Today was not the best day to be a bipedal organism of above average height scheduled as hired labour at a location with poorly designed patio architecture—chrome load-bearing beams glisten, stretching outward at aesthetic angles, matter solid and perfectly aligned with one’s skull, rendering a brief motherboard conduction glitch on impact, inner circuitry concussing from the top down.

A bellowing chime—like the bells of Notre Dame—clanging through the sinuses, while gravity-bound, thirty-inch long motion hydraulics folded faster than a deck chair in a hurricane; the shock of bone striking ground quaking through the concrete as thunder ripped through the sky.

Restored system status conscious and connected to server… housed within a pulsing cortex and readjusted windows, not entirely certain if this was a meat-suit piloting error…

Author’s note: The meat-suit mechanic states firmware intact with zero circuit corrosion. 

A staircase falls through a sternum.
The wallpaper peels at the smell. 
Wind rows down.
A hand arrives at the destination 
Four. The room is practicing being a room. 
Three. The oar is practicing being an oar. 
Two. The water vibrates in the shape of elongated breath.

A corridor of mirrors whispering catch 
but the clocks are already inside the catching 
and the corridor has been wheezing curtains 
through a wall that is also the inside of the word below. 
The table is set in a kitchen 
where someone has left the light on 
Blindness becomes clear. 
The light has been waiting 
for the breath that has been before you had knees.

I sat in a chair 
that was made of my own breathing 
unwinding into soil 
dissolving on my tongue.

The ceiling opened. 
The house tilts. 
Upfall.

The spine is a building with too many doors. 
Every door is basement is a basement 
beneath the basement and there, 
at the bottom of the long dark, 
in a room with no walls, 
on a floor made of everything
a stone turns over in a riverbed. 

The riverbed is someone’s pocket.

The floor here is made of every water.
A coin falls. 
Ribs open through the mirrors, 
and through light, 
my hands touch the forge.

The walls remember being mountains.

I signed the paperwork a week earlier than planned. The paperwork that came months after my position was dissolved. It had a time of death, a due date and I had a strategy. I would persist through those six weeks — explore work opportunities with resources I was given and see if there was anywhere in the organisation where I would fit while resourcing myself for what comes after if I chose to sign. I was being methodical, not rushing and not making rash decisions. That was the plan, and I almost got there.

Then Saturday morning arrived and I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, dreading Monday morning thinking, what the fuck am I doing. My body knew. It always does.

Not in the way of someone feeling defeated. In the way of someone who is tired and who already knows the decision they will make as the paper ticks and who has run out of reasons to keep pretending otherwise.

I signed it first thing on Monday morning. Today is Wednesday. This is the last morning I walked into that office.

There is a specific texture to being someone whose mind cannot exist inside a workplace that requires constant self-conflict for survival. That knowing doesn’t arrive all at once. It was slow — the way erosion is slow — and one day you look down and realise that what is being eroded is you. Your capacity, underutilised. Your autonomy, slowly being stripped. Your body, slowly breaking under the weight of corporate time. Your job role being hollowed out until it holds no meaning and discarded like it meant nothing, while in that hollow, a vacuum forms where purpose used to live — until the only question left is:

What am I still here for, if not for the thing I was hired to do?

Yet the business had already dissolved my role while the corporate structure continued to push change while refusing it. A workplace that preached diversity while slowly stripping it from procedure, undermining what it claims to need. People being processed and moulded until they are indistinguishable from the organisation, policies masquerading as fairness while making it redundant in fine print, processing people through compliance. 

I watched it happen around me and I felt it happening to me. I had to stay to survive — which is very different from the first day I got my swipe card, walking in excited, feeling it with my whole chest. I walk out knowing my skill and innovation was never the issue. Their capacity to hold it was and I was just a number.

But this isn’t about them.

It’s about the moment I stopped trying to illuminate something false and chose to honour what is true instead.

My hands build. They create. They innovate. That is not incidental to who I am — it is what I am here for. I create structure for meaning. That is my purpose — not my identity, not the roles I had to perform to pay the rent.

My purpose.

I cannot build that inside a workplace that asks for innovation, while simultaneously shifting the goal posts, or changing direction entirely. I cannot pour tangible meaning into an organisation that was never designed to hold it. Being chained to a corporate schedule is not honour or loyalty — it is spending the wrong currency in the wrong place, slowly, until the cost became my body, my sleep, my sense of autonomy, my questioning of what my hands are even for.

I am not built for performance inside a workplace that isn’t in alignment with my neurology. I never was. What I am built for is creativity and innovation — work that uses the full range of what I am capable of, environments that don’t invite me in and then sand me down to fit, or change the script halfway through — somewhere I can be my whole self rather than a carefully managed version of it.

Signing the redundancy paperwork earlier than I planned wasn’t impulse. It was sovereignty. It was choosing myself before a deadline could make it look like anything other than a choice. It was putting something down — not in defeat, but with the knowing that the cost outweighs the risk.

I feel relief handing in my swipe card and my work issued laptop and walking away from the place that never took accountability for the harm it caused. The carpet still spreads the infection, and there's still smoke in the building. 

And now, I am not standing in it.

As I walk into uncertainty, with aligned work opportunities that I have time to consider, I feel free. Uncertainty feels like room to breathe — and that, for me, is not something to fear.

It is freedom to build.

I didn’t sign the paperwork because they offered me a redundancy. I signed it because a change of job title doesn't change the carpet.

I walked out of there today, with a smile and a full breath, because I choose to live. I will not go back to being someone who just survives.

And that is enough.

I am enough.

Author’s Note: Today I take my first full breath, released from sneering hands of faces thieving laughter, pouring smoke into the lungs. The carpet continues to rot and I am free from the smell of decay.

I regained consciousness this morning
the way an NPC loads into a video game:
lagging, glitched into the wall, under-textured,
and possibly in danger of clipping through the floor.

My head felt like someone had shoved
a full-sized watermelon between my ears,
whispered “good luck,”
then put tinfoil through a paper shredder
and yeeted it off a balcony.
In heels.
Whimsically.

Meanwhile,
the tasty hum of subharmonics 
was still ringing—
complete with lasers, pyrotechnics,
and a rogue mosh pit in my prefrontal cortex.

Great for Friday night.
Considerably less great for Monday morning
in the lawless frontier known as “being employed.”

I stood up.
Gravity said, “haha inverted player controls.”
My organs said, “girrrrrrl.”
My few correctly functioning neurons—
laugh in cryptid—
attempted a cartwheel
and immediately unionised for better conditions.

But whatever.
Work exists.
Time exists.
Therefore I, in my gelatinous, 
half-fermented state,
must also exist
as a functional adult today—
against my will.

I got dressed using a technique known as
Glitter and Vibes™.
At one point my arm went through the neck-hole,
and honestly?
I didn’t have the bandwidth to argue.

Then, as I waited for the bus,
my calendar leaned in
with a half-smirk—
and whispered:

“Rent inspection tomorrow.”

I felt my soul evacuate my body
like a cartoon ghost
speedrunning an existential
“COOL, COOL, COOL—”
like a sim crying at a dirty plate on the lawn.

There is nothing—
NOTHING—
more nope
than realising you must deep-clean your home
while your bloodstream is still singing about piña coladas.

At work, I attempted “normal.”
Unfortunately, my version of “normal” today
was giggling at the photocopier
because it was beatboxing dubstep.

I opened an email.
The words were soup.
I closed the email.
I felt nauseous.
The words continued to swirl
purely out of spite.

A coworker asked,
“Are you okay?”
And I, with the confidence of a peacock in a turkey suit, replied,
“I am… perceivable.”
Which is a generous overstatement.

My entire body is currently being piloted
by a feral gremlin
and her chaotic little intern
who absolutely ate the operating manual
as a snack.

Tonight, I will enter my home—
sigh at the cache of unfolded laundry,
survey the floors begging for a vacuum,
re-enter the rave,
with my favourite cleaning mix
and transform my textile shrine of “I’ll do it later”
into something my inspector won’t write
a tragic novella about.

