"That's not my backstory.
That's my qualification."

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?

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. Speaking in 27 countries. Writing seven books. Being the first patient 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.

The work is always the same.