I didn’t start my business brave.
I started it because I’d run out of any other way to survive.
The cage
For years I lived in a cage I’d built to be acceptable. People-pleasing. Making myself smaller so I didn’t take up too much room. I had a job where I wasn’t paid my worth and a boss who took my ideas and put his name on them, and I kept thinking if I just worked harder I’d finally get the recognition.
I never got it. You don’t earn your way out of being undervalued by being more useful. You just get more tired.
Anxiety my whole life. RSD before I had a word for it. A constant feeling of not being good enough that I carried like it was normal.
The mask running out
Then it all stacked. A baby. Postnatal depression. PTSD. Lockdown. And finally a late ADHD diagnosis that explained thirty-odd years of doing life on hard mode while everyone else seemed to have the manual.
I didn’t bravely choose to stop masking. I ran out of the capacity to keep doing it. And underneath the mask, when it finally came off, I didn’t find peace. I found rage.
Rage at a world that’s spent two thousand years keeping women small. At business advice written by men who got to the top because they had a wife at home doing everything else, then sold the rest of us the lie that we just needed to hustle harder. None of it was built for the woman who is also the wife, also the mum, also the one who remembers everything and holds everyone while quietly disappearing herself.
What actually worked
I was that woman. Unmasking in public with no idea what I was doing. It was messy. It flopped. And I was still trying to do it all alone, because some part of me thought that proved something. It didn’t. It just kept me exhausted and invisible.
Two things changed it. I stopped doing everything alone. And I found the first place my brain didn’t have to perform: AI, not as a magic answer machine, but as a thinking partner that holds the chaos so my ADHD brain doesn’t have to.
For a brain like mine that’s not a productivity hack. It’s an external brain. That’s when I stopped fighting how I work and started building around it. An ecosystem that supports the business instead of one that runs me into the ground.
It counts.
Before all this I led the Dippy on Tour exhibition. 153,000 visitors in twelve weeks. 300 volunteers. A £15 million museum redevelopment. I’ve always been able to see what’s been built before anyone explains it. I just never thought it counted.
It counts. I run two businesses, a magazine, I’m raising two kids and unmasking in real time.
And I am fucking amazing. I have spent my whole life not letting myself say that. I am now. And so are you.
Honest, inclusive, anti-bullshit.
Honesty, even when it’s uncomfortable
I say the thing most people only think. I’ll tell you what’s actually wrong, not what’s easy to hear.
Every woman gets to exist without shrinking
Inclusivity and advocacy. The systems were never built for us. That’s not your failing to fix by getting smaller.
No bullshit, no performance
I can’t stand fakeness, or the highlight reel that hides the support behind it. Be honest about your help. I am.
Now I help women stop disappearing inside their own lives.
I help female founders in the messy middle stop, breathe, and build an ecosystem that supports the business so it stops running them. I give you back your time and your mental capacity.
You don’t need permission. You don’t need to ask. You need to accept how good you already are and go and take what you need. If that’s you, the door is open. The best is yet to come.