I will clean.
I will scrub.
I will vacuum with the holy conviction
of a woman who knows she is
one dust bunny away from victory.

And if tomorrow my landlord says,
“Looks good,”
I will have pacified
the minor but vengeful god
Landlord,
and my character earns
+100 Household Diplomacy.

It gets to a point, where silence starts to feel like a dare. Where desire outweighs fear. Even when trust exists in the silence between you, knowing it is never empty. It has shape. It has voltage. It has weight.

Each micro-shift in the body is a small confession. The tension that pools at the base of the throat. Pulse relocates — to the wrists, behind the knees, in the soft curve of the stomach where a full breath won’t quite reach now. Each moment held surges the power grid — pulse quickening with each withheld breath.

The angle of the eye becomes the distance between skin and breath — the way a tesla coil notices lightning contours when striking close. Not touching. Not yet. The charge bends gravity, the shape is already there, already humming beneath the surface — a current you can’t direct, a leaking conduit deep within the marrow. 

The mouth goes dry before the mind comprehends. Hands try to find excuses — the hem of a sleeve, the edge of a door — because they need to be doing something. The ribs feel tight, not with breath but with a lit fuse, slowly exhaling smoke. A whole chest becomes a white-knuckling fist, a hovering palm.

Then the shift. Something small. The angle of a shoulder. The weight of a lean an inch closer. Pulse registers the touch of a hand before the skin does. The weather changes.

The curve of the spine knows. The hinge of the jaw knows because it softens without the mind telling it to soften. The hair at the nape of the neck stands on end. The charged ache, it pools low, and doesn’t apologise. It just arrives. It does not shrink or soften. Warmth spreads, meeting every place that trembled.

This silence? It is not quiet. The body has been screaming in it the whole time. If silence is no longer polite, then what ground does restraint stand on?

The clinical smell of the room stings my nose, making my eyes water as soon as I walk through the door. A smell that has become familiar in the one hundred plus hours I have sat in its presence, one that brings terror to some but has become both mediative and meditative over time. Asynchronous buzzing increases as I move deeper and take my seat — soothed by the hum of machines carving at their own pace, different hands, different stages of someone else’s quiet negotiation with their own skin. I know this sound the way I know my own breathing when it’s about to steady itself. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It layers.

The thing that most people don't know, is that the placement of a stencil is something that is earned. There’s a geography to this, an unwritten law that whispers in nerve endings and countless healing of skin — the most visible and vulnerable parts come after a long trial of endurance, a room you can only enter once you’ve already marked the others. Not because of a governed policy, but because visibility tells on you. The artist knows this. They’ve watched people sit for ten minutes and tap out on the first line that touches the wrist and those who outlasted six hours on a rib. The body anchors the truth more honestly than the mouth can at times, and for some, this is the time where that lesson is learned.

So you earn it. Quietly, session by session, in the hours no one counts but you. You earn the right to place yourself, enduring pain in the most unforgiving parts of your own body, willingly asking someone to make something permanent there.

My artist doesn’t ask if I’m ready. We are past that. He knows the shift — the moment my breathing changes and my jaw softens and I stop being someone sitting in a chair and start being someone sitting inside a process. There’s a difference between those two people and it takes about three minutes to cross from one to the other. The first one is still thinking. The second one has stopped. 

The part of the body where the nerves are the closest to the surface is different from everywhere else. The skin is thinner. The bone is closer. There is nothing between the needle and the truth of what’s underneath — no muscle to absorb it, no soft tissue to intervene and soften the bite of 5,000 to 12,000 RPM. Every line registers at full volume. Every nerve lights up. Tendons carry vibration further and deeper than the origin point, into places where older scripture has already been written and has settled into the body’s memory, healed and has settled into being. This mark hasn’t gone quiet yet. The warmth, the swelling still speaks.

I flatten my fingers against the chair and hold them there. Stillness is not the absence of wanting to move, it is the presence of a desire deeper than want. I learned that a long time ago, in rooms that didn’t smell like this, that didn’t hum like this, that didn’t have anyone pausing to ask if I needed water. I learned it the way you learn that life and people change you, sometimes without you understanding the impact of that change and learning it years later — not by choosing to, but facing it again when life throws something at you, leaving you standing in it. Stillness given is a different creature than stillness taken. They live in the same posture but breathe from different lungs.

The ink goes in. Layer by layer. The black first, then the midnight hues that aren't quite blue, then flame at the centre, the sensation reflecting its colour. My artist and I sit in silence now, not because we have nothing to say, but because we have reached the part of the session that doesn’t need language. The machine speaks. The stretching, and subtle burn of the epidermis answers. I focus on my breath and close my eyes, drifting into my mind, the clinical air stinging the back of my throat and my jaw slightly clenched.

Hours pass the way years pass when you are inside something rather than watching it — without edges, without clear markers, just the steady hum and the sting echoing through your nerves. This is the part that doesn’t get photographed. The process. The raw and swollen hours between walking in with a patch of unmarked skin and walking out with something sore but alive on it. No one sees this part. They see the end result and not the journey.

The machine stops. My artist leans back. I look down and there it is — dark at the edges, burning at the centre, open in the way that only something that rooted and grew in the dark knows how to be. It greets me before I greet it. It will greet everything before I do now — coffee cups and every ordinary thing I reach for will be reached for by this bloom first.

By the time I leave the shop, it's late into the evening. The fresh scripture throbs as it makes itself at home on my skin, pulsing with its own weather and I make my way home with a smile, admiring the bloom.

The boxes sit empty and judging,
their cardboard mouths agape,
waiting for the life I keep not giving them.
I was supposed to be packing down my studio 
to move house this week,
discovering what grew sentient 
in the back of the closet,
making peace with undoing my cable management.
But the vodka was right there,
it was already cold,
and boring tasks are boring.

My lyre was already tuned—
or close enough for a hallway at 8 PM
when the acoustics are cathedral and forgiving.
So here I am, sitting cross-legged in the hallway
that will belong to strangers soon,
plucking strings like I’m summoning something ancient,
but what comes out is me finding
my teenage iPod in the closet—
eyeliner and side-swept bangs,
the particular ache of being young
and certain the world would never understand,
though that part is still somewhat true haha.

The neighbours might hear my falsetto
about writing sins and not tragedies
and I am not sorry.
The echo carries my voice back
to me like a gift I didn’t ask for.
Tomorrow I will be more responsible.

Tomorrow I will bubble-wrap the wine glasses.
Tonight the moving tape is sticky with melody.
I am Sappho with a skinny-jeans ghost,
I am Orpheus in smudged mascara,
I am a bard of suburban grief and mischief,
I am three drinks deep
and finally packing the one thing that matters most—
all the noise I keep so close to my heart.

I’ve been sitting with something for a few weeks now. It arrived quietly, the way most true things do—not in the heat of a confrontation or the aftermath of another restless night, but in a gentle moment. I was making tea. The kettle was boiling and somewhere between reaching for the mug and pouring the water, a thought surfaced that I couldn’t put back down.

I was so consumed by what has happened to me, the stories I didn’t necessarily start but assumed roles in—that I hadn’t looked at what I built to survive it.

That’s not an accusation against myself. It’s just… an observation. The kind that arrives when you’ve finally stopped running long enough to notice the shape of the walls you built. The shape of your darkest shadow.

Deep down in my soul, I think I’ve known for some time that the workplace fight was about more than the workplace. The poetry made that obvious—lungs shredded by protocol, tongues severed, bodies erased. You don’t write like that about a job. A job shouldn’t tip you to the edge of annihilation. You write like that about something that found an old wound and ripped the sutures. Knowing it and feeling the weight of it are different things, and I’ve been very good at blending the two so I'd keep fighting for justice before laying down the sword and reflecting.

That’s the thing I’m seeing now. How skilled I am at understanding without stopping long enough for the understanding of the cost to sink in. To pause and think whether putting down the sword was even an option.

