I was sick for ten years. Seven of them bedridden.
The medical system didn't know what to do with me. So it did what systems do with things they can't categorize: it made me invisible.
I became obsessed with that. Not bitterly — curiously. Why do people with something real to say go unheard? What actually happens in the gap between what someone feels and what they can say out loud in a room that has power over them?
I've spent fifteen years inside that question. Training 20,000 healthcare professionals. Teaching 15,000 people — most of them sick, exhausted, dismissed — how to speak when everything is working against them. Advising pharma companies. Speaking in 27 countries. Writing seven books. Being the first patient ever placed inside a medical research institute not as a subject but as a voice.
I still have ME/CFS. I still have POTS. I still know what it is to perform wellness you don't feel, in rooms that need you to be fine.
I work with spoonies who need to advocate for themselves. Carers who've become invisible in the room. Healthcare professionals who went into medicine to connect and ended up somewhere else. People who are somehow all three at once.
The work is always the same: find what the system made unsayable. Say it.
I run intensives in Vienna. I write at Chronically when I have something real to say. I teach when people are ready to learn.
I'm not performing recovery. I'm not selling transformation. I'm just doing the work, honestly, for people who need it.
