About us
Leah
My life has been many things, but straightforward isn't one of them. I experienced a lot of instability and trauma from a very young age, and for a long time I carried things I didn't fully understand. By my teens I was rebellious, regularly making questionable decisions and generally being a bit of a handful. I left home at 16, became a mum at 18 and somehow still managed to leave school with decent GCSEs despite spending a questionable amount of time actually attending it. Early motherhood settled me in some ways, but my adult life brought its own trauma. I experienced abusive relationships, sexual violence and periods of very poor mental health. For a while, alcohol became a way of getting through life rather than simply something I did for fun. There were points when surviving my own mind became incredibly difficult. Eventually, things began to change. By the time Dave and I got together in 2017, I'd stopped drinking, started understanding myself better and was making very different choices. Dave became the final piece of that puzzle. For the first time, I understood what it was like to feel genuinely safe with another person. He feels like home. And strangely enough, that's when I became creative. I wasn't the child who spent her days drawing pictures or dreaming of becoming an artist. I had absolutely no idea that was where my life was heading. Dave suggested I try painting as a way of giving my brain something else to focus on and helping my mental health. I still don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I bloody love doing it. Creating gives my brain somewhere to go. It lets me switch off, process things and express things I don't necessarily have words for. Writing happened in much the same way. I began journalling about my past and my life and discovered that I loved putting things onto paper. Eventually that turned into writing books, beginning with a subject I'd spent years learning about. Today I predominantly write non-fiction because I love learning, sharing what I know and hopefully helping somebody else along the way. Then there's fishing. Dave took me fishing and, somewhat unexpectedly, I fell completely in love with it. After spending so much of my life surrounded by chaos, sitting beside water in the middle of nowhere feels like hitting a reset button on my nervous system. Being outdoors has become incredibly important to me. Sometimes a home filled with memories is exactly where I want to be, other times I need to get away from four walls, sit beside some water and just exist for a while. In 2025, my life changed forever when my eldest son died by suicide at just 19 after struggling with his own difficulties. He was incredibly intelligent, caring, loved music and computers and had a brilliantly dark sense of humour. Our relationship hadn't always been easy, and circumstances outside of our control caused fractures that we came to understand but never had enough time to fully repair. We did, however, laugh. A lot. Losing him fundamentally changed the way I look at time. I've learned that we don't get to know how much of it we have — or how much time we have with the people we love. I don't want to spend mine constantly waiting for some imaginary point in the future when I'll finally start living. Since losing him, I've become more creative, not less. I paint. I write. I fish. I spend time outside. I talk to my friends. I share what I've learned. I support people where I can. I enjoy slow mornings, good food and evenings with my family. Most importantly, I try to spend my time doing things I actually love with people I actually love. I don't believe profound trauma has a neat ending where you're suddenly "healed". Some things become part of you. You learn yourself, learn how to regulate, learn what you need and keep moving forward — sometimes gracefully and sometimes swearing the entire way. These days I'm outdoorsy, compassionate, adventurous when my body allows it, helpful, understanding, reasonably funny and someone who swears far more than is probably necessary. I've also completely stopped trying to live according to other people's expectations. Freedom is probably the thing I value most now: the freedom to be unapologetically yourself, manage your time around the life you actually want and fill as much of it as possible with things that make you happy. That's really what How to Wright is about. Dave and I have been through an extraordinary amount between us and somehow we're still here. We must be doing something Wright. We're trying to build a life and a living around the things we genuinely love while sharing what we've learned along the way. Not because we've got life figured out — we absolutely haven't — but because we've learned a hell of a lot by getting it wrong. If some of that helps somebody else get something right, even better.
About Us
Grab a cuppa, pull up a chair and read all about us in our profiles below.
