I’m so glad you’re here.

I was a feeling, instinctive child — the kind who noticed everything and said so. I was often told I was too much. I grew up in South Africa, and moved to England as a teenager, which meant learning, early, how to fold myself into a new shape and call it fitting in.

For a long time that skill served me well. I built a life that looked right — marriage, career, children — and mostly, it was right. But there was a quiet undertone running beneath it, a sense that I was performing a version of myself I hadn’t quite chosen.

In my thirties, a business I’d built failed. Then, at thirty-nine, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Between the two, most of the noise I’d been living inside got stripped away. What was left underneath wasn’t pleasant, exactly, but it was honest. I could finally hear myself.

So I rebuilt. I studied again and became a teacher, and later built a business of my own that did well by any measure that matters on paper. Somewhere in there, there were also months on the road with my husband — a stretch of time that taught me how little I actually needed to feel like myself.

It wasn’t until my fifties that I actually started to see my own patterns clearly — the ways I’d kept choosing what looked good over what felt true. I sold the business. I turned toward the work that had actually been calling me the whole time.

Today, that work is this: sitting with women one-to-one, and through The Stone in My Shoe podcast, helping them notice what they’ve been quietly moving past. Trained as a counsellor and an educator — but mostly, someone who’s walked with a stone in her own shoe long enough to know what it looks like in someone else’s.