I’m no stranger to life’s curve balls giving me the opportunity for growth, as well as working hard to figure out my calling.

I’ve also spent a lot of my life trying to work out where I fit.

After university, I ambled my way through a long series of jobs that never quite felt like me, with some very happy travelling in between. I knew I wanted to do something more meaningful, but I had absolutely no idea what that was.

For quite a long time, part of me really wanted to be “normal”. Couldn’t I just have been a lawyer, doctor or teacher… something I could tell people about more easily at parties?

I’d always felt a little different. I grew up with a mum and grandmother who meditated, analysed their dreams, practised healing and talked about things that definitely weren’t part of most people’s conversations in the 1980s. At school, I found that mortifying. I was shy, unconfident and very good at trying to hide the parts of myself that felt different.

But underneath all of that was a deep curiosity about people, about what makes us who we are, and about the things we can’t always easily explain.

Then, at 26, my life stopped me in my tracks.

I burnt out so completely that I became unable to work and could barely function. I eventually received a diagnosis of M.E. (also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and for a long time I felt like a shell of myself.

The six years that followed, as I slowly recovered, changed the direction of my life.

I had to learn to listen to myself in a completely different way. I explored therapy, spirituality, creativity, movement, travel, personal development and all sorts of approaches to healing. I began to understand my own patterns, boundaries, emotions and my intuitive gifts and, perhaps most importantly, I started to discover that the parts of myself I'd spent so much time trying to make more “normal” were actually some of the most valuable parts of me.

Eventually, the things I had once tried to hide became the very things that shaped my work.

And that journey is still unfolding.

It turns out finding yourself isn’t a one time deal.

Recovering from those years of illness was only the beginning.

As I got well again, I started to build a life and a body of work that felt much more like me. I trained as a coach, NLP practitioner, hypnotherapist and EFT practitioner, and began working with people professionally in my early thirties.

What started as an exploration of my own healing became the foundation of my work with others. I became fascinated by how we make sense of our lives, how we find a sense of purpose, why we get stuck, what happens when we lose touch with ourselves, and what can happen when we finally feel safe enough to explore what is really going on underneath the surface.

Over the years I’ve continued to learn, train and explore, sometimes professionally, sometimes simply because I am endlessly curious.

I’ve worked with coaching, therapeutic and emotional approaches, intuitive and spiritual practices, creativity and personal development. I’ve created workshops and conferences, written, performed, travelled, experimented, made mistakes, changed direction and had plenty of my own life experiences along the way.

Some of my deepest learning has also happened in spaces where there wasn’t a neat answer or an easy fix. I spent several years in intensive personal and spiritual development work, including a Shamanic Feminine Initiation, exploring the layers of ourselves that can emerge in relationship with other people: our defences, patterns, projections, tenderness, power and capacity for connection with an amazing group of soul sisters.

And, as life tends to do, it kept offering me new chapters.

I’ve learned that becoming more yourself isn’t about arriving at some final, perfected version of who you are. It’s about becoming more willing to listen, to question, to change and to begin again when life asks you to.

And then life asked me to begin again.

Just when I thought I had found my feet, life changed again.

In 2022, after 13 years together, my marriage ended suddenly and completely unexpectedly. There was no gradual process of coming to terms with it, one moment I was living the life I knew, and the next I was trying to understand how everything I had thought was secure could have changed so quickly.

I went into deep shock and trauma. I lost not only a relationship, but my home, my community and the life I had imagined continuing to live. After 25 years in Brighton, I eventually had to leave the place I had called home for so long because it had become too painful to stay.

For a long time, I questioned almost everything, including my trust in life, my trust in myself and even my work. I felt as though I had lost my identity. It genuinely felt like a death, and there were times when I couldn't imagine a future at all.

And yet, despite all that, just three days later, I was back working with a client. I found that the capacity and desire to hold space for another never left.

It was a gradual process but slowly, I began again.

I moved to Devon with a friend, then to Cornwall to be with my new partner. I started to train as a counsellor, continued my own healing and gradually began to reconnect with my intuition and the deeper sense of myself that had gone quiet.

It wasn't a dramatic transformation. Much of it was simply getting up, putting my clothes on and going to work. Taking the next step. Then the next one.

And somewhere along the way, I discovered something I hadn't known before: I could survive one of my deepest fears. I could lose so much and still not lose myself. In fact, a new, more integrated and grounded version of me emerged alongside tremendous strength, determination, resilience and an almost unquenchable zest for life.

It also reaffirmed something I already knew: how this work matters deeply to me.

I'm still integrating that experience. I think I always will be.

But I know now that beginning again doesn't mean becoming someone completely new. It can mean bringing the old and new parts of yourself together, healing what needs to be healed, keeping what is true, letting go of what isn't and learning to love again, in all the ways that matter.

That experience has changed me. It has deepened my understanding of what it means to find your way forward when you can't yet see the way.

Finding my sense of adventure again, traveling in the mountains of Albania in 2026.