My Story
I didn't come to wellness
through textbooks.
I came to it through necessity — through years of standing by the people I love, through a body that eventually said enough, and through a quiet conviction that the science most people need most is the science nobody has explained to them clearly.
Stephanie Moore
Publisher · The Practical Wellness & MyMindGym™ Series
10 min read · Personal
My family came to Perth from Malta in 1975. I grew up in a household shaped by that particular migrant experience — warmth, practicality, loyalty, and a deep understanding that life requires you to be tougher than you feel on any given day. I didn't know then how much I would need that toughness. Or how many times it would be tested.
There has always been a cat in my life. Possibly several. People who know me well joke about it — the "crazy cat lady" label has followed me for years, and honestly, I've stopped arguing with it. But those who know me well also know that my cats have never been just pets. They have been anchors. Small, purring, utterly indifferent-to-your-problems anchors — which is precisely why they work.
"You learn a particular kind of resilience when you love someone through their darkest years. You also learn that the body keeps the score — and eventually, it will present the bill."
Ten Years of Standing Still
My husband faced a devastating blow early in his career — the kind of professional heartache that doesn't just wound your ego, it reshapes your sense of who you are. What followed were ten years of depression. Not the kind that announces itself dramatically, but the slow, grinding kind that quietly changes everything: the energy in a room, the plans you stop making, the version of your future that gets quietly set aside.
I stayed. Of course I stayed. But I want to be honest about what staying looks like from the inside — because it is not simply a decision you make once. It is a decision you remake every day. Some days it is easy. Many days it is not. You become a person who learns to carry things quietly, to regulate your own distress so that you have enough steadiness left for someone else. You get very good at functioning. You get less good at noticing when your own foundation is starting to crack.
During those years, my cats were a constant. There is something about an animal that cannot be performed for — they simply respond to who you actually are on any given day. Some of my best, most honest moments of those years happened quietly on a sofa with a cat in my lap and no requirement to appear fine.
The Children We Didn't Have
We tried IVF. We wanted children. And we discovered — as many couples do, quietly, in clinical rooms that smell of antiseptic and careful optimism — that we were biologically incompatible. Our bodies simply could not do together what we'd hoped.
I don't write this for sympathy. I write it because it is part of the story, and because I think there are far more women than anyone acknowledges who have walked a version of this path and found no easy language for what it costs. The grief of IVF that doesn't work is complicated — it sits alongside hope for a long time before it settles into something you can carry without it catching you off guard.
What that experience gave me, eventually, was a different understanding of what family means — and a redirection of the nurturing instinct that didn't stop existing just because its original destination had closed. The animals in my life. The people I could still help. The books I would eventually write for the reader I kept imagining — someone sitting somewhere, feeling lost in their body or their mind, needing someone to explain things clearly and treat them as capable of handling the truth.
Every book I have written starts from the same place: what do I wish someone had explained to me clearly, earlier, before things got harder? The science isn't complicated. It just hasn't been translated into language that works at kitchen-table level. That's what I try to do.
When the Body Said Enough
Cellulitis came first. It is an unpleasant, underestimated infection — the kind that leaves you bedridden and rearranges your understanding of how quickly a body can tip from functional to very much not. I recovered. But recovery is not always a clean line. Sometimes it is more of a threshold you cross that changes what comes after.
Stiff Person Syndrome arrived more slowly — the way the serious things often do. A rare neurological condition, frequently misunderstood, frequently misdiagnosed, and characterised by a progressive muscle rigidity and spasms that would be hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived them. It is the kind of diagnosis that requires you to completely renegotiate your relationship with your own body, your career, and the future you had imagined.
I took medical retirement. This was not how I had planned things. I had spent years in corporate life — B2B sales in the life sciences sector, a world of regulated products, clinical buyers, pharmaceutical importers and the particular rigour that comes with operating in health and compliance environments. I was good at it. I found it meaningful. And then, very suddenly, that chapter closed.
"I couldn't go back to the work I'd done. But I could take everything I knew about the science, and everything I'd learned about what it means to need clear answers when your body or mind isn't cooperating — and put it somewhere useful."
Why I Write
I became a publisher of books because it was the most honest answer I had to the question of what to do next. My background in life sciences meant I could read the research. My years of navigating a husband's depression, my own health challenges, IVF, loss, and the long work of keeping a life intact — meant I understood, from the inside, what it feels like to need information that nobody is explaining to you in plain language.
The Practical Wellness is the result of that convergence. The MyMindGym™ Mental Fitness Series. The Practical Wellness Series. A book about the mental health gifts that come from raising children alongside cats. These are not random topics. They are all chapters of the same story — the one about understanding your body, training your mind, and treating yourself with the same careful intelligence you would bring to any other important problem.
I write for the person who has tried the obvious things and found them insufficient. Who is health-conscious and self-aware and still not sleeping, still not well, still not sure why their gut plays up every time life gets hard. Who suspects the pieces connect but hasn't found anyone to explain how. Who deserves better than a list of tips.
The Cats, Still
There are still cats. There will always be cats. I stand by the crazy cat lady reputation entirely — not because I think it's accurate, but because the people who say it are usually smiling when they do, and that feels like the right energy for a brand built on the idea that wellness doesn't have to be earnest and joyless to be serious and effective.
My Maltese heritage gave me a particular relationship to family, resilience, and getting on with things without making too much fuss. My cats gave me something harder to name — a daily reminder that presence matters, that small consistent acts of care compound into something real, and that sometimes the most important thing you can do for your nervous system is sit quietly with something warm that purrs.
If you've read any of my books, you'll recognise that last sentence. The science behind it is real. Your nervous system genuinely responds to warmth, rhythm, and safety cues — a purring cat delivers all three. I didn't know the mechanism when I first noticed the effect. I just knew it helped. That gap — between what works and why it works — is exactly the gap I keep trying to close.
That's why The Practical Wellness exists. That's why I keep writing.
— Stephanie Moore, Perth, Western Australia
Start with the science.
Stay for the tools.
Every book in The Practical Wellness library begins where this story does — at
the intersection of real biology and real life. Find the one that speaks to where
you are right now.
Explore the full site · Healthy You · Healthy Environment
The Practical Wellness
Healthy You — Healthy Environment
