Our Chief Sender of Hugs, Faye, was recently featured on the wonderful The Rest Room podcast - a space dedicated to exploring what it means to live well with chronic illness .
It’s an honest, thoughtful conversation, and one that feels especially close to home for us as a business built around care, compassion and understanding. If you’d like to listen (or read the full transcript), you can find the episode over on The Rest Room.
In the episode, Faye talks openly about building a business while living with chronic illness - something that’s often not spoken about enough. There’s a lot of pressure, both from ourselves and from the world around us, to keep pushing, doing more, and keeping up. But as Faye shares, learning to adjust expectations has been one of the biggest shifts.
It’s about recognising what’s realistic, rather than what we feel we should be able to do. That doesn’t mean lowering ambition - just approaching things in a way that’s sustainable, kinder, and ultimately more supportive in the long run.
Faye also speaks about the importance of communicating those expectations clearly with others. When you’re open from the start about what you can and can’t do, it creates space to grow gradually, without pushing beyond your limits or burning out along the way.
One of the most reassuring parts of the conversation is the reminder that there isn’t just one way to build something. You can still follow the same path as anyone else - it might just look a little different. Slower, perhaps. More considered. More intentional. And that’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. For us, this way of working is woven into everything we do at BearHugs.
A huge thank you to Natasha for thinking of BearHugs and featuring this conversation with Faye. We've been long-term admirers of her work and it was a pleasure to get involved with the Rest Room.
