I have been where you are. This is how I got here.

The years I lost, and what I found in them

In 2013 I came home from several years of contract work overseas. I had been working twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week. In the final six months of that contract I made a decision I have thought about many times since: I skipped my scheduled rest break and pushed through to the end.

I came home planning to rest and then get back to work. That is not what happened.

What arrived instead was a collection of symptoms that did not seem to belong together. Exhaustion that eight hours of sleep did not touch. A mind that could not hold a sentence long enough to finish it. A body that had, without consulting me, simply stopped cooperating with ordinary requests. I had blood tests. Everything came back normal.

If you have lived through that particular experience — being profoundly unwell while every test says you are fine — you already know how disorienting it is. You start to wonder whether you are imagining it. Other people start to wonder that too, and some of them say so.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. At a stress seminar I met an acupuncturist who had trained in both Eastern and Western medicine. She examined me properly, took a full history, and gave me the first real answer anyone had offered: chronic fatigue syndrome.

I had, by that point, already completed my certification as a holistic health coach. What I had not anticipated was needing it for myself.

Working out a way through

There was no single thing that fixed it. There rarely is.

What there was instead was three years of careful, often frustrating work: changing how I ate and when. Learning what my nervous system was doing and how to give it somewhere else to go. Understanding pacing, which meant accepting a version of my capacity I did not want to accept. Genuine rest, which turned out to be a skill rather than an absence of activity. Paying close attention to what my body responded to and what it did not.

By 2016 I was symptom-free. I have stayed that way since.

Credentials and experience

The things I hold to in this work

Persistent fatigue is not a character flaw. It is not laziness, weakness, or a failure of willpower. It is a signal from a body under strain, and it deserves a careful response rather than a lecture.

The whole person matters. Body, mind, and the circumstances shaping both. You cannot separate someone's energy from their sleep, their food, their stress, their relationships, or the fact that they are frightened about what is happening to them.

Coaching works alongside medicine, not against it. I have no interest in positioning holistic work as an alternative to medical care. Keep your doctor. Ask them hard questions. Let me help with the parts that fall between appointments.

Honesty about limits. I will tell you what coaching can offer and what it cannot. I will not promise outcomes. If I think you need something I cannot give, I will say so.

Understanding your own patterns is a form of agency. When you are ill and nobody can explain why, the loss of control is its own injury. Learning to read your own body — even before anything improves — gives some of that back.