I didn't come to this work from the outside.

​I grew up close to the systems that were supposed to help people. Mental illness, addiction, unresolved stuff moving through families without ever really being looked at. The NHS doing what it could within what it was designed for. Which wasn't always much.

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I went into social work and then the NHS — working as a mental health practitioner with people with severe and dangerous presentations, personality disorder, addiction. The people the system finds hardest to accommodate. I saw what good practitioners could do and I saw what the system itself did regardless of how good they were. The gaps, the gatekeeping, the way people had to perform a particular kind of crisis to get taken seriously, and then get managed rather than met.

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I trained as a psychotherapist and kept going — bodywork, sexology, somatic movement. Each one taught me something real about how people carry their experience, where it lives, what it takes to shift. But the accumulation started to feel like its own kind of noise — performance dressed up as purpose.

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Most of what I know I learned from my own life. Depression, destructive patterns, relationships that didn't work, the gap between how things looked and how they felt. The slow realisation that a lot of what gets called disorder is just what happens to people when connection fails and nobody names it.

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I'm not interested in fixing people. I don't think that's real. I'm interested in what happens when people stop performing their okayness in a room together.

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Over twenty years in and it's got simpler. Connection. What gets in the way of it. What we reach for instead.