There’s a particular emotion that almost every client I work with carries quietly in the background — an emotion that rarely gets named yet shows up loudly in the body. Resentment. It’s one of the most human emotions we have, and yet it’s one of the hardest to acknowledge.

For a long time, I thought purpose was something I had to find; a destination. A title. A role. A sentence I could write neatly on a website or say confidently when someone asked, “So, what do you do?” But purpose — as I’ve learned through my own healing and the work I now do, isn’t a fixed identity. It isn’t a job description or a mission statement. It isn’t even something you ‘discover’ once and then carry forever.

As one of SIRPA's Ambassadors for Fatigue, this is a personal story from my lived experience. There are chapters of my life I can still feel in my body if I close my eyes - not because the symptoms are still here, but because the emotional imprint of those years was so deep and so consuming that it reshaped the way I understood myself.

The short answer is yes. Anxiety is deeply neuroplastic. In other words, the brain circuits that create and maintain anxiety are not fixed; they can change, soften, reorganise, and settle through new experiences, learning, and intentional practices. Anxiety isn’t a personal flaw or a permanent identity; it’s a pattern the brain has learned over time - which means it’s also a pattern the brain can unlearn.

Every so often someone reaches out to me from a place so raw, so overwhelmed, that even getting the words out feels like a final act of strength. Recently, a client shared something with me that reflects what many people quietly endure: “I’m in despair. No medication seems to work. I’ve tried several now and all I get is more symptoms. I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.”

There’s an element of recovery from CFS or Fibromyalgia that almost no one talks about — not because it’s rare, but because it’s strangely hard to put into words. It’s not a symptom, not a crash, not even a setback, it’s quieter than that. More private. It happens inside the body, inside the mind, inside the nervous system. It’s the moment you feel yourself getting better… and something inside of you freezes.