OLD PAIN WAKING UP For most of my life, I never knew how to live this life. Time after time, I tried to get out of this life by taking this life. Not because I truly wanted to leave the world, but because I simply didn’t know how to live in it. It always seemed like everyone else had the answers except me. Addiction, alcoholism, chaos, and mental health became my escape from that feeling. Looking back now through awareness and recovery, I can see something I never understood back then: the addiction was not really the problem. The suffering underneath it was. There was an old pain inside me I could not explain. A nervous system at war with itself. A mind constantly trying to escape itself. And the more I suffered, the more I believed I deserved to suffer. Not just suffer a little. I wanted to tear Charlie Morrison into as much pain and destruction as he could possibly imagine and then disappear completely. That’s the truth of it. But something changed one day. I became so exhausted by fighting myself that I finally gave myself up. I held my hands up and asked for help. Not perfection. Not saving. Just help. Slowly, through recovery, awareness, community, walking, talking, meditation, coaching, and learning how to stay present with my own mind, something began changing. One of the biggest lessons I learned is that there are multiple paths to recovery. Through recovery coaching, the support of the London Academy of Recovery Coaching, and working alongside the team at Mauni, I began to understand something I had never truly understood before: many people are not weak — they are carrying pain they never learned how to hold. The body remembers what the mind tried to forget. Today, I no longer see addiction simply as self-destruction. Many times it is an attempt to escape emotional suffering, survival patterns, shame, fear, loneliness, or old pain waking up inside the nervous system. Recovery coaching helped me understand that awareness changes things. When we begin to understand ourselves more deeply, we create space between the feeling and the reaction.

Hi everyone 👋 I’ve ended up here through a slightly unusual mix of lived experience, operational work, recovery conversations, neurodivergence, burnout, systems thinking and a lot of very late-night “hang on a minute…” moments. A huge part of the work and thinking I’ve been exploring recently sits around the crossover between: • ADHD • addiction • emotional regulation • burnout • shame • nervous system overload • and what happens when people spend years surviving systems that never fully understood them in the first place. The more I looked into neurodivergence through my own life and my children, the more I started recognising similar patterns everywhere else too: • recovery • workplaces • education • community settings • mental health • trauma • exclusion It stopped feeling like isolated struggles and started looking more like repeated human patterns. I’m particularly interested in: • recovery through a neurodivergent lens • trauma-informed approaches • reducing shame-based narratives • earlier understanding • and creating environments where people can engage without judgement or stigma. David Collins encouraged me to join after reading some of my writing and honestly… I’m really glad he did. Looking forward to learning from everyone here and being part of the conversations.

What are the " Unique gifts that you bring to the world? " What is the one gift / skill that only you have ?