Age: Loving my forties.
Hometown: Birmingham, UK
Currently residing: Sunny Midlands
Interests: the digital society, museums and culture, mental health recovery, social inclusion, personalisation of care, learning, my family, social justice, the autistic point-of-view, drawing, crafting, meditation, high-intensity interval training, creativity.
Dislikes: narrow-mindedness, smelly people (including too much perfume!), crowds, double standards.
Learning: Fashion Design with Retail Management BA (Hons) First Class, Google Squared Online Certificate in Digital Marketing, MSc in Mental Health Recovery and Social Inclusion. Currently battling through a PhD researching the mental well-being of female perceived autistic people.
Career: Mostly spent working in marketing agencies, specifically digital for the last nine years. I’ve worked extensively within the health and social care sectors training new and established professionals from a living-experience perspective. I completed an MSc in Mental Health Recovery and Social Inclusion in 2020. I’m now back to work full time as a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, investigating the identity and mental wellbeing of female perceived autistic persons. Check out my blog for any latest news, or my projects list for what I have been doing recently.
The bio’ bit: I’m a curious and creative geek with interests in many fields and industries. My education started in fashion design, specialising in retail management. I spent my final year working in places like Habitat, and Harvey Nichols London, as I loved the store environment and how it could engage customers and immerse them completely. When I left uni’ I ‘fell’ into marketing and then progressed onto agency work, specifically digital, until I was thirty. Since then I’ve been creating a new life in the wake of an experience of ongoing mental health challenges. My current PhD pulls together all my professional and personal experience to date: people and their interactions with their lives and environments, digital technologies, mental health, and identity construction.
I had my son nine days after my 30th birthday and everything crashed for a while, quite badly. We couldn’t figure out why, but I got my high-functioning Autistic diagnosis age 32 (March 2015) which has answered a lot of questions about my life and why things that happened took place. Since then I’ve been working to understand myself, what my life is going to look like and what I need to do to thrive.
- Old WordPress blog 1 (4th Jan 2011 to 9th Jan 2015)
- Old WordPress blog 2 (28th June 2009 to 3rd Dec 2010)
Some of my life in photos: