I gave both tales to the Gleeman — a teller of stories, some his own, some carried to him from elsewhere — because I wasn’t ready to speak the whole picture in my own voice.

He could illustrate what I couldn’t say directly. The boy and the angel, the mirror and the bag, the wings furled against the long muscles of a back: all of it arrived through him, shaped into fable, held at the distance fable permits. The first story came to me as someone else’s telling, the second I wrote myself, both penned in the final days of a marriage coming undone.

My journal entry from that Saturday reads: A quiet day at home alone, I cleaned and wrote a short story. It was late February, four days after the marriage was ended by vicious text. Four days after my birthday. I was in my bungalow on a thirty-five-acre common, Kitty the cat for company, sat at the desk where I always worked. I framed my tale, as I’d told myself I would, with compassion and gratitude, though it was received as mean.

There comes a point where a mask does more protecting than truth-telling. The Gleeman has served his purpose with those stories, so I take the telling back by asking myself:

What do the two fables say together that neither says alone?

Marie-Louise von Franz, the Jungian analyst, mapped the five stages of a projection rising and withdrawing decades ago. The diptych traces that mechanism in two voices. The boy with the storm in his backpack in The Weight of Wings is Stage One; the boy at the greengrocer, choosing apples He Sat Watching the Dusk is Stage Five.

Between them lies the collapse of a mythology, the void, and the long work of bringing the light back home.

The Story That Arrived Complete

Her story arrived as an email during the marriage’s messy ending. She had cast us both: I was the boy with the storm in his backpack, a darkness so vast that no love could hold it. She was the angel who descended, who knelt in the sand, who put her hand on my shoulder and asked to help me open the bag. When the tempest erupted, all shadow and slicing hurt, she fought to stay. The other angels had to drag her away. She wept as they carried her upward: I never should have unzipped your backpack. I’m so sorry!

The teller does not know it is a story. The one receiving it cannot argue with it from the inside. The image and what it points at fuse into a single whole.

It was complete. Internally consistent, aesthetically compelling in the way all projections are when they have fully inhabited their image. The boy IS the monster. The angel IS the blameless rescuer, overwhelmed by a darkness she did not create and could not contain, though she tried.

The Gleeman received that story and rendered it faithfully. He could do nothing else. A story at archaic identity — where the self is fused with the image — has a coherence that commands the telling. The first fable is both beautiful and untrue at the same time.

I held that mythology in my hands and knew two things at once: that it was a story about me, and that it was not factual about my nature. But knowing the story was a story did nothing to undo it; the marriage had imploded and the story was complete.

The sun came up. Life went on. Reality accumulated.

What Was in the Bag

In the second fable, the girl in the crumbling playground clutches a plastic bag bulging with sweets, sherbet, and fizzy drinks. The other children cluster behind her, whispering. The angel’s halo is there, but her glitter and gauze wings are brittle. This image holds a pattern I lived inside: substances as avoidance, the party as the answer to every difficult question. The bag of sweets a social currency: loyalty purchased with treats, noise that stood in for difficult conversation.

The children with their unquestioning fealty were a structure: friends recruited as observers, as reporters, as audience, as extras in the play. I was cast as suspect long before I understood the role I had been given. Accusations were seeded through the group. A predecessor’s name was invoked to explain what I was: a pattern, a personality type, darkness with a familiar shape. Their surveillance was so thorough that I learned to watch my own face before I showed it to anyone.

The backpack in the second story holds the pain and the story about the pain. His to set down, the both of them.

I remember the moment the pattern lit up, sitting at my desk with my notes spread out: the sherbet, the children, the predecessor. The room went very still. The cat watched from the armchair. My breath was shallow, then deeper, as if my lungs had decided something my mind had yet to.

He listens and he changes. I had heard her say this, and I took it as a compliment. I had gone to therapy. I had cut the substances, found clarity. I had dismantled my own unhealthy patterns piece by piece, hoping to model a different way of being together. But the burden only ever flowed one way. Her contempt-face arrived whenever I stumbled. Cruelty by effect, whatever the intent. My nerves would fire up before I understood why; this wound was older than the marriage.

I was the scapegoat in a pattern older than me.

The provocation was invisible to anyone watching from outside. The setup came first: words or silences, or small actions calibrated to trip the wire. Then came my frustration, my protest and the story she wished to tell came to be: see what he’s like? The cycle completed itself every time. I was set up to react in front of people and made to look like the one at fault.

There were other mechanisms deployed, too. Vulnerability repurposed into ammunition. History rewritten to maintain a noble self-image. An impossible requirement: my love is not unconditional; you need to be exceptional.

Then, neurodivergence. She named it first: pointed to it as care, as observation, as the key to our difficulties. I have her to thank for the pointing. She studied it, though not as deeply as I. She said she wanted to understand me better, but for me, the only way to understand a person is to listen to them tell their own experience of the world.

Her studies did augment her toolkit, though. I felt the changes in my body before I had a name for it: the rejection dysphoria triggers fired more and more often, layered looks and remarks landing closer to the bone. Whatever she intended, her home became a place I learned to brace in. My diagnosis itself came months after I had left her. The gift preceding the escape; the escape preceding the receipt.

My story of the marriage was written as fable, framed with compassion, but received as cruelty. She told her circle that, though the people she told had not read it. They judged me anyway and the verdict ran faster than the text.

A friend close enough to me and far enough from her, carried that back to me at a dining room table months later: your story was mean. Her story about me had run unchecked through that circle for months: me the broken boy with nothing in his bag but pain, her the angelic rescuer descending in good faith. My telling held both of us. Hers held only one. Yet mine was the one they called cruel.

I told my story from where I stood, and telling it that way let me leave the rough texture of that life behind.

The Soul-Search

There was a label. Narcissist.

It came through the social group: the children clustered behind the angel in the fable, the friends whose fealty had been purchased with... sweets.

The word arrived secondhand, as a report from her: her people were all debating whether I was one, and she had been defending me in those conversations. The gibbet was already built. The group had been seeded; the debate was running; her position as my “advocate” was set.

The double-bind was force-fed. To deny it would be just what that type would say. To accept it would be confession. Every answer I could give would reinforce the executioner’s frame, except one: to name the straight-jacket I’d been put into and ask her to watch me instead.

What took me longer to see was a third move: that the word had reached the circle from her in the first place. She’d whispered the label in their ears and then positioned herself as the one defending me from the accusations she had seeded.

An insidious story to tell about a person.

I took it seriously. A label handed with that much conviction, from people who thought they knew me, cannot be waved away. If the worst of it was true, I had to own it. I did not get to be the good guy in my own story if I was rotten on the inside. I had to find out.

This is what von Franz calls moral evaluation: the genuine testing of the projection’s content. Is the thing they see in you actually yours? The question wants more than a sentence. It wants you walking around inside it for months, looking for the place where it might catch.

For three months I carried it everywhere: into therapy, onto the mat, into the reading, into my dreams.

I went to the bottom of it.

I had three months signed off work after my breakdown. I went to MIND in crisis, then to private psychotherapy, then CBT through the NHS. I practised yoga, qigong, authentic movement. I read intensively, dozens of titles. Pamela Connelly’s Head Case came first, then Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, and Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Many more since. I consumed hundreds of hours of video and podcast material from creators like Sam Vaknin, Dr Ramani and the Crappy Childhood Fairy.

Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? was handed to me by her as thinly veiled accusation during a scheduled check-in while we were ‘on a break’. I bought my own copy immediately after that call, and read it to the end within three days.

I refused to take their accusation on trust. I worked with an LLM to build a structured self-interview grounded in the clinical instruments: DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, and the Pathological Narcissism Inventory across its seven domains.

I ran it on myself more than once, in different framings, watching for the pattern that would confirm what she had named. The profile that came back each time, was one I already knew: a self organised around the terror of not being enough, around the conviction that love was conditional, around four decades of learning to be small enough to be safe.

I noted where I was unsure. I asked the follow-up questions myself. The work was ugly and methodical; the work of someone who refused to either to take the claim on trust or to dismiss it without testing it thoroughly. The LLM-built interview was a support for the conversations I was already having with counsellor and my therapist; this work was held by people who knew me, and wasn’t delivered by the instruments themselves.

A self organised around maintaining an inflated image does not walk voluntarily into a terrible story about itself and stay there for months. Mine had. I spent those months naming my own failures in writing and absorbing feedback from anyone who offered it.

I lay on the mat in my front room with the weight of me pouring through my palms into the floor, asking the floor if the thing she had named was here. The floor kept giving the same answer back. The shape being named was nowhere in the rooms I actually lived in.

I went to the bottom of the ocean and surfaced empty-handed. Whatever they had named lived elsewhere. My interior didn’t fit that shape; an awful story about a person had been scrawled on my face in someone else’s hand.

A damning label assigned with total conviction, by someone who knew you intimately, that does not fit you. What is that?

It is a projection and it belongs to the psyche that sent it.

Recollection means not completing the projection in the other direction. The mirror stays in my pocket; the silence where my private conviction sits is part of the work. You may infer whatever you infer; I will not steer it any more than this.

The Void and the Lock

The projection collapsed, and then there was a period of nothing. The illusion recognised; the source not yet found.

My psyche was reorganising.

From outside it looked like the lights going out, but inside, something was moving in the dark. I remember sitting in my chair for hours, discovering a dead mouse under its edge — there for a while by the looks of it — and not knowing what to do with that fact.

That void was the space between the two fables.

I sat in that emptiness for months. The drafts I wrote during that time wanted to win. They wanted to lay out every grievance, every mechanism, every instance where I had been set up to fail and then blamed for failing. The drafts were true enough, though they were also poison.

If I had published them, I would have built my life around having been the wronged party. Building a life around the wrong done to you keeps the projection alive. It just runs longer in your own voice.

The question became: Why did this story fit so cleanly into me?

The lock was older than the marriage.

I was conditioned in childhood to accept blame, to seek approval from a withholding woman, to carry shame that was not mine. The word “mother” is not new territory here. I have named her before, in the first Emergence letter, the sting of a wet tea-towel, a slow poisoning of my soul.

That training ran deep. When my marriage presented the same structure — carry the projected shame, seek approval from someone who withholds it with intent — the fit felt like chemistry because it felt like home.

I had known for more than four decades what had happened to me; but it took the marriage collapsing to finally know what it had done.

What I called home was familiar; the lock recognising the key.

I received her projection and I was someone whose childhood had shaped him precisely to receive it. Both things are true; neither cancels the other.

It reached violence once. That was the nadir. The body knew before the mind would say it; some part of me had been counting the distance to that bottom for longer than I wanted to admit. She’s dangerous, my inner voice had whispered when I first saw her profile all those years ago.

Freedom required me to leave. It also required dismantling what put me within her reach in the first place: recognising the childhood conditioning, and reclaiming the projected material from that direction too.

I had to see the full pattern to escape it. I saw it. I left. What I am building now sits beyond all of that. The seeing served the exit and the exit has its own legs now, its own weight, its own road to walk.

What the Gleeman Leaves Behind

Von Franz uses the metaphor: projection scatters the light. Each projected image is a spark shooting outward into the darkness of matter, into people and places that carry what we cannot yet hold in ourselves. We feel depleted because our energy is thrown outside of us, burning an image of who we are onto someone else.

Recollection gathers those sparks back, scattered light returning to the central fire.

The second fable is this. The boy no longer sees the girl as an angel. He does not think his way back to himself. He chooses his way back. The greengrocer: apples firm as courage. The baker: bread still warm as a heartbeat. The butcher: ham wrapped in waxed paper, the saltiness on the tongue confirmation that he is here and he has chosen this. Each errand is a ritual of choosing. Each chosen thing gathers a spark of light back from the world.

The yoga mat. Downward dog in the front room of the bungalow, the weight of me flowing through my palms, through the bones of my arms, into my shoulders, the solid earth taking what I had been carrying. The in-breath an act of active unworking. The floor underneath, reliable, undemanding, present. Six classes a month at the studio for the bigger work; the mat at home for the daily one.

This is somatic intelligence in practice. The body is the operating system and it chooses before the mind finishes its argument. My shoulders dropped before I understood what they were putting down.

The grounding produced the flight.

The boy does not look back, he does not curse the girl dressed as an angel. He leaves the mirror where she might one day find it, if she wants to look. You know where I’ll be if you want help unpacking yours. Then he walks home.

In the second fable the boy reaches his door and realises the backpack is gone. He laughs to no one on the step with the bread in one hand and a half-munched apple in the other. Inside, he draws the mirror from his pocket and his own eyes look back at him, brighter, no longer haunted. Behind his shoulder, in the glass, his own wings unfurl. Fledgling but fierce.

His.

Not the monster-story she wrote on his face.

His.

The mirror on the windowsill is where the sun’s first rays will catch it in the morning. The light gathered home. The wings growing because the ground was chosen first.

You have been handed a story about who you are. Whoever did the handing may have had a bag of their own, sealed, heavy, still theirs. Their light scattered into you when they reached for yours. The story felt true because part of it rhymed with an older wound; your lock recognising their key.

Sometimes the lock holds something of yours and the search returns its own answer; a real weight under the false one, your own to carry. Owning what is yours is not the same as accepting a verdict that was handed to you; the work is heavier but it is yours alone.

The recollection is yours.

The ordinary chosen thing is the method. The greengrocer, the baker, the butcher. The yoga mat. The journal page. The breath that goes all the way to the bottom before it turns. Each small act gathers a spark back from the world. The wings grow in the choosing.

Yours might be the kettle in the morning, or the dog at the door, or the cold tap held against the inside of your wrist when the room tilts. The first chosen thing, then the next.

What neither fable could say alone is this:

Projection rises. Projection withdraws. The void between them is where the lock gets dismantled, where the drafts that wanted to win get composted, where the real work of recollection begins. And on the other side of that work, your own eyes look back at you from the glass, brighter than you remembered.

The wings were always yours.

What story have you been handed about who you are — and who did the handing? What spark of theirs was scattered into you when they sent it?

Have you searched the worst of it honestly enough to know what is yours and what is not?

What you found that was yours, have you held it without flinching, owned its weight, done the work it asks of you?

What you found that was not, did you hand it back, or did you gather your own light home?

What is the ordinary chosen thing that has been gathering you back to yourself while your wings grow?

If you are doing similar work — testing an accusation against yourself, walking the worst possible story for months — do not do it alone, just you and the instruments. Hold it with someone who can witness it: a therapist, a crisis line, a person who loves you and who is not your accuser.

This letter has travelled landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌀 Spiral Passage / 🌟 Sovereign Essence / 🌊 Somatic Intelligence

• Aspect: 🔑 Unlocking / 🪷 Rebirth

• Terrain: 🌑 Shadow / 🫂 Community / 👣 Body

These are missives from the mid-journey. If they speak to you, then I invite you to subscribe:

Hamish

Subscribe now

I was sitting on the bed explaining to her why I found it so hard to apologise: how my brother blamed me for everything, how my mother was violent because of it, how I was the scapegoat and he was golden. I was crying so hard my ribs hurt, my breath was shallow and my face red.

She kept asking questions, to push further in, past the place where tenderness should have been. I had been to a place where I had no one else to turn to but god, and she had been nowhere to be seen.

I spent years reaching for something I could feel but couldn’t name; a quality I kept finding in other people, losing it, finding it again, in someone else, in a different body, in the same desperate pattern. I called it love. I called it connection. I called it need.

The pattern had a shape, though I couldn’t see it from inside. I would meet someone who seemed to hold the thing I was missing. I would orbit them. I would make myself essential, indispensable, the one who understood.

When they inevitably withdrew or broke or turned out to be human, I would feel the absence like a salted wound, as painful as if they had taken something that belonged to me.

These people had been holding something I refused to pick up. I wouldn’t know what it was for years, and honestly, I’m still finding out.

The Knowing That Changed Nothing

Jung mapped this pattern in four stages:

• Eve: seeking comfort and safety outside yourself, the mother you never had or the mother who broke you.

