I turned my “why me” into my purpose. Now I help others do the same.

I was born with a bilateral cleft lip — the first person in my family's history to be born that way. By six months old, I'd already had two major surgeries to reconstruct my lip. The blood loss was so severe that doctors had to delay the third surgery until I was two.

I don't remember the surgeries. What I remember is walking home from school one day and asking my parents why the other kids were staring at me.

That question — why me? — followed me through childhood. Every time someone spoke on my behalf because they couldn't understand my speech. Every time I was told to “stay here, it's not safe for you” while other kids ran off to play. Every time I felt like I was being watched, whispered about, treated as other.

For years, I believed being born different was something that had happened to me. A loss. A limitation. A reason to stay small.

I was wrong.

Fast forward to September 2020. I was working as a pizza chef in Manchester, four hours into my shift, joking around with a colleague — when I slipped near the grill. My ankle shattered so badly that my foot was left hanging on by skin alone.

What followed was one of the longest nights of my life: hours waiting for an ambulance that never came, a car ride to hospital with my uncle, COVID restrictions that meant my parents couldn't be at my side, and a surgeon's warning that they might have to amputate to save the rest of my body.

I lay on that hospital bed running through every worst-case scenario a mind can produce. What if I never walk again? What if the surgery fails? What if this is the end of the life I was building?

The surgery worked. A plate now holds my ankle together for life. I spent two months on complete bed rest, relearning how to walk — and, in a much bigger sense, relearning how to live.

That night didn't just heal a broken bone. It rebuilt how I saw every “broken” part of myself.

Here's what I've learned, the hard way, twice over: being born different — or becoming different through an accident, an illness, a betrayal, a failure — is not a life sentence. It's a different starting line.

I stopped asking “why me?” and started asking a better question: what am I uniquely positioned to do because of this?

I looked at people who'd been dismissed, doubted, or written off — and who built extraordinary lives anyway. People whose so-called limitations became the exact thing that sharpened their focus and purpose. The pattern was always the same: they stopped waiting to feel ready, stopped waiting for the doubt to disappear, and took the next right action anyway.

I did the same. I went from a young man who could barely speak to a stranger without panicking that I'd be misunderstood, to someone who chooses — on purpose — to stand in front of rooms full of strangers and speak.

That shift didn't happen by accident. It happened through a process: naming the real story (not the fear-based one), rebuilding belief one small proof-point at a time, and refusing to let a body, a bank account, or a bad year define what I was capable of.