Get to Know Me

I know what it feels like to be the one holding the phone.

In April 2017, I got a call that changed everything. My fiancé Ed had dived into a swimming pool, broken his neck, and was in hospital. I drove there not knowing what I was going to find. What came next — the weeks, months, years of recovery, reinvention, and rebuilding — taught me more about myself than anything else in my life. But not in the way people expect.

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Ed's story is remarkable. He defied every prognosis, wrote a Sunday Times bestselling book, climbed mountains, and became one of the most in-demand speakers in the country. I am genuinely, fiercely proud of him. But the story I want to tell you is a different one — the one from the other side of the room. The one about what it costs to be the person who holds everything together while someone else's life becomes extraordinary.

 

It wasn't dramatic. It was quiet.

I wasn't Ed's carer — he'd tell you himself how incredible I was. But publicly, the story was always his. And somewhere in those years, between absorbing the emotional weight of his recovery, supporting my dad through an opioid addiction, watching my mum navigate a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and building a charity from scratch — I'd poured so much of myself into doing everything I could for the people I loved that I'd quietly stopped asking what I needed.

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Not because anyone asked me to. Just because that's what you do when you love someone.

 

The gap between fine and fulfilled.

I was functioning. I was loved. I was, by any external measure, doing well. But there was a gap — between coping and actually thriving, between being the person everyone relied on and also being a person with something entirely my own. I knew that gap too well, and I knew I wasn't the only one living in it.

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What I've learned, slowly and imperfectly, is that you don't have to choose between loving someone deeply and living fully yourself. That your happiness isn't something you earn once everyone else is okay. And that the version of you that existed before you became someone's supporter? She's not gone. She's just been waiting for someone to finally ask about her.

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The thing I really believe.

Underneath all of it — the coaching, the charity, the conversations I have every day — there's one thing I keep coming back to. I've seen what happens when someone loses their sense of joy over a long period of time. When life gets heavy enough, and nobody helps them find their way back to lightness. When the weight of everything they're carrying quietly becomes who they are. I've watched someone I loved go down that road. And I think about it every single day in the work I do.

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I'm not interested in helping people just cope. I want them to find genuine, lasting joy — not despite the life they're living, but inside it. That's not a soft ambition. For me, it's everything.

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What I do now.

I'm a coach, co-founder of Millimetres 2 Mountains, a former netball player and coach, a plumber's daughter from Bournemouth, and a woman who has spent the last eight years figuring out how to be fully present for the people she loves — without disappearing in the process.

My coaching is practical, warm, and rooted in lived experience rather than theory. I'm not a therapist. I'm someone who has been exactly where you are, who has done the work, and who can walk alongside you while you do yours.