Anyone who is familiar with Doctor Who, in any of its many incarnations, will know the amazing quality of the Tardis is that despite its outward appearance as a typical British telephone box it's interior capacity is enormous.

The month I spent on Nauru I described as being compacted. Just as a wrecking yard will reduce a car to a metre cubed of crushed metal in minutes, so my time on Nauru was is if a whole year of experience was compacted into four weeks. During those four weeks there was very little time spent alone - even our accommodation was in shared rooms of up to nine people (imagine - nine women and only one bathroom!) Each day brought intensity in terms of emotions, weather and responsibilities.

Although I have returned home seemingly the same person I was when I left, like the Tardis, my internal capacity is far greater than my outward appearance. I feel enlarged by the experience, full to overflowing. I carry the compactness of the last month not as a weight but as a change in who I am.

My capacity as a human being has been enlarged but somehow this largeness still fits into the same container.

What I realise now, more than 10 years later, is that my experience on Nauru did not enlarge me – it showed me how big my capacity actually was.

In the years since that experience, I’ve talked with women – some of them crying tears of frustration – who know that there is so much more to them than any job role has given them opportunity to explore. They know they’ve been underestimated, kept small, told to be quiet, to stay small.

And yet they know they cannot.

What my experience of working with asylum seekers on Nauru showed me was that I am so much bigger than I thought. I have a capacity that is beyond what I thought I was capable of, beyond what I’d been taught was my place in life.

And because I know that to be true of my life – and am convinced it is true of so many women’s lives – I now guide women as they rediscover and reconnect with their own unique power.