I thought it was about time I wrote a new post to reintroduce myself, because I started this blog almost 12 years ago! Digital marketing and media have changed a lot since then. We have many more video-based platforms now, and fewer people reading blogs.

This site has naturally changed during the last 12 years. It started out as a “Dear diary”, and organically shifted into being more of a resource, as it became clear that there was a gap that needed filling for our community.

Why I disappeared

In 2025, I barely wrote a thing for this site. In fact, I wrote nothing for the site. I just copied over the social media posts that went well. I knew I was stepping back. I needed to, for my mental wellbeing. Social media became a difficult place for me to be years ago, which is unfortunate because I run a Facebook support group. When I first started out in 2014, I was checking in constantly – did someone have a question I could support them with? I didn’t want to leave anyone waiting long. It was so much pressure, and it took years for me to realise that the only person putting that pressure on me was me. Anyway, that was a bit of a side track, so let’s get back to it.

In the years prior, I’d been slowing down with my writing. I wrote about ostomy life much more because I was writing articles for a stoma supply distribution company. I was also writing IBD stuff for Health Union, but they wanted less and less of it. The distribution company told me at the end of 2024 that I wouldn’t have a monthly contract with them anymore as of 2025 due to internal structure changes in the marketing department. Then, the Health Union contract disappeared too. By the time the roles ended, I was pretty exhausted, and my passion for the blog had died off, because I’d felt censored at times and forced to write when the inspiration wasn’t really there.

I truly felt like I’d run out of things to say. Even on World IBD Day, I felt like I was just regurgitating stuff. So, it made no sense to me to write posts for the sake of writing them, to then spend time on social media to post and respond to them. It also felt quite lonely online, even just in the IBD space, because my community, the ones that were actively engaging and influential in this space when I arrived, had all disappeared. Blogs were left dead or didn’t even exist anymore. They weren’t around on social media. I’d not got much joy out of it for the last few years.

We moved in 2020, and I had a garden to plan and play in. I soon found a love of horticulture, and I finally discovered what it felt like to feel peaceful. I’d never felt anything like it before. I experienced what is often referred to as a flow state. Time no longer existed. It was just me and the earth. Seeds germinating felt magical, and the connection with nature made me feel so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It put me in my place, and I was happy there. So when it came to choosing between writing articles or posts or heading into the garden to find my joy and peace, you can guess what I chose – always!

Along the way in my journey, I also collected a chronic pain condition – fibromyalgia. I think it was there for years before diagnosis, but my last stoma surgery to form my permanent ileostomy in 2018 really kicked it up a level. This led me down the rabbit hole and learning about the biopsychosocial model for pain, in a frantic attempt to help myself get some quality of life back. This simply means that our experience of pain, which is created by our brain (just like everyone else’s), has biological, psychological, and social elements to it. I started learning about the nervous system, trauma, and the fact that trauma lives in our bodies as pain and tension – The Body Keeps the Score is a really interesting read that I’d recommend to everyone.

The rabbit hole continued. I was trying everything and anything to see if my experience of pain could be decreased, from seeing a mental health therapist and chiropractor to trying dry needling, cupping, shiatsu, acupressure, and Reiki. The more I learnt, the more I realised how much my overall treatment of myself, physically and mentally, had likely contributed to inflammation levels and even flares. I’d always known stress caused flares for me, but I’d never realised that there was a different way of being. My baseline psychological state was stress, and my go-to emotion was anger. I can see this now, but then, when I was living in it, I didn’t know any different. That was just my normal. I suspect there was a lot of trauma (old and new) at play there, leaving me in this constant state of stress, which ultimately increased my flares.

Stress responses play out in the body in physical ways, such as releasing cortisol, flooding the system with adrenaline, and dysregulating the immune system so it loses its ability to turn off the inflammatory response. This creates the perfect environment for a flare to thrive, making the link between stress and the gut-brain connection an important factor for us all to understand. My previous post, the role of the autonomic nervous system in inflammatory and immune conditions, can give you more of a deep dive into this if you’re interested.

So, there I was. Therapy and shadow work were bringing so much pain and trauma to the surface, but I was determined to face it this time. Finally aware that forcing it back down into submission and not allowing myself to feel all of it for fear of breaking, hadn’t done me any favours in the long run. If it’s not dealt with and processed, it never really goes away. Instead, it lives alongside you, impacting how you interact with people around you and the relationships you want to nurture. As the Borg would say, resistance is futile.