I became the adult when I was a child. I’ve said that before, written about it, even. Now, I’m not sure I’ve ever let myself feel the full shape of what that meant. Not just the parentification—the word therapists use, clinical and neat—but the specific texture of it. The way my body learned to scan rooms before I entered them. The way I learned to read my father’s posture to know if it was a safe night or to bar my door and sleep with a switchblade under my pillow. The way I positioned myself between him and her, at fourteen years old, because no one else was there to protect him. Or me. So I became the protector.

I’ve called that strength. I’ve been proud of it. And it was strength—it is strength. I survived something that breaks people, and while sure, I bent, I didn’t break.

I see the cost.

The cost is that I don’t know how to be in a room without scanning it. The cost is that my nervous system runs a threat assessment before my conscious mind has finished saying hello. The cost is that I’ve built an entire life around being the one who sees, who protects, who holds—and I’ve never let anyone do that for me.

Not because no one offered, 
because I couldn’t let them.
I didn’t know how.
Not properly.
No one taught me that part.

There’s a deep, aching loneliness in being the one who sees clearly. I write about that often—how people are either over-friendly with me or avoid me entirely, like the ground shakes beneath my feet because I wield words like a blade wrapped in silk. I presented harm as their problem. Their discomfort with truth. And it was, mostly, but I also used words as tripwires too.

I’m seeing that now. The same truth, but my part in it where I definitely threw gasoline in a building already burning, without me as the ignition point.

I built a fortress from clarity. I made my ability to perceive everything a part of my identity. I built walls by design, kept people out, because if no one could scale them, I'd never be hurt again, but I'd also never be truly known either.

When you’re the one who sees through every mask, you’re also the one standing alone in the watchtower. When you’re the one who can’t unsee, can’t unknow, can’t pretend—you’re also the one who never gets written into anyone else's story—the kind that lets other people close enough to feel. I thought about what would happen if I ceased to exist. What people would say standing next to my casket. The sad truth is, in the past, I had never let anyone get close enough to say anything real. Not real in the sense that it was a risk to the tough exterior I built for myself. The words that get hidden in smoke to disorientate. Small talk. Polite evasions. The grace of letting things never be seen where the fracture lines run the deepest. Morbid as it sounds, it was my own wake up call to myself. Peak avoidant attachment logic, feeding behaviour that insists needing something feels like death, but the ache to be known feels like waking up and already dying.

I somehow lied to myself over the years that I didn't want those things. Feelings and closeness. That choosing truth over comfort was morally correct. I walked that path for so long—I’m not sure I truly understood what the cost of what I was giving up was. Or maybe I did know, and it was still the right choice for survival. I became hyper independent to a fault. Now that I see myself clearly, survival isn’t enough, it’s not sustainable and while I don’t completely know what being allowed to want feels like yet, I am consciously making the effort to learn.

The workplace was a repetition of the origin wound.
A past I was trying to atone for.
I see that now.

Power trips causing harm. Others complicit through silence. A system protecting itself instead of its people. Once again, I was standing in the middle of it, documenting everything, refusing to look away, taking the brunt of it because someone had to and I was the only one willing.

I thought I was only fighting an institution.
I was fighting my childhood.

Not consciously. I didn’t walk into that building thinking this is where I’ll replay my father’s house but the body knows what the mind won’t say. My body knew. That’s why it broke. That’s why sleep was a fight every night. That’s why I kept showing up even when I was bleeding out, because that’s what I learned to do—you don’t leave, you don’t stop, you stand in the fire until the fire goes out or you do.

The building never stopped burning. 
That’s what I didn’t understand.
Not properly.
Not if you keep standing in it.

This is where that question my father asked a few weeks ago ties in. The one where he asked if I’d considered that it could be the building and whether I keep applying ointment or whether I should stand somewhere else.

I’ve been letting that sit as an open tab. This was deliberate because I didn't want to assign context consciously. I wanted the answer to arrive in its own time. So I went about my life knowing it would come. 

It did.
He wasn’t telling me to leave the job. He was asking if I know how to exist outside of crisis.

I don’t.
Not really.

I know how to endure crisis. I know how to document it, name it, fight it and transmute it into art that makes people uncomfortable. I know how to be the last one standing when everyone else has looked away. I worked in healthcare for seven years. I told myself it was preparation—that I might want to be a surgeon. I realise now it's because high-risk environments are the only thing my nervous system truly understands. I became exceptional at reading crisis outcomes. I became exceptional at crisis management. I became exceptional at making decisions in high pressure situations... except when it came to the one I never let go of... the fact that not every second of my personal life needs to feel like that in order to be worthy of being alive.

The heartbreaking truth in that is I don’t know how to rest. Ever. Every second of stillness is my nervous system telling me there's a threat looming. Not to be confused with silence, I can sit with that. It can either be sanctuary or screaming, depending on context. I am capable of letting a day be ordinary and at times, I can have them for consecutive weeks, even months. I'm learning how to not let things hit breaking point before that happens now. I'm learning to receive care, starting with self without bracing for the cost. I’m learning how to be held without waiting for the hands to turn and plunge a knife into my spine.

My body has always been trying to help me recognise when I need to rest. I usually run well past the check engine light though and live in the recursive thought of "I just have to get through this and it will be ok." It never is. I have never known when to stop. This is when I end up with a broken foot. Insomnia. The nerves that rattle under my skin so much at times that I can no longer safely perform dexterous tasks. I’ve treated it like an inconvenience—something to override, push through, manage with chocolate and books and good intentions of rest that my brain doesn't have the instruction manual for.

But the body isn’t the enemy. The body is the only one that’s been honest with me.

It said: you are not okay.
It said: this is not sustainable.
It said: stop.

And I didn’t listen, because listening felt like giving up, and giving up felt like drowning, because somewhere along the way I learned that the moment you stop being strong is the moment you get hurt.

That was true more than once. In my father’s house, it was true. In relationships, it was true. In workplaces, it was true. Letting your guard down meant walking into a room where bottles were already shattered, where blood was already on the floor. Vigilance was survival.

But I’m not in that house anymore. I left when I was sixteen. I left again when she shattered my cheekbone. I left the same situation wearing the face of a relationship at twenty-eight. I’ve been out for years.

So why is my body still bracing like the next haemorrhage is coming?

The answer is hidden in the deepest part of the wound.

I learnt early that love and harm come from the same source.
I learnt that if I blink and drop my guard, that it only leads to suffering.
I learnt that life is to survive and to survive is to suffer.
I learnt that to suffer is to tempt death and pray for fate’s sleight of hand.

My father loved me. I know that. Even when he failed to protect me, even when he chose her over his children, even when he kicked me out after she broke my bones—he loved me. The failure wasn’t absence of love. It was love that couldn’t overcome his own wounds, his own patterns, his own inability to see the fire he was standing in.

And because I learned early that love and harm came packaged together, I started to expect both. To scan for the harm inside love. To keep one foot out the door even when I wanted to stay. To be the one who leaves before I am left, the one who sees before I can be blindsided, the one who protects so I never have to trust anyone else to do it.

It kept me alive. It also kept me alone.

Not alone in the sense of no friends, no connections, no people who care. I have those. I have people, I’m not isolated, but I’m alone in the sense that no one has fully held me. That the deepest parts—the parts that are tired, the parts that want to stop, the parts that ache for someone to lean beside me—those parts only come out on the page. The page gets the confession that I've never said out loud.

I’m tired of that. I’m tired of being my own only safe container.

I wrote at the end of last year that I wanted peace. Not to fix or rescue—I’m not a damsel—but peace where I can build a home and stand whole side by side with someone else whole, who loves even in imperfection and who doesn’t see me as wreckage and ruin.

I meant it. I still mean it and I’m realising now that peace isn’t something I can fight my way to. It isn’t a battle I win, an institution I defeat, a wrong I finally right. Peace requires something I haven’t practiced: stopping.