• Helen: seeking excitement, the fantasy, the charge that lights you up and burns you down.

• Mary: the equal, the companion, the first face of partnership that doesn’t require you to perform.

• Sophia: wisdom fully embodied, all of it contained within.

I could draw you the diagram. I could tell you which stage I was stuck in and cite the sources. I could name the projection mechanism, the way disowned psychic material gets lobbed onto the nearest warm body.

I could recite the entire dynamic, the broken trust, the disrespect, the wedding night, and still find myself at two in the morning being questioned about whether I was the one who couldn’t apologise.

The irony.

Every time I named the pattern, I bought another day of not having to feel it. Naming it was the avoidance: brilliant, articulate, but completely stuck. I could map my own dysfunction with the precision of a building survey, documenting every crack in the wall, measuring the subsidence, writing the report. Then I would walk back into the building and carry on living in it.

I could have lectured on it. Standing at a whiteboard with a dry-erase marker, explaining the mechanics of my own disintegration to an empty room. each diagram more detailed than the last, each one a day longer spent not feeling any of it.

A knot below the navel tightens when the thing you’ve externalised is standing in front of you, wearing someone else’s face. The throat closes when you try to say what you actually need instead of what you’ve rehearsed.

The intellect can only describe these places from the outside, like a surveyor documenting defects in walls he will never live within.

Below the Explanation

Bill Wood spotted it from across the room: my leg bones wouldn’t drop back into their hip sockets. He came over, put his hands on one, and pushed. Pop.

Something unlocked that I had been holding so long I had stopped registering it as tension. During shavasana, at the end of the last session of a three-day workshop, I cried from the sudden absence of something I had carried so long I had forgotten it was there.

You can lie in a shape and wait. On the floor in positions where my mind had nothing to do, my body could finally speak without being interrupted.

A knot I’d carried so long I’d mistaken it for part of my anatomy turned out to be stored charge. Years of reaching for something outside myself, compressed into a fist-sized contraction below my ribs that I’d been breathing around without knowing it was there.

When it moved, it moved because I stopped trying to understand it.

The body holds what the mind tries to protect us from. It has been storing things up the whole time, patiently, while the intellect runs its explanations and builds its diagrams and keeps the whole operation safely theoretical. The body waits. When you stop talking long enough to feel what’s there, the body can do in twenty minutes what the mind couldn’t manage in twenty years.

Knowledge describes. Integration inhabits. Carrying something is the only way to learn its weight. You carry it, or you keep handing it to someone else and wondering why they drop it.

The Map Was Right

The stages are real: Eve, Helen, Mary, Sophia. They are real in the way a map of a mountain is real: accurate, useful, yet completely unable to climb it for you.

I moved through them the way most people move through them: badly, in circles, forward and sideways and back to the beginning with my hands full of the same projected material I thought I’d put down six months ago.

After the mat, after the diagrams, I found myself at the same coordinates: a tightening in my solar plexus, an old script running: make it better before she blames you. A pattern I could draw on a napkin, wearing someone else’s face.

The solar plexus loosens, the reaching stops. What you were looking for in someone else’s face was already living in your own chest. Projection becomes embodiment. The weight you kept handing to other people, you pick up and carry it yourself.

You catch yourself doing it, and the distance between the doing and the catching gets shorter. Six months becomes six weeks becomes the middle of a sentence when you hear yourself asking for something you already have.

The spiral is the shape: you revisit the same ground, but from a different altitude. The view changes and what felt like failure from below looks like precision from above: the map took you back to the coordinates you needed, because you weren’t finished with them.

Still Carrying It

The Sophia stage is a direction, not a postcode. I face toward it most mornings, though some mornings I face the other way entirely and catch myself halfway through the old pattern before my ribs remind me.

Exiled, the lot of them. The qualities I spent decades projecting onto other people, the ones I kept seeking and losing and seeking again. I’d buried them so early I’d forgotten they were mine.

Some mornings the carrying feels like a held breath I’ve finally remembered to let out. Integration is the work of carrying those qualities back into your own body. It is unglamorous and non-linear. It does not photograph well, and it does not paragraph well, and it will not make a good social media post.

But the body knows the difference between projection and embodiment, between reaching for a quality in someone else and generating it from within, between a borrowed fire and your own.

I am still carrying it. I will be carrying it tomorrow.

That is the work.

If these words speak to a truth of your own, I would be honoured to hear your reflection in the comments.

• When has your body held something your mind refused to name, and what happened when you finally stopped explaining it?

• What quality have you consistently sought in other people that might already exist somewhere inside you, unclaimed?

• When you found yourself back at a place you thought you’d left behind, what did the return teach you that the first visit couldn’t?

This letter has travelled through landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌊 Somatic Intelligence / 🌀 Spiral Passage

• Aspect: 🪷 Rebirth

• Terrain: 👣 Body / ✨ Spirit / 🌑 Shadow

This is a story of a difficult passage. It is offered as a light in a dark place, confirmation that such passages exist.

If it rings true for you, then I invite you to subscribe.

Hamish

Subscribe now

The Pipe

I smoked changa on my 39th birthday, over five years ago now.

The house smelled of blue lotus and something sweeter underneath it, the passion flower herbs warming in the pipe bowl, smoke wafting in gentle spirals. I sat against a mound of pillows on my bed, the room sparkling clean, the bubbler on the nightstand beside me, and the birthday cake still on the kitchen counter.

Someone I was with at the time prepared the pipe, and that’s the only sentence she gets in this story.

DMT is a controlled substance in most countries. What I’m writing here is testimony. Set, setting, preparation, and company matter as much as the molecule, probably more. I had all four. I was lucky.

Changa is an “enhanced leaf” form of DMT: mine was a handcrafted mix of blue lotus, mullein, and passion flower, soaked in a solution of the same active molecule as ayahuasca. Once the solvent evaporates, you have magic ready for your pipe.

Julian Palmer designed it as smokeable ayahuasca. The herbs aren’t just for decoration, they have specific roles to play in the experience:

• Passion flower calms the ride, its flavonoids bind to the same sites as benzodiazepines, and its trace beta-carbolines extend the duration to something you can actually inhabit.

• Blue lotus modulates the serotonin signal at the same receptor DMT agonises, softening the edges, dream-coating them.

• Mullein protects the lungs so you can inhale deep enough for the rest of it to work.

The whole blend shapes the experience the way a kiln shapes a firing: temperature, atmosphere, time.

I started with a few small puffs to get used to it.

The visuals come on strong immediately, geometric patterns, colour behind closed eyelids, the room shimmering at the edges, a strange hum in the ears. Sub-breakthrough territory.

Someone I know smoked a small amount once and stayed right there: visuals in the here and now, the wormhole visible but not entered. A postcard from the other side.

I emptied my lungs, took a huge draw through the bubbler and held it. Two more.

Gone.

The Tunnel

Sucked down a kaleidoscopic tunnel to elsewhere.

Gone. I don’t know where my hands went. The room, the pipe, the weight of my own body, all of it fell away like scenery struck from a stage.

What replaced it was so much more vivid, more saturated, more structurally present that this — the right here, right now — felt like a rough sketch, a prototype. Something with the capacity to be worked up into a masterpiece, but nowhere close to finished, nowhere near achieving its potential.

The changa gave my body a minute or two to say yes to it. Freebase DMT fires you from a cannon, but the herbs slowed the launch just enough that there was a beat between the room dissolving and the arrival.

A breath where the last threads of ordinary reality thinned and snapped, one by one, and I knew I was going somewhere and I couldn’t stop it and I didn’t want to.

Then fractal geometries, acceleration, expansive travel and a destination. Somewhere that made every room I’ve ever walked into look like an artist’s impression of what a room really is.

The Impossible Room

I met conscious entities who occupied impossible spaces, rooms that reminded me of the staircase scene from the old film Labyrinth, or Escher’s etchings. Walls that were also ceilings. Doors that opened onto the insides of other doors. Steps that lead nowhere and everywhere at once.