This made gardening and yoga even more essential for me. I needed things to soothe my nervous system when things got heavy. And this was yet another reason that I had to step away from patient advocacy for a while. It was too difficult to start healing from the trauma when I was constantly re-living it.

Where I’ve been

I’ve not been anywhere. I’ve not even been in the garden during 2025, because the house hunting began in earnest, and I didn’t want to spend time and money on a garden I wouldn’t be in next year. No, we still don’t own our own house yet…

I did pass my RHS Level 2 Principles of Plant Growth and Development, though! I started my 200-hour yoga teacher training on the same day as my RHS exam. I love yoga. Over the years, I realised that it was doing a lot of the trauma processing, somatic, and nervous system work I needed, even though I originally started because my physio sessions were cancelled during COVID. It even allowed me to reduce (not stop) some of the medication I take for fibro. But I got to a point with the yoga and my yoga teacher where I didn’t think I could progress. I wanted more knowledge, so I decided to do the training. I loved it so much that it became what gardening had been for me previously. Something I could look forward to starting as soon as I finished work. When I completed that training, I went on to do a somatic healing certificate, a trauma-informed yoga certificate, and a breathwork (pranayama) certificate. My love of learning and this space had been ignited. I started and finished my 300-hour yoga teacher training, too, making me a 500-hour yoga teacher now!

2025 was the year of me. I’ve found tools that help me regulate, and I’ve connected to my body in a way I didn’t know was possible. I’ve also connected with people in a way that I didn’t know was possible! I’ve learnt how to ground myself, and I even sleep now. I wanted to explore anything and everything, still hopeful that there can be further decreases in pain if I find the right practice. Visiting gardens and going to a monthly cacao ceremony and sound bath are staples now in my nervous system work, along with yoga and regular trauma-releasing exercises. I imagine it’s always going to be a work in progress, much like myself. Of course, due to my current learning addiction, this has led me to do a sound therapy course. I’ve also very recently joined a meditation group in the hope that it will encourage me to start making it a more regular practice. I have a Reiki training next week, and I also agreed to go to a reflexology course in March because my aunty wanted to, despite not liking feet! It was impossible to go through all of these learnings and not uncover a spiritual side I didn’t know existed. I realise the word means different things to different people, but still, when I started doing yoga in 2020, even bringing my hands to a prayer position made me feel uncomfortable.

Life obviously continued to happen, too. The house we were buying didn’t go ahead. My gran died. My dog has started treatment to fend off chronic heart failure for as long as possible. None of these things feels good, of course, but the way I handled them all, and even felt about them all, I wouldn’t even have been able to imagine this time last year.

In conclusion, a lot of self-development and introspective work has happened, which is why I feel I may be ready to dip my toe back into public patient advocacy. I didn’t completely stop; I have been doing things behind the scenes, such as creating an online ostomy resource for new ostomates, including the design, content, and even being interviewed for the site. I have also helped design a chronic pain study with the University of Salford, I have reviewed applications to access NIHR Bioresource data, provided feedback on a decision aid tool for ulcerative colitis, and I sit on two NHS patient panels, which meet once a month, both with a focus on health data. Actually, as I’ve written that, I’ve realised how much I’ve still been doing!

What you can expect going forward

There are almost 300 posts on this blog, but most of them were written by a different version of me. I don’t think what she has to say is any less valid, particularly because I am sure there are people in the same frame of mind, so it’s all useful, but I want to start over. I want to rewrite some things, and I also want to try and share new treatment news, etc., when it’s relevant, in an understandable way! I have 24 draft blogs started on here, and countless article starts and brain dumps in a laptop file, so I guess I’ll start there.

I’m hoping to create more video content, too. I always hated trying to make videos and found it really stressful, then I got in front of the camera to record a yoga practice and was entirely calm. Ever since then, creating video content no longer seems scary!

I’m also making the commitment to myself to step away as and when I need to, so there’ll be no promises to stay consistent. I’ll remain authentic to myself, and I’ll do what I can, when I can, to support you. You can always find me on social channels, and if there’s anything in particular you’d like to say, let me know in the comments!