ABOUT CLAIRE VON CLEVELAND

THE STORY

Portsmouth, 1974. Where it begins.

Claire Von Cleveland was born in Portsmouth, England, to two young parents who emigrated to Vancouver, Canada with $250 and two one-way tickets when she was six months old. Their marriage dissolved before she could walk. She was raised by her father — in a house that looked fine from the outside, and wasn't.

What she learned in that house, before she had words for it: how to read a room before entering it. How to make yourself small enough not to be noticed. How to survive inside someone else's chaos. And how to keep going when everything is on you, because there is no one else.

At fifteen, she found a quarter, walked two miles to a phone booth, and called her mother. Her mother said wait there. She did. That was the first time she understood that one small act of courage could change everything.

Tokyo, modelling, and the beginning of elsewhere.

Six weeks before high school graduation, Claire was offered a modelling contract. It took her to Tokyo, then Australasia, then across Southeast Asia. She slept in places that had no business calling themselves hotels, navigated cities where she couldn't read the signs, and once ate a rat offered to her by the Karen Hill Tribe in Thailand — because when someone offers you hospitality, you accept it. For five years, her world expanded in every direction. She learned that discomfort, handled with grace, opens more doors than comfort ever does.

Between modelling assignments she went back to the subjects she had struggled with at school and rewrote the exams. The grades came back as A's and B's — the voice that had told her she wasn't smart took considerably longer to update. After five years she stepped off the modelling circuit and enrolled at the Canadian Tourism College in Vancouver, graduating with an Associate's Degree in Advanced Travel and Tourism with Honours in 1998.

London, twenty-one years, and the cost of success.

She moved to London in her mid-twenties and stayed for twenty-one years. She built a corporate career in financial services — director level, global clients, forty staff, the Rolex-and-Louboutin world where success was measured in league tables and she consistently topped them. She was also, quietly, unravelling.

The panic attacks started at a children's birthday party. Her body knew something her mind wasn't ready to accept: that she had spent her entire life performing competence inside systems that were never going to give her what she was actually looking for. She read 233 books on spirituality, philosophy, and human consciousness. She tracked them in a spreadsheet. With a spiritual impact score. She was trying to heal herself with a Type A personality.

She found clarity in the Canadian Arctic, watching Beluga whales at midnight. She found it again in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, in a conversation with an elderly Berber man who explained that every human wants the same things: love, health, family, and a camel. She did not have a camel. She had a knowing that something had to change.

She left corporate life when she realised she was trading her health for her wealth. What followed was a decade of building something different — an independent coaching and consulting practice working with executives and leadership teams across the UK and North America on leadership, wellbeing, and the hidden cost of high-performance cultures. She holds certifications from Harvard and the University of California Berkeley in organisational health and the science of happiness at work, and is a Certified Neurodiversity Professional. She has spoken at events sponsored by KPMG, Shell, LNG Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, and Encana.

The divorce, the pandemic, two suitcases.

After seventeen years together and ten years of marriage, Claire ended her marriage during a global pandemic. She left her husband, her home, and her cats — leaving the cats broke her heart — and moved into the first of nine Airbnbs in three months, the smallest a 300-square-foot flat in Kensington, with no friends permitted to visit and the airspace closed. She sold her jewellery in Hatton Garden to the kind of man who operates with a smile and a handshake and gives you considerably less than your jewellery is worth while making you feel like you got a bargain. She walked away from everything else. She carried what remained in two suitcases onto the first flight to Canada when the airspace reopened.

What she took with her was guilt. Not the vague, manageable kind — the suffocating kind. The guilt of leaving a man she loved. The guilt of knowing he was in pain and choosing herself anyway. The guilt of understanding that choosing yourself and hurting someone else are not always separate.

Alongside the guilt was something harder to name. A quiet knowing that she had made the right decision, even if she couldn't yet say what that meant or who she would be on the other side of it.

Palm Springs, and finally, herself.

After two weeks quarantined alone in a hotel room in Toronto — pandemic rules — she landed in Palm Springs and felt she could finally breathe again. She had been coming to the desert since the late 1990s, drawn back repeatedly by the heat radiating off the desert floor, the palm trees against the San Jacinto Mountains, the midcentury modern oasis sitting in the heart of the Coachella Valley. California had been the dream since childhood.

She fell in love with Sonny Von Cleveland and ghost-wrote his memoir, Hey White Boy: Conversations of Redemption — the story of a child who survived unimaginable abuse in silence, and what that silence cost him, and what it took to find his way back. Every morning at 5am she recorded their conversations, then turned his spoken memories into written ones. Three months of intensive interviews and writing. It was through living his reality firsthand — watching redemption be welcomed as inspiration and denied as reality, watching institutions celebrate second chances in their mission statements and quietly enforce exclusion in their decisions — that she came to understand what she now writes about. Redemption. Institutional power. Who gets to belong. She didn't learn it from books. She lived it from the inside.

Writing had always been there, running underneath everything else — the thing that turned the noise in her head into something she could see and understand. Claire Von Cleveland (née Claire Rogers) publishes long-form cultural essays on Substack on power, shame, media, and the gap between what we are shown and what is actually true. Her memoir, Two Suitcases and a Knowing, is in progress.

In parallel, she built Frisky Business Palm Springs Cat Café from scratch — the first and only cat café in the Coachella Valley, receiving two Certificates of Congressional Recognition and one Certificate from the California Legislative Assembly for disability employment and inclusion work, becoming a Certified EmployABILITY Champion through the California Department of Rehabilitation, and establishing a Certified Neurodiverse Workplace.