My Story

I grew up the Clever One, and got in trouble precisely two times at school. Early on the message “if you work hard and do well then you can do anything” somehow found a way to fuse my self-worth with high achievement. I was always striving for the next milestone on the highway to success, ordering university prospectuses at 15 and ticking off all the extracurriculars.

At 22 I committed to an older man and fell into a marketing job at a local recruitment agency. It turned out I had natural flair for marketing; the blend of creativity, problem-solving and strategy was apparently a sweet spot for me. Better yet, working in the recruitment agency I was able to see very clearly the career path for a marketer - what was possible and what it would take for me to “get success”. I wanted to be a CMO with an office at a big name brand.

I became a Marketing Manager at 24, travelling the country and the world, loaded with the high level responsibility I’d craved. I was doing it - but I didn’t like it. In 2016, I started a blog called Simple & Season because I could feel my life slipping into a rut of work-TV-bed-repeat, and I didn’t like it.

That blog changed everything.

By creating Simple & Season, and joining Instagram about five years late to the party, I opened a door onto a world I never knew existed. Women building their own businesses, sharing their creativity, living outside of the success highway. I wanted to be a part of it too.

A year after starting Simple & Season, while on holiday in North Wales my then-partner was offered a job and I returned to the office with the news that I was quitting and moving 200 miles away to do…something. It was not very well thought out, but I knew I could help people with my marketing knowledge.

I worked hard to build something that ticked the success boxes, to the point that work became my entire life. In 2019 I hit a burnout. All I thought, read, spoke, cared about was business and I’d said yes to so much that I was trapped in it. I became obsessed about buying the dream house where I would be able to be happy - and at the end of the year we moved into an idyllic listed cottage with a huge garden and three fire places. I’d ticked the ultimate success box. I’d made it.

Being locked down in that house with my partner in 2020 I realised that the problem wasn’t me. It became clear, over those long weeks, that the relationship was unhealthy, unbalanced and emotionally abusive. It took me three months of excuses and fear but I finally ended the relationship at the end of the summer.

I lost the dream house, I lost a lot of money, I lost all the “success points” I’d built up - but I gained myself. I started walking for something to do and uncovered a deep, primal love of hiking in the mountains. I found a depth of emotional and physical strength I never knew existed. I developed a fierce protectiveness over my own agency and choices. I began to focus more on how I felt, rather than what I had.

I lost track of my work for a little while. I was dating and trying to figure out what was next and who I even was and I couldn’t put my finger on what any of it was. I was trying to make the next version of my work fit inside the old one, and it was wrestling to get out. I was deeply uncertain, and desperate for clarity. It wasn’t until I gave in and got curious, that things started to make sense.

In 2023 I left North Wales after six years living in the mountains. I moved back in with my parents. I took a day job while I rebuilt the business. I also fell in love with a kind and wonderful man, began to take myself seriously as a writer and finally burned the old version of Simple & Season down, re-branding under my own name and on my own terms.

And now the story continues.