I’ve always had an active mind. As a child, I didn’t just think, I imagined, expanded, explored.

Looking back, I can see I was sensitive, energetic, curious, and often operating in a world that felt bigger than the one around me. Even then, there was a sense of heightened awareness… almost an early form of hypervigilance, though I didn’t have the language for it at the time.

 

Around the age of 12, something shifted.

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The confident, direct child I had been slowly began to change. I became more internal, more isolated, more emotionally unpredictable. It was as if the natural flow of ease started to leave, and in its place came something heavier, uncertainty, tension, and disconnection.

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Then at around 17 and a half, there was a defining shift.

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One moment life was ordinary, moving through the world, walking in the dark, doing simple everyday things. And then, almost suddenly, everything changed internally. A heightened state of awareness took over.

 

Hypervigilance. Anxiety. Intense self-awareness. The mind began scanning constantly, interpreting, analysing, predicting. Thoughts became global and absolute: they think this… they’re saying that because… no one likes me… everyone feels this way… And when the mind creates that kind of meaning, the body begins to follow.

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At that time, I didn’t have the understanding, language, or support to make sense of what was happening internally. I was left largely alone with it. And like many people in that state, I began to build an internal world that felt unsafe, unpredictable, and difficult to escape from. Looking back now, I can see there were approaches, tools, and modalities that might have helped me understand and regulate what I was experiencing but they weren’t available to me, or weren’t found in time. My mother did what she could with what she had, and I can recognise that now with more understanding than I had then.

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After many years of struggle, I found structure. I found a professional kitchen.

 

In many ways, it was exactly what I needed at the time. High pressure. Clear boundaries. Direction. Intensity. A place where the mind had to focus outward, moment by moment, task by task. It wasn’t always safe in the emotional sense  but it was predictable in its demands. And in that structure, there was something stabilising.

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You may notice how environments like that can both challenge and contain someone at the same time. For me, it became a space of discipline, creativity, pressure, and endurance. And when service ended, there was often a real sense of completion, of having survived another day. Over time, as I began my own process of understanding what was happening internally, something started to change.

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I found myself naturally drawn to emotional work, communication, and ways of helping people regulate stress and find their own solutions. At first, it was informal, just conversations, just support, just noticing patterns in people. And then something became clear.

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It was as if the skills I had developed in kitchens were quietly merging with something deeper, an ability to understand people beyond the surface of their words, and to recognise what might be happening underneath. Eventually, it became obvious that this wasn’t just something I did in passing. It was something that had meaning.

So I whilst in the kitchen environment I formally trained in therapeutic modalities including EFT, NLP, Hypnotherapy, and Matrix Reimprinting, bringing together lived experience and structured method. And that brings me to where I am now.

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Not in a world without stress but in a world where stress is understood, where internal experience can be worked with rather than fought, and where life’s challenges no longer define the system… but move through it.

From extreme internal states… to a life that, while still human and sometimes challenging, is now something I can live with, understand, and navigate.