A Personal Dispatch from the Liminal Space Between Image and Integrity
When healing stops performing and starts transforming from the inside out.
What happens when your body breaks before your image does?
After years of pushing through autoimmune symptoms, emotional strain, and performance culture, I left London and landed in the California desert—physically, emotionally, and spiritually depleted. I stopped “performing wellness” and started listening to my biology. What followed was a redefinition of healing, embodiment, and purpose. In this post, I share the backstory behind ANEW, a system born not from optimization—but from collapse, clarity, and somatic truth. If you're curious about nervous system regulation, personalized healing, or AI in health, this is where it all begins.
🌵 Part 1: The Desert Threshold
I wasn’t someone who got homesick.
I left California as a teenager and didn’t really look back. For a decade and a half, I lived abroad—studying, building, climbing, performing. There was always another level to unlock, another identity to grow into. But somewhere, quietly, about two years ago… California started calling me home.
It wasn’t a dramatic pull. More like a low hum. A poignancy I couldn’t quite place. But I didn’t go. Life, as it does, kept handing me reasons to stay where I was. Or rather, I kept telling myself I didn’t have time to go. There was always another product to launch, another investor meeting, another championship. I was preparing for the World Stage as a competitive bodybuilder while leading the product and engineering org of a fast-scaling tech company. On paper, everything looked strong. Powerful. Peak.
But inside, I was unraveling.
I was having daily panic attacks, blacking out when I stood up, slamming into doorframes from brain fog. I was finalizing a divorce that had to be handled across two continents. My autoimmune condition was worsening—and getting completely dismissed by the NHS. And in the quiet between the chaos, I started to feel something I had never known before:
I couldn’t rely on myself the way I used to.
My drive, my sharpness, my creativity, my energy, my body—they had always been my tools. But suddenly, they felt foreign. Like I had been hollowed out from the inside, left running on borrowed time and someone else’s expectations.
What hurt most was the loss of the self I had once admired. The version of me who could carry everything and still show up. The version who got things done. Who sparkled in meetings. Who hit macros and deadlines with the same precision.
That version was gone. And I hated the body she left behind.
That was the state I was in when I finally said, f*ck it. If everything else was breaking, maybe it was time to listen to what had been quietly calling me for years.
I booked a flight and landed back in the States in December of 2024.
That’s when everything changed.
Part 2: When the Noise Stopped, the Truth Got Loud
By the time I got to the desert—just outside of Palm Springs—I was depleted. My system was stripped of noise, but also stripped of certainty. For the first time in years, I wasn’t managing anything. Not a company. Not a brand. Not a relationship. Not even a version of myself.
Just… me.
No polished appearance. No deadlines. No expectations to sparkle.
And slowly, something began to soften.
I’d always been someone who meditated, done yoga, even journeyed deep through psychedelics. But this time, it wasn’t about altering my state. It was about letting myself feel it. Fully. Without resisting, without optimizing, without trying to alchemize the pain into productivity.
So I gave in.
I meditated for an hour each morning and again each night. I walked daily through sand and sagebrush. I did yoga—not as a workout, but as a conversation with the pieces of myself I had long abandoned.
And somewhere in that quiet, the fog began to lift—not just from my body, but from my vision.
For a little while, I’d known I wanted to work in the space of human biochemistry, emotions, and embodiment. I’d interviewed scientists. I’d mapped out frameworks. I’d even gotten a philanthropist onboard. But no matter how deep I dug, it always felt like something was missing. Like the tools we had weren’t enough to decode the fullness of what we feel—or why it matters.
Until now.
When I finally prioritized my own healing, I began to see it clearly:
What I’m meant to build.
Who it’s for.
Why it matters.
Not because I had all the answers.
But because—for the first time in years—I could hear the right questions again.
That’s when ANEW started to come through.
Not as a product idea.
As a calling.
Anew is the system I wish had existed when everything broke.
It’s what I wish someone had handed me when I couldn’t trust my body anymore—
Not to perform, but to feel.
So I’m building it.
I don’t have all the answers. But I finally know the next right step. And for the first time in a long time… that feels like enough.
💥 Not All That Glows Is Growth
A manifesto for those done “performing wellness”
We live in a world that rewards the appearance of progress more than the experience of presence.
You can drink green juice, go to therapy, post sunrise photos from a retreat in Tulum…
and still be performing.
Still be pushing through.
Still be quietly hoping that being seen as intentional will one day feel like being whole.
But it doesn’t work like that.
I say this not with judgment, but with recognition.
Because I’ve been that person. The one who looked radiant on the outside but was unraveling inside. The one who kept performing healing while quietly hoping something—anything—would actually shift.
And I know what it feels like when you finally stop.
When your body can’t fake it anymore.
When your nervous system throws the red flag.
When your soul whispers: not this, not like this.
That’s when the real work begins.
Anew is for that moment— and every moment in between.
It’s not simply here to optimize your hustle or aestheticize your wellness.
It’s here to help you listen again—biochemically, emotionally, spiritually.
To reconnect you with your body’s own intelligence.
To remind you that clarity doesn’t come from being seen. It comes from being still.
This is more than self-improvement.
It’s self-return.
And if you’ve felt this shift—if the image no longer fits, if the performance feels heavy, if your body has sounded the alarm, if your truth is starting to leak out through the cracks…
You’re not broken.
You’re ready.
Welcome home.
So what is Anew?
It’s a system designed to help you make sense of your inner world—through the lens of your body’s real signals. ANEW turns feelings into feedback using AI, neurobiology, biochemistry and therapeutic intelligence. It helps you track the cycles behind your stress, your shutdowns, your surges of energy or creativity. Not to fix you—but to help you understand yourself, rebuild trust in your body, and make choices from a place of clarity and physiological alignment.
I’ve written about the science and the systems in past posts. But this—this—is where it really began.
If you’re curious, there’s more to come. And if you feel the resonance already, I’d love for you to join the waitlist.