Ten years ago I got a phone call, late at night, in my pyjamas, halfway through a cup of tea. I'd just won two awards for Gooseberry Planet — the business I'd built to teach children, parents and teachers how to stay safe online.

Ten years ago I got a phone call, late at night, in my pyjamas, halfway through a cup of tea. I'd just won two awards for Gooseberry Planet — the business I'd built to teach children, parents and teachers how to stay safe online. I stood there holding the phone thinking: I've made it. The hard part's over.
I was spectacularly wrong.
What that phone call didn't know was that I'd built the company while recovering from breast cancer treatment, that the drugs had forced me into an early menopause nobody explained, and that the next ten years would hold more plot twists than I'd have believed if you'd scripted them. I took the business into 14 countries and raised £1 million. Then my body had enough — sepsis, surgeries. My Dad died. I met the love of my life in a river, thanks to a cocker spaniel with no respect for boundaries, and buried him two years later. One week after his funeral, I was back in hospital. And somewhere in all of it, I walked away from the business I'd built through cancer.
For a long time I thought walking away was my biggest failure. Now I know it was one of the bravest things I've ever done.
So I rebuilt — slowly, and not in a straight line. I learned you can build something extraordinary without carrying all of it on your own shoulders, and eventually I started again on my own terms: no investors, no board, just the work and the life I wanted this time. These days I swim with Bude Surf Life Saving Club, because if you're going to save your own life over and over, you may as well learn to save other people's too. It took me eight years to believe I could be happy again. It turns out I can.
I speak about all of it: success that doesn't feel like success, the wrong decisions that don't define you, and why resilience isn't about bouncing back — it's about moving forward. No gloss, no "just push through." Honest, funny, hard-won and true. Because if there's one thing ten years taught me, it's that you've already survived 100% of your worst days. And that's a pretty solid track record to build on.