The entities were mechanical, jester-like beings. The closest popcult reference I can reach for is the Dwemer from Skyrim, a blend of ancient craftsmanship and impossible engineering, but alive with personality.

Playful. Mischievous. Cheeky. A slight undertone of something more... malevolent.

If you know Alex Grey’s work, or the band Tool, you’ve seen a painting of the neighbourhood. But even that isn’t it, that’s just a sliver, an impression. Nothing from here is it.

You have to go there to experience it.

They spoke without words. Telepathic, instantaneous, already laughing before they started.

“At last, you are here and you see! We’ve been watching and waiting for you. Now you see! He he heh.”

They showed me the records they’d been keeping of my entire life, all stored and playing back as a hologram inside a golden egg of glorious light. The egg sat at the centre of a room dedicated to me, in a vast complex containing an infinite number of rooms, one for every being who has been, who is, and who will be.

The closest frame I’ve found for that place is the Akashic Records, a universal library of all experience, referenced across Hindu, theosophical, and mystical traditions. Other frameworks I’m sure map the concept differently.

I had no idea what any of that even was at the time, but there I was inside it.

The whole thing was terrifyingly ecstatic and incomprehensibly vivid and there isn’t a way I’ve found of putting the essence of it into words, though I’m trying! I’ll give you the closest thing I have.

In a study of 3,778 DMT experiences, almost half involved entity encounters, and the beings people describe — jesters, mechanical entities, feminine archetypes, insectoids — recur with uncanny consistency across thousands of unconnected individuals.

93% of the entities were perceived as conscious and self-aware. In 98% of cases, the entity initiated contact.

I don’t know what that means.

I know what I saw. I also know other people saw things they wish they hadn’t, experiences that fragmented them rather than ground them, that take months or years to process.

The Void

After the jester Dwemer and their show, the golden egg, the hologram life records, the impossible architecture, after all of it, the vision didn’t end. It changed.

The ecstasy drained out of the experience like water pours from a jug and what remained was space.

Infinite, featureless, alive.

I spent aeons floating in it.

No walls, no floor, no body to speak of, and no grief about its absence. The void held nothing and asked for nothing and I hung there inside it the way a single star hangs in deep space, neither lonely nor waiting, just present in a stillness so total it had its own texture.

I didn’t experience fear, or even thought as we know it. There was no edge where the emptiness ended and I began, just a vast, warm dark that breathed when I breathed and was me and is still inside me.

Blissfully peaceful.

Then I came back to my body and fifteen minutes had passed.

I opened my eyes and the room was the same as I had left it. The candles had barely moved. My body felt like it had been gone for centuries but had returned in the time it takes to blink.

Fifteen minutes. I’d lived geological time in fifteen minutes.

An aeon in a breath.

The Return

That was one dose. One. There is no going back from it.

Once you’ve been somewhere that makes this place look like a mock-up, ordinary reality never quite sits the same again. The researchers call this ontological shock, a word that sounds clinical until you’ve felt it behind your ribs.

In the largest survey ever conducted on DMT entity encounters, 80% of 2,561 people said the experience permanently altered their fundamental conception of reality. More than half of those who identified as atheist beforehand no longer did afterwards.

I am one of those.

I understand those numbers from the inside. Dick Khan, a documenter of the DMT experience who smoked it over 600 times across three years, put it better than any researcher:

“I already believed in something beyond humanity. That was faith, because I had no knowledge of it. But having seen what I’ve seen, I am now certain.”

Faith is a word for what you hope is true; certainty is what happens when the hoping stops because you’ve been there.

The changa mattered and the pharmacology mattered. Rick Strassman administered DMT to sixty volunteers in a clinical lab in the early nineties — hundreds of doses, extraordinary experiences, entity encounters that left people shaking with conviction.

In follow-up interviews a year or two later, almost none of them had changed their lives. The molecule in a sterile room with no container around it was fire without a kiln, a flash without the slow burn.

The container makes all the difference.

The harmala alkaloids carry their own weight — a dream-coated grounding, a medicinal warmth that experienced users describe as healing you from the bones outward. Smoked DMT users talk about alien hyperspace — mechanical, electric, cerebral. Ayahuasca users describe something visceral and embodied.

Changa lives in the space between the two. Palmer called the blend “more integrated, connected and relevant to the human form.”

The experienced users on the DMT-Nexus forums, hundreds of them, say the same thing: once you’ve done it, you don’t go back to freebase alone.

Grounding changed the experience for me. I came out of it knowing something had shifted, the way you know the weather has turned before you open the curtains.

Everything I’ve done working on myself since — the self-enquiry, the authentic movement, the yoga... the shadow work: five years of pulling myself apart and putting myself back together differently, this experience is underneath all of it.

It is the bedrock.

It all came back in a casual conversation once. Someone asked what I believed in and I opened my mouth to say something reasonable and what came out was the golden egg. The whole thing. I hadn’t planned to say any of it.

The 2025 research on ontological shock found something I recognised in my bones: the people who shattered from these experiences and the people who grew from them had the same molecule in their blood.

The difference was in the grounding. Yoga, bodywork, cold water, walking barefoot, creative expression: 22 out of 26 people in that study named body practices as what pulled them through. The ones who tried to think their way through it got worse. The body had to hold what the mind couldn’t contain.

I want to be clear about something I’ve circled around long enough:

These substances can break people. Psychosis, depersonalisation, spiritual emergencies that last months or years. If you are on SSRIs, if you have a personal or family history of psychotic episodes, if you are in crisis: this is not for you. Not now, possibly not ever. The research is unambiguous on this. I’m writing about what I experienced, and I would not change it. I am not writing a permission slip.

I’m still doing that integration, honestly. Five years on and the work hasn’t finished. It’s not supposed to. The experience rewrites all the questions you thought you were asking.

My bones stopped asking some of those questions after that night.

I stopped wondering whether the world is as thin as it looks from in here. I stopped wondering whether what I can see from my ordinary vantage is all there is to see.

What’s there is bigger, more complex, more beautiful, more coherent than the version my head is built to hold.

I don’t need to argue for it. I was shown.

One day I will go back again.

• What does your body know that you haven’t found words for yet?

• What is the difference, for you, between believing and knowing?

• What threshold has your name on it that you haven’t crossed yet?

This letter has travelled landscapes of:

• *Truth: 🌀 Spiral Passage*

• *Aspect: 🔥 Catalysis / 🔑 Unlocking*

• *Terrain: ✨ Spirit / 🧠 Mind*

These are words from the road less-travelled. If they speak to a truth that you’re walking, then I invite you to subscribe:

Hamish

Subscribe now

Initiation

I asked the bot the question and I will tell you exactly what it said.

Is he being a difficult cunt?

No. He’s not.

I had been building the file for weeks: dates, photographs, quotes. A specialised AI assistant working the evidence reached the same verdict I had.

My anger had been building something. I could feel it. The heat behind my eyes, my jaw locking tight. Precision sharpening into its final form.

A record.

Survey

Last summer, when the neighbour carried out defective work affecting my property without seeking prior agreement, I photographed every contravention. Dated the photos. Logged the timestamps.

I spoke with them and they denied observable reality.

Hackles up.

I sent a letter that quoted the Party Wall Act at them, section by section, because I wanted a record that would hold in court if it came to that.

The cultural script around anger would call this disproportionate, inappropriate, evidence of instability.

But there is another kind of anger. The kind that dates things, that quotes verbatim, that screenshots the WhatsApp messages, photographs the evidence, and files the documents in chronological order.

Contemporaneous notes; the surveyor’s file.

When the bot recommended I not respond to an email riddled with lies written to my appointed surveyor, I called it what it was: I am correcting his misrepresentations FOR THE RECORD.

I could feel the file hardening: every document, every timestamp, every screenshot sharpening its edges.

I was building a file fit for litigation.

Countervoice

“You’re overreacting. You’re always like this.” The words echoed in my head, remnants of the voice of a partner who spent weeks telling me her love and my needs were conditional on me being exceptional.

My jaw clenched and my hands stopped mid-gesture. That familiar heat rose behind my eyes again. A boundary had been crossed and I was being told I wasn’t allowed to notice.

