When the Science Catches Up

In June 2025, I was featured in a BBC article about a research breakthrough at the University of Aberdeen — one that identified chronic pain as physiologically different from other types of pain. I was asked to share my story alongside the research, and I said yes, even though saying yes meant being publicly visible about something I'd often kept quiet.

I've lived with chronic pain for over a decade. Chronic fatigue syndrome came first, in my early twenties, and fibromyalgia followed about five years ago. If you've never experienced either, it's hard to describe — but the closest I can get is that ordinary things, the things most people don't think twice about, become difficult. A clothing tag. A brush against the skin. Standing up to cook a meal. Painkillers don't touch it. And for a long time, the hardest part wasn't even the pain — it was the invisibility of it. You don't look sick. You start to wonder whether it really is all in your head.

What struck me most about Dr Bewick's research wasn't just the science, although that's remarkable in its own right. It was the validation. For years, chronic pain has been treated as something you should be able to push through, manage, or simply put up with. To have researchers say clearly and publicly that this kind of pain has its own physiological pathway — that it isn't imagined, isn't exaggerated, isn't a failure of mindset — felt like being seen.

I don't know what treatments will come of the discovery, or when. But the research itself, and the conversation it opens, matters now. It tells anyone living with chronic pain that they aren't making it up. That's not a small thing.

Being featured was strange, in much the same way the IoD feature earlier in the year was strange. There's always a moment of "why me?" — followed by the realisation that if my story can sit alongside the research and help even one person feel less alone, then it's worth saying out loud.

For now, I carry on as I always have. I run the agency, I work from wherever I happen to be — Aberdeen, a farm in Kenya, the sofa with Spock and Cheese — and I keep a sunny disposition on the days when the pain is loudest. It's not mind over matter. It never has been. But it is, every day, a choice to keep going.