MasterChef star Julie Goodwin shares terrible secret

Something so awful happened to Masterchef’s Julie Goodwin that she had no choice but to “burn it all down”, the star has revealed.

Something so awful happened to Julie Goodwin that she had to “burnt it all down” in order to rebuild her life.

The MasterChef star bravely revealed the lowest point in her life to The Project on Sunday night, including how she managed to turned it all around.

Speaking to Hamish Macdonald about how she ended up in such despair, author and chef Goodwin detailed the moment that she said her life was saved by strangers.

“I couldn’t see how to keep living. I didn’t want to leave my family but I just honestly believed that they would be a lot better off if I did,” Goodwin said.

On that day, just a few years ago, the mother of three and devoted wife of 29 years to husband Michael, found herself wandering away from a football game.

“I didn't know where I was walking, I was just walking away from the football game I was meant to be going to. I ended up a couple of Ks down the road in a park.”

Goodwin said she kept staring at her shoes as they had been given to her by her youngest son, and she couldn’t decide whether to take them off or leave them on.

“I just couldn’t figure it out, I just thought is it going to be too painful if my shoes are still here,” she said.

“Because my son had given them to me and I just didn’t know what that would mean for him and I knew I was going to be causing a lot of pain but in my head it would be the last time I would cause that pain.

“But I just couldn’t get my head around what to do with this pair of shoes and what would be the least painful thing to do with this pair of shoes.”

Then, something happened that would change the course of her life.

Julie Goodwin talked to The Project about the joyous moment her life turned around. Picture: Channel 10

“I’d run into this young couple and their dog and they asked if I was OK and I eventually said ‘yeah I am’ and we went our separate ways but something told them to come back, they came and sat next to me on the bench and said ‘we just thought we’d hang out with you for a bit, you seem like you could use some company’. And they stayed with me for a couple of hours.”

That when her life changed and was the catalyst she needed to seek help in a mental health ward and improve her life.

“That was so surreal, how has my life come to this? How was I here?” Goodwin said she asked herself.

During her time at the mental health ward, she realised everyone in there was the same – ordinary people struggling with different things. Ultimately, she said she leant a lot about humanity in there.

Hamish Macdonald talked to Julie Goodwin. Picture: Channel 10

Fifteen years since winning MasterChef, she has been reflecting on the dark chapters of her past that haven’t been dealt with properly.

Goodwin discovered that her trauma, which is detailed in her memoir titled Your Time Starts Now, has stemmed from being sexually abused as a seven-year-old child. She didn’t tell anyone about the abuse and carried on, a high achieving student, before attempting suicide as a teenager.

These traumas built up inside her over time, leading to anxiety and depression.

Thankfully, things are looking up for Goodwin now. Picture: Channel 10

“I’ve written about a way that I was harmed during childhood, the only reasons really for writing that down is, first of all, because it does give context to the breaking down as a teenager and other things that happened, and the second reason is if anyone else has been harmed as a child, abused as a child, to let me be a … cautionary tale, if you pack that away it’s going to come back.

“You can put it in a box and you can put the box in the attic but one day that box is going to open and it’s going to fall down the stairs and make a messy life.”

Goodwin on MasterChef.

Thankfully things are looking up now for Goodwin and her family is also very happy.

“I’m so much better, I’ve changed my whole life to be better. Back when things were really bad I thought ‘I’ve got to burn everything to the ground’, and that’s kind of what I did.

“I’ve lost – I haven’t lost – I’ve chosen to leave my radio career, I’ve chosen to close my cooking school and now I just take opportunities that pop up on an ad hoc basis.

“I paint, I swim in the ocean, I spend time with my granddaughter. And the big lesson for me is that everything is a choice and I exercise those choices and my life is so much better for it.”