I was in my early thirties, a single mother with a serious breakdown behind me, no qualifications and a medical opinion that my story was effectively over. I heard all of it. Then I decided it was not my story.
Law had been the dream for as long as I could remember. In 2016 I went back to university, not to law because I did not believe I was capable of that yet, but to rural studies, doing
something I loved whilst quietly rebuilding. Two years in I picked up Unf*ck Yourself by Gary John Bishop and something shifted for good. I applied for a training contract at a commercial
law firm, went through months of interviews and assessments with a detailed mental health record on file, and won one of eight places. The firm sponsored me through the GDL and
LPC and I graduated with distinctions in both. I had proved everything I needed to prove to myself, and then I did something that surprised almost everyone, including occasionally me: I walked away.
What I walked towards was a closed dental practice with no patients, no CQC registration, just a lease, a set of assets, no industry background, no clinical training and an enormous amount of work to do.
My clinical partner and I negotiated the deal, built every system and protocol from scratch, and opened Carew Dental on 1 July 2021. Within weeks it was clear the practice needed me fully and my firm offered to defer my start date. I have too much integrity for that and I already knew it. I declined, committed completely and did not look back. What followed surprised me most of all: patients travelling from London and across the UK, a team with a culture I am fiercely proud of, and the discovery that building is what I am built for.
Protora arrived differently. The more time I spent running a dental practice whilst deliberately tracking my own health markers, the more one gap came into focus: people who do everything right and still struggle with fatigue, inconsistent recovery and inflammation that will not shift, and one biological system sitting almost entirely outside modern performance
optimisation. The mouth. On my birthday in February 2026, sitting in a sauna, that realisation became Protora.
Some stories do not arrive neatly. They unfold through setbacks, pivots and the occasional sauna epiphany, and you only understand them looking back. What I have learned is that we are not the fixed sum of our circumstances. With enough courage and clarity, we can rewrite our stars.
