It started for me, like for many of us, with illness.

I became seriously ill at 18 when my underlying auto-immune condition relapsed.

I was thrown into a world of illness, of hospital waiting rooms, too few answers and too many blood draws. I brought my experiences from activism and academia to the task - experience had taught me with research and strategy, I could effect change.

As I learned how to navigate the struggling and systemically unjust health and social care systems, I learned just how difficult making change would be.

But through learning from other sick folks on message boards, in waiting rooms, and while queuing for accessible bathrooms,

I learned how to navigate this new world. I drew on my academic background to research my rights - we called it going to Healing University.

Somehow, word of our victories spread, and my phone became an informal crisis hotline…

How did you get that equipment from an occupational therapist?

Someone was being denied medical treatment?

An institution was refusing to make access adjustments?

My friend has been moved into a care home against their will and they’re scared, what can we do?

We called it Grace’s Crisis Hotline and calls came in at all hours, I began to realise the problem was bigger than I had ever imagined. But I didn’t know what I could do.

One day, a chronically ill friend was visiting and I showed her my Healing University research folder (complete with colour-coded paper clips and reward stickers for completing tasks). I thought it was a sweet topic to show my love of stationery.

But she was furious.

She asked me why I had not shared this research and these resources.

“How dare you?” she challenged me. “Don’t you think someone like me could benefit from this?”

I was stunned, but I saw her point.

“We aren’t all like you, Grace,” she went on. “You have an academic background, you got to go to university. When you ring experts up to interview them, they speak to you. Why don’t you share this?”

I agreed I would, but I had no idea what that could look like.

The next month, when I was 22 years old, my doctors told me they suspected I had extensive bone cancer, throughout my body.

I didn’t know if I could cope with chemo. Who does? It’s not something any of us can choose.

On the day I was due to get the results, I came out of hydrotherapy and waited for the call under a beech tree on the grounds.

I started to make a list on my phone of what I needed to do if I didn’t have to dedicate my energy to chemo and ensuring survival.

Living bigger felt impossible when most days I struggled to take my pills and eat.

But I wanted to be able to move forward, alongside my fear. I realised my life needed meaning beyond a focus on my survival.

I moved from Ground into Gather.

I made my list:

• I want to wear more earrings and dare to have a style beyond ‘looking disabled’ and wearing the most accessible clothes.

• I want to camp in the Forest of Dean and see the stars again.

• I want to share all we’ve learned in Healing University with others.

I got the call that I had severe osteoporosis (not cancer).

I spent the next six months researching bone-strengthening treatments and fighting to get permission to work without losing my benefits.

When permission came through, I sent my friends and family an email entitled “I’m Legal, Celebrate With Me”.

I asked them to recommend my coaching sessions to people they knew who were struggling with illness.

My coaching sessions and seminars got booked out over a year in advance.

My Healing University research and Grace’s Crisis Hotline work became a blog, a business, a viral TEDx talk, a thriving coaching and later, after years of training, psychotherapeutic counselling practice.

I graduated with distinction in my psychotherapy and counselling practice MA.

I won multiple research fellowships, working with universities, and exploring how to support people with complex trauma and illness.

I watched the ascendence of a dangerous president through the experiences of marginalised folks deeply at risk from him.

When he was elected, I asked myself, it such a thing were to happen in the UK, what I would wish I had already done.

Then I set out to do it.

I researched academics and activists experienced in resisting anti-democratic regimes.

I decided to pick something important to me and guard it. If we all did this, I thought, we might make it through.

So, I chose social care and the National Health Service (NHS) and got a seat at the board tables. I became the youngest disabled woman NHS Non-Executive Director, (to the best of our knowledge). I sit on boards across health and social care.

I’m still sick, still not cured, but I found more possibility and space to live when I stopped trying to have a life designed by someone else, for bodies not like mine.

But my work is not about teaching you my path or trying to make you like me.

I intimately understand that the charity model of disability doesn’t work.

Not only is it patronising - I don’t need pity - but it’s inaccurate as for most of us, we aren’t a singular sick person surrounded by well-resourced non-disabled people with plentiful time, money and energy to support us and our goals.

We heal in community and we may be both responsible for/to others and living in relationship with people, communities, landscapes and lineages.

This means we don’t heal alone, even when we feel alone.

We have to account for our lived relational experience when we are thinking about change.

The Bootstrap Wellness Narrative tells us we can do it all ourselves if we try hard enough. I don’t think that’s what it is to be human.

I’m working with you to find your own way, what fits your body and life.

What this means for you is that my work emerges directly from lived and community experience and is intersectional.

I’m not going to impose my experience on you, try to teach you to be like me or assume your body or life is anything like mine.

I’m going to believe your experiences and help you navigate them and strategies to live well, in the midst of it all - whatever that looks like for you.