You can be angry and precise at the same time. The heat and the cold, working together. One holds the pen; the other remembers what it is writing down. You do not need permission from the person whose behaviour you are documenting.

When someone says you’re being difficult or that you’re overreacting, they are telling you: you’ve caught them. And they’re terrified you’ll document it well enough to be believed.

Precisely. Evidently. Irreversibly.

You know this already.

You’ve felt it: the moment someone tells you that you’re not allowed to notice what’s wrong, and some part of you has already built the case. The documentation happens before the conversation; the file was already complete.

Escalation

I was patient for months. I tried the friendly route. I documented everything along the way. Dates. Quotes. Photographs. The sequence of it all. Then I escalated, just like I said I would.

Every step up in the dispute forewarned, but ignored.

The ADHD narrative would call this emotional dysregulation. Impulsivity. A symptom. But I’d slept on it for many nights. My jaw had been set for weeks, the documentation was complete. The survey was already done; the escalation was filing the report.

The difference between reactive flooding and forensic precision is what you build with it.

The person who has been patient, who has been thorough and exact, then escalates with a complete record, they have a strategy.

Is he being a difficult cunt? No. I had asked a machine trained on the whole canon of human disputation to tell me if I was the problem. It said I was not.

I already knew this deep in my bones. I did not owe that neighbour a softened tone. I owed him a letter that can hold in court.

You are allowed to keep a file, you are allowed to read it back. You are allowed to escalate.

You are allowed to hold people accountable for their behaviour, their words, their actions, their choices.

Inheritance

What do you do when your body is building a record and the people around you keep telling you to calm down?

Somewhere in your history is the person who told you your anger was the problem. They were afraid of what you would say, frightened of the truth.

What do you build with it? A file or a fire?

Not every anger needs to be expressed, but every anger that is legitimate deserves a record.

Build with it, or burn.

• What would it mean to document your experience with precision, rather than dismiss yourself as reactive?

• When did someone tell you that your anger was the problem — and what were they afraid of hearing?

• What would you do with the record, if you trusted it was accurate?

This letter has travelled through landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌟 Sovereign Essence

• Aspect: 🔑 Unlocking

• Terrain: 🧠 Mind / 🌑 Shadow

I write to you from the road. If these words speak to a truth of your own, I offer them as a lantern in the dark and invite you to subscribe.

Hamish

Subscribe now

Earlier this week, I told the story of a descent into the underworld: the painful but necessary disintegration of my old life. It ended in the void, with a promise of an answer waiting within.

This is the story of what grew in that void. This is what happens when you begin to listen.

A Wizard Waxes

Losing a future you’ve vowed to build leaves a gaping void in your heart. For a time, that emptiness is all there is. But a void is a fertile darkness. It was in that emptiness, learning to see without the old light, that something began to stir.

I write this to you from 🕯️Cinderlight’s Rest, the hermitage I built in that same void. It is at once a rural Norfolk bungalow where I’ve lived alone since my world was turned upside down; a psychic retreat where my inner council gathers in a cave overlooking sunny vineyards; and an act of conscious isolation, a safe container for feeling everything and figuring all this out.

I’ve wracked my brains over the last year trying to remember what I’d dreamed of becoming as a child, but found nothing more than a horrible realisation that everything I’d ever wanted had been shaped by the expectations of other people.

I started this Substack because I remembered who I really am and worked out what I wanted to be when I grow up. At forty-three. And a half.

A few months ago, while doing some inner council work, I finally asked Little Hamish directly: what do you want to be when you grow up?

His answer stopped me cold:

“I want to be a wizard.”

He didn’t mean metaphorically, or eventually. He is a child. He meant: now.

Something cracked open in my chest, a pressure I hadn’t known I was holding. Forty-odd years of living someone else’s life, and my ribs finally let go.

A wizard crosses thresholds, he turns the wheel. He’s someone whose personal work has a wider impact. No sooner had I accepted this truth than the work really began. The work of 🌟 Sovereign Essence: reclaiming the way of being that had always been mine.

A dream delivered my mission brief:

A convex disc, part ancient artefact, part hyper-future technology, part a magic that hummed in the bones.

It was held in long-fingered, platinum-gauntleted hands, held before eyes that were not mine but through which I was seeing.

A sacred hard drive for the soul, with one instruction: gather the fragments and deliver them to your human aspect.

The image of the disc was still burning behind my eyelids when I sat up. My hands were shaking with something I had no word for. The work had changed shape while I wasn’t looking.

I was compelled to build the Tesseract.

Magic

A wizard’s work is unglamorous; most of it is learning to listen. A few months ago, Little Hamish taught me something about this magic:

He’d been asking for chocolate a lot leading up to this. Even after a ninety minute yoga class, even after a block of time dedicated to movement he loves, he’d still want chocolate because, I came to realise, something deeper wasn’t being satisfied.

So, instead of the usual negotiations about how much and what type, I actually asked what he really needed.

“Playtime. Just you and me. You’ve been too busy ‘working on yourself’ and taking everything too seriously.”

It turns out Little Hamish wasn’t craving chocolate at all. He was asking for time together, just the two of us, for a deeper connection.

My body knew what it needed before my mind had worked it out. 🌊 Somatic Intelligence. Brilliant.

So now we’re making time for movement play together, rolling on the floor in happy baby or gentle spinal twists, or swinging Indian clubs and steel maces around, or just squatting and tracing patterns on the floor with our fingertips. We’re exploring what feels good, what’s fun, rather than trying to make it disciplined.

Listening

After a lifetime of being silenced, of being punished for asking why, of being shouted over and shut down, of being framed as a problem that needed fixing, my voice learned to retreat.

My body learned to speak when my mouth could not. It learned to hum, without choosing to, to calm a body so rattled by the weight of other people’s voices that the only safe sound was one I made for myself alone.

My body knew the way long before my mind was willing to accept it. It knew through the knot in my solar plexus when my feelings were dismissed as “bullshit,” and from the muscular armouring when someone’s look carried contempt or their energy was hostile.

I know what it’s like to be told you’re overreacting until you start to believe it. I believed it for years. It wasn’t until I learned to slow down and pay attention that I heard the voice underneath: calm, firm, and clear.

The voice of the deep within.

Active Passage

For months in meditations and shadow work exercises, through tarot and ikigai, and in many other synchronistic ways, I’ve been asking myself the same questions: what is my purpose, why am I here? The answer comes back, consistent, persistent, insistent:

“You are a storyteller, tell your stories.”

The mechanics are the same whether the wizard is asking about chocolate or about purpose. The body holds what the mind forgot.

All the chaos I’ve lived: the expat childhood, international boarding school, the drink and drugs of a 20s spent in the UK capital, my many sojourns to the underworld. A life of masking a wiring I was unaware of until it all crashed and burned after my marriage.

The rest of the colourful life I’ve led: all just research, gathering the material. And now the telling has begun.

I am a Trickster in a world that demands obedience. My neurocomplexity is the gift of disruption that smashed open the rigid conventions of our society, of my family.

Rebuilding myself from the inside out hasn’t been gentle, and it hasn’t been kind. It has been a violent, chaotic dismantling of everything I thought I was, of everything that had made me, me.

Salting the earth. Purging the venom. Total annihilation.

This is my story, initiated by an inner guide. It is not a prescription. Everyone walks their own 🌀 Spiral Passage and no two paths are alike.

If you recognise yourself in my writing, if you’ve ever felt your body revolt against your choices, or found yourself having conversations with parts of yourself that know things before you do, you’re probably my people.

You are welcome here.

This is a story of what can grow in the void. The parts I silenced for decades had something to say. The quiet magic that stirs after the storm has passed through.

If you are also tending to new growth, do share what is emerging for you.

• Where in your body do you feel the thing your inner child has been asking for?

• What is a childhood dream you abandoned that is now asking for your attention?

• What is something new and unexpected that has grown for you in the space left behind by an ending?

