The life behind the work
The dark doesn’t whisper. It claims.
With tears falling down my face, I screamed I cannot take this anymore. My body shook uncontrollably. My heart was pounding through my chest. My stomach was twisting itself inside out.
I was on the floor of my bedroom. A bedroom that used to be our bedroom, now only filled with the remnants of who he was. The pillow that still smelt like him. The mattress we bought together. The doona we used to fight over. Memories were everywhere of what was.
After twelve months, the pain was somehow even worse. I did not want to feel like this anymore. I could not function with my whole body locked in grief and my mind trapped in the past. I wanted to end it all right there on that floor.
Then a voice, an idea, came from nowhere and told me to look something up. That single action stopped me cold and disrupted everything.
Every version created the next
It was only when I sat down with a pen and a piece of paper that I could start pulling apart my life. I looked at what happened, what I learned, what choices I made and how I felt. What could I have done differently. What did I wish had changed.
It was through that process that I realised each version survived a different chapter of my life. Each one building on the version before, expanding in some ideas and retracting in others. Each one no better or worse than the last, but all part of the full experience.
Our lives do not give us meaning. We are the ones who give meaning to them. And based on where our beliefs are, that is how our world will be reflected toward us.
I have written about my seven versions on my Substack.
On Substack
I Am Exhausted, but My Wounded Child Will Not Leave Her Post
She kept me alive. Now I have to convince her we are safe.
You learn early that your body is not a safe place. At ten, you fall down the side of a mountain and end up hanging from a tree branch by the collar of your shirt. Your father and grandfather stand at the top and look down. Neither of them moves.
Read the piece
I write, paint, draw, record and build
Out of my own life and my own methodology I built the frameworks, the structures and the tools that let me keep expanding into a life that I could finally own. I look directly in the face of fear. I believe in myself more than anyone else ever could and I continue to show up even when the world refuses to look at me.
With this experience I became someone who would detach from the obvious surface situations and see the pattern running underneath it. I can see shadows where you think there is only light, I can create structure where there is no form. While everyone is looking at the surface, I am sitting underneath it.
I am a systems thinker. I see how the parts connect, what is shaping them and what happens when something changes. That thinking runs through everything I create.
This has been the underlying frequency to everything that I have ever experienced, lived through or looked back upon. Finding a way to make it make sense.
The scene on the floor, the seven versions, the twelve foundations and the myth underneath all of it came from sitting down with what had happened to me and making it mine. Giving it a form. I took it all apart until the shape of it was visible, and once I could see the shape I could eventually work with it.
I have created books, courses, artwork, podcasts, apps and interactive experiences, learning what I needed as each idea developed. I created my own mythology too, giving the ideas I kept returning to characters and a world of their own.
Sometimes an idea needs words. Sometimes I need to see it, hear it or make something I can actually use. I follow it into whatever form gives me a way to express it.
Human Patterns Decoded is my latest project, bringing my writing, tone and visual expression with interest in human behaviour together.
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