Grace Tame is obsessed with the greater good

Grace Tame is focused on controlling the controllables in her life. For everything else, she’s taking a ‘ride the wave’ approach.

Tame became a household name in 2021 when she was named Australian of the Year for her powerful advocacy for survivors of child sexual abuse. 

Since then, she’s become an unrelenting force driving these difficult conversations into the mainstream and making systemic change.

Fuelling this level of momentous change requires a keen focus. Tame admits she’s been focused – even obsessive – for most of her life. 

“I’ve always been that way,” she tells Helen McCabe as part of FW’s Too Much podcast.

“My mum said recently that even before I could walk, when I discovered that I could lift myself up in my cot, I was pulling myself up in my growsuit and looking out the window. I was moving the curtains to look at the action outside and I was walking at 10 months. I’ve always been a mover.

Left to right: Grace Tame at the seaside, and in front of the Enmore theatre (Source: @tamepunk Instagram)

“Even as an eight year old, my attention to detail on work as well as activities was 100 percent, if not 110, 200 percent.” 

Tame surmises her obsessive nature went under the radar in her childhood until it surfaced in her teenage years in mental illness, namely the eating disorder, anorexia.

“I grew up with two parents who are in many ways, chalk and cheese. They separated when I was two years old, but are alike in some ways, and one of the ways that they are alike, is that they, in different ways, are very conscientious, arguably obsessive people,” she says.

“My father was a star sportsman; he played state level cricket, hockey, and baseball, and is just one of those people who’s good at everything that he does, essentially, except maybe singing.”

The celebrated author and CEO of the Grace Tame Foundation, pauses, allowing a moment of levity. 

“Sorry, dad, listening to this podcast, please don’t sing,” she jokes. 

“I’ve done a lot of work [on] how to channel that obsession into positive outlets rather than negative outlets.”

Tame’s grapple with obsession continued into her high school years. 

With social disruption of changing schools, being away from her childhood best friend, and the breakdown of her parents’ marriage, Tame felt added pressure to perform.

“I didn’t have one solid foundation, and the household dynamics, the two household dynamics were very, very different from each other,” she says.

“When you’re a kid, you can kind of just cope because you’ve got a pretty big bank of resilience to draw upon, but that wears out as you get older.

“The coping mechanisms that I fell into were, perhaps, just more amplified versions of things I was already doing. And they then crossed that threshold from healthy to unhealthy.”

Tame says she’s worked hard to understand her focus towards the obsessive.

She was diagnosed with autism when she was 20. She’s 29 now.

Left to right: Grace Tame standing beside her father, and holding up an award for running the half marathon (Source: @tamepunk Instagram)

“It’s certainly not a constant state for me. I’ve, over the years, done a lot of work to unpack why I tend to be obsessive about certain things, and how to channel that obsession into positive outlets rather than negative outlets,” she says.

“Because also, there’s the fact that that the trauma, the prolonged child sexual abuse, which really is intense psychological manipulation, that when perpetrated against a child whose neural pathways are still developing, it alters them in a way that sort of disrupts everything or how it should function optimally.”

She says, being neurodivergent and then having trauma, disrupted her “reward system”. 

To cope, she escaped into prescription drugs, alcohol and illicit drugs before focusing on her health. Despite her best intentions, the old obsessions resurfaced.

“It’s been a trial and error process, because then I went the other way and was running too much,” she says. 

“When I was named Australian of the Year it had been nearly two years since I’d had a period. I was significantly underweight and running about 120 kilometres a week and that’s not sustainable. It might be for a particular race if you’ve got a 12 week block of training or something, but I was just doing this every single week. And part of that was motivated by anorexic tendencies.”

She had to create a new relationship with exercise.

Through better understanding her own patterns, Tame has also broadened her focus on exercise to her daily life.

“I try to focus on controlling the controllables and riding the wave with the rest,” she says. 

“I have things that I do in my daily life that ground and centre me and I’ve come to accept that there’s a lot that’s beyond my control. 

“I mean, I don’t work a particularly typical job, not that there’s such a thing as a typical job, I suppose. But my work, by its very nature, is without boundaries.”

IMAGE CREDITS: Getty Images, Instagram and @monsieurremi