Dave
I grew up in a fairly ordinary British family with my mum, dad, brother and sister. Home was relatively stable. My parents worked hard to provide for us, which sometimes meant they weren't around as much as I wanted them to be. Looking back, I understand why , bills needed paying, but that doesn't necessarily change how things feel when you're a kid. School was a completely different story. I was different, although nobody really understood why at the time. Years later, I discovered that I'm autistic. Back then, autism wasn't something people really talked about or recognised in kids like me. If you were different, you were just different and unfortunately, that often made you a target. I was bullied, I hated school and I never fitted into the system. I found it boring, didn't respond particularly well to the way some teachers spoke to me and regularly found myself in trouble. I truanted, fought, smoked, took drugs and was generally a bit of a tearaway. Underneath all of that, though, I was an angry and anxious kid who never really felt like I fitted in. I was repeatedly told by teachers that I'd never amount to anything or do anything with my life. Eventually, I left school having failed every GCSE. Including Art. Which, considering what I do for a living now, is quite funny. Art was actually one of the things I'd always loved. I've been creative for as long as I can remember and could happily disappear into a drawing for hours. Nobody particularly encouraged it or taught me how to do it. I just drew, practised and figured things out for myself. There was one other thing that became part of my life very early on, fishing. I've been fishing since I was around five years old. Over the decades since, I've travelled the length and breadth of the country with a rod in my hand, fishing different waters and learning multiple disciplines along the way. It's one of the few things that has remained a constant throughout almost every stage of my life. After leaving school I started an electronics apprenticeship, but once again I struggled to fit into the system I was placed in. I eventually left and started working with my dad in toolmaking and injection moulding. We went on to build an engineering business together, where I became a company director. Once I'd escaped school, something changed. The kid who'd been told he'd never amount to anything became absolutely determined to work. And I worked a lot. For years my work ethic was pretty extreme. Seven-day weeks and long hours were normal to me. I've always worked hard for everything I've had, and providing for my family became incredibly important to me. Life outside work hasn't always been easy. I've experienced betrayal, difficult relationships, financial hardship and some incredibly difficult periods within my family. Becoming a dad gave me something much bigger than myself to fight for, and I'm fiercely protective of my children. Our family has had to navigate serious trauma, mental health difficulties and neurodivergence. There have been lengthy battles, enormous financial pressures and times when I've wondered how much more life could possibly throw at us. In 2009, I started tattooing. I'm completely self-taught. No formal artistic education. No Art qualification. No teacher showing me how it was done. I learned through practice, determination and probably a fair amount of stubbornness. Tattooing eventually became my career, and I also create detailed pencil portraits. You'd think making a living from the very thing I failed at school would have finally convinced me that I'm actually quite good at it. It hasn't. Being bullied and put down when I was younger affected my confidence more than I probably realised at the time. Even now, I rarely think my work is good enough. Autism and things I've experienced throughout my life also mean I don't have much of a social life and I can find it incredibly difficult to trust people. Then Leah came along. We'd known each other for around two years before we got together in 2017. At the time I was a single dad, living back at my mum's house, working constantly and pretty much fed up with life. For the first time, I found somebody who genuinely took the time to get to know me. Not the version of me somebody wanted me to be. Not the person they thought I should become. Just me. She accepts me exactly as I am, and over the years we've built a life and family together that I'm incredibly proud of. She also gradually convinced me that perhaps working seven days a week until I dropped dead wasn't the greatest life plan. These days I'm learning to slow down. I still work hard and probably always will, but success means something different to me now. Yes, I want to earn more money — obviously — but I also want to work less for it. I want time with my family and I want days off. And after more than four decades of fishing, I still want to spend a ridiculous amount of my life beside the water. I spent years believing that working harder was the answer to everything. Now I'm learning that there's not much point building a life if you're too busy working to actually live it. And I did eventually get the opportunity to answer one of those teachers who'd told me I'd never amount to anything. At the time, I was running the engineering company I'd built with my dad and was a director of the business. When I saw one of my old teachers, I handed them my business card. “I thought I'd never amount to anything?” I left school with nothing and went out and built something for myself anyway. And years later, I'd go on to make a career out of Art too — the GCSE I'd failed. That's a big part of what How to Wright means to me. Neither Leah nor I have followed the conventional route through life. We've both made mistakes, been through things that changed us and learned plenty of lessons the hard way. Now we're trying to make a living from the things we genuinely love, while creating enough freedom to actually enjoy the life we're building. We don't have everything figured out. But after everything life has thrown at us, we're still here. We're still creating, still fishing, still learning and still moving forward. So we must be doing something Wright.