This letter has crossed landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌟 Sovereign Essence / 🌊 Somatic Intelligence / 🌀 Spiral Passage

• Aspect: 🪷 Rebirth

• Terrain: 🧠 Mind / 👣 Body / ✨ Spirit / 🌑 Shadow

These are missives from the mid-journey. If they speak to a truth you’re walking, then I invite you to subscribe. Every letter is free.

Thank you for reading,

Hamish

Subscribe now

Initiation

Every child is a detective, trying to solve the mystery of their own worth.

I found my evidence amongst experiences like: the sting of a wet tea-towel whipped across my face, mother’s snarling contempt, and her unbridled vitriol as she hissed: “Get out of my sight, you little shit!” There were many more like these.

The clearest proof of all was in the contrasting experiences of my golden-child brother and me. He seemed to receive all the love I craved, and to be unable to do any wrong. We speak only at family funerals now, and it’s been that way longer than 20 years.

The conclusion Little Me arrived at was simple, brutal, and absolute: I’m not good enough. I’m not loved. I’m not worthy. This was my ‘bottom line’, the core beliefs etched deeply on my nervous system, and lies on which my entire life was built.

For more than four decades, I lived by these harsh rules for survival: Never trust anyone. Never show weakness. Become fierce enough that no one dares hurt you.

These rules kept me alive, though they didn’t keep anyone from hurting me. Something would drop behind my eyes, a shutter crashing down, whoever I’d been a moment before was gone, replaced by someone who didn’t need anything and couldn’t be touched. They became rigid bonds of self-confinement; a cage I had unwittingly locked myself inside.

I realised who’d written these rules for life: they were the well-intentioned, though misguided efforts of a brilliant, but terrified child. A child who had done what he needed to do to survive, but had never worked out what it would take to thrive.

You need both a floor plan and the keys to your cell before you can escape your own prison. I found my schematics in shadow work prompts and journal pages, and my keys in books, therapies and Authentic Movement.

It took naming, facing, banishing every demon in the room so I could finally see the way out.

I wrote pages of memories, triggers, fears, and an endless inventory of symptoms: rapidly fluctuating energy, all-or-nothing thinking, perfectionism, a harsh inner critic, sudden rages. On and on the lists went, a litany of the bars in my cage.

In therapy, I worked through a model that revealed the hidden mechanisms of my own suffering.

Someone would look at me a certain way, or say the wrong thing in the wrong tone, and the machine would start. A knot in my solar plexus. Cold behind my eyes. Then silence, withdrawal, the walls going up, and every time they went up, they proved the bottom line true. Not good enough. Not loved. Not worthy.

Round and round it went, the machine feeding itself, insatiable, inevitable. The loop got reinforced, deepening the mechanism’s etching on my nervous system.

I realised I’d been fuelling a psychological contraption of singular purpose: to prove my own unworthiness to myself, over and over again, ad infinitum.

The work hasn’t been to fix this dangerously flawed machine. Instead, it’s been to thank it for its service, to walk out of the factory, and to distance myself, physically and energetically, from all the people and places that want to see it start up again.

Disintegration

Overwhelmed

It’s rarely a single event that causes a life to disintegrate like mine did. It was brought on by the rapid implosion of my fledgling marriage into waking nightmare, parting from a parent, and then the discovery of my neurocomplexity: a lens that reframed every single year that had led me there.

All that pretty much all at once. Yikes.

My marriage was initially a sacred container of perceived emotional safety, which allowed me to finally acknowledge the impact of my early years, despite having always been aware of what had happened to me.

While this enabled me to sever the psychic umbilical that still tied me to my mother, erasing the nagging yearning for her approval, attention, and affection, it also meant the shock of my wife’s early betrayals hit my body hard: a black sludge fell down over my life. I was plummeted directly into the underworld.

All in, I am grateful for the tough lessons both women offered me, because they eventually led me to discover the divine feminine hidden deep in the forest of my own psyche all along: a wise sage named Mathilda with a basket of herbs and mushrooms, and a fox familiar.

Betrayal

It came with the quiet violence of emotional neglect: the slow poisoning of my soul through being dismissed and misunderstood, through having my deepest needs shrugged off as nothing, and through being met with “you’re over-reacting” for daring to feel hurt and for needing accountability and reciprocal effort towards repair.

I didn’t want a wife who weaponised my words by twisting them into personal attacks, who weighed my heart in her hands and told me it was not good enough.

I didn’t want a wife who saw my patience as weakness to exploit, my kindness as a resource to consume. I didn’t want a wife who would say she “can’t even imagine a version of myself that doesn’t drink every day.”

I didn’t want a wife who recruited her friends to observe me and report back, whose friends tried to tell me what I was allowed to feel. Whose friends tried to convince me she wasn’t treating me poorly, without ever hearing my side.

I didn’t want a wife who would throw a wine glass at me, then punch me in the face rather than accept a repeated “no” as an answer. I didn’t want a wife who would make out her violence was my fault, that I’d started it, I’d made her do it because I’d banged a fist on the table in frustration after the twentieth “no”.

I didn’t want a wife who would stand by smirking with satisfaction as her cruel revenge unfurled into my unravelling, who would take pleasure in seeing the layers of my being torn away one by one, until I was but a ghost in a fleshy shell, a stranger in my own skin.

I didn’t want a wife who could only offer me half a life: enslavement as an obedient playmate where we’d pledged a partnership of equals.

Resolve

My natural ways of being became a problem to be managed, a set of inconvenient traits she needed to rasp into the shape of her expectations.

“My love is not unconditional. You need to be exceptional. Why can’t you be more like them, they’re always kind and respectful.”

Meaning… That they didn’t challenge her, didn’t hold her accountable for her words, her actions, her choices.

I didn’t want the brightest colours of my soul overpainted in shades of grey.

Yet still I bent. I softened my voice, swallowed my words, made myself smaller in every room we shared. I learned to read her face before I spoke, to measure how much truth she could hold that day and offer exactly that much, no more. I became someone I didn’t recognise, and I did it so slowly I didn’t notice.

I was being used as an outlet for her unprocessed pain, and was left grievously wounded by the ongoing betrayal of every vow we’d made, and the denial of my reality.

Everything she’d ever accused me of was her own confession.

At last came a realisation:

‘I don’t even know who I am anymore, but FUCK THIS! This isn’t what I signed up for; I deserve far better!’

So many times I’d told her, “I can’t fix this alone,” but always this was deflected to it being all my fault, I alone was to blame, I was the one who needed to change. The burden was on me alone.

It was so hard to resist the pull of the potential our partnership had and let go of the hope that one day she would show up and start the work to jointly repair the Stygian rift that yawned between us.

I had to accept that there would never be any meeting in the middle, never any working together, never any facing life as a team. This wasn’t a real partnership; this wasn’t a real marriage.

I had to accept being the villain in her version of events, but I didn’t have to stick around for that.

The Threshold…

I felt the slow, quiet horror of being coerced into self-sacrifice. The depravity of numbing your soul so you can bear to let your living parts be harvested and consumed. All just to keep a thin facade of peace.

I’d heard her say, “He listens and he changes,” and I took it as a compliment. I’d begun the work. I’d gone to therapy, gotten sober, cut out the cannabis, found clarity. I’d untangled my own unhealthy patterns, hoping to lead the way to a better future together.

But the effort only ever flowed one-way: towards her. I was shown countless times that our marriage, and moreso my feelings, were the lowest of her priorities. I came to realise that I’d rather be alone than lonely, ostracised, an outcast in my own marriage.

When I asked her to set some joint goals for our partnership, all she would commit to was ‘mastering the art of having fun’. It turned out this was far shallower than the ‘memento mori, ergo carpe diem’ that I initially took it for.

Instead, it was an excuse for escaping the responsibilities of our union, for hiding from me behind gratuitous excess and the constant company of others, for reducing the little ‘quality time’ we got together to barely more than sleeping off the wreck.

We never made it on a proper honeymoon.

We could have been giddy with excitement for our shared future; overflowing with the love, trust and respect we had vowed for each other.

Instead we were trapped in a no holds barred, deathmatch power game that only one of us was playing.

Rank.