Stopping the constant, exhausting vigilance. Stopping the documenting like a criminal preparing for a court case. Stopping the nightly sharpening of the sword in preparation for the next attack. Trusting that it might not come and that if it does, I can handle it without having already pre-handled it. That I don’t have to live in a permanent state of my hand already grasping the hilt. That I’m allowed to exhale.

My father exhaled. Eventually. After decades of holding his breath inside a burning marriage, after nearly ending his life, after his child had to call the police and talk him down—he exhaled. He did the work. He found someone warm, stable and not without their own stories and imperfections. He became the man who could sit across from me in an upmarket pub and speak like a parent for the first time.

If he can, I can.

That’s not optimism. It’s just observation as fact. He had deep wounds and more years of calcification and he still found his way out. The pattern isn’t necessarily my condemnation. It’s a pattern and I am breaking it.

To do that, it requires me to do something I’ve continuously resisted: letting go of the fight before the fight is won. Surrender.

The institution will probably never give me the accountability I deserve. They’ll protect themselves. They’ll erase what they can and reframe what they can’t. The redundancy will go through, and either way, they’ll continue being what they are. I could keep fighting. I have the receipts. I have the documentation. I have the fury that sharpens into strategy or I can decide that they don’t get any more of me.

Not because they’ve won, because I’m choosing something they can’t touch.

I don’t know how to wrap this up. Usually I write toward some kind of resolution—not a lesson, but a landing. A place where the piece can rest.

I’m sitting with the realisation I’ve been repeating the shape of the origin wound. I'm learning what it means to really stop fighting—instead of convincing myself I constantly have to—and focus on building something different. I learnt that the war I’ve been waging might be a war I inherited rather than one I chose.

What I know is this:

I am not my vigilance.
I am not my clarity.
I am not my ability to endure.

Those are things I built. They saved me and they are not the whole of me.

Underneath the armour, there’s a person who is now unafraid to learn what peace and love actually feel like. Who wants to be held and actually breathe. To be able to surrender safely. Who wants to continue to make art and who wants to build something where my skin isn’t scorched every day.

That person has been waiting a long time. Since they were ten or eleven, probably. Since before they had language for what they were waiting for.

I think I’m ready to be her.
I think I am becoming her.

Not perfectly. I’ll brace again at some point—but it'll lessen over time. It already has started to. The patterns don’t dissolve overnight. Naming it and understanding the behaviour does. Consciously recognising and changing it does.

And I am.

Author’s Note: The kettle boiled three times while I wrote this. I forgot to pour the water.
Somewhere in that forgetting is the proof that I’m learning to sit with things, to rest inside them instead of bracing for impact. Small wins count. They always will.

08:40 - This is so cooked. The wrong frequencies taste like flaming garbage. I am the sweatiest person who ever lived and also more parched than the Sahara desert. My thoughts are scattered like fifty-two pickup. 

9:30am - The comedown from this is going to be worse than watching someone eating a random pinga off a nightclub floor. I can taste colours now. Paper feels weird. My synesthesia is cross-wiring into territory I didn’t know it could. My normal way of orientating is distorted. I want to cry but run five kilometres at the same time. I don’t feel anchored in my body and my eyes are looking at me like “cunt, what the fuck.” How do people take this shit. What the actual dissociative hell is this.

11:00 - My CPU is overclocked from sensory data I've not experienced. My skeleton wants to leave my body. My organs have staged a coup and my nerves are in agreement. Every cell in my body is vibrating at a frequency that translates roughly to "vibrating in another dimension." The fluorescent lights are personally laughing at me. Karen from accounting just asked if I'm okay and I said "absolutely" in a voice that suggested I was about to either correct her or astral project and haunt the break room vending machine. Both feel equally possible. Neither feels survivable. 

13:00 - Genuinely sitting here doing the maths on how long until this leaves my bloodstream and the answer is "too fucking long." My body is not a temple right now, it's raccoons wearing a trenchcoat. Somewhere a pharmacist is going about their day not knowing they've turned me into a cautionary tale with a lanyard. Once I survive this I'm framing the prescription and hanging it as a warning. This is your brain. This is your brain when the doctor doesn't double-check the dosing chart.

16:20 - Finally escaped the fluorescent hellscape. Walked through my front door like a Victorian woman overwhelmed by shocking news seeking a chaise lounge. Immediately laying down on the floor. The floor is safe. The floor understands. The floor isn't asking me to be productive. My cat looked at me like I was the one who'd been licking themselves for three hours. Fair assessment honestly. We have reached an understanding. She will not judge. I will not move.

18:46 - Successfully ate something but food is a concept invented by people whose jaw muscles aren't clenched into a single existential crisis. Managed to make a halloumi burger. It tasted like F minor. Not at all in a bad way.  In a sunny yellow way.
The shower was either transcendent or traversal, still processing. Water has never been so quiet. Each droplet had a story and I didn't mind. Stood there until I forgot why I was standing there. Got out. Couldn't tell you if it was five minutes or forty.

Now I'm sitting in bed at seven thirty pm like a blanket burrito who's a gremlin before midnight.  Brain finally slowing from "air traffic control during an emergency" to "holding a plushy until your brain stops screaming into the void." The comedown arrives in waves. Each wave whispers "you're never doing this again." I whisper back "I surely am fucking not. Death would have been mercy compared to a doctor that cannot do simple mathematics."

Tomorrow I'm calling the doc and using my outside voice.
Fiercely polite with the undertone of "I hope you shit yourself traffic."

Author’s Note: Fractions scratch their head. Colours taste like nails on chalkboards.

The mirror reflects light from upper windows.
The elevator stops.
I walk a dripping corridor
where the whales smile
and reach the door handle that usually argues.
Today it laughs instead as I turn a key.
Water floods through halls that stare,
yet I can breathe.
I walk into a room that is silvered ebb and flow,
a perfect tempo of retracting and expanding.
Here lies every skin I ever shed
or was slain by someone else’s hand.

I pull the drawers and steady my pulse.
Contorted faces whisper toe-tag lies
as shadows spin mirrors, laughing.
I wave to them, watching them frolic,
listening for any that still hide.
Equations tilt gravity’s axis.
I exhale, listening where sound reflects,
painting the outline of what I cannot see with eyes.

A pendulum stops.
A coin hits the floor.
The doors open.
Breath returns.

Author’s Note: Some rooms fall upward. Some inh—

You are falling through the keyhole of yourself when the fish arrive, silver-bellied and speaking in your mother's voice from before you were born. They say things like the appointments have been rescheduled and gravity is optional on Tuesdays and you nod because this makes perfect sense, because you have always known that the ceiling is just a floor that lost its geometry.

Your hands belong to someone else now. They are making bread in a kitchen you have never seen but recognise completely—the yellow light, the hum of a refrigerator that died in 1987, the way the window looks out onto a city that is also a thawing forest that is also the inside of a cathedral made of snow. It's also Spring though—?

A door opens in the architecture of your breathing.
It closes in the harbouring of your restraint.

Someone is calling your name but they are using the wrong mathematics. You want to answer but your mouth has become a staircase, and there are people climbing it, small figures carrying lanterns, and each lantern contains a different version of this same moment: you, dissolving. You, refracting. You, a threshold nobody walks through because they are too busy being the walking.

The fish have left. In their place: a grandfather clock striking thirteen, or perhaps it is just your heart forgetting its rhythm, improvising jazz in the key of almost-sleep. Your thoughts are unspooling like ribbons from a magician's hat and each ribbon is a sentence you may not remember, profound and then gone, profound and then—

Somewhere, your body is breath
Somewhere, phosphene.
Reality hits the floor that is also a ceiling.
Nothing shatters.

Windows inhale.

Author’s Note: Everything tilted. The body was simply the last to know. Or was it the first?

2025 left no breathing room, as I hit the ground running with spending New Year's Eve on the other side of the country to play a set on the same lineup as my best friend from overseas who was touring my country and staying with me for ten weeks. I had to fly out from there quickly for a headline set back in my city the next day while my friend stayed in that city for a couple of weeks with my other best friend / out-of-state artist manager. 

