I never had a brand on my bingo card

I want to say that first, before anything else, because I think people assume there was a plan. There wasn't. I didn't wake up one day wanting to be a founder. I didn't have a five year vision or a mood board or a name I'd been saving. I was just a woman in a job that was quietly taking her apart, and none of this was anywhere near my bingo card.

So this is the long version. I've told bits of it before, the tidy bits, the bits that fit in a caption. This is the whole thing. I'm not going to name the firm, that's the one line I'm holding, because this isn't about them, it's about what it did to me and what came out the other side. But everything else, I'm telling you.

The job

I worked in a high performing corporate firm. Brilliant on paper. Brutal underneath. The culture didn't really tolerate anyone below a certain level, and I don't mean that in a gossipy way, I mean it was baked in. There was a line and if you were under it you were a cost, not a person.

I was in HR, looking after business services. That's the job I was hired to do. What it actually became was about ninety percent employee relations. Performance managing people out of the business. Terminating contracts. Grievances. Disciplinaries. On and on and on, one into the next, no gap in between.

And here's the bit that broke me. I was paid to deliver the message. That was the job. But the message didn't align with what I believe, and it definitely didn't align with the empath in me, which if you know me at all you'll know is most of me. A lot of what was happening felt wrong. Some of it, honestly, felt shady. And I was the face of it. I was the one in the room.

People cried in front of me. Actual people, with mortgages and kids and a whole life that was about to change, sitting across a desk from me while I said the words someone else had written. And I'd nod and be professional and then go back to my desk and do it again the next day.

I tried to leave. Of course I tried to leave. But I was too desperate to get another job, and that desperation does something strange, it makes you cling harder to the thing that's hurting you. So I stayed. Stuck in this daily loop of issues, one after another, no exit.

I describe that period as being under a black cloak of darkness. That's genuinely how it felt. Something over my head, no light getting in, and I couldn't work out how to get out from under it. And my body was telling me. My body was screaming at me. I wasn't listening to a single word of it.

The thing my husband said

Then one day my partner said, I feel like we're losing you.

And that was it. That was the moment. Because it meant it had trickled home. It wasn't just a work thing anymore that I could leave at the door, it had followed me in and sat down at my kitchen table and started taking from the people I love. I could justify what it was doing to me. I couldn't justify that.

So I knew I had to do something. I just had no idea what.

I didn't want to go down the pharmaceutical route, that wasn't a judgement on anyone who does, it just wasn't for me and I knew it in my gut. So I started with what I could control. I looked at what I was eating. I tried to exercise. Everyone kept telling me to meditate and honestly, meditation was out of the question, my mind was far too busy, sitting still with my own thoughts at that point was the last thing on earth I needed.

A bottle of lavender

And then my twin sister gave me a bottle of lavender. Really good lavender, the proper stuff, not the supermarket version.

I inhaled it.

And I felt a crack. That's the only way I can put it. Like the black cloak split open and there was a bit of blue sky coming through it. Just a bit. But after months of nothing, a bit was everything.

I knew instantly. Not thought, not wondered, knew. That was my hook. That was the thing that was going to get me better.

So I became completely obsessed. I bought more oils. I lined them up on my desk at work like a little wall of defence. And through the day, in between the meetings and the difficult conversations and the whole grinding lot of it, I'd put a couple of drops in my palms and breathe them in. Just that. And I got stronger. Not overnight, but day by day, actually stronger.

When other people noticed

People at work started clocking it. What are those. What are you doing. Can I try.

So I gave some away. Just handed bottles over, didn't think anything of it.

And then those same colleagues, who were every bit as stressed as I was, started messaging me asking for more.

That was the first time it landed that this wasn't just me. It wasn't a placebo or a quirk or me being a bit woo. It was doing something for other people too, people in the same building, under the same pressure.

The perfume problem

At the same time, something else was happening. I'd gone right off my own perfume. Couldn't wear it. It smelled synthetic to me, chemical, like something being sprayed at me rather than something I wanted on my skin.

What I wanted was a perfume made with beautiful botanicals. Something I could wear because it was gorgeous, yes, but that I could also lift to my nose in the middle of a horrible day and inhale, and have it actually do something for my nervous system.

I looked. I genuinely looked. It didn't exist.

So I made it, badly

So I started making my own, and it was a disaster.

I want to be really honest about this bit because I think people skip it. Blending is an art form. A proper one. You cannot just tip nice things into a bottle and expect a perfume, I know because I tried, repeatedly, and produced some absolute horrors. So I went and took a perfumery course, and I learned it properly, and I kept going.

Elyse came together bit by bit. Slowly. Much more slowly than anyone would like, including me. There was no launch moment, no big reveal, just years of getting it slightly less wrong.

Why I'm telling you all this

Because I think there's a story that gets sold about women starting businesses in their forties and fifties, and it's usually about being brave and taking a leap and following your passion, and it's very clean and it's not what happened.

What happened was I got ill from a job I couldn't leave, my husband told me he was losing me, my sister handed me a bottle of lavender, and I followed the one thing that made me feel better until it turned into a company.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

I don't think of Elyse as a business I built. I think of it as a calling that found me at the exact point I had nothing left to argue with it. And I know how that sounds. I don't care anymore, it's true.

If you're reading this in the middle of your own version of it, under your own black cloak, still turning up every day and doing the thing that's slowly taking pieces out of you, I'd just say this. You are not behind.

I thought I was. For years I thought I was so far behind that there was no point starting.

I was never behind. I was becoming.

And so are you.