By the early 2000s, life had shifted gear again. With a three-year-old son and a husband facing redundancy, we made the wild decision to start a web development agency. I had never built a website in my life. Armed with nothing but an “I’ll give it a go” attitude, I taught myself HTML and CSS, learned how to collaborate with graphic designers, and hit the pavement doing the hard sales while my partner handled the deep coding. It wasn’t a flash in the pan; it was a resilient, successful small business that withstood the test of time. And the business I eventually handed over to my husband when our marriage ended.

In 2012, I gave birth to my illustrated poetry brand, teaching myself graphic design software to bring my pithy, comforting verses to life. Realising the way to reaching a poetry audience was tough, I pitched a BBC radio presenter on Twitter using exactly 140 characters, telling him I had a poem for World Poetry Day. He loved it, put me on the air, and a decade-long relationship with local BBC Radio was born.

For years, I became a regular fixture on BBC Northampton and BBC Stoke, performing live weekly rhyming summaries of the news. I wrote and filmed a commissioned poetry video for a major historical anniversary, grew a global Facebook following, and even wrote a custom wedding poem for BBC presenter Rob Adcock that successfully drew both laughs and tears. Throughout the historic chaos of the 2020 pandemic, I was on the air every single week, capturing a strange, shifting world in real-time verse.

For years, my brand was built on bringing pocket pick-me-ups and cheer to everyone else’s everyday challenges. But behind the scenes, I was running on a corrupted childhood blueprint. I was managing other people’s emotional ledgers, walking on forty years of eggshells, and trying to smile through the cracks.

In my mid-forties, the walls closed in. My relationship with my mother, my marriage, and my hormones detonated all at once. I quickly realised that a witty rhyming couplet wasn’t going to save me. I didn't need a pick-me-up; I needed completely new terms of engagement with life… my terms.

Supported by an eccentric, soul-centred internal troop of monkeys, I broke free from the expectations of others. I traded the safe paths for the absolute hell of a 101-kilometre ultra-marathon on two tricksy feet, and I started the messy, chaotic, beautiful process of reclaiming my own mind… stitch by independent stitch.