It was an amazing ten weeks together where I felt immersed back in my language and culture and felt so at ease with her here, yet exhausting in the way that two months of nonstop gigs and other friends constantly at my house all while working my survival job and being a good best friend and host, would be. It was both amazing and exhausting, during this time I moved my studio to a different part of the house so I could create a private space for her while she was here. When she returned to the UK (many tears were shed), I reassembled my studio space and by that time, I was weeks out from flying to play my first international shows.

I feel fortunate that my art has taken me places I've dreamed of visiting. I was so excited to escape the forty-degree heat and humid summer I'd had so far and go back to winter. I had an amazing experience exploring a new country in the snow and I quickly adapted to the language and culture. I took my time exploring the city, spending many days off just wandering on foot, catching the trains wherever my heart desired that day.

I’d never felt more myself there and experienced a kind of peace I had not felt in a very long time. When I play out of state, I travel alone, which used to terrify me but over time has been something I’ve learned to become a little too comfortable with, enjoying my own company and the unrestricted freedom that moving to the beat of my drum brings. There were other artists on the tour from where I live but I flew out early to have some time to explore before travelling to the show locations, which were outside of the capital. I shared a double-story loft with one of my closest friends from home and her husband during this time, which was beautiful, we consider each other family.

My friend was in recovery from nitrous oxide addiction at the time and taking medication to aid recovery while dealing with symptoms of fatigue and vitamin deficiency. Her husband asked me to help keep an eye on her, as she was not completely steady on her feet, which I did, not that the substance is easy to get where we were (it is not and no one tried).

I was having slight health issues too during this time, as my prescription meds required declaration in the country I was in and my doctor neglected to tell me that this had to be done 30 days prior (a detail medical professionals seem to forget, but an essential one every neurodivergent traveller should know) so I didn't risk taking them with me. Hell is a real place when your body gets hit with withdrawal. I was lucky someone had a variant of the medication I take and could spare enough to help me stabilise in conjunction with CBD vape  —  which is surprisingly legal there  —  which helped with the nerve pain.

I didn’t want to return home after that tour. I fell in love with where I was and wished time had slowed just a little.

Things at my survival job had already been tense before I left. I was being directly harmed by someone in a position of power who was playing psychological war games. It wasn’t just happening to me — they were using divide-and-conquer so no one in the team would speak to each other about it, which meant they kept control.

I started to become quite unhealthy through the following months while convincing myself I was fine. The cracks started to show as I overscheduled myself intentionally to counter the disdain and condescension I was receiving from my survival job. Outside of my musical endeavours, I was working with a close friend’s wargaming and prop design studio as a procurement manager and business consultant spending many weekends at conventions as both a vendor and special guest, building brand reputation through my engagement as a well known artist in the scene.

This was sustainable for a while... until it wasn't. As the year started to further unfold, things really started to come to a head. I had played more gigs than I could count on two hands, supporting a number of international artists, touring internationally and playing numerous headline sets while enduring harm from my survival job and helping my friend with their business. I was getting ready for work one morning and I could feel my nerves rattling under my skin. That morning I requested immediate leave. I was so wrung out from what was happening at my survival job that my body would not let me physically enter that building and I was dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. Later that morning, I received a call from the director who was supportive and approved it.

It took two days for my nervous system to start unclenching. I was resigned to the couch, alone, in silence, learning how to breathe again. That’s when the idea for my video game arrived, and I began writing. In those two days, it felt like relief. I began to work through and gain further insight into the level of harm I was enduring and the impacts it had on me both consciously and subconsciously, transmuting them into a video game IP (RPG story completed, art WIP). For the first time in months, I felt like I was realigning with myself and felt joy for the first time in a long time about something I’d created. I designed new and comprehensive accessibility and trauma-level settings so the game would be safe and accessible for people with different sensitivities. The video game work is still entirely private, I haven’t posted about it or mentioned it anywhere until now, remaining separate from everything I have written and posted publicly. 

I also started experiencing nightmares when my mind finally had the space to process everything I had pushed aside. Some nights I woke up in panic, other nights felt like bricks weighing my chest and lingered through the morning. It became clear that something deeper was beginning to unravel. During this period, I'd shifted to working from home full-time, which at first felt like a small relief from the atmosphere I had been enduring, but it didn’t take long before it came with its own kind of unease. Communication became sparse, interactions felt colder, and I started noticing decisions being made around me rather than with me. I received a letter that my position was in line to be made redundant as a part of a workplace restructure. It sat strangely with me — not shocking but conveniently timed as they were being formally investigated following reports of harm and every position on the redundancy list were people who had made reports. I was one of many who received a request and attended a formal investigation interview, raising further questions about the harm I was enduring.

Not long after this, I found out someone close to me was terminally ill and that news hit me like a freight train. It was the kind of grief that arrived all at once — as their time was extremely close to running out. When I got the call, her only request was to get matching tattoos, something we had been talking about for two years, but had not yet got around to. I remember that day, the call, the days that follow. We got the tattoos a week later and spent afternoons in the tattoo shop with my friend of ten years who is an incredible tattooer. This was a beautiful way for us to stay connected when so much felt unstable. 

Eventually, due to the compounding pressure I was under, my sleep deteriorated also destroying my appetite. My ability to concentrate became nonexistent and small decisions felt like quantum physics. I kept telling myself it was temporary, that I just needed rest but the pattern was relentless and I was forced to start noticing how many parts of my life were being strained at once. My survival job were simultaneously using silence as a weapon against me while trying to silence me. My friend was dying. I received the letter that my position was in line to be dissolved. My day to day health became unpredictable. My energy was inconsistent. My nervous system felt like it never fully exhaled. I would wake up already tired, already wired, already bracing. On the outside, it appeared like I was functioning — I was performing, creating, supporting others, keeping up appearances, moving through obligations... because I didn’t know how to stop and underneath, my capacity was thinning, slowly and quietly.

My body began to shut down as insomnia reached it's peak. I was either awake for two to three days at a time or I would randomly fall asleep on the couch while reading, gaming or writing and wake up disoriented, unsure how long I’d been out or what time it was. Sleep literally became passing out on the couch, a pattern that continued for two months. I wasn't even making it to bed anymore and I was only out for three to four hours the nights it did happen. I tried to push through it but eventually, the cost began to show on the surface after it crept in sideways. Small things started slipping. I would stare at emails without understanding the words, forget conversations I’d had the day before, lose track of what day it was. 

My brain and my body felt heavier, slower, like it was moving through quicksand while everything around me moved too fast. I kept thinking I just needed one good night of sleep, one quiet weekend, one afternoon without demands… but those never came. Instead, the weight kept building, subtle and relentless, until even the smallest task felt insurmountable and I knew I was reaching the edge of what I could carry, when doing the things I enjoyed like writing, became more difficult as sleep deprivation and malnutrition pulled me under.  I honestly don't know how I was still showing up to my bookings. There’s a video from my terminally ill friend's wedding reception around this time where I was performing and I can now see how unwell I actually was. I remember thinking I looked tired but fine; watching it back, it’s clear how overstretched and depleted I had become. Every movement looks like it's slowed down. 

Insomnia eventually eased and I was recovering and feeling more like myself. My cognitive function was returning to full capacity, and ironically the moment that snapped me fully back into my body was when I slipped down the stairs early one morning and managed to break three bones in my foot. It happened on the day of a headline set. I spent the morning at the doctor, got the x-ray, was fitted with a moonboot on the spot, went home rested and then had to get ready for the show. There wasn’t any real option to cancel, so I played the set in the moonboot that night, moving a little slower than usual but still showing up and bringing vibes.

As Q4 rolled around and came to a close quickly, I was pushed (threatened) forced to return to work with no acknowledgement of the harm I had been subjected to. I went back because I had no choice and I'm still watching. The lease for my house ended the week before finally receiving my redundancy paperwork with my projected end date in 2026 on Christmas eve.

