About
Anne-Marie Markos is a wife, carer, writer, and founder of Finding My Sunshine. She has always stood up for those who couldn’t defend themselves and likes to fight against injustice and inequality. She has navigated the Administrative Review Tribunal system, written extensively on systemic NDIS failures, and built this platform from primary source evidence: her own life.
I’m Anne-Marie. A mother, a wife, a writer, and some would say an advocate. I am a woman who has fallen apart and rebuilt herself more times than I can count.
I’m not going to soften this for you, because softening it is how the truth gets lost.
I live with erythromelalgia, small fibre neuropathy and restless leg syndrome, conditions that set my nerves burning. I live with bipolar, ADHD, and complex PTSD. I’ve had more than fifty surgeries. In 2020, an injury destroyed the nerve in my left shoulder. The muscle wasted, and it no longer works for lifting or anything that takes two hands. Most days my legs give out around lunchtime, so I get about five hours on my feet before I am down for the day. My mind keeps working until midnight, whether the rest of me agrees or not.
My life has taken me to some of the darkest places any person should ever have to witness. Experiences that still shape how I respond to the world today. These are not things a person merely survives. That word would suggest I have neatly closed the chapter and it no longer touches me. The truth is that many things have happened to me, and while I work hard not to live as a victim, I would be lying if I said they haven’t shaped the woman I have become.
I’ve lived through medical trauma most people will never have to imagine.
And I’ve spent years proving, to tribunals, to the NDIS, to people with no idea what our days hold, that my family deserves help. I’ve written it into Senate submissions, freedom-of-information fights, and decisions that took years to win.
Here’s the part the paperwork never captures. I’m articulate. I’m organised. I can hold a room and write a submission that lands. None of that means I am okay, and the system has spent a long time mistaking the one for the other. Looking like you are coping is not the same as being held. I know that better than I know almost anything.
I’m raising two sons. One has complex, lifelong needs, and loving him has stretched me in ways that are both heartbreaking and the best thing I have ever done. My husband carries his own serious illness alongside me, so we hold each other up on the days we can.
So much of this happens where no one sees it. In hospitals. In waiting rooms. In the quiet after everyone is asleep.
And I am still here.
Not because I am stronger than anyone else, but because I keep choosing to believe there is something worth staying for.
Finding My Sunshine is where I put all of it down and tell the truth. About pain. About the fact that healing almost never looks the way we were promised. If you are here, maybe you know what it is to carry too much. To hold joy and grief in the same breath. To feel invisible in a world that does not slow down for your kind of hard.
You don’t have to be fixed to be welcome here. You don’t have to pretend.
I see you. I’m glad you’re here.
With love,
Anne-Marie x