The Path That Shaped My Work

From lived experience to multidisciplinary practice.

Memory shapes everything, how we build meaning, how we design experiences, how we connect past and present. My work integrates heritage, psychology, wellness, creativity, and technology as a single, evolving practice grounded in that understanding. Whether I’m developing interpretive tools, designing sensory experiences, or exploring ways to support reflection and change, I work where lived experience meets cultural memory.

From Heritage to Human Insight

My career began in heritage researching, interpreting, and preserving the stories of the past. I spent many years volunteering in my local museums and heritage sites, either lost in the objects within the stores or taking groups on guided tours. I went on to get a degree and postgraduate qualifications in heritage management and a heritage role in my local authority. It was work I found deeply meaningful. But when that chapter came to an unexpected close, I found myself at a professional and personal crossroads.

Opportunities became harder to access. I had to step back and re-evaluate not just what I was doing, but why. That pause gave me perspective. I realised that what I had always been drawn to in heritage wasn’t just the artefacts or events. It was the people behind them, their beliefs, their fears, legacies, the unseen forces that shaped their decisions. And if you want to understand the behaviour of people from the past, you have to understand how they thought at the time compared to today. That’s not just history. That’s psychology.

Illness as a Catalyst

At the same time, I was navigating life with severe Crohn’s disease. That experience changed me. Conventional advice didn’t always help, and I found myself digging deeper, into the mind-body connection, into the role of stress, memory, trauma, and belief. That search led me from academic sources to holistic frameworks, from neuroscience to ancient wisdom, and ultimately to formal qualifications in wellness and mental health. In learning how to care for myself, I discovered a new drive to help others. Psychology and wellness qualifications followed, but they weren’t a career switch, they were a continuation of the same questions I had always asked. What do we carry? What shapes us? How do we heal?

Building Something From Scratch

With no clear road back into employment in heritage and no desire to force myself into a box that no longer fit, I did something I hadn’t expected: I began building my own path. That’s how WyldRoots came to be, not just as a business, but as a foundation to house the full breadth of my work.

WyldRoots brings together Histopia, which continues my heritage and creative consultancy under its own dedicated branch, and UTherapy, which brings together my clinical skills in mental health, fitness, and wellness to support people through evidence-based, integrative approaches.

The business world has a steep learning curve. From designing websites and writing wellness content to coding custom tools and building an online shop, I’ve had to learn everything from the ground up, legal structures, marketing systems, e-commerce, branding, logistics. It’s been demanding, but also surprisingly liberating. Each part of the business reflects a part of me, and all of it is connected by intention.

Creativity as Translation

Alongside all this, there’s been another constant: creativity. I’ve always been drawn to it, traditional arts, graphic design, website building, multimedia. There’s something grounding about bringing an idea into visual or physical form, something that feels like both expression and restoration. I find the process therapeutic, not just for myself, but for others too. Whether it’s drawing, painting, creating in wax or jewellery, composing music and visual narratives, or building user journeys that make sense to real people, this is how I translate complexity into something felt. In my handcrafted projects, especially, I find a kind of continuity, a quiet thread that links the past to the present through creativity and care and the items that resonate with me often find their way into the WyldRoots store.

Creativity, for me, also lives in structure, in the frameworks and systems that help ideas move, connect, and make sense. I apply the same design mindset to building websites, developing databases, and experimenting with embedded systems or interactive tools. Whether it’s creating digital interfaces for heritage content, designing data-led wellness resources, or building tools to support reflection and learning, I use technology as another creative medium, one that brings logic, accessibility, and flow to complex information.

The Symbolic and the Strange

As well as being a fan of a good ghost story or decent horror film, I’ve always had a deep curiosity for the symbolic, from folklore and ghost stories to superstition, pseudoscience, and the esoteric. Not as a believer, necessarily, but as someone fascinated by why these ideas endure. Why we still knock on wood, read our horoscopes, or sense something in an old house we can’t explain. Are these things really just confirmation bias? Perhaps, but such stories and symbols shape how people see the world, in the past and in the present. That interest flows into my work with WyldWell, where psychological insight meets myth, metaphor, and ritual. Tools like past life therapy, intuitive frameworks, and the symbolic are explored here in more detail. WyldWell is about accessing story, unlocking inner meaning, and giving people new ways to process and explore their lived experience.

Creative Technology

Along the way, I found myself drawn increasingly toward technology. Not in the abstract, but in practical, creative ways. Embedded systems. Sensors. AI. Tools that respond to human need. Whether through building therapeutic tools, creating interactive heritage experiences, or designing systems that support reflection and self-awareness, I see tech as a new medium for storytelling, for understanding and a future where learning and entertainment combines to create new memories.

I’ve always been a builder, of systems, of stories, of meaning. And today’s tools, from embedded systems to AI, combined with traditional methods offer exciting new ways to explore what I’ve always cared about: memory, wellbeing, and the ways we make sense of our past and the world around us. Technology is not only another way to hold and record information and memories. It’s a means of interpretation, Another way to listen. Another way to preserve, connect, and empower.

From Personal Tragedy to Public Accountability

A defining part of my path came not through work, but through personal loss. When my mother became reliant on adult social care, we found ourselves trapped in a system that failed her, catastrophically. The negligence and mismanagement we experienced weren’t isolated issues; they exposed wider systemic failings that continue to harm families every day. Her death was preventable. The fight for truth and accountability has become a central part of my life ever since. I created CareSocial to document what happened, to hold systems to account, and to campaign for reform. That experience reshaped how I think about care, responsibility, and integrity. It also opened my eyes to ineffective and wasteful public services that hire ineffectual staff and that should not be allowed to continue unchecked.

It’s a fight I never asked for, but one I’m fully committed to. And I will keep going, until those responsible are held to account and meaningful change is no longer optional.

Where the Threads Meet

So from my multi-disciplinary background, I learned the following:

• Heritage taught me to listen to the past.
• Psychology helped me listen to the present.
• Illness taught me to listen to my body.
• Creativity taught me how to organise complex information more efficiently, and to give abstract ideas form.
• And loss, personal, preventable loss, taught me to speak up, even when it’s hard, and to never assume the system is working just because it exists.

Now I’m taking all of that forward. I’m currently consolidating these ideas into a PhD, exploring how they connect, and finding new ways to bring them into practical use. My aim has always been to honour the past, speak for those unheard, and build something quietly meaningful.

If you’re curious how these threads come together in my work today, you’re welcome to explore more across UTherapy, Histopia, WyldWell or WyldRoots.

If you’re looking for someone to work with you can take a look at my CV or drop me a line