The press version goes like this: young designer starts selling jewellery on Portobello Road. Brand grows. Harrods, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols. QVC Japan. Disney collaborations. 22 years of building something beautiful.
Every word of that is true. That is what makes it such a useful thing to hide behind.
A press version is not a lie. It is a shape. It takes the parts that can be checked, puts them in order, and leaves out everything that happened between them, because the gaps are not interesting to anybody who needs 300 words by Thursday.
The real version goes like this: young woman with no business training and a lot of determination builds something extraordinary while simultaneously navigating a marriage breakdown, single parenthood, financial pressure that would have broken most people, and the discovery that success doesn't actually fix the thing you thought it would fix.
That last part is the one I would underline if I could only keep one.
Because the whole arrangement rests on it. You work on the outside because the outside is the bit you can move. The shop, the stockist, the collection, the order. It is all measurable, and when it goes well it feels like proof.
And then it goes well, and you notice nothing inside you has changed.
That is a very strange morning. The thing you were told would settle it has arrived, and the feeling underneath is sitting exactly where it was.
What people do next, and what I did for a long time, is assume the dose was too small. You do not question the medicine. You take more of it.
A bigger stockist. A better year. One more thing that will finally be the one that counts.
It does not hold, and the reason it does not hold is simple when you say it plainly. The outside was never where the problem lived. You were treating the wrong address.
I didn't pivot from jewellery to coaching because I got bored. I pivoted because I broke. And in the breaking, I found the work that was always underneath, the real work. The inner work. The body work. The thing that no amount of external success can substitute for.
I am not recommending the breaking. It is not a method and nobody should go looking for it.
But I will say what it did, because it is the part that is useful to somebody else. It took away the option of carrying on, and that turned out to be the only thing that would.
If you can keep going, you keep going. That is not a character flaw, it is how the thing is built. The capacity to cope is the exact reason the coping never ends.
The houseboat was not a lifestyle choice. It was a financial reality that became the most honest thing I've ever done. Living on water strips away everything that isn't real. It teaches you what you actually need versus what you thought you needed.
Water does not let you pretend. The boat moves. The weather is not a backdrop, it is a fact you have to work around. Things have to be put away or they fall over.
You cannot own very much, so you find out quite quickly what you were keeping and why.
And there is no spare room to put a difficult feeling in. On a boat you are always in the same room as yourself.
I would not have chosen it and I would not now swap it, and both of those are true at once.
Here is the bit I think is worth taking away, if you are reading this and your own press version is doing a lot of work for you.
The gap between the 2 versions is not shameful. Everybody has one. It only becomes expensive when you start believing the short one, because then you cannot ask for help with a problem you have told everyone you do not have.
You will know it is happening by what you leave out. Watch the small edits. The thing you decide not to mention because it would need too much explaining. The cheerful answer you give to how is it all going.
That editing takes effort, and the effort is invisible, which is why it never shows up on the list of what is tiring you.
The other thing to notice is how much of your own story you only tell in the order the outside world finds acceptable. Achievement, then difficulty, then achievement again, so it closes properly.
Real ones do not close properly. They just carry on, with the hard part still in them.
So the practical version of this, and it is small, is to tell 1 person the longer one. Not the whole thing and not as a performance. Just the part you usually trim.
What people tend to notice is that it is less dramatic out loud than it was in their head. The sentence you have been carrying for 10 years takes about 9 seconds to say.
There is a practical reason to know your own long version, beyond honesty for its own sake.
The short one cannot teach you anything. It is a list of outcomes, and outcomes do not explain themselves, so when you read your own back you learn nothing you can use.
The long one has the decisions in it. The year you should have stopped and did not. The thing you took on because somebody needed it and you were the one who could. Those are the parts that repeat, and the parts that repeat are the only ones you can do anything about.
So when people ask what 22 years taught me, the answer is not a lesson about business. It is that I spent most of it treating the outside as the project.
22 years leaves a trail. Here's mine, unedited.
More like this
From Portobello Road to a houseboat, and what I am proud of. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/from-portobello-road-to-a-houseboat-twenty-five-year-and-what-i-am-proud-of
The houseboat interiors that cost almost nothing. https://www.annalouwellness.com/love-and-relationships/the-houseboat-interiors-that-cost-almost-nothing
22 years of press, and what I am willing to say now. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/twenty-five-years-of-press-and-what-i-am-willing-to-say-now
The unedited version turns up first in the Reset Letters, which go out on Substack. They are at resetletters.substack.com if you want them.