This year was a fucking shitshow and even with everything that happened, there were things that steadied me. I wrote a video game from the ground up and I kept writing even on the days when the world tried to draw blood from my veins. Writing again after years of putting the pen down became my lifeline, a way I could express my innermost thoughts without fear of retribution. It became the constant I held onto when nothing else made sense and I felt like a ghost of myself, slowly reclaiming the parts of myself I'd lost. I connected with someone through writing who I care deeply for. I kept walking onto stages when I was barely breathing, staying loyal to the parts of me that the world tried to strip away. I stopped giving my time to people who only wanted the currency of my name. I faced parts of myself I could only see through my mirror, parts I thought I'd healed years ago. I also came to realise that while I am much better than twenty year old me was, I was still afraid of real vulnerability and I'm consciously working through that. I stood in my sovereignty and I kept moving, even when I was within an inch of my breath. 

I’m not tying anything into neat lessons or silver linings. What 2025 gave me, more than anything, was the truth of my own limits and the cost of carrying more than a single person should. I learned how quickly a body will force honesty when life refuses to slow down. I learned where my real support lives. I learned what was taken from me, and that art was returning me to myself. I defined harsher boundaries where I was losing myself and learnt to relax the ones where I was losing or hurting others. I learnt that I am allowed to want, and what I want without performance, is the next chapter of my life to be built from things that don’t force me to stand in a kiln while I bleed. Maybe that’s enough for now — not resolution, but recognition and certainty of a direction. An alignment toward the life I want to want to live, instead of the one that I am forced to survive.

I lost my job, my home and almost my mind. Ironically, I'm not angry about it. I really learnt who I was and who I am. I continued to do the work to integrate the parts of myself that still weren't healed and I will continue every day. I've accepted I will never live without pain and that it's ok to accept that, I'm not running from it. Now? I'm in search of peace. Not to fix or rescue, I'm not a damsel, but peace where I can build a home where I can stand whole, knowing what safety feels like where someday, I can stand side by side with someone else whole, who loves even in imperfection.

I was small enough to stand on a chair beside you,
watching your hands work the dough,
flour on your apron, on my nose,
the bakestone smoking just right.
“Not the oven,” you’d say, “never the oven,”
and I’d nod like I understood at the time
that you were teaching me sacred things.
You let me press the cutter down,
gave me the misshapen ones to keep,
called me tânen and ddraig fach before I knew what it meant,
taught me the old tongue
like a secret the others didn’t want to learn.

They rolled their eyes at the bara brith,
picked around the fruit,
asked why we couldn’t just have normal cake.
But I sat beside you, 
plate on my lap,
letting you tell me again
about the plygain, 
the dark chapel,
your mother’s mother’s voice.
You taught me the songs 
they didn’t want to sing,
hummed them while you stirred the cawl,
and I hummed too, 
learning the shape of words
my tongue didn’t quite fit around yet.

Now they’re gone to other tables,
other traditions, 
easier ones,
assimilated ones.
They’ve forgotten our traditions
the way you said nadolig llawen
like it was a blessing and a gift,
And I’m here alone with your recipes,
in December without you,
your handwriting fading on index cards,
trying to remember if it was a pinch or a palm,
slowly cataloging the old songs in our dialect, 
from memory, keeping everything you taught me.

I still make the cakes.
I say the words wrong sometimes.
I set a table for one
and feel the whole weight 
of your heart on my shoulders.
The others ask why I bother.
Why I don’t just let it go,
let it fade like our language almost did,
like our customs nearly have.

Your hands are in my hands now
because someone has to remember
the flour dust, the steam, the words,
because you chose me,
out of all of them,
to carry it forward—
and I won’t let the traditions die,
even if I’m the only one
still singing in the dark.

Rwy’n colli chi, Mamgu,
Gyda chariad,
Ddraig fach.

Author’s Note: To embody memory is to carry it forward.

This morning the alarm 
sang its song of tyranny 
and I listened, 
really listened, 
for the first time in months—
to the sound of a machine 
telling me where 
my body should go. 
And I thought: 
No, fuck that.

I call in sick,
even though I’m not unwell
even healing my broken bones
though I am sick of corporate bullshit
and I simply don't have the capacity
or patience today for it
and that is the quiet truth 
sitting in my chest 
like a stone.

So I made my next move
in the system's game
by refusing to play today.

I take extra time
lying in bed
staring at the ceiling 
as summer dances it’s way 
from the light fixture 
toward the window like a river 
finding its way to the sea.

I watched it for twenty minutes. 
I regret nothing.

Outside, the morning commute 
is happening without me. 
cars zooming through intersections, 
people on the street carrying coffee 
like warm prayers
trains screeching across rails
as the highway traffic stands still.

I am not among them. 
I am here, in bed, 
planning a whole day of freedom.
I’m going to eat ice-cream outside
read a book in the sun
paint something 
breathe for once.

They will manage. 
The emails waiting 
to bark orders
will still be there. 
Meetings will still
meet without me, 
filling the room 
with words that evaporate 
the moment someone 
opens the door.

Today I am a glitch 
in the system, 
a small rebellion, 
a breath the world takes 
without being noticed. 

And somehow 
that feels like the most holy 
yet morally uncompromising sly move
and a mischievous laugh escapes me —
to steal time for softness, 
to be nowhere 
I’m supposed to be, 
to actually breathe, 
in this late morning light 
that asks nothing of me at all.​​​​​​​

I chose to live today 
instead of being 
forced to survive.

Author’s Note: The ice-cream tasted like rebellion and sunshine. 10/10 recommend.

Something in the air has shifted—
not loud, not visible,
but resonating deep,
like a tuning fork struck beneath my ribs
as the ground tilts a fraction
and my skin is charged like it’s reading lightning.

My pulse quickens.
My ears ring with that thin metallic sound
time whispers over my shoulder,
and a hum pulses within my forehead.

Something is moving.

Stillness isn’t still.
Silence keeps listening to itself.

The sky is the same shade it was an hour ago—
it hasn’t changed
and somehow it has,
wearing the colour differently now,
light bending where it lands,
murmuring between the stars
that have become increasingly loud.

That feeling—
it coils tight in my chest,
tightly wound and pressing,
right before the dam breaks.

Everything is exactly what it is
and yet
not quite.

It feels like a breath held too long,
a pause with no clock,
the whole world leaning forward,
and the wind holding still.

Nothing has happened.
And still—
still—
something has changed.

Rave culture emerged from the underground dance music scenes of the 1980s, evolving into a global phenomenon that celebrates electronic music, community and altered states of consciousness. At its core, rave culture represents a countercultural movement built around rebellion and sound system culture in the form of all-night dance parties with artists spinning techno, house later evolving in the 1990's to include jungle, trance and other modern electronic genres. The scene has always existed in a complex relationship with party drugs, viewing altered consciousness as part of the transformative experience alongside hypnotic, repetitive beats, immersive lighting and geometric visuals.

The culture emphasizes values of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect) and creates spaces where people can escape mundane reality and connect with others through shared experiences on the dancefloor. From warehouse parties to small local venues to massive festivals, rave culture has diversified considerably while maintaining its essential character: the pursuit of collective euphoria and liberation through movement and electronic music. However, this pursuit has become increasingly centred on drugs which have become more deeply ingrained into the scene increasing risk to both patrons and the scene itself.

When I first started in my corner of the industry, substances at raves were mostly MDMA, cocaine, mushrooms, cannabis and maybe some acid. Over the past two years, I’ve watched ketamine and nitrous oxide (nangs) slowly cannibalise the rave scene. Both drugs are cheaper than MDMA in many places around the world and have moved from the periphery to disturbingly central to the rave experience for many patrons. Nangs have become the most highly accessible drug with some online retailers offering two hour home delivery per canister and for boxes of the smaller cartridges.

