Emily Forbes,
Substack Indie Author
Emily Forbes spent nine years as a public sector CEO — leading, delivering, performing at the highest level. Then her body stopped co-operating.
Diagnosed with a cluster of chronic conditions including fibromyalgia, deep infiltrating endometriosis, adenomyosis and gastrointestinal dysfunction that left her living on liquid food for the last five years, Emily found herself navigating illness, identity loss, and the particular grief of a life that no longer fits. Too Hard to Swallow is what she made from that.
It is not a recovery memoir. It is not a wellness manual. It is an honest account of what happens when the life you built collides with the body you're living in — and the slow, necessary work of rebuilding something real from the wreckage.
Emily is the founder of Wylde Wellbeing and an ILM Level 7 executive coach. She works with women leaders and executives navigating burnout, chronic illness, and midlife transition and the particular exhaustion of performing strength over an extended period. Her approach is grounded in coaching psychology, positive psychology and the recognition that capability does not equal capacity when your body operates on a different set of terms than the world expects.
Her Whole-Wellness™ framework was not developed in a seminar room. It was built inside the experience this book describes. This has led to her soon commencing doctoral research in coaching psychology and health psychology, with a focus on capacity, burnout, and sustainable functioning.
She lives in Cowbridge, Wales. She writes from lived experience first, research second, and framework third.
She believes you do not need fixing. You need to be seen.
Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/emilyforbeswyldewellbeing
