Living with chronic illness.
The gift and curse of hypersensitivity.
I want to share something with you. Some people assume that because I have been “successful” in business, that I am productive and seemingly unimpacted by struggle. It couldn’t be farther from true. I have a disability — it is just not one that you can see.
I have lived with chronic illness since I was a teenager. Once diagnosed as chronic fatigue, I now know that it is not really something to diagnose… it is, rather, just a part of who I am; sensitive, being born into a world that does not cater for my abilities and gifts. Many of us are this way — and we love to pathologise ourselves. I personally have never found this to be helpful… even when I have been given diagnoses, they have never sticked. I tend to think of myself more like a deciduous tree— one that does not fail in winter, but simply knows when to go inward.
Roots deep enough to have survived every stripping. Branches that have learned the wisdom of letting go — not as defeat, but as seasonal intelligence. I do not shed because something is wrong with me. I shed because I am built for cycles, not for the relentless performance of bloom.
The world was designed for the evergreen. Consistent, predictable, green in all seasons — always available, always producing, never asking to rest. But I am not that. I never was.
I am the tree that looks most barren at the moment it is doing its deepest work. Drawing down. Conserving. Listening to something older than productivity. The falling away is not loss — it is the tree’s great intelligence, redirecting life-force to what cannot be seen.
And come spring, I do not return apologetically. I return completely.
There is no diagnosis for that. There is no pathology in knowing your own nature. Some of us are simply wired for depth over duration, for intensity over consistency, for root-growth in the seasons when the world sees only bare branches and draws its conclusions.
I am not broken in my winters. I am becoming.
I have both lived and worked in this field for 15 years now.
Well, I have lived within it my entire life… but somehow it has become the purpose that I live and breathe, also.
Hypersensitivity. It is both a superpower and a curse, all at once.
My whole life, I have felt as though I want to run away and hide from the world, to withdraw from having any human contact and just to dance among the animate — to walk barefoot on the forest floors and swim in the salty seas. I spent my upbringing (mostly) living this way.
When I am living this way, I barely notice that I am not the “norm”
It isn’t until I am in bright lights, amongst loud noise, sitting in a cafe trying to write, that I often realise — wow, I am not coping.
This morning, it was lying on the pilates bed, watching me trying to attempt something in the most uncoordinated way possible. A reasonably simple movement that my body just couldn’t seem to grasp. They call this Apraxia: It's a neurological motor planning disorder — the brain has difficulty coordinating and sequencing the movements needed to perform intentional actions, even when the muscles themselves work fine. It's essentially a disconnect between intention and execution.
I know this, because I used to specialise in the diagnosing and treating of clients with neurological issues. And only more recently, I have discovered that Apraxia is also very common in neurodivergent people.
Where it shows up in neurodivergent populations:
Autism — Motor apraxia is quite prevalent, affecting things like gesture imitation, fine motor tasks, and sometimes speech. Many autistic individuals experience a significant gap between what they intend to do and what their body actually does, which has become an important area of advocacy (sometimes called the “intention-execution gap”).
ADHD — Dyspraxia (developmental coordination disorder, closely related to apraxia) is highly comorbid with ADHD, affecting motor planning, coordination, and sequencing of tasks.
Dyslexia/Dyscalculia — These sometimes co-occur with dyspraxia, which shares the same underlying motor planning difficulties.
Tourette syndrome and other tic disorders — Motor planning disruptions can be part of the picture.
Speech-specific apraxia (Childhood Apraxia of Speech / CAS) — This is particularly associated with autism, Down syndrome, and some genetic conditions like FOXP2 mutations.
For me, I have apraxia as well as dyslexia — neither of which really impact me unless I am joining something like a pilates class or dance class, where I often just simply struggle or even fail to be able to follow instructions to co-ordinate a sequence of movements. My mother even took me out of dance classes as a small child, because I could not get it right.
And then there are other days where I just cannot get out of bed and am too exhausted to even cook myself. These days are not few and far in between — this is a regular occurring experience for me. This is also where I dream. Where I incubate. It is where my prophecies communicate themselves to me — and so the exhaustion isn’t just simply exhaustion for the sake of it… it is revelation.
Living with this and also working with this, within my profession, as a Neurological Physiotherapist who has created a whole training company to support people like myself — highly sensitive, perceptive and gifted with extrasensory abilities — I have had to learn something that no textbook ever taught me: that the very thing the medical world wanted to fix in me was the instrument of my greatest work.
My nervous system is not dysregulated. It is finely tuned to frequencies that most practitioners simply cannot access. What reads as hypersensitivity on a clinical intake form is, in the treatment room, the thing that allows me to feel into a body before I have even touched it. To sense where the held grief lives in the thoracic spine. To know, without being told, that the pain in the hip is not about the hip at all.
I built my training company not despite this, but entirely because of it. Because I looked around at the landscape of Somatic Therapy work and I saw that there were no bodies of work that really bridged Somatics with Field work. The body has a field that surrounds it and the nervous system as receiver. The practitioner is an instrument.
And I knew that the people drawn to this work — the ones who felt too much in clinical settings, who burned out not from laziness but from an inability to switch off their perception, who were told they were too sensitive for this industry — they were not the problem. They were the most gifted healers in the room. They simply had no framework that honoured what they were.
So I built one.
This September, I have teamed up with some of the most gifted Medical Intuitive’s I know to present to you my training on Medical Mediumship, through the International Institite of Esoteric Medicine.
This training has been a long time coming. I have been practising this work specifically now for 10 years. I have been talking about creating it with my collaborators for about 2 of those years. And now it is time to bring it to life.
If you desire to be a part of the very first cohort of students, we are now taking applications and enrolments. We have a super early bird discount available currently, until June 1st. This work moves me deeply, and it is my deepest desire to share it with those that are ready to receive it.