The pharmacological distinction between traditional “party drugs” like MDMA or even psychedelics that tend to enhance the party experience amplifying the music, intensifying the lights while deepening social connections keeps users engaged with their environment, often hyperaware of the sensory landscape around them. 

Ketamine and nitrous oxide are dissociative which separate users from their immediate lived experience. Ketamine is an anaesthetic (also referred to as horse tranquilliser) that can induce what is commonly referred to as a “K-Hole” which is a state of profound detachment where individuals are unable to move or respond to external stimuli. Nitrous oxide, while shorter-acting, produces similar effects: a brief, intense disconnection by depriving the brain of oxygen followed by disorientation.

The physical risks of these drugs are quite severe. I’ve seen sets interrupted by medical emergencies by people who’ve mixed ketamine with alcohol or other substances, people who’ve fallen and injured themselves because they have become so dissociated as well as people who’ve needed to be carried out by their friends after a show because they couldn’t walk. As both an artist and patron in the scene with a regular presence, it’s frightening how many people I see out regularly at events who have sustained long term injuries through vitamin B12 deficiency and motor neuron damage from nangs and severe injuries and asphyxiation from ketamine.

What saddens me most is how these substances cause long term harm to users and how they are changing the energy of the dance floor. There’s a noticeably large disconnection between patrons and connecting with the art. Two years ago, when I played peak-time sets, I could feel the room breathing together. Now, I often feel like I’m playing to several different parties happening simultaneously in the same space: people gurning on MDMA who are still present and connected, people on ketamine who are in their own dissociative bubbles and people with nangs who aren’t really there for the music at all.

This fragmentation affects how I play. I find myself working harder to hold attention, to create moments that can pierce through the chemical haze. My artistry is a balance of skills with one being the ability to read the room and take people on a journey while thinking eight tracks at a time while beat juggling on four decks and a mixer. Over time this has become more of a challenge, with the bigger question being: how do you take people on a journey when half of them have chemically removed themselves from the collective experience? Many artists including myself have had discussions on how we have had to adjust how we approach our craft just to maintain some semblance of unified energy. I have been attending a wide variety of events in multiple genres to determine how widespread this is and have left each one with the same conclusions. The mixes and track selections aren’t the issue. The lineups aren’t the issue. The venues aren’t the issue.

There is an impact in this shift in culture on newer ravers too with young people coming into the scene often thinking this is just how it is—that raves are supposed to be about getting as fucked up as possible on whatever’s available and not understanding or respecting the history and culture of what they are a part of. They haven’t experienced what it’s like when the music, the collective energy of people moving together and connecting with each other is enough. This makes me fear for the cultural knowledge being lost over time and it being replaced by a consumption-focused mentality that treats raves as just another place for getting shitfaced which also puts pressure on the very few venues still supporting electronic music as there are many that will not allow events of certain genres to take place because of the pressure it puts on their resources when people go too far down the rabbit hole.

In saying this, I want to be clear about my stance: As someone who has wrestled with their own past substance addiction, I’m not coming at this from a place of moral judgment, just saying maybe think twice before ketamine and nangs and roll a spliff instead. I don’t think drugs and electronic music can or should be completely separated—they’ve been synonymous since the beginning and I’m not naive enough to think that people are going to stop taking substances at raves just because an artist wrote a piece about it. What I am advocating for is awareness, education and harm reduction strategies around the use of ketamine and nitrous (and to go home after a set feeling a little less disheartened about it) and to keep the culture and history of dance music alive.

I don’t have all the answers and I’m not here to lecture, just sitting in the uber post set reminiscing about "the good old days," writing in my notes section sweaty and a little feral.  I exist in the scene and have so much love and care for it because music has been the reason I even decide to wake up every day since childhood and it saddens me that the culture is shifting away from what it is supposed to be about. I care about the music and the history of the scene and I believe in the transformative power of collective experience on the dancefloor but I also think we need to be honest about what’s happening and the impact of what the wider electronic music scene is at risk of losing.

I’m going to keep trying to create those moments of magic that make people remember why they came to the rave in the first place. I’m going to keep playing and writing music and advocating for the community to create more avenues of awareness around drug education and for pill and drug testing machines to become standardised so that people can test their drugs without judgement and know what they are taking.  I have hope most days that more people will remember why the scene even exists and what it represents instead of choosing obliteration, dissociation and choose losing yourself in the music and connection with the art and each other over the chemical escapes that disconnect from the experience entirely.

The beat goes on and the dance continues, but the question is: As time goes on, will anyone be there to feel it?

Author’s Note: Raw, slightly unhinged post set musings (ranting?) from an artist who fell asleep sitting up with their laptop open and thought they had already posted this while realising too long after the fact it was still sitting in drafts.

My body decided to break bones at 3 AM this morning,
ironically, reminding me of what I already knew—
Pain is just another room I can sit in and stay.

Three bones in my foot, broken,
their names learned later from a doctor
with tired eyes and coffee breath,
as I sit there thinking not why, 
but okay, this too.

The sunrise this morning didn’t care.
My name up in lights tomorrow night can’t be rescheduled
as my foot swells into a language I’m fluent in—
I slipped, I fell, something broke and yet, 
I still stand.

This isn’t about being strong,
it’s about the clarity that arrived
in such a ridiculous moment,
cutting through the noise 
like a strobe landing directly in my face.
I didn’t ask for it, the reminder that was waiting
at the bottom of the stairs—
that something that breaks 
isn’t something broken,
and hurting is not the same as ruin.

The moonboot is ugly.
It kinda sucks,
but it’s necessary
and I’ll wear it like a uniform, 
unashamed
playing my peak slot,
visible under the lights in it—
not because I’m brave,
the pain is real 
but I’m choosing to show up real
and both are true at the same time.

I didn’t panic when I fell.
It was just me, the quiet, 
my cat glaring as I’d interrupted precious sleep
and the deep bone-aching reminder
that I contain more rooms than I think sometimes.

I can have broken bones and still walk,
even if I'm limping beneath that LED screen,
I don’t have to ignore the pain;
I can keep moving, swear under my breath
when adjusting my sock — a tiny catharsis —
but it still isn’t the same as honouring what hurts.

Still, tomorrow night I’ll stand under those lights,
and no one will know about the stairs,
or the moment of pain and clarity,
the strange peace I made
with my body’s rebellion
gravity rearranging,
and the morning x-ray
in the time it took the sun to rise.

But I’ll know.
And that knowing
will be the truest note I play.

Author’s Note: Not a metaphor— three broken bones, a moonboot and a very real morning.

Ragdolls are the universe’s failed attempt
at a gravitational experiment.
Every time you lift one,
Newton rolls in his grave and whispers, “oh no, not again.”

Every ragdoll lives by three laws:
	1.	Announce everything like a teenager discovering Snapchat in 2014.
	2.	If gravity calls, answer dramatically.
	3.	Unhinged zoomies accompanied by sounds that would terrify Cthulhu are a valid love language.

They have the tensile strength of pudding
and the existential resolve of a dropped croissant.
You do not own a ragdoll—
you simply rent emotional space from a semi-liquid being.

Somewhere deep inside,
a brain cell pings once per hour, just to say, “vibe check.”

If startled, they do not flee.
They fold in on themselves like pastry dough,
eyes wide with ancient knowledge:
they have never paid taxes.

They know no fear, no shame,
only the sacred geometry of gremlins.

You will find them staring at walls,
contemplating the fifth dimension,
and then slowly tipping over
as if felled by invisible philosophy.

They are 47% sentient marshmallow, 53% feral celestial chaos.

Their purr?
The hum of distant microwaves.
Their soul?
Suspiciously sticky.

Some say they are cats.
Others insist they are dessert pretending to have opinions.
All agree they are perfect—
proof that the sun once spilled a cup of cream,
and it now sleeps on your keyboard,
writing shitposts.

Author’s note: Broadcasted by the floofy sentient marshmallow staring at me for breakfast at 4am.

