My life has been all about seeing things differently. I am analytical and intuitive, I believe both in the power of the unseen and in the importance of critical thinking in challenging our assumptions and expanding our hearts. At times this difference has been difficult to hold, but I now know that it is my greatest strength. 

I was born on the Isle of Man, my earliest memory is a raging thunderstorm, the electricity out and my joy at being awake and in the middle of it all with my parents by candle light. When I was 4 years old my mother, father and I moved to London. I have a faint memory of the journey by boat crossing - excitement.

We lived in the brutalist but beautiful Barbican in a 21st floor flat. This must have been an intense transition for a four year old, from farm to city. At secondary school I received a part scholarship from Guildhall School of Music and Drama to attend Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, it was tough but very fun. I learnt to push myself to do hard things and I developed a deep awareness and understanding of my body, this is a gift that has stayed with me throughout my life and still informs my engagement with the world today. I love to dance.

At 18 I attended University College London to study Anthropology where I learnt to think differently about difference. I learnt that reality is truly multiple and to look critically at my own culture. This was a radical shift in the way I understood the world that would stay with me for life.  During this time I started working with the Boston Heath Care for the Homeless Program, in street outreach teams,  night vans, shelters and clinics, where I learnt about suffering and resilience, and the power of one being to bring solace to another.

At 21, while sitting my final exams at UCL, I applied for and won a prestigious full scholarship to study for a PhD in Anthropology at the University of California San Diego, to continue my research into chronic homelessness, vulnerability, and the power of the stories we tell in giving meaning to our lives. I travelled to California with a heart full of all of the associated hopes and dreams and the belief that a path in academia would and should pertain towards intellectual freedom.

While my heart and mind expanded, fed by a flood of new experiences, ideas and intellectual growth, I began to push back against the narrowness of thought as confined to individual disciplines in academic institutions. The foundation of my academic study was my continued work with homeless outreach and care programs in Los Angeles and Boston. These experiences led me to believe that truth and understanding, if that was what we cared about, could not be contained within a narrow theoretical framework - they were out there, somewhere in the wilderness, and to be grappled with using all of the tools that we could bring to the task.

I was put under pressure to keep to the known path and operate within disciplinary boundaries, but I made a choice to stick to my heartfelt truth and wrote an interdisciplinary thesis anyway, incorporating insights from philosophy, art, psychoanalysis, metaphysics and literature to my ethnographic findings on the human experience of vulnerability, death and dying. As a result of my refusal to conform I was told that I no longer had a home within the Anthropology department, I fought for what I believed in but made no headway. This was one of the hardest rejections of my life, I was heartbroken.

Everything that follows has been a product of this decision to stick to my truth and follow my heart. I stepped out of the box and into the existential wilderness. My mapped path to a PhD, along with all of the expectations and ideas of self that go with this, were thrown off course. I have had to learn to define myself in my own terms. This has been hard but the rewards of staying true to myself are felt in my soul and reflected back to me in the quality of my relationships.

I moved to New York and found my way back to my early passions of photography and writing. I re-enrolled in school with the help of another scholarship and gained an MA in Psychology, studying neuroscience, developmental and social psychology. I worked as a photography assistant and as a model, something I found great satisfaction in due to my dancer roots. New York gave me the space to rediscover myself and for that I will be forever grateful. There I met William, the love of my life. With his support and encouragement I expanded my artistic practice, developing and sharing ideas which I had been pursuing in my academic work through new mediums. My writing and photography have been published and exhibited internationally and this work continues to be an important part of my life.

In late 2019, six months before Covid hit, my wild and wonderful mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. We nursed her at home through the years of Covid, she died in 2022. I am still healing. I believe that this will always be the case.

Since this time I have embarked on training as a coach and gained a graduate certificate in counselling and psychodynamic psychotherapy in the hope of helping others facing difficulty and challenges. These struggles may take many forms, but I believe that the deep processes underlying healing, growth and carving our own paths are shared. Of everything that I have tried, coaching has given me the most hope and motivation in my own healing journey. I hope to share this gift with you.

P.S.

If you would like to like to read my thesis on the lived experience of vulnerability for chronically homeless individuals, you can do so here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tt844rf