Ablepreneurs Stories 

I was 24 when the Chief Medical Officer told me I would never be an operational police officer again.

I had 6 years service at that point. I’d passed my exam to enter a detective pathway and accepted a specialist role.

I was bloody good at my job and I had worked incredibly hard to get to where I had, so the news was completely devastating.

People often assume something must have happened to me in the line of duty, but the truth is far more sinister than that, because what happened to me, could happen to anyone.

In 2019, I began to really struggle with my health.

I felt constantly exhausted.

I kept getting random pains in all areas of my joints.

I would sit in the office wearing a forehead strip and sunglasses because I had these horrific migraines with aura.

I kept going back to my GP, but my test results weren’t indicating anything obvious.

Then I got sick.

Chest infection, throat infection, eye infection, ear infection… You name it, I had it and I could not shift it.

My GP kept mentioning my mental health (I have lived with anxiety, depression and OCD for most of my adult life), but I kept pushing back, adamant that I had another physical illness, that wasn’t in my head.

ME/CFS is a diagnosis made through exclusion.

I had over 225 blood tests that year, before it was confirmed, I had ME/CFS.

ME/CFS is a neuro-immunological illness that affects multiple bodily systems.

It’s severely underfunded and under researched, so not much is known about what the cause is, and as I’m writing this there is no treatment or cure.

I didn’t want to believe it at first.

How can something that makes me feel so incredibly poorly, not have a test.

But the more I learnt about it, the more I realised, I had struggled for a very long time and just continued to push through because I thought that was just how life was meant to be.

Fast forward a few years, and another serious mental breakdown, I left the police and retrained in software engineering, a desk based career that I thought would set me up for life. Two careers in your twenties is kinda cool, right?

But still, I was having the same conversations, always focused on everything that I couldn’t do, like travel or work from an office full time.

I knew I was still capable. Most people that worked alongside me knew how valuable I was. In fact, I had been awarded a fairly significant promotion within 3 months of my career change.

Yet, I kept having to justify and push for the flexibility that allowed me to remain successful.

Then I unexpectedly found myself unemployed.

No matter how well I did in interviews, no one wanted someone who couldn’t come into the office.

The thing is, no matter how many times I hit rock bottom, I always dust off my knees and get back up.

Corporate doesn’t want me? Then I don’t want corporate.

And that is where Ways to Wishes was born.

My third career at thirty? Business owner.

I support chronically ill, neurodiverse and mentally frazzled business owners to untangle chaos and build businesses that work with them not against them. Because I don’t believe you need to change your brain or body to be successful, you need support from someone who gets it.

Being self-employed has meant all the energy I had to constantly pour into fighting for my job, I have been able to finally put into looking after myself.

I’ve even recently been rewarded with another diagnosis - Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder - what I believe to have been the cause of years of significant pain.

I genuinely love what I do and who I work with, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy.

As an entrepreneur with limited energy and capacity, my timeline looks very different to many others and that can be really difficult when you’re starting out.

But I’m learning that doing things differently doesn’t mean I’m doing them wrong.

In the past, I was told what I couldn’t do.

But now, I know I don’t need to ask anyone else what I am capable of.

And having an amazing community of Ablepreneurs beside me, gives me all the inspiration I need to keep on going.