I wake before words,
light spilling softly across the walls—
but what I notice first is not the room’s brightness stinging my eyes,
but the tinted whispers of the morning’s quiet.
Even silence is a colour;
mauve and chalk,
something I can’t touch
sometimes screaming, 
sometimes sanctuary,
but always like a phantom breath 
sinking beneath my skin.

Branches scrape across the patio
and the sound blooms red—
just a flicker at the edge of vision,
but there,
loud in my mind’s eye,
leaning against my optic nerve,
stuttering my vision 
distorting the room.

The kettle sings; 
a thread of yellow winds through the steam.
As I move, through low light,
footfalls echo 
a map appears in my mind 
before my eyes meet the ground—
every creak and breath mapping out
the architecture,
my ears seeing 
what the naked eye can’t
tuning night into my field of view,
turning distance into certainty.

When coffee is poured,
the sound is round,
settling in the chest 
the way warmth from a hoodie 
fresh out of the dryer does.
Words on paper shimmer
in pale green and red;
a rainbow pulse as I read,
sometimes quiet—
but the world is never blank,
and never merely 
what’s in front of me either.

In my body, I feel
the fridge
the walls
the house—
its heartbeat a pulse of 
soft vibrations thrumming 
through my feet, 
brushing against my every fibre. 
Distant cars whisper through the floor,
letting me know who is coming,
how far away the street really is.
Some sounds I can’t bear: a neighbor’s pen clicking,
the sharp snap of someone chewing gum—
slicing through me,
like a iron rod to my flesh,
immediate,
searing
leaving me clenching,
teeth gritted,
nerves surging with the need to fight or flee.

I carry headphones 
and -25dB earplugs as armour,
my mind exhales
with the hypnotic pulse of LFOs,
where the velvet hum of 80Hz 
washes over me like balm.
Here I am the lighting tech.
Here, the world is safe.

Clocks rearrange themselves, 
tripping on their own hands 
in the rooms I walk,
so my walls do not adorn 
their sneering faces.
The morning always warps,
stretching long and wide,
afternoon curls like a cat at the foot of my bed,
evening caresses my spine,
soft and sultry as dusk,
it’s gentle rhythm keeping me awake.

Emotions manifest their own geometry:
sadness feels heavy,
like wading through quicksand;
joy as golden bubbles under my skin;
anger is like fire ants eating through my skin,
anxiety prickles like wearing something itchy, coiling around my ribs.

When I try to name these things,
words sometimes come second—
what comes first is waves of colour,
a sensation on skin,
images, 
shapes,
forming clearly in my mind’s eye 
before the contours of syllables.

The richness of senses shapes language;
vibration shapes my world
before articulation can catch it.

When someone checks in,
asks me how I am,
my first impulse
is to answer with music,
because sometimes 
what lives in me
feels too wide for language,
texture too rich,
too deep to pin down,
too blunt for syntax alone,
and melody can invoke
the feeling words can’t.

I had to learn to translate
my thoughts into words
because sometimes 
my feelings don’t fit
into anything but waveforms,
sound morphs into colour
colour morphs into image,
syncopated frequencies
is the crutch I lean on
when what I feel inside
is too rich for words.

And when pen hits paper,
How I orient in space and time 
isn't neat or simple
painting outside the lines,
when really this is how
I stake my place in time,
how I anchor,
in space,
in memory,
I’m not a writer,
I’m a composer,
working in an an alternate
notation system
to name and translate the texture 
of my lived reality 
that would otherwise
remain unnamed
and swallow me whole.

Sometimes it’s all too loud—
colours flare too bright,
sound cuts too deep,
fabric feels wrong,
and I retreat into quiet,
days folding into small dioramas
I keep behind my eyes,
drawing the world closed behind me 
until I can breathe again.

But mostly,
living in between—
seeing the unseen,
walking through the world’s hidden language
not just seeing, 
or hearing 
or touching,
but feeling it all at once,
every moment so vivid,
flowing through me in currents only I can trace
is a quietly loud kind of magic.
The way invisible ink quietly maps every hidden shore,
a secret river running from skin to heart,
from heart to memory,
to the place where all the senses meet—
etching itself into my mind,
able to recall in perfect detail
in my own personal HD movie theatre.

This is how I wake,
how I live and breathe,
never just one thing at a time,
but always everything,
all at once,
my life unfolding in colour,
my language of rhythm and bass,
in silk, in velvet, in movement, in dance,
in the invisible flow of time and space
moving through me,
veiled and rich,
a harmonic seventh
to life’s resonant chord.

Author’s Note: Insight into the inner landscape of a regular Monday morning.

Let’s talk about this lie that somehow
there is a universal agreement,
that somewhere, somehow,
across some far blue river,
there exists a destination,
a state called Ready,
a platform we can stand on
where all doubt disappears
and the future lands soft.

But readiness is a flickering mirage—
walk toward it and it vanishes.
It’s a carrot we dangle in front of ourselves
to justify staying exactly where we are.

Here’s the smoke and mirrors of what readiness really is:
it’s waiting for the universe to give us a permission slip,
a green light from ourselves, a peer, or the cosmos,
a feeling we’ve been taught to expect
and all the while, the earth continues on its axis,
and the sun pours through the windows every morning,
whether we are ready or not.

Think about it for a minute—when have you ever felt ready?
Ready for your first day of school?
Your first date? Your first job?
The moment you became responsible for your own life
or another life?
Or the moment you had to let someone go?
Ready for your family member’s diagnosis?
Your own diagnosis?
The call that changed everything?

We weren’t ready for puberty, for god’s sake,
and that came with years of warning
a handbook from the school nurse and a seminar.
We weren’t ready to be teenagers, or adults,
even though we’ve been aging at a consistent rate
since the day we were born.

If you listen to your own doubt too closely,
it will lie about there always being a reason to wait.
Just a little more time and then I’ll be ready
after I lose the weight, after I save more money,
after I’m more confident, more knowledgeable,
more somehow enough—then I’ll do the thing,
as if there were a more qualified version of you
in some other parallel life or some other dimension.

So we become cartographers,
mapping every possible turn.
We tell ourselves we’re moving—
that the gathering of knowledge,
a task with infinite objectives,
where every checklist crossed
is the same as living—
but planning is really just
inertia on a side quest.

Here’s the catch to that:
time is the variable that always costs.
While we’re preparing, life is still happening.
Readiness is the tale we tell ourselves
so we do not have to grieve the time lost
while staring at a moving target on a moving platform,
standing still, carefully aiming,
while the whole carnival continues to spin around us.
And the altar of tomorrow is never a guarantee,
because the world could end at any moment
and all that careful planning
would vanish with the morning dew—
all sacrificed to the idol of someday.

Every expert was once a beginner who didn’t quit.
Everyone who became a master at something 
sucked at it first.
Every person admired for their courage,
was scared and said, “fuck it,” and did it anyway—
not because they were prepared,
but because they decided that doing it scared
was better than living with not doing it at all.
And eventually, the gap between who they were
and who—or where—they wanted to be, closed.

There is not some missing crucial piece
that everyone else has figured out.
There is no preparation for becoming.
No one actually knows anything.
The self you will become is hidden in the act itself—
in the wild, unsteady motion of saying yes
while your voice shakes,
letting the story be written on the journey
as the path unfolds beneath your feet.

So maybe the question isn’t “Am I ready?”
Maybe the question is “Am I willing?”
Willing to not be perfect,
but to do something new.
Willing to mess up,
to fall,
to not have all the answers that very second,
to suck at something in an obvious way,
willing to become through doing.

Ready is just a word we use for brave in hindsight.
So go as you are—
not as some version you think you have to be
before you do the thing.
Let the song find its note
and sing it with your whole heart,
even if you’re still trembling.
The key to the door is already in your pocket.
You are already enough.
You just need to turn the lock.

Breathe in.
Step out.

We are all, 
beginning.

Author’s Note: To begin is to agree with uncertainty. The self is truly revealed through motion; every breath an unfinished sentence of becoming.