Careers In The Making
Zoe Fox's Story
Creative excellence always finds a way to shine through adversity. Against the odds, Zoe Fox inspires women to find their true potential through creativity – all the while living with a spinal cord injury that changed her life forever at the start of the pandemic. Watch her ‘Careers In The Making’ story below:
Interview transcript
I'm getting goosebumps even now just talking about it. So I'm like, I know there's going to be other women that are feeling perhaps how I felt at some point along the journey that are looking for that hope and that inspiration. I've got so much to add, I've got so much value to give, and I've got one hell of a life experience that I can share with other people.
I would just love to see more women really feeling like they know what it is to be connected with their ultimate potential without being hindered by any of their past experiences.
So I was too scared to leave the house because of my anxiety. I was agoraphobic. I wasn't functioning properly at work. I went to study counselling, and so I went back to uni as a mature student and I started to learn things there that helped me set me free. So once I realised that I had the potential to transform my life, I'm like, okay, so how can I take what I've learned and help other women to do the same?
Three years ago now, on the day of my daughter's first birthday party, I just had no feeling from the waist down. So I got rushed to hospital and they did an emergency MRI scan and it was like, we need to do emergency surgery, otherwise you're going to be permanently paralysed. And it's been a long journey of trying to rebuild.
"Connecting with my creativity is a massive tool for me that's helped me to deal with my adjustment to this disability."
Zoe Fox
Podcaster, Writer
The injury happened just at the beginning of the pandemic, so I got kicked out of hospital. Honestly, you couldn't like, yes, my life has just been – but now I see, like, there's a purpose in it because it's, it's given me all this insight. Difficult things can happen, hard stuff can happen, but we can find wisdom within that to help us to get to know ourselves and know more about what we want to experience in the world and then just go out and get it.
The parallels that I found between my creative journey and my personal journey are, what is it that I want to get out of, whatever the circumstances? So, like, with the creative side of things, it's like, what's the message? Who's the message for? And how do I want to be able to deliver that message?
Cannes is known typically as being quite an exclusive place. People here don't look like me, they don't sound like me. This feels different to normalise experiences like this for working class people of colour with a disability, especially to allow us to feel as though you've got a seat at this table, like, amazing.
Connecting with my creativity is a massive tool for me that's helped me to deal with my adjustment to this disability. Starting this podcast, I'm having these conversations, I'm writing this book, and I believe in myself now in a way that I never have before, because I survived a spinal cord injury in a pandemic with a one year old. So, yeah, there's no stopping me now.
I'm Zoe Fox. I'm a podcaster. I'm a writer. And I'm really helping women to connect to their greatest potential through one to one work and workshops.
