried to end my life.
In the haze, I called my dad to say goodnight.
I said goodbye instead.
Something in him knew.
He drove straight to my house.
Dragged me into his car semi-conscious.
Didn’t wait for an ambulance.

I am alive because of him. Again.

Since then, it’s been a long, unglamorous road — fighting demons from every version of me that ever learned survival the hard way.

For others, visibility is aspirational.
For me, every platform has also been exposure.

Another place to be found.
Another place to be targeted.

So I tried to make myself small.
To disappear just enough to stay safe.

The demons nearly won.
The haters nearly won.

But this time, something is different.

I have an exceptional psychiatrist.
A brilliant exercise physiologist.
A solid psychology team.

And when I return — it will be on my terms.

What does “Dr Anneline” of 2026 and beyond look like?

Honestly?
I don’t know.

But I know this:

I am no longer confusing survival with success.
I am no longer trading my nervous system for validation.
And I am no longer making myself small to fit anyone else’s comfort.

But whoever I am — wherever I am —
I am done paying with my life for other people’s denial.

Let’s do this.