I was disgusted by her behaviour and the resentment kept boiling over. Yet somewhere in the wreckage, the work I’d been doing for her started doing something else. At some point I realised my shoulders had dropped and my chest had loosened. They’d been carrying her, and then one day they weren’t. The work had put something down; I found the man I’d lost.

My body had found him first. 🌊 Somatic Intelligence: the knowing that lives below thought, below language, in the bone and the breath. The shoulders dropped. The man returned. 🌟 Sovereign Essence: the self that was buried, not broken.

… To the Liminal

On my 43rd birthday, standing on her doorstep about to walk into yet another petty, manufactured conflict where I knew I’d be interrupted, shut down, shouted over, silenced, my feelings and perspective dismissed.

Instead of turning the key, I paused, slowed my breath and closed my eyes.

In that moment of stillness, a voice rose from the depths inside me. Clear, calm and firm, it repeated:

‘It’s time to walk away.’

It was an instruction from my soul and I obeyed.

YES! Abso-fucking-lutely, yes! I put myself first. I protected my health, guarded my wellbeing, reclaimed my peace, saved my sanity.

I would do it again. Even knowing the grief that was to come.

Not everyone can walk away when their body says no: some doors are locked from the outside. If that’s your environment right now, take comfort in this: your survival is not contingent on leaving. The work of self-reclamation can begin wherever you are.

I had stood before my friends and family and said, “in you, I’ve found that thing - that purpose, that calling - you are my fire!” and I had meant it with every fibre of my being.

But the future I had vowed to build with my wife - to love, trust and respect one another, to stand beside each other for the rest of our lives, the freedom to always be ourselves, to bring what we’ve got and to deal with it together.

All that had vanished and had been revealed as false promises, a fake future, inevitable heartbreak for us both.

Everything I thought I’d wanted had been lost to a future that could no longer exist, and with that, so too the man who had said those words.

When all that had been snatched from me, what did I have left?

The answers were already growing in the rubble. I just couldn’t see them yet.

This is a story of my own 🌀 Spiral Passage: the wound walked through, not skirted around. I offer it as a lantern to illuminate a dark place, to show that paths like mine do exist, and that they can lead somewhere worth the pain of walking.

I would be honoured to hear your reflections in the comments.

• When has your body told you ‘no’ long before your mind was ready to agree?

• Have you ever had to dismantle a core belief about yourself in order to find your freedom?

• For you, what did it feel like when the pain of staying became greater than the fear of leaving?

This letter has travelled through landscapes of:

• *Truth: 🌟 Sovereign Essence / 🌊 Somatic Intelligence / 🌀 Spiral Passage*

• *Aspect: 🔥 Catalysis*

• *Terrain: 🧠 Mind / 👣 Body / ✨ Spirit / 🌑 Shadow / 🫂 Community*

These are missives from the mid-journey. If this fire is worth returning to, do subscribe. Every letter is free.

Thank you for reading,

Hamish

Subscribe now

I’m Hamish. I’m 44, I live in rural north Norfolk, UK and a year ago my life fell apart in ways it had been waiting to do for decades.

My fledgling marriage imploded just three weeks after the wedding, kicking off what I have dubbed my Season of Shit. Seven months of blame, aggressive projection, and the slow suffocation of becoming someone’s emotional landfill. In the end, I walked out to save my own sanity and left a version of myself behind that had been running on fumes for four decades.

My marriage was the catalyst, but my old life’s demolition had been set and scheduled by something much older than that.

I’d been living someone else’s life, though it took me forty years and a disastrous marriage to finally open my eyes and see it all clearly.

I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. My mother screamed at me often and hit me with wet tea towels and hairbrushes. At 12, I was packed off to boarding school where I had to learn to be invisible. The message was clear before I could articulate it: your voice is dangerous. It’s safer to stay quiet.

So I stayed quiet. For more than forty years.

I built a career as a chartered building surveyor, diagnosing how structures fail, writing reports on cracks in walls and the causes of penetrating damp. Decent money, interesting, steady work. I had a life that looked perfectly adequate from the outside but felt like a slow drowning from within.

Then the drowning stopped, because the rug got pulled out from underfoot.

In that wreckage, I found things I didn’t even know were buried.

I’m neurodivergent, with ADHD and a splash of autism on my palette, doing their contradictory dance together. One side wants order and silence, the other novelty and fire. Together they create a mind that sees patterns everywhere, connects things that don’t appear to be linked, and crashes hard when the sensory load gets too heavy.

For most of my life, I’ve been framed as a problem. Too intense. Too sensitive. Too much. I was medicated for the wrong things and masked through the rest.

What I’ve learned since the floor gave way: these traits aren’t defects. Hyper-vigilance is a radar. Enhanced pattern recognition is how I see connections others miss. The sensitivity is a high-gain antenna for the truth. It just needs better calibration rather than a mute button.

The energetic cost is real, though. Shutdowns can wipe out a whole day. Executive function can vanish mid-sentence. I have a body that stores every sensory insult until the accounts become overdue.

Re-framing these traits doesn’t erase the tax they carry.

I’ve been doing the heavy work. Therapy. Sobriety. Shadow work with inner parts I’d spent decades ignoring. I have a fierce warrior inside me, a trickster goblin, a wise woman of the woods, a shadow vizier who breathes my rage, and more. Buried under all of them, a wizard-child who sees in symbols and was told his whole life that he was the problem. These all got split off from my awareness by trauma, though they all carry energies I can harness.

I’ve read the books, and more than that, I lived the books. The deep ones with far more substance than your average tome of self-help on display at your local Waterstones.

I took every framework that resonated with me: somatic intelligence, nervous system regulation, the Enneagram, archetypes, consciousness medicine, Human Design, and more. I tested them against the reality of my own broken life - the ones that held up against the actual pain I experienced, I kept. The rest got composted.

Somewhere in the middle of that work, the old world caught fire. A job that frustrated me and crushed my soul: redundant. The last ties with a mother who never wanted me: severed. A lifetime of masking, of trying to be the person I was expected to be in any given situation: abandoned.

The anxiety-driven engine that powered my old life sputtered out.

I had to learn how to “be” again from scratch.

What I discovered in the rubble: I’m a surveyor of my own consciousness.

The same disciplines that taught me to read a cracked lintel, to look at a wall and see the load paths, the weak points, the areas that are going to fail, even if they haven’t yet, that discipline also applies to the psyche.

I can diagnose structural failures. I make records before I demolish. I don’t patch plaster over subsidence, I go down to the root, to the foundations.

I’m also a builder. I’ve spent the last year constructing what I call the Tesseract, a system for self-integration, built with the help of AI and the kind of obsessive attention to detail only a hyper-focused surveyor could sustain. It’s the tool I use to hold all of this together.

And I’m a storyteller. I sat down to write for myself about what had happened to me, just to make sense of it all, and I didn’t want to stop. That surprised me most of all. It turns out that the voice that was silenced from birth has things to say. The man who spent twenty years writing building condition reports can also write about the human condition. The precision is the same, the honesty and the clarity is the same. It’s only the subject that changed.

This is 🕯️ Cinderlight’s Rest, the name I give to the quiet space where this work happens.

Think of it as an hermitage with stools by a slow fire, where the door is left left ajar. I’m no guru; the word puts my hackles up. I’m just a traveller who walked a particularly difficult stretch of terrain and is writing notes about what he found there. These notes are for anyone walking a similar path. If they’re useful, take them, and if they’re not, walk on. The door will still be open if you decide to come back.

If you’re rebuilding a life from the inside out too, or if you’re wondering whether the floor is about to give way beneath you feet, perhaps these notes will help you find your bearings again.

What you’ll find here to start with:

📜 Letters from an Hermitage — personal dispatches from an active transformation. Neither theory nor advice. Just honest accounts of what it’s like to rebuild a life from within, written by someone in the middle of doing just that.

🏮 Lights Along the Way — practical tools and small, tested practices for grounding, orientation, and staying sane when everything around you has rapidly gone awry. The kind of thing I wish someone had handed me when I was face-down in the rubble.

