NiCole's Notes
NiCole's Notes: The study guide for adulting. Witty, rigorous analysis of everything that matters: politics, love, illness, friendship, technology, aging, and the contradictions we live with. Sarcastic scholarship for the thinking Gen-X mind. Smart when it matters and Witty always.
A graduate from the University of Calgary, B.A. Political Science '95, B.A.Spanish '08, born with cystic fibrosis, a lung disease that has been trying to kill me since birth. Hanging on to life by the horns with only 26% lung function. I have 20+ years of experience building organizations and understanding how systems actually work.
Founder of the Summit Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis, raising 3.5+ million dollars for local research, Philanthropist of the year for Alberta in 2014, Honoured with the naming of a research lab at the Cumming School of Medicine, Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases, at the University of Calgary in 2013. Featured in a documentary about my journey with CF and being a CrossFit athlete, while owning my own gym in 2018. I have been a part of a 350 million dollar fundraising campaign and had a 50' banner of my mug hanging off the Foothills Hospital for 4 years from 2003-2007.
Currently finishing two programs at the University of Calgary, one in Graphic Design (graduating June 15, 2026) and the other in Integrated Digital Media (graduating May 2027), my friends would consider me the Sassy Smurf out of the group.
I may have been given a cactus, but I don't have to sit on it.
NiCole's Notes
Intro to the Journal Series
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Nicole Zeller opens her private journal for the first time on the podcast. This is a four-episode Nicole's Notes series about strength, heartbreak, self-respect, and what it really costs to feel everything without running. Starts now. What happens when the thing that kept you alive starts keeping you lonely? Nicole opens the journal. Raw and uncensored.
I have a journal. Actually, I have several. Floral covers, line pages, blue pen. Absolutely nothing about them matches the rest of my brand, and I don't care. And in those journals over, well, especially over the last year, I wrote some of the most honest things I've ever put on paper. Not for an audience and not for a platform, not for a grade or a picture, a content calendar, but just for me, just to not lose the thread of myself while everything was in motion. Today I'm reading them to you. This is the open page, a four-episode series inside Nicole's Notes, where I do something I've never done publicly before. I open the journal. Not the polished essays, not the arguments I already want in my head before I start taping. The actual pages written in real time, in the middle of real things. Heartbreak, desire, exhaustion, self-reckoning. Four entries, four episodes, and one arc. I looked at my walls, that's rare. When I'm strong, people do not rush to protect me. This experience hasn't diminished me, it has expanded me. Take the armor off today. I've got the perimeter. Here's what that series is about, underneath the personal. It's about what happens when the things that kept you alive, your strength, your discipline, your ability to handle it becomes the thing that's also keeping you lonely. It's about what it costs to feel everything and not run. It's about learning to name what you actually need instead of performing not needing it. That was a big revelation for me. And it's about a quote I taped into my journal at the bottom of a page when I have no other words. Love's not a victory march, it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah. Four episodes starting with that's rare. If you've ever been the one who handles it, if she's strong, has followed you like a job title you never applied for, this series is for you. I'm Nicole Zeller. This is Nicole's Notes. Welcome to the open page.
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