What if the well trodden path isn’t the only one?

Over time, “fighting fires” started to feel like my default state. While the work could feel meaningful, the system often wasn’t.

I found myself wondering: is this the only way to live a good life? And even more confronting:

If I’m not a doctor, who am I?

So I stepped away — not because I had a perfect plan, but because I didn’t want to keep living on autopilot.

Leaving didn’t instantly create clarity. It created space.

I started asking questions about life outside medicine — what happens when you take clinical insight into startups, venture, and building.

I began writing to make sense of it all. That became a small newsletter, which led me into venture capital, and eventually into one of Australia’s fastest-growing health tech companies.

Through all of it, one lesson has stayed constant:

Being good at the pathway doesn’t mean the pathway is good for you.

We are capable of so much more than the pre-prescribed path.

Medicine teaches competence and composure.

It can also teach you that the only legitimate life is the one on the track — and that confidence must be earned through credentials.

So when the track stops working, it can feel like personal failure.
It isn’t. It’s the predictable outcome of a culture that treats deviation as deficiency.

I’m determined to change that — to normalise varied careers and help clinicians make choices based on who they are, not just what they trained for.