⚙️ Tinkering in the Tesseract — the tools behind this work, shown honestly. AI, Obsidian, and the particular obsessions of a neurodivergent builder trying to make a mind he can actually live in.

Some things I’ve planned for later down the road:

Gatherings ‘round the Hearth — invitations to sit by the fire and share. Questions posed to the community. A space where the hermit shuts up and listens.

Voice of the Gleeman — stories from the road. Fiction, myth, and dark imaginings from the troubadours who travel with the hermit. Not everything true can be easily said plainly; some truths only arrive through story.

Running through all of this:

The work of shadow integration: shaking hands with the parts of me that hold my rage, those who push me to please those around me, or who tell me it’s safer to keep schtum.

The peculiar texture of a neurodivergent life, receiving fourteen conflicting signals at once in a body that has to carry them all.

The seasons as a language for inner weather; the self moves in cycles, not straight lines.

And the long, strange project of building something of your own, from scratch, at 44, from the remains of a burned career.

I’ve mentioned it above, but I want to be clear and honest about this. The project is built assisted by AI, though not in the way you might find distasteful.

I use AI the way a land surveyor uses a theodolite: as a precision instrument that extends what I can see and measure. These words are mine. This voice is mine. The pain and the joy and the hard-won clarity: all mine, too.

But the structure that holds it all? That’s a collaboration between a human mind and several digital ones, and I think that collaboration is worth documenting openly rather than hiding it behind a hoarding.

This is also a part of the story I’m telling. How a 44-year-old neurodivergent surveyor-turned-hermit uses emerging technology to reclaim his humanity.

I haven’t arrived yet, so I’m writing from a road less-travelled.

My divorce isn’t finished. My career transition is still in progress. My body still carries decades of stored tension, and my voice is still finding its full volume after a lifetime of enforced quiet.

I’ve found my direction now. My nature is my north and my body knows the way. My wounds - the ones I spent forty years trying to plaster over and the ones I picked up along the way - these turned out to be the gateway.

I say this looking back, not from up on high. The wound is only a gateway if you can survive long enough to turn around and see it. For some of us, it’s still just a wound, and that’s real too.

Three truths hold steady under everything I write here.

• 🌟 Sovereign Essence — your nature is your direction.

• 🌊 Somatic Intelligence — your body knows which way to go.

• 🌀 Spiral Passage — the wound can be the gateway.

If any of that pulls at a truth inside you, know that you’re not alone and you’re welcome at this fire.

Where does it sit in the body, the weight of a life you didn’t choose?

What rules were written for you before you had the words to question them?

If the floor gave way underfoot tomorrow, what would you find in the rubble?

Hamish

This letter has passed through landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌟 Sovereign Essence / 🌊 Somatic Intelligence / 🌀 Spiral Passage

• Aspect: 🔥 Catalysis

• Terrain: 🧠 Mind / 👣 Body / ✨ Spirit / 🌑 Shadow

These are missives from the mid-journey. If this fire is worth returning to, do subscribe. Every letter is free.

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Preamble

Something sits in my chest before I open the laptop. A weight. A knot below the sternum that has nothing to do with the blank page and everything to do with what I think the blank page requires of me. The first sentences, when they come, are explanatory. They contextualise. The surveyor is writing his preamble before he states what the defects mean.

I have sat at this desk and waited for the answers to arrive before I allowed myself to type the questions. I have written six drafts and published none. I have built twenty-seven tools for writing and used them to avoid the writing itself. A hundred and forty-seven Claude Code sessions. Six drafts in Review. Zero published pieces. Zero readers.

The ratio is inverted. More skills than finished posts. More rules about how to write than writing.

The six drafts in Review are good. Maybe they’re ready. Maybe the block isn’t the page, but the decision to let go.

Machine

I know this machine. I have watched it run in other rooms: the surveyor’s report that opens with three pages of methodology and caveats before stating what the defects are and what they actually mean. This machine has a mother’s handwriting.

My mother was unpredictable and often violent, at least until I grew fierce enough to make her think twice before striking me. I learned to know the answer before I spoke; or I learned not to speak at all. “Get out of my sight you little shit! I’ll brain you!” was the cost of the wrong question or the wrong word at the wrong moment.

Then, boarding school: racial slurs, fists in the night, a hierarchy of boys who already knew the rules. The message both places carried: shut up unless you’re certain. I was taught early that my voice was dangerous and that it was safer to stay quiet.

The seeds accumulate in the garden. The skills stack in the workshop. The drafts pile up in Review, each one polished a little more, each one a little closer to perfect, each one still unwritten in the way that matters: unread, unpublished, unseen by the readers who need it.

The Gleeman series has zero drafts. The idea has been there for several years now, mapped out, seed notes filed and tagged. The Gleeman is the most ambitious thing I’m attempting but also the most fragile and the scaffold around it keeps getting more elaborate. It has its own section in the Tesseract, its own tag, everything except words on a page.

A scaffold that stays up after the mortar has dried becomes part of the building. I’ve been building scaffolding for the Gleeman for months. But no mortar is yet mixed.

I can’t write this because I haven’t figured it out yet. The answer has to come first.

The expectation that you write from knowing, that you arrive at the page with your answer assembled, your authority verified, and your credentials stacked on the table. That the piece demonstrates what you’ve already figured out and the reader receives its conclusion.

A mind that feels like a pile of technicolour post-it notes blown by a fan sits in front of that expectation and goes silent.

Sometimes waiting is right. This piece is an experiment, but not a rule.

Ah ha!

I read a sentence by a writer named Harsh Darji. He was writing about the essay form, and he said something I had known in my body but never in my mind:

“The word essay comes from the French essayer — to try. To attempt. Michel de Montaigne, who invented the form in the sixteenth century, wrote toward understanding, not from it.”

Writing Essays as a Way of Learning

I was at my desk, mid-scroll, phone still in hand. The sentence landed and there was a gap, maybe three or four seconds, where the words were just true without my mind having built a container for them. For three seconds, the brain chaos stopped. Quiet. The sentence was just there, floating around.

Something in my chest released. Just one degree. A grip that had been with me for a hundred and forty-seven sessions, a grip that needed answers to questions yet to be posed, absent. Not for long, mind you. But for a moment, the page was just a page, no longer a seething mass of possibility and potential.

Then the mind arrived and began to attach meaning to it, builds a scaffold - a six-paragraph framework around the bravery of it - and by the end it is beautiful and coherent and the not-knowing is gone.

The essay lives in the gap.

Experiment

Here is mortar. Wet, unset, imperfect. Writing from not-knowing.

This newsletter, 🕯️ Cinderlight’s Rest, is the experiment. Every piece I write here is an attempt. An essai. I sit down with a pressure in my chest and a question I can’t answer, and I follow it honestly through the page. I arrive somewhere I didn’t expect. Or I arrive nowhere.

I know the question I’m following: how does a man rebuild himself after his whole life burns to the ground around him - the marriage, the career, the identity? That question is 🌟 Sovereign Essence work. I know the form: the attempt, the failure to arrive, the somewhere-I-didn’t-expect.

I know the question and I know the form. I’m following both into the page.

If you came here looking for someone who has the answers, I will tell you plainly: I am still in the questions; those are the work. You’re watching me figure it out in real time.

This is one attempt, one essai. I’ll post another soon.

If you’re in the gap, these are the questions I keep returning to:

• When have you waited to know before allowing yourself to speak about something?

• What would change for you if you were to write in search of answers instead of from them?

• What experiment have you been avoiding because you don’t know how it ends?

Hamish

This letter has travelled landscapes of:

• Truth: 🌟 Sovereign Essence / 🌊 Somatic Intelligence

• Aspect: 🧭 Direction

• Terrain: 🧠 Mind / 👣 Body / 🌑 Shadow / 🫂 Community

These are missives from the mid-journey. If they speak to a truth you’re walking, then I invite you to subscribe:

The free subscription ensures you receive all future posts as they are written, including:

• 📜 Letters from an Hermitage

• 🏮 Lights Along the Way

• ⚙️ Tinkering